Пандемия от травми

ХОР

Не знам добре ли стори ти, но по-добре

да бе умрял, отколкото да бродиш сляп.

ЕДИП

Не казвай, че не съм постъпил най-добре

така, недей, не ме съветвай повече!

Не знам с какви очи бих гледал татко си,

когато ида в ада, между сенките,

и майка си, злочестата: вината ми

пред тях не ще изкупи и бесилката.

Ала копнял ли бих да срещна погледа

на своите деца — родени, както са

родени?

— Софокъл, Едип цар

Едиповият комплекс е една от най-ползваните обяснителни рамки в психоанализата (да, най-нагло ще продължа да ползвам Уикипедия, както съм се зарекла отдавна, понеже за неполитически неща, постиженията са невероятни; а за eдиповия комплекс, ретроградните елементи още не са се усетили колко е политически).  Историята на Едип, която се оказва, че разиграваме периодически от бебешка възраст та поне до юношеството ни, когато отново се активира, индивидуално и колективно, на символно и фантазно ниво, е известна: Едип е обречен да убие баща си и да се ожени за майка си и, по ред стечения на обстоятелствата и не само, това се случва.

Всеки един от нас, неизбежно, минава през тази несъзнавана фантазия. Успешното й отработване, през личния капацитет и през капацитета на родителите, а ако не – по-късно евентуално чрез психотерапия и други по-неуспешни похвати на обществото, води до развитието на много полезни качества, умения, режими на мислене, отношения, разбиране, творчество и пр.

Една от най-тежките травми, която можем да преживеем е, когато несъзнаваните ни фантазии се сбъднат – било, когато са най-активни, било когато, през сбъдването си, активират фантазната ситуация отново. Понеже индивидуалната анализа не ми влиза в работата, ще се опитам да генерализирам относно случващото се на ниво колективно несъзнавано, или по-скоро, когато цели групи от хора и поколения преживяват едиповата ситуация като реална.

Представям си, че с този блог пост ще се опитам да проследя какво се случва, когато колективно преживеем такава травма и се окаже, че Едиповата ситуация е символно разиграна в реалността. Ще маркирам четири нива: манийният триумф на “Eдип” и съпътстващите, често потиснати драми; лишаването от символен и властови капацитет на “бащата”, който е оцелял само физически; “затварянето на очите” от страна на обществото, допринасяйки за сбъдването на пророчеството; и какво се случва с децата на Едип.

Едип през 1990-те години

Нямам много доказателства, отвъд личния си опит от онези времена, но ако някой има желание може да си ги намери – сигурна съм, че има някъде данни кои бяха хората на улицата. Истинските, безкористни носители на демократичния импулс в ранните 1990-те, бяха юношите – 13-20 и няколко годишните. Това бяха хората, които излязоха на улиците, които правиха барикади, които внасяха музика, филми, концепции от “демократичния” Запад. Млади хора, движени от бунта и на възрастта си – събудената и разиграна отново едипова драма, бунтът срещу родителите си, бунтът срещу управляващите, бунтът срещу авторитетите. Бунт, който всяко поколение преживява. Но бунтът, в който това поколение победихме.

Победихме като детронирахме предишното поколение, под предлог, че детронираме един режим, който сам си отиваше и си отиде. Детронирахме с реално лишаване от власт, но и с обезценяване, подигравка и често дива омраза – канализирали бунта и отричането на авторитета на собствените ни родители.

Не говоря за хората от трибуните, които се възползваха от едиповата ситуация на младите и им помогнаха да победят в умовете си в бунта им – с интерпретации и реални интервенции, които валидизираха желанието да се убие или поне кастрира предишното поколение. Отречена и осмяна беше цялата предходна система, с все достиженията й. Отречена и осмяна беше цялата концептуална и обяснителна рамка. Отречени и осмяни бяха начините на правене на образование, наука, производство, медицина, политика. Отречени и осмяни бяха капацитета и уменията на поколението на “тоталитаризма” (вж Статева, 2019 тук, от стр. 276).

Макар и да не бяха реално убити, хората с ресурс и житейски и друг опит бяха реално и символно кастрирани и изключени от обществения и производствения живот. С изключение на тези, които чрез сенилността или меркантилността си (заменена с “демокрация”, “пазарна икономика”, “шокова терапия”, “меритокрация” и пр.) се вписваха в новите времена. Едип харесва това.

Едип харесва това, но и го боли за загубените авторитети. За да се справи със загубата триумфира манийно вече 30 години и търси безкритично загубените авторитети в нови, по-добри, по-“западни”, които да му помогнат да си мисли, че истинският му “баща” не е детронираният и обезглавеният. Не е този, който му е дал читаво образование, отношения и условия за оцеляване по достоен начин, а този, който го е осиновил и “отгледал” – имагинерният “Запад”. И, разбира се, не спира да повтаря и показва, че погубените през 1990-те авторитети, не са истинските му “бащи” – истинските му бащи са авторите на каптализЪма, начело с Адам Смит, ако и да не е го е чел, както и, разбира се, авторите на шоковата терапия, ако и да не ги знае кои са.

Щайнър, с който ще се огранича сред авторите по темата в този пост, обръща внимание на по-ранните травми на Едип и, в частност, тези маскирани от илюзията за щастливо детство при осиновителите му. Любопитно е как хора, които повече от очевидно са получили поне отлично здравеопазване и образование при авторитетите, които отхвърлят, с готовност се впускат в “шоково-доктринните” и “неолиберални” парадигми на тези, които приемат за свои осиновители. Тежката травма на Едип, породена от подмяната на собствения му произход със желания произход, показва Щайнер, ‘може да блокира приемането на вина, и следователно да блокира един доброжелателен цикъл на прошка и репарация”.

Едип през 1990-те години не се вихри само в България. Синовете, без значение на пола им, се бунтуват срещу родителите си през 1990-те навсякъде в Европата и “демократичния свят”. Срещу бащите, родили “бейби буумърите”, бащите, които са се борили и живяли за “Никога отново” на Холокоста и Втората световна война. Бащите (и майките), които са посветили всяка своя стъпка на един по-добър свят, и които го бяха осигурили за няколко десетилетия.

Рейгън, Горабчов, Тачър и сие яхнаха бунта на тогава тийнейджърите, които сега са световни лидери, било в професионалната си сфера, било в практиката, било в разработването на политики, било в голямата политика. Тези бунтовници плачат от умиление от падането на Берлинската стена, и подхождат с най-малкото пренебрежение към издигането на стената на “шоковата терапия”, която в наши дни води до иллеберализма на новите автокрации в Източна Европа и на расизма срещу “новите джиписита” от тези земи.

 

Родителите на Едип

В България – 45 години опит, а може би и повече, биват отрязани с лошите и добрите им страни. На Запад – до 2008 година това знание и опит и смесването им с опита от соц. – страните води до ценна и полезна критика. Само през последните три години, наблюдаваме наплив и дори нахлуване на сенилност, т.е. войнстване на кастрирани и в резултат дементни политици, в разработването на политики. В България: от Урумов до Мутафчийски, от решението за обявяване на противоконституционно на понятието “джендър” (все едно да се обяви за неконституционна Питагоровата теорема или принципите на термодинамиката) до Концепцията за интеграция на ромите на Каракачанов, която дословно повтаря  “Върху циганския въпрос” на Химлер и Мюлер.

Хората от онова поколение, които остават във властта, имат капацитет на нарязани краставици. Това, разбира се, не е проблем само на България, макар че става видно едва в последните години, когато сенилността и неадекватността на политиците започва да се проявява с външния им вид – от Тръмп до Джонсън. Това, което Тим Дартингтън дефинира като “брилянтна глупост” започва да надхвърля индивидуалните организационни капацитети и се прехвърля в локалните и глобални политики.

Малко е известно реално, коя и каква е майката на Едип, както и как се чувства на различните етапи. По всичко личи, че типично за патриархалните култури, тя е някак пасивна по отношение на съдбата и преживяванията си. Коя е тя? Тъгува ли по загубеното си дете? Влюбва ли се в убиеца на мъжа си или просто приема, че е редно да приеме победителя? Как се чувства от това, че бащата на децата й е убиецът на мъжа й и, всъщност, синът й?

Нямаме много информация и няма как да обозначим коя е тя в колективното несъзнавано. Може би държавата, която като майка на обществото ни, или поне това се очаква от социалната държава, подава ръка на “революцията”, на неолиберализма, за да запази принципите и идеалите на доброто семейство, доброто общество, добрата демокрация, добрата република?

Ако социалната държава е майката на Едип, какво се случва с типoвете социална държава, документирани от Еспинг-Андерсън? Социалната държава, възходящо с последните десетилетия е суспенидрана и всячески обругавана, докато служителите в нея или се корумпират безнадеждно, платили с морала си за сегашната политическа ситуация, или кършат отчаяно ръце в опит да пордължат да спасяват хората. Не знам какво повече да кажа в тази област, понеже то цялата работа, много едипово и инак някак неудобно идва. Не за друго, а от цялата работа хора не просто се разболяват и страдат, а умират. Някои, от 2013 г. поне насам, и се самозапалват – засега в България.

 

Затваряйки си очите

Че властниците отдавна знаят накъде отиват нещата е повече от ясно. Реалността на бомбоубежищата и други убежища за уърст кейс сценарио са известни и доста забавни, както и тези в сценариите на множество холивудски филми.

Същият Щайнър, който извзех за този блог пост, говори за феноменът на покриването на едиповата ситуация. Той забелязва, че често имаме достъп до адекватно знание, но тъй като то е неприятно и разстройващо обичайните ни режими на функциониране, ние – несъзнавано или понякога съзнавано – избираме да го игнорираме.

Според Щайнър, цялото общество е знаело за проклятието на Едип и го е способствало като си е мълчало, предотвратявайки информираният избор на Едип и близките му. За него, истински отговорни са не Едип и семейството му, а едно общество, което е направило проклятието и сбъдването му възможно с пасивното и активното си съучастие. По подобен начин, цяло едно общество знае какви ги върши нашенският Едип и гласува с негласуване на разиграната от него/тях ситуация. Вихрейки се по мас- и социални медии, докато убива баща си, нашият си Едип не впечатлява никого и дори не успява да докара народа до изборните урни, камо ли до читателска аудитория. Триумфирайки вече 30 години, “демократичният” Едип се опитва да не признае, че кастрирайки “елита” на “соца”, кастрира, т.е. ослепява, собствения си свят и собственото си поколение.

А народът, масите или както и да ги наречем, знаят. Знаят, че Харалан Александров чете несъзнаваното на народа и масите по книгите на все по-стесняващият се иллиберален елит и не по книгите на тяхното колективно несъзнавано. Знае и се присъединява към “ГЕРБ”, “Обединените патриоти”, “Възраждане”, “Шипка”, “Крепостта Европа” и други неонацистки формирования, понеже му липсват колективни интерпретации, които да му помогнат да разбере и да противодействат на едиповата ситуация, в която е изпаднал. Хората знаят, че Харалан или Маргиналия нещо не им казват, както и БСП, и преди това СДС, и сега  – Правителството на ГЕРБ и, за да сме съвсем съвременни, на Кризисния щаб НОЩ.

Народът, масите, знаят, че нещо не е както трябва, че разиграват сценарий, който друг е написал, че участват в самонаписано и самоизъпълняващо се пророчество, в което те играят тези с картофките и бирите на дивана пред телевизора или фейсбук страниците. И, както Щайнер описва, пък и както се е случило в древногръцкия мит,  нищо не могат да направят, освен, в най-добрия случай, да го играят ХОРЪТ.

 

Децата на Едип

Децата на Едип, четете си я сами тази работа по мита, са звезди. Ако има нещо положително в драмата на “прехода”, че Едиповата драма роди най-малкото Антигона – Антигона, от всички полове, която не се ръководи от голямата политика, а от политиката на общността, справедливостта, солидарността и съпричастността. Антигона, която живее и се бори, не само за братята си, паднали в неолибералната борба и озовали се на улицата, или станали с докторати таксиметрови шофьори или работещи достойно 24/7, само и единствено, за да оцеляват.

Децата на Едип погребват братята и сестрите си, отхвърлени от системата, против разпореждането на властта. Помагат и са солидарни с бездомните, затворниците, жертвите на експлоатация, потисничество и съвременното робство – като Българско затворническо сдружение, Автономен Работнически Синдикат, Фабрика Автономия, Жълти жилетки България, Храна – не война, Черната и Червената Антифа. Изпълняват ритуалите на скърбенето като се събират и празнуват борбата и оцеляването или жертвите или анализират като Студентско общество към СУ, Живот след капитализма, Адопто, Диверсия и други. Да се борят срещу расизма и новонадигащия се фашизъм като Б’ней Б’рит, Асоциация на оцелелите от Холокоста в България, Постоянна ромска конференция и др.

Да се чувстваме ли щастливи и горди и да продължаваме ли да живеем като Едип или като обществото, което е позволило едиповата ситуация? Нямам много отговори. Антигона престъпва закона на властниците и погребва брат си, противно на закона. Антигона, по свой начин, осъществява революция в името на справедливостта на кръвта – солидарността, братството, лоялността, емпатията, правото на живота. Другите деца на Едип и майка му, Полинес, Етеокъл и Исмена, не оставят много впечатляващи, камо ли пък поучителни истории. От нас зависи коя част от едиповата драма ще разиграем и с какви последствия.

 

 

 

In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 1 — milenastatevablog

Virtual pitch is a pitch at the missing fundamental of a harmonic complex tone. It corresponds to the phenomenon whereby one’s brain extracts tones from everyday signals (including speech) and music, even if parts of the signal are masked by other sounds. Virtual pitch is contrasted to spectral pitch, which is the pitch of a […]

via In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 1 — milenastatevablog

“Burn out to glow”: on the ritual suicide of the Left in Bulgaria.

‘History shows that the most successful societies are those that harness the energies of voluntary action, giving due recognition to the third sector of voluntary and community organisations.’

—Tonny Blair, 1999

This blog is an observation on the aporia of  the internalised “third way” of early austerity  which leads to the ritual self-sacrifise of the Left in Bulgaria in both literal and symbolic ways in the context of survivalism as the fundamental weapon of capitalism. Back in 2013, when ordinary people and activists set themselves on fire as a form of desperate protest against the neoliberal politics, a genuine Left has not yet crystalised in the country. The official left in the face of the Bulgarian Socialist Party is increasingly moving to the far-right, including distancing itself from the Europian Socialist Party and embracing, and even promoting, anti-women, anti-minorty, and anti-migrant/refugee policies, while siding with the businesses.

In recent years, leftist informal collectives and individual activists are gaining mementum, successfully developing collective interpretations and frameworks that have the potential to lift off the people to stand up for themselves and for their survival. However, these collectives rely on idealism and passion alone for surviving and for making a change, somewhat backed up by a belief, or perhaps rather hope, in the meritocratic powers that would not allow to genuinely good people within networks of solidarity to be spit off by the system. Given the levels of poverty and misery in the country, this emergent movement is perhaps the only source of hope for the vast majority of people who are pressed by issues of not just coping, but surviving in the current economic, social and political circumstances, yet refuse to embrace fascist and neo-Nazi sollutions. To understand the limits of these powers, however, we have to look at the history of the solidarity project in Bulgaria, which is apparently the land of the first herecy that embraced social equality, including gender equality in Europe. Which was violently extinguished in the country, after spreading throughout Europe and probably beyond, on one hand. On the other hand, we have to look at the processes in the Left at the wider context.

The analysis, therefore, requires looking at the state of play at the global level and admitting that the policies promoted by May and Trump should not be attributed entirely to the right wing. Long before the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent austerity measures, the version of the left in the neoliberal world has begun cutting off welfare resources by throwing the responsibility back to the people themselves, mersilessly responsibilising them by promoting the concept of equality as equality of responsibility (see here how this all begun). The then famous, now internalised by the left and forgotten “third way” promoted by Tonny Blair under the advisory guidance of LSE elitist sociologist Antony Giddens, was embraced by other policy makers such as also Clinton and Shroder who enthusiastically led their democratic parties into embracing an approach in which welfare is provided not by the state and the governmental structures and not by the market, but by the community, the society and the citizens themselves. Voluntarily. That is without being subsidised. Your relative or friend is ill, disabled or a victim of domestic violence? Pay for treatment. Quality conceptual art is important to you? Pay for it. But wait, how about the taxed money? They go to the military, for infrastructure, for parties. And for the government. Have no money to pay? Donate your labour or tallent.

By branding responsibilisation under the auspices of a solidarity project and community mobilisation, the New Labour long proceeded the Torries policies of responsibilisation and used this rhetoric to justify significant welfare cuts at the expence of higher investments in maintaining power and profit. This happened mainly in the context of a more that 20-year of Labour in power, with the leftist discourse being the dominant discourse in most of the democratic countries and, consequently, with a middle class that supported Labour or probably the other way around – Labour and more widely leftists supporters being relatively in power, hence possessing comfortable financial means. The disenchantment of the working class with the Labour, who were not able to be cool in these ways, then led to the growth in Torry supporters, which – as a right-wing turn – consequently enabled the far right to play with their resentments and turn them, for less than a decade, into a mass of neo-Nazis (see for example this 2010 study by  a team of the University of the West of England). Leftists are still relatively strong in the West by virtue of their mostly academic employment as well as young hipsters from the IT industry or middle-aged well-off former punks engaged in high-level social work, hence there are quite a few people with financial capacity on the Left, yet they do not buy in into the religion of a voluntary action in their circles and luckily, Labour itself, has forgotten about this “revolutionary” invention and has distanced from Blairism (even though Corbynism has its own problems).

I was, however, shocked to find the leftovers of the “third way” bulsh**t in Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, especially among the moderate and the far-left activists. Young activists, who are bearly surviving being unemlpoyed or poorly employed, are brainwashed by the said Blairist reasoning, without being aware of its admittedly formally leftist roots, into sacrificing their anyway miserable income for solidarity projects that promote horizontal organisation which includes self-funded action and spaces. While this trend co-incides with a boom of educated into leftist theories intellectuals from the times when Giddens was a name, the trend can also explain while Bulgarians are being slowly boiled without revolting on the bacground of all 2018 riots even in neighbouring countries. The illusion that without financial means people reduced to bearly survivng can participate in a democracy is embraced to the extent that these very same activists work on their daily jobs to maintain the worst aspects of the capitalist system, and at night and weakends, they steal from their sleep and leisure to… fight the system. As much as and as long as they have a remaining strength and thinking capacity to do so. And without really considering that they are excluding those who are the depository of historical knowledge, the most oppressed and the poorest, by virtue of them not being able to participate in the party.

 

How the “burn out” rhetorics failed the first wave of activists in Bulgaria

 

The disgust of the lefties with money and funding can be found in the failure of the  first opportunity for a genuine democracy in Bulgaria, which dates back to the years immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall when the West promoted democracy building through non-governmental organisations (NGOs). According to Najam (1996), there are at least 49 acronyms with which NGOs are known world wide. In fact, the same structures are known in the UK as voluntary organisations, which is perhaps linked to their historical evolution from church services and the associated Christian paternalistic values, whereas in the US, where the profit sector has been predominating traditionally, the emphasis is on distinguishing NGOs from the profit sector – hence the name ‘non-profit’ organisations. However, these labels also bear different connotations in public opinion – in the UK the term ‘voluntary’ organisations also denotes that they are not professional as social services will be, while being ‘non-profit’ for some authors actually suggests that these organisations that these organisations have a business-like character, but no commercial goals. Clark (1991) distinguishes between six types of NGOs: relief and welfare agencies, technical innovation organisations, public service contractors, popular development agencies, ‘grassroots’ development agencies and agencies governing networks. In reality, however, most of the NGOs at present do all of these, which often affects their effectiveness and/or affects the people working there. In Eastern Europe, following a supposed history of autoritarianism during the so called “state socialism”, NGOs was juxtaposed to governmental organisations with the idea that they will monitor and control the State as an always potential authoritarian power.

This form of sponsored activism failed mostly with the help of the all pervading in parallel psychologisation, and the concept of “burn out” in particular. In the neo-liberal discourse, solidarity was seen as a problem, the altruistic drive was considered pathological and bringing the dangers of collectivisation. NGO staff was throughly trained to take care of itself first and this is what people did. As a result, not only a new elite, including financial elite through pumping aid, was build, but also people were perposefully trained to “guard their boundaries” and not to do to much, while explicitly and implicitly being encouraged to not resist and not think too much, but to “take care of themselves”. While gradually they focused on self-survival, including both the survival of their organisation as a source of income, thus resulting in zombie organizations that exist predominantly to ensure the very survival of the organisation as such, and of their individual survival, resulting in the class of professional tourists and resource users as a menas to prevent a real and imagined burn out and vicarious traumatisation, the NGOs turned into mere service providers, entirely dependent on the state.  While they are still happy by the virtue of enjoying the products and results of their marketing strategies, the people at the bottom and those outside the other wise enormous sector coined the derrogatove of “grantadjii”, meaning people who survive of grants.

