On ‘Just’
There’s a tendency to denigrate attempts to analyse pop culture with the accusation that things are ‘just’ things. There’s always more to it.
When I bore my non political friends and family with hot takes about pop culture, there’s usually the same rebuttal every time. “It’s just a kids film.” “Why can’t a skyscraper just be a building?” It’s usually said fairly flippantly, but ironically this four letter word is overflowing with meaning to unpack. ‘Just’ is not, well, ‘just’ a throwaway word. It disguises the interrelationship between society, culture, and our own sense of being, and in denying ideology exposes its own intensely nihilistic ideological nature. Whilst my instinct is to say there is no ‘just’, I wonder if there’s an argument to say there is nothing but ‘just’, and if there’s something powerful in that.
The word ‘just’ is used here in a derogatory, diminutive way. The accusation is that there is no more than the immediately apparent nature of the thing in question. It says things have no meaning beyond their primary intended function. It’s an oddly nihilistic word that seeks to absolve the world of subconscious intent and remove things from their cultural context. In fact there is no thing in itself — only that which speaks to and is spoken of by other things. Signs and signifiers constituting signs and signifiers, to put it in a continental way.
Judith Butler writes about the misuse of the word ‘performative’ in popular discourse. They suggest that there’s an (often implicit) ‘merely’ or ‘just’ preceding the word when it’s used. That when people say ‘BLM activism is performative’, they mean *just* performative. As if there is anything more or less than performance to anything that seeks to shape the sphere of public discourse.
Butler attacks the ‘just’ in a very specific way here. I want to take this further and question why there’s ‘just’ anything. There is no just.
A friend sent me a video essay applying existentialist and absurdist philosophy to the gameshow Taskmaster. The temptation again is to retort with ‘it’s just a gameshow’. And to ‘stop overthinking it’. But the point is not merely that politics is downstream from culture as Stephen Bush suggests — but culture, politics, and our fundamental relationship with our lived reality are all awash with each other in one plane of immanence. It’s messy, complexly interrelated and any effort to divorce any from the others is naïve nihilism.
At the heart of the word ‘just’ is an insistence that ideology has limits. That ideas and meaning are restricted to the things that say ‘this is an ideology’. As if there is no politics outside of parliament, political parties, thinkers and writers in tomes shoved in the “smarter thinking” section of Waterstones. No. Ideology pervades everything, to the extent that the very denial of its existence is purest ideology in and of itself.
The Bill Withers song Just the Two of Us speaks to this idea. Withers’ insistence that the ontological nature of his relationship is predicated on the exclusion of all but those within it on the face of it seems to concord with the nihilist ideology of ‘just’. That the pair of them can be content isolated from the rest of the world. In fact, it exposes the redundancy of the word ‘just’. Rather than diminutive, the song reveals that in what’s ostensibly merely two people is greater than the sum of their parts. Within and created by ‘just’ the two of them are ‘castles in the sky’. I think there’s an implicit question mark after the titular phrase.
In the same way, it’s utterly meaningless to denigrate Bee Movie as ‘just’ a kids film. What does that even mean? Within that apparently innocuous category is an emergent abundance of things to explore. What I mean to say is that both the intended and actual meaning of the word ‘just’ are bogus: things cannot be reduced to any ‘innocuous’ category or the sum of their parts without anything more emerging from it; and things can’t be analysed in a vacuum anyway.
And so in a very Absurd fashion perhaps we can take this and turn it on its head. Perhaps the way out of this nihilist hole is not to insist that there is no just, but celebrate it. Yes. It is ‘just a gameshow’. But what about a gameshow is diminutive? It is packed with meaning from within itself and by creator and audience alike. What if rather than derogatory, there is power in ‘just’? So rather than shirk from the accusation of a piece of culture being ‘just’ something, it’ll be a prefix that indicates its quiet power. Shrek 2 may be ‘just’ a kids film; but therein lies a universe of discourse.