There are some things that language does not quite describe.

Here’s an example. Over the last year I have been particularly interested to watch Britain bifurcate. The murky and oftentimes fuzzy lines of native/foreign, male/female, middle class/working class, political Left/Right,  have faded into the background of a simpler dichotomy.

In or Out.

Every politician’s Wikipedia page now features a note on how they voted in the Brexit referendum, some of them as prominently as their party affiliation. With the negotiations taking place at the time of writing, this means that every newspaper is covering Brexit, with various reactions and concerns being ever so clearly articulated and analyzed.

Amidst this coverage, one particular type of article, video or story stands out and there’s not really a term to describe it. “Ironic” doesn’t quite fit and “schadenfreude” isn’t altogether accurate.

Maybe it’s a Leave voter who owns a strawberry farm and suddenly realizes that most of his workforce is about to face a major obstacle getting into the country. Or, as is the case in one of the Guardian’s excellent shorts a Remain voter who doesn’t understand the way that her working class boyfriend (and his father) might feel that it’s time for some kind of change. Maybe it’s the Donald Trump supporter who is facing the prospect of losing her health insurance under the new administration’s reforms (indeed, a whole subreddit has formed to chronicle Trump voters who regret their decisions).

There is a certain humour to this that we can all appreciate and even laugh (hence the schadenfreude) but it is also one that we perhaps need to reconsider because it indicates a startling level of political polarization. That is to say, it indicates a fundamental inability to understand the thoughts, fears, hopes and desires of the other. Upon closer consideration we need a concept because the problem is not so simple as the implication of divisive politics or needing a word which can adequately capture the affective experience of engaging with a piece of news like this in order to explain why these stories have such appeal. We would need to fully develop a pedagogy of the concept in order to make sense of its entanglement within which these news items are taking place, i.e., how they emerge as a problem.

A colleague of my describes concepts as ideas adequate to the event of thought. I prefer the following two quotes from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?:

“The concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come.”

“ A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality).”

Concepts are not merely modes of description for Deleuze and Guattari, they are heterogeneous, interrelated, evolving, and non-discursive relations to a given problem or set of problems. What the current trends in news present us with is a set of problems to which we have not yet adequately been able to respond. We need concepts, therefore, with which to think but, to return to my initial statement, we also need them to tell people that there is a problem.