The problem with the shaming as “grantadjii” people who survive of grants is hugely important. As a result, no genuine activists committed to values and ideals of pure democracy would approach valuable EU and other schemes. There are three key outcomes of this “disenchatment with the sponsored democracy”. First, Bulgaria is currently cited as the most corrupted EU member state, with the greatest abuses of EU structural funds. I would argue, because mainly corrupted actors and money laundry schemes use the structural funds and generally the EU funding opportunities. Leaving aside the question of how successfully the EU funding schemes opperate, with what consequences and whether, after all, Britain was not right to want to leave the EU, the second example is the Roma funds. 5 years back now, I was contacted by an entrerpreneur who has recognised my capacity to work on Roma issues successfully, and who has noticed that billions and trillions of Euros lie in the EU funds with no one willing to apply to use them. In the meantime, these millions and trillions have doubled and yet very few organisations and groups apply to use this available funding, on the background of a growing resentment with Roma and how they use this system. capable people, decent people, but neoliberals, have told me they will never apply to work on behalf of Roma. This piling of money for Roma integration was all going to copy the process in which the poor policy making in Ireland stockpiled butter enough for the next three centuries for the whole of Europe, when – thridly – the 2015 migrant crisis broke through. Piling a new wave of billions and trillions, the EU again could not manage to spend the money that the wealthy countries dedicated to the poored member states to cope with the problem. This is so to the extent that two municipalities in Bulgaria were offered by the EC (or the EU, God knows, but my source is more than reliable), completely unaccountable Euros 10,000 per person from a refugee family to integrate in Bulgaria (mind you, a family is often about 8 people). If the family decides to go elsewhere, which is usually the case, the municipality keeps the funding and does not have an obligation to account for how the money is spend.

“Burn out to glow” is the title of TV series in the times of state socialism which has become a metaphor for the glorification of self-sacrificial pride and a heroic dedication to a passion. If “grantadjii” is the ultimate offence for the new wave of activists, a “burn out” staff was considered the ultimate failure of the activists who originate in the 1990s. NGO service providers are still burning in the flames of the “burn out” curse, under the cover of dedication to professionalism and professional discources, which are admittedly very interesting and inspirational, but bring little change to our society, let alone to improving the situation of stigmatised, marginalised and overly oppressed population, which is increasingly involving all members of the Bulgarian society which does not belong to the IT- or NGO-elite, the only occupations that can compete with the ruling oligarchies which control probably about 95% of the wealth in the country.

Survivalism and the logic of capitalism

Click on the image below to the Nine Inch Nails video that well described the ssence of capitalism and how it affects not only humans but also the world by exploiting our darkest energies.

In a series of books beginning with “Liquid Modernity” (borrow the book from me as the wikie is not very good, but gives an idea), Zigmund Bauman (oh, well, not too bad wikie) described how capitalism, as well as the whole of the modernity projects and its ways of manufacturing death require re-thinking and re-structuring our ways of being. Unlike the interpretation of many that capitalism is based on our greed, his analysis shows that capialism is based on our survival anxiety (including the anxiety for the survival of our ingroups and significant others), thus provoking us to stockpile resources, and to fight violently for this resources by domination and exploitation. As a result, like hamsters on a wheel, we constantly make a significant effort, with no outcome and now result, while burning ourselves out from the speed.

 

The scientific basis of pure democracy

The origins of politics in the Greek polis is a well-known story – citizens had the right and obligation to speak at the market place and to participate at the agora happenings to create politics and to sustain democarcy. A less known fact is the additional aspect of this story, which is told to us by Fuller (2003), namely that these habits eventually resulted in 100 years of wars and, ultimately, in severely weakening the polis due to the high economic and human cost of these wars that were inspired by all too passionate and not thought through speeches. People were easily triggered and the ideas were not always good – but nevertheless acted upon, thus involving Athens in perpetual sets of military invasions against real and imagined enemies while at the same time causing a sugnificant turmoil and social and economic erosion internally. That this led to eventually establishing the academy as a remedy and an intellectual space originally designed to create a containing space for speech, thoughts and innovation before or while they were turned into action, is another little known aspect also told us by Fuller in the same piece (ibid.). Thus, history teaches us that pure democracy is not a question of simple stimulus-reaction participation, but that it requires spaces where ideas are thought through, often equally passionately to the ideas on the marketplace, but contained within a thinking and an experiential space where they can be nurtured and polished before being turned into action. 

Klick the image below for an awsome performance of the Young Ensemble by Batsheva.

Allegedly, the governors of Athens commissioned the academy as an enterprise to tackle the problem of the all too easy ways in which ideas were accessible to the masses via the marketspace where everyone could speak up freely their mind. This approach of doing an academy as a containing space is very different from the function of the academy today, since contemporary academia entails predominantly the transfer of skills and knowledge. The university as the contemporary academia, according again to Fuller (ibid.), has evolved through the influence of the guilds that sponsored the processes of re-shaping the academia as a place that predominantly deals with the transfer of knowledge and skills first in the Roman Empire and then through the German University, that is – in the emergence of a capitalist society.

The reflective function inherited by Plato’s academy, unlike with other reflective spaces and group settings, is best expressed in general assemblies that serve direct democracy. They require work on areas that constitute societal (including socio-psychological, cultural, economic and political) challenges – social and political areas that are of significance to practitioners, experts and citizens in their everyday functioning and are often characterised by causing teams, organisations and groups, dealing with them, to get stuck in what Thrist (1968) called a mess or a problematique to describe the consequences of aspects requiring trans-organisational and often trans-national endeavour due to the complexity of these issues and their consequences. This is so because direct or pure democracy is not an expression of uninformed, unthought-through, and often biased and manipulated through the mass media and individualised discources opinion, but are supposed to stimulate far-reaching and probing conversations into the current state of democracy and what undermines social justice, social cohesion, solidarity, and human rights at the everyday level.

Contemporary propagators of direct democracy ingnore these considerations and promote participation through referendums only. I would call this approach an appeal to  people’s political lazyness that joepardises the very idea of pure democracy by expecting that questions that belong to the field of problematique, such as poverty, inequality, scapegoating, stigmatisation and marginalisation, violence, oppression, exploitation and so on, are to be resolved by a) simple yes and no answers; and b) by mere opinions which are usually uninformed, biased and manipulated, not to say brainwashed. It is easy to see that the resort to referendums is even more lazy, and potentially much more dangerous, than the speeches at the marketplace in ancient Athens, with potentially more catastrophic consequences. At best, such propagators shoot themselves in the foot on their way to pure democracy, and at worst – they purposefully mobilise and exploit what Dartington (2013) calls brilliant stupidity in groups and organisations (the tendency of groups, organisations, communities, nations and so on gatherings of people not to think thus sabotaging their own progress).

The problems with being in a group

A lot of resistance to forming general assemblies as a road to direct democracy is the experience of frustration of those who have participated in groups without having a conceptual framework to understand what they have been through, an experience which is well described by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion in his “Experiences in Groups and Other Papers”. There are two key aspects: the dread of loosing oneself into the group and the tendency of people forming a group together to make this group to avoid staying on the work task, by investing phantasies into its functioning which is then characterised by three basic assumptions that will be outlined below.

First and foremost, an idea that is difficult to comprehend is the tension between being a part of a group and being oneself. It is important to acknowledge that we have a tendency to wish contemporaneously to dissolve as individuals and to become one with the group, on one hand, and on the other hand, that we tend to dread this dissolving into the group. This ambivalence causes tension within members who then adopt a behaviour in the group that is attacking the borders and functioning of this group (if the facilitator does not encourage an understanding of the group as an entity which is different by the sum of its members). It is crucial that the facilitator speaks to the group and its processes and decisions as an entity to which everyone, inlcuding himself or herself also belongs, and to interpret the processes and phantasies as belonging to a single entity in which individual members are only expressing different aspects and conflicts of the whole.

