‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform.
A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’.
I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C. I don’t remember this being spelt out when I was a little girl.
This logical sense of transitive is different from its meaning in describing a transitive verb. But whereas the transitivity of verbs seldom attracts crowds, the transitive property is now widely deployed as a metaphor.
Last year, Lionel Shriver wrote about the consequences for her of having criticised a publisher: ‘I think that the left in general is an unforgiving bunch. And most of publishing is occupied by left-wing women. So, by the transitive property, I’m not forgiven.’
It is all too easy to misapply transitive property. Take the game of scissors, paper, stone. Scissors beat paper and paper beats stone. But scissors do not beat stone. Failure to spot such disparity makes it easy to smear someone. T.S. Eliot took poetic advice from Ezra Pound, who was given to fascism. If I admire Eliot’s poetry, it does not make me a fascist.
The transitive property metaphor is often used loosely. Someone in the Guardian complained about the staging of Macbeth: to convey spookiness, a producer assumed, ‘a performance of Macbeth need simply evoke a Jazz Age haunted house’ confident in ‘the transitive property of a vibe’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in