Linked to that basic challenge is the understanding that even though a group has a work task to which it is supposed to stick, usually groups serve a second agenda: the emotional needs of its members who, as we saw above, a torn by the inner ambivalence to belong and not to belong. This state gives rise to a primitive annihilation anxiety and an existential dread. To cope, according to Bion (ibid.), the group mobilises three modes of functioning called basic assumptions: fight/flight, pairing and dependency. These are expanded by Hopper (2003) with a fourth mode, that of incohesion in traumatised groups. More recently, I have suggested a fifth mode of “apocalypse now” which characterises the function of groups who experience a societal crises or operate in societal domains characterised by working with “the catastrophe” and the failure of organisations to deal with problematiques.

The fight/flight basic assumption can be described as a tendency of the group to organise around a perceived internal or external enemy or enemies. Thus, instead of working to achieve the work task, it is busy fighting with real and imagined enemies, which can be often projected into members, who are then scapegoated and effectively wasted as potential and actual contributors. As a result, the group may dissolve or, similarly to the Athens polis, engage in meaningless wars and fights internally and externally, that eventually can exhaust and destroy it in literal or symbolic ways. The pairing basic assumption is my favourite basic assumption, yet it is similarly disfucntional. It is born in the phantasy that an idea, a solution or a messiah will be born that will bring salvation to the members. As a result, the group tends to mobilise a pair, often of a man and a woman, but sometimes same-sex pairs, who are invested with leadership as a couple, which is expected to fall in love and get pregnant. Very often the pairs literally fall in love, using the energy of the group that supports their romance, which leads to the group effectively not receiving their intended product – a solution, a decision or an effective new-born saviour, so it eventually dissolves, too with members staying disappointed and even desperate that a messiah cannot be born and the endeavour has no meaning. Another scenario under this assumption is that the pair effectively gives birth to a messiah by empowering and nurturing a real leader who is initially embraced by the group but eventually scapegoated since the group cannot bear his or her “goodness”. In addition to disappointed, the group is then also left with the guilt of mudering in imagined or sometimes literal ways their messiah and may continue to exist as a means to perpetuate their teachings but at the expence of the leader being scapegoated in real life and wasted as both a leader and very often as a sane human being.

Even though it may seem that the fight/flight mode is most danegrous, the dependancy basic assumption is most destructive, hence special attention has to be paid to dismantling such groups since they are extremely dangerous for democracy in all its forms. This is the group, which surrenders to the authority of an ellected or an imposed leader, regressing to an unability to think, make decisions, act and even live independently. Such groups usually invest charisma in narcististic people, whose borderline pathology makes them capable to listen, connect and re-enact the unconscious, hence irrational, phantasies of members, to attract and lead the masses. The mechanisms and perils of narcissistic leadership are well analysed, especially in relation to their capacity to feed on and to foster hatred and destructiveness (see for example here and especially the work of American object relations theorist Otto Kernberg and his “Anatomy of Evil”).

In Hopper’s theory (ibid.), in addition to these three modes of functioning of groups, traumatised groups, and I would add, communities and societies, tend to function under a phatasy of incohesion. This phantasy is characterised by helplessness and the fear of annihilation, which precedes the emergence of envy. Traumatised people thus mobilise defences/protections against the fear of annihilation and are then likely to personify aggregation and massification processes, respectively. In other words, such groups are driven by fears of separation and tend to submit themselves entirely to the whims of the mass/crowd processes while the same time remaing incohesive, chaotic and messed up, unable to find purpose or direction to channel their energies.

My proposition of an “apocalypse now” mode relates to groups of people, professionals or activists, who work in catastrophic or limbo societal fiels such as poverty, violence, illness and death, and child development, as well as to groups of concerned citizens and activists in times of crisis, turmoil and upheaval. In addition to my work with these groups, I have had the opportunity to observe as staff the dynamics of this basic assumption in a gropu relations conference in Ireland, organised by IGRO, which not simply was dedicated to the question of What happens now?, but did that in the most economically and politcally challenging times recently for Ireland. Key questions that concern this basic assumption relate to salvation, anxiety for the survival of the soul rather than the body, and resurection and relatedness to eternity and infinity. This basic assumption has an enormous potential for a meningful action and staying on the task, if the tendencies of reactive somatisation and actual physical or mental illness, self-blaming, and other aspects of self-imposed sufferance as a punishment for real or imagined wrong-doings, are overcome.

The task of the leader

In other words, the paragraphs above describe how groups can be, and are, an arena of exciting yet eventually disappointing, and even painful phantasies and experiences. The task of a leader of such a group, or a community of practice or learning, or of a general assembly then is nothing more or less but to be absent. It is often expected that a leader, or an organiser, has to “speak wisely”, “to inspire”, “to talk to the masses”, which – quite a few people have realised by now after Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Putin and Trump – is a characteristic of the narcisistic leader, one that leads the groups to oppression, exploitation and hatred. On the contrary, the role of a democratic leadership, also called distributed leadership, or absent leadership and – according to some – is nothing else but moderation or facilitation, is to establish the framework and the boundaries in space and time, and to protect these boundaries, while at the same time supporting the group through mutative interpretations to stay on task and to return to rational behaviour and decision making by pointing out to the nature of the basic assumption and to its functions to serve primitive needs of the group, which ultimately belong to its members and archetypes. The study and the search for solutions of societal problems, therefore, becomes the study and exploration of the group itself, in the here and now, as a fractal of this society or community the members want to rule.

In groups facilitated this way, the leadership is either rotational, or in the absence of sufficiently trained facilitators, the leader alone strives to give as much as possible power and authority to the group, help members connect with their voice and give them opportunities to use and channel this voice into meaningful problem solving and reflection by bringing to the surface and naming beneath-the surface dynamics, processes, phantasies and issues. This is also different from chairing a meeting, a session or an assembly, since the role of the facilitator is to observe through vicariously experiencing the phantasies of the group through participant observation or through observant participation. In the ideal design of two co-leaders, one leading absently and the other one chairing, the role of the chair is to stay on the work task and to return the group back to it, to pick up and formulate the agenda based on the contribution of all members, especially the silent ones, and to keep an eye on the content (the whatness) and structure (howness) rather than on the process (the whyness, which is the task of the facilitator). In the absence of a co-leader, the facilitator is supposed to acquire what Bion called a “binocular vision” – keeping one eye on the content and the other – on the process, and – I would add – on the structure and the contextual, objective, constraints coming from the wider environment of the group.

Going back to pure democracy

The re-dicsovery of pure democracy go hand in hand with the re-discovery of democratic leadership (also called distributed or absent leadership), which dates back to the first post-Worls War 2 attempts at a) revitalising the economy and b) the “Never again” sentiments against the manifucturing of death by the Nazis. For the most enthusiastic readers, there are exciting three volumes that link organisational discoveries from the military, the coal mines, the factories, the families and so on to promoting effective and efficient groups and their relations and relatedness with each other, not only as a form of pure democracy in action, but also as means towards better economic, social, group, cultural and political health. Key to understanding how pure democracy works is the understanding of action research, and of participatory action research in particular. The use of “research” can be sometimes misleading, since it is more of a rigorous technique for bottom-up and grassroots-anchored intervention than a coherent methodology. Nevertheless, the term “research” helps us to emphasise that this is not about ad hoc design and solutions, but about a purposefully developed framework.

Action research is seen to offer a dual approach to both ‘understanding’ and also ‘promoting change’: as detailed by Rapoport (1970) it is a merger of academic social science with practice considering ‘both the practical concerns of people in immediate problematic situations and the goals of social science by joint collaboration’ (Ibid:1). The term ‘action research’ was first used by Kurt Lewin, within his formation of cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting and has been expanded into extremely diverse meanings and applications.  The definitions and methods of action research vary considerably and are highly contested, as it is not located within a single discipline but has rather emerged over time from a broad range of fields and historical sources.

According to Carr and Kemmis (1986) improvement is central to the term ‘action research’, which endeavours to achieve both an improved understanding of a practice and situation, which leads to the improvement/ revision of the practice.  Collaboration between researchers and practitioners is seen as central to the action research process (Whyte, 1991), and the participation of users and local communities is highly embedded:

‘Action research is a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes.  It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individuals persons and communities.’ (Reason & Bradbury, 2008:4).

The participatory nature of action research is seen as a method of empowering participants, by facilitating their ‘access to research proposals, programmes and findings’, and ensuring that the research process seriously considers their needs (Heller, 1993). Correspondingly a central purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in their everyday lives, and therefore it has ‘emancipatory’ intentions: as described by Reason and Bradbury (ibid.) ‘action research is about working towards practical outcomes and also about creating new forms of understanding, since action without reflection is blind, just as theory without action is meaningless’ (ibid:1). Therefore the ideological and political intentions of a research project are made explicit within action research, in contrast to other research approaches, since – as outlined by Gaventa and Cornwall (2008) – it focuses on practical problem-solving and the knowledge generated from the process (Ibid: 181).

Unpublished piece by the Tavistock Institute emphasises that the origins of action research are frequently traced back to the social-technical experiments of Kurt Lewin in the 1940s at the Tavistock Institute, and their application to the practices of social democracy and organisation change (Lewin 1946; Greenwood and Levin, 2007), yet the origins of contemporary action research have to be linked to the theories of Marx, the contemporary critique of positivist science, the educational work of Paulo Friere (1970), the participatory work of Orlando Fals Borda (1979), progressive research on race and gender, experimental learning and psychotherapy (Schein and Bennis, 1965), with trends, as distinguished by Greenwood and Levin (2007) that include: industrial democracy; participatory action research (PAR) (developed in the global South alongside labour movements and civil rights); human inquiry and cooperative inquiry.  Furthermore, the piece says, action research is utilised in an increasing variety of practical contexts: to name but a few, it has been adopted by large international development agencies, the education sector, social and political movements (such as human rights and labour movements), industry and also in work-based organisational settings.

Towards a system change

Pure democracy requires a system change which replaces the entire fabric of the contemporary capitalist patriarchal society, which corresponds to more recent understandings of innovation. Innovation does not mean to discover something, but instead to merge what works best into new constellations of ideas, practices, approaches and frameworks. The “Open Book of Social Innovation” describe the process of system change as a long and rather slow spyral of social innovation as presented below.

It may be understandably frustrating for the protesters that will go out on the 16th of March 2019 in Bulgaria supposedly to destroy the Parliament, but this is the state of affairs – direct democracy will not come on this day even if more than 50 people gather to attack the current system. It is a question of sustained affort the first step being finding their voice (cf. Mosse and Roberts in “The unconscious at work”) rather than granting it to and following narcisistic leaders. It is of a foremost importance to embrace emergence, to synchronise and to organise through a backbone organisation, a core that is healthy, strong, thinking and capable to inspire and attaract mature members who have a voice, who are autnomous, and who are thinking and acting. The figure below presents the mechanisms through which such a backbone organisation, through collaboration, can serve to bring about a collective impact.

Power to the people: what is power though?

When enacting the above techniques and methodologies, one has to be aware of the different etymologies and meanings of concepts such as power, authority, government and governance. First of all, one has to be acutely aware of the different conceptions of the ancient Greek democracy, whereby politics is the ruling of the demos, and the Roman Empire politics, whereby government has the power and is supposedly driven by vaux populi (the voice of the people), but is in reality driven by populsim (manipulation and abuse of this voice for the purposes oppression and exploitation). These two political frameworks are carefully analysed by Arendt where she traces authoritarianism and totalitarianism to the Roman understanding of politics, which misplaces the achievements of the polis. It is a subject to another blog and analysis to explore how did it come that in many languages, including Bulgarian, the concepts of authority, authorities, power, ruling, government and governance are not distinguished and are instead replaced by one word, which – in the hope that citizens read the context – can be understood by a reference to intentions and purpose. Key readings that are to be reviewed for this objective are: “On violence” for a distinction (or the contemporary lack of thereof) between violence and power, the “Origins of Totalitarianism” on the perils of conflating Greek and Roam conceptions of politics and “What is authority?”.

 

 

 

All violence against women is one

 

“People sit on their grants and live – it’s not a women’s movement, it’s the creation of jobs! If only they [funders] guessed what happened to their money.” Looking at me, she said with a wink, “Don’t tell them! They only support us because they think that where there are feminists, there are no communists!” —from Julie Hemment’s research on empowering women in Russia

According to the UN and a strong line of research evidence, the position of women and girls in society puts them at a higher risk of all forms of systemic violence. The work against violence against women, however, is patchy – despite a growing recognition that something has to be done with no delay. A key problem is the current state of affairs in which the issue of violence against women is split off, driven mostly by availability of funding and policy agendas and vested interests of funders, rather than by priorities set up by a trans-national movement. There are a number of reasons for this – firstly, there is a split off between women’s and feminists’ organisations; secondly, organisations feeding on funding in the field split the various forms of violence and target individual aspects rather than the problem of violence against women as a whole; thridly, issues against violence against women are easily abused by those in power to impose restrictions and to turn the empowerment project into a framework legitiming exclusion and oppression not only of women, but of wider groups. The latter is most prominent in the work against trafficking in women – a field pumped with funding which pretends to care about victims but in reality promotes anti-immigration, anti-Roma and anti-refugee agendas as well as pathologisation and stigmatisation of victims, going on to pathologise whole populations via questionable definitions and a lack of proepr conceptualisation.

International Women’s Day historically has had a remarkably socialist platform, dating back to the early 20th century. Originally the movement considered all forms of oppression and exclusion of women and faught for structural, systemic, legislative, economic and political change. The organised struggle against gender-based violence gains momentum with the 1960s liberation movement and its purpose to de-mystify violence by revealing the different forms of oppression that give rise to structurally-determined violence (Cf. Dialectics of Liberation, 1967). The movement links to the struggle for human rights and for civil rights of disenfranchised groups, including women. A key role in recognising the reality of gender-based violence (GBV) was played by women GPs and psychotherapists who spoke on behalf of their patients and revealed that mental health issues of women and girls are caused by real and not by imagined violence, especially at home (Herman, 1998). Building on their hard-won victories of the 1970s and 1980s, women’s movements activists skillfully used the structure of the Washington Consensus and its “New Policy Agenda” after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. They became a new cluster of policy objectives that guided development interventions within and beyond post-socialist states (Hemment, 2007).

In the immediate post-Cold Era period international campaigns on women’s rights gained momentum throughout the 1990s, emanating in the 1995 Beijing conference – the UN Fourth World Conference, which marked the democratisation and internationalisation of campaigns and highlighted the importance of a synchronised effort to tackle all forms of gender-based violence, promoting the role of NGOs, especially in post-socialist countries. In post-socialist countries, women’s empowerment projects were promoted under the general auspices of the civil society promotion program, which was classically defined as the sphere of public interaction between the family and the state. The work on GBV has proven to be a vehicle for prevention of future re-victimisation, especially of women trafficking, since untreated past trauma from child abuse, domestic violence or sexual abuse is a key risk factor for entrapment is human trafficking.

As Stateva (2008) says, the concept of violence, gender-based violence in particular is difficult to define, there are risks of abuses, it is under-conceptualized despite of endless research throughout the last two centuries. Although individualistic approaches predominate in the study of violence both academically and in the common sense, an approach that takes society and culture seriously, one that also ‘recognises the link between intimate individual actions and social/structural determination’ (Bourgois in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004:304) is crucial for understanding violence. Post-structuralists go even further to suggest that in its origins, violence has collectivistic rather than individualistic character; that in its character it is social; that it is culturally constructed and always culturally interpreted; and that we should also account for different types of sociality that result in different conceptualizations of personality (Tishkov in Botcharov and Tishkov, 2000:11). At the same time, violence results in a vicious circle in which victims give birth to either victims or perpetrators and the whole cultural context perpetuates this vicious circularity. The same circularity can be seen behind interpersonal violence to the degree that authors speak of inter-generational aspects of trauma (Cf. Yehuda et al, 1997).

Partly due to the epistemological difficulties in understanding violence, partly due to the work being framed by funders and policy makers in power, with the time, the political functions of women’s organisations declined, alongside with turning “feminism” into a dirty word, in post-socialist countries in particular. The discourse shifted from prevention through a system change and from overcoming systemic and symbolic violence into treating the consequences of violence, especially the psychological consequences. Organisations turned from fighters for women’s equality into mere service providers. Nevertheless, this is one way to access issues of violence – through the concept and study of trauma from violence, which can be seen as a gate towards thinking about violence with a view of empowerment, emancipation and autonomy of the victims and their families.

Despite that for the purposes of needs assessment and treatment, all forms of violence can be seen through the prism of complex trauma, services for GBV are rare at the expence of services targeting politically constructed issues such as human trafficking. The study of complex trauma links a range of experiences ‘from domestic abuse to political terror’ and can illuminate trafficking trauma in the same terms in which it can throw light on other forms of violence (see Herman, 1998; Sluzki, 1997; Garland, 1998; Hoffman, 2005). In this perspective, trauma is seen as a product of the human inability to derive meaning from real overwhelming experiences hence it is seen as a normative response (e.g. van der Kolk and McFarlane, 1996). In the long run, it affects the victims’ emotions, cognition, behavior, social functioning, relationships and identity; at the social level, defenses are evoked that originally serve to protect from an overwhelming anxiety and vulnerability but effectively result in stigmatization, marginalization and ultimately re-victimization (Herman, 1998). This conceptualisation clearly shows that in reality there is no need to separate the work on different forms of violence against women, and even beyond – the consequences and their understanding are very similar, regardless of what type of violence has been experienced. Genuine organisations who have remained through to this principle had to survive on funding from anti-trafficking policies while doing the work on other forms of violence voluntary despite that more than 80% of their clients were victims of domestic and sexual violence.

Furthermore, the concept of trauma allows to mainstream screening and assessment and to go beyond ring-fenced services and service providers. Screening and assessment are crucial for the psychological assessment for treatment and recovery, for social and other needs for referral, for cultural mediation to connect with and give victims a voice, especially when issues of intersectionality are taken into account. Key role in this process is played by NGOs that are trained in the paradigm of trauma studies, yet other professionals also have access to opportunities for screening and assessment, most notably GPs and other frontline health practitioners, social workers as well as police first responders. It is not clear whether this joint approach to all forms of violence would work in their everyday practice as their access to trauma is not studied sufficiently. There is currently a huge debate about the role of police in domestic violence as well as a number of activities related to improving the work of frontline police on human trafficking. Debate and discussion on sexual abuse and violence, on harassment at the workplace, let alone on the economic, social and political position of women as a form of violence against women per se, is lacking.

An OSCE study published yesterday shows that the problem of GBV is pandemic in post-socialist countries. It is not by co-incidence that the work against the problem has been framed mostly as work against trafficking. Work against human trafficking became especially prominent in the late 1990s. To strengthen the response of NGOs, a Global Alliance against Traffic in Women was established globally, as well as a strong European network with headquarters in the Netherlands, called “La Strada” European Network against Trafficking in Human Beings. It has to be emphasised that the majority of the organisations in these networks work on all forms of violence against women, yet they receive funding mostly for human trafficking and, one can say, they do the majority of their work “under cover”.

Policy makers worked hard to bring to light the multiple forms of what they called “human trafficking”, yet I would argue they simply re-discovered the phenomenon of exploitation under capitalism and patriarchy, thus expanding the definitions to also include trafficking in labor and other abuses. Consequently, organisations around the world highlighted trafficking as a form of violence in which the majority of victims are women and girls, but that it affects also men and boys. With the piling evidence for the wide spread of the phenomenon, came also the need to involve organisations and institutions beyond the civil society framework – governmental, intergovernmental and trans-governmental structures and initiatives. The UN seriously engaged with the issue and accepted the 2000 Palermo Protocol, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children. 

In 2003, OSCE developed the concept of NRM that presented a methodology for cooperation in the identification, assistance, protection and re/integration at national levels, whereas in 2009 ICMPD elaborated a Transnational Referral Mechanism (TRM) to cover the cooperation across borders. NRMs were established in post-socialist countries, with exceptional work being done in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Macedonia, for example. The 2008-2010 NRM in Bulgaria, set up at the level of the Council of Ministers to involve all ministries, as well as NGOs in Bulgaria, was among the first the follow closely the concepts of both the NRM and the TRM. The NRM deals with the issue of trafficking only, but the Crisis Centers for Victims of Trafficking and Violence cover not only TIP but all forms of gender-based violence while the longer-term shelters are dedicated to TIP victims in particular. A number of the NGOs involved in the system also provide services for victims of other forms of violence, most notably the “La Strada”-Bulgaria member “Animus Association” which plays a leading role. IOM and ECPAT are also active in the field. The NRM framework in Ukraine was piloted in 2008-2010 with the Inter-Agency Council on the Issues of Family, Gender Equality, Demographic Development and the leading role of the Combating Trafficking in Human Beings and the Expert Working Group on the Issues of Prevention of Domestic Violence and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings. “La Strada”-Ukraine also plays a leading role in the processes of development and implementation and there are a number of other NGOs involved as well as the OSCE and IOM. The NRM in Macedonia operates for almost the same period. It is a system of cooperation among the competent institutions and organizations (MLSP, MOI, NGO and MD), which act within the territory of the Republic of Macedonia in the field of prevention, protection and referral of victims of trafficking in human beings.

Trafficking is prioritised not only in the field of NGOs service provision. The situation with health and social care staff is better explored internationally, yet their involvement in post-socialist countries is still minimal. Following the establishment of NRMs in nearly all EU countries, current and newly identified victims, and those in need of long term care (whether staying in their current destination or going home), receive social and security support. Yet, they also need quality health care access, referral and specialized treatment, especially mental health care, all of which are lacking an evidence base. The 2009 CoE Convention on Action Against THB, the 2000 Palermo Protocol and the NRMs stress the health authorities’ role in the support system as an NRM is a cooperative framework through which state actors, together with civil society, protect and promote the victims’ human rights, ensuring in particular that they are referred to comprehensive services. However, NRM is multi-purpose – simultaneously a framework, a welfare structure and a process – giving rise to complexity that brings difficulties to development and enforcement. Furthermore, efforts to address trafficking are hindered by poor understanding of the problem, especially around victims’ health needs, even though health care professionals can play a critical role in both captivity and recovery.

A research on health services, as well as on frontline police and social care staff should aim at enhancing their response based on the following principles:

•Survivors’ access to comprehensive, sustained, gender, age and culturally appropriate healthcare aiming overall physical, mental and social well-being (BDPHTHB, 2003).

•The cultural context at all stages of migration is taken into account to ‘provide appropriate services at destination (and origin) points, taking into consideration specific occupational hazards, language barriers, and ability to access health and social care facilities’ (Busza, Castle and Diarra, 2004).

•Medical assistance that is tailored to the individual victim’s needs (UNODC, 2017). The health complications range from severe psychological trauma to effects of working under hazardous conditions, injuries from violence, sexually-transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, various adverse reproductive health outcomes, and substance misuse (Beyrer and Stachowiak, 2003; Zimmerman et al., 2011; Zimmerman et al., 2007; Zimmerman et al., 2006; IOM, 2006; Zimmerman and Borland, 2009).

•The expanded immigration and integration options to improve victims’ protection and to provide better evidence for prosecution (see Heynes, 2004) require paying special attention to their long-term needs, particularly to the mental trauma.

Similar questions are faced in the area of services where there are four main forms of services – psychotherapy and crisis intervention, social assistance (including crisis centers and shelters), police protection, and comprehensive re/integration plans. The experience of combining TIP and GBV in shelters is well studied by Surtees (e.g. 2008) who observes that there are issues related to stigma, shelter safety issues, and issues of restrictive shelter rules. Warnath (2007) makes a wider review, analyzing also medical care, mental health care, vocational training and job placement, family mediation and assistance, educational assistance, legal assistance, educational assistance, reintegration, specialized assistance for minors and awareness raising/education. These studies mainly cover provisions combining domestic violence and TIP and not GBV in its variety of forms and commonalities of consequences and needs. They also review services from the prism of services available to victims of TIP while there are a number of mainstream approaches that may well work not only for GBW, including TIP, but for mainstream populations, such as participatory frameworks that are gaining momentum and coming back to life after their invention between the 1960s and the 1980s. All these issues can be related to understanding the work in support of victims of all forms of gender-based violence – but they are not.

I argue that the problem of human trafficking is a purposefully framed issue, socially constructed by policy makers and those in power and with money to highjack the agenda away from gender-based violence and its real intersectionality, by conflating questions of migration, criminality, violation of borders and so on and by tricking women’s groups and organisations into serving their own agenda rather than to promote the rights and position of girls and women. This is partly linked to the divisions between left and right feminists, the latter, in particular neoliberal feminists even giving up the name of a “feminist struggle” in favour of “women’s movements” that focus on treatment of trauma, which is intself perhaps useful in pragmatic terms, but damaging through pathologisation, the fight for women’s empowerment and utonomy.

Far-right feminists go even further to exclude LGBT women and inter-sex people from their sphere of influence. This inlcudes questions the field of human trafficking, too.Thus, more sensitive has become the topic about the risks related to alternative sexuality and a tendency towards alternative sexual behaviour. There is very little research, especially in post-socialist countries and it is mostly related to the field of human trafficking again. The Centre for the Study of Democracy has done such work in Bulgaria within the “CHILD TRAFFICKING AMONG VULNERABLE ROMA COMMUNITIES” Project. It is well known, however, that boys offer trans-sexual services in Bulgaria, that transgender people are active in Macedonia and that the attitudes towards trans-sexual people are severe in Ukraine, with a recent case of an attacked activist. The topic is difficult, yet important, not only because of the sensitivity and stigma but also because the issues of gender identity and gender, in general, are giving rise to serious protests among the mainstream more conservative populations, linking to rising far-right wing sentiments and activity, including at the highest political levels, especially in Bulgaria. According to experts, alternative sexuality is not a risk factor for human trafficking per se, but the risks stem from the surrounding stigma and marginalisation, including hate crimes, which can make homosexual, transsexual and queer people more vulnerable as they seek a safer environment in more tolerant countries.

The questions of race and ethnicity are also very problematic. It is often argued, in particular by policy makers, that violence against women, including women trafficking, is more present among ethnic minorities, especially the Roma. This argument is so strong that it was used by the French government in the last decades to expell Roma women from Eastern Europe under the auspices of human trafficking victim support, whilst in reality, the programmes were used to expell all Roma women from the country regardless of their stories. Research, however, shows that Roma women victims of trafficking from Bulgaria are app. 13-14%, which corresponds to the representation of the Roma minority among the general population.

The issue of intersectionality between the different forms of violence should be kept high in the political agenda. Although it is well known that around 30-40% of victims of TIP are also victims of other forms of VAW, there is no systematic research on the phenomenon, nor it is known how identification, care and integration affects those who are victims of VAW as well as of TIP, nor whether support, protection and services can be expanded to victims of VAW given that they are most suited for work with traumatised people as well as due to the role of treating and integrating victims of GBV as a means of preventing trafficking and re-trafficking. The voice of those reminding that not only forms of individualistically-defined GBV are inter-connected but also issues the issues of how GBV is caused and perpetuated by political, systemic, structural and symbolic violence, remain unheard.

By defying policy-set agendas, the Yellow Vests movement in France has established a new tone of revitalising grassroots bottom up movements and giving women a voice. By resisting and protesting all forms of violence against women, including economic, structural and symbolic, the women among the Yellow Vests are setting up an example of how the official discourses can and should be cracked and turned upside down, this time around for the purposes of real liberation, autonomy and leadership of women.

This blog, therefore, has argued that policy agendas and vested interests have suffocated the women’s struggle, turning the fight for women rights, liberation, autonomy and leadership into a service provision machine, predominantly targeting victims of trafficking, who are then turned into patients. There is a hope for a new rise of the struggle for women with the revitalisation of grassroot movement led by the Yellow Vests as well as by a rising intellectual and middle-class opposition to pro-governmental neoliberalist women’s “movement” – the latter a word masking service providers engaged in money making and job creation to sustain their own existence rather than to bring a real change to the life of women locally and around the world.

 

 

 

 

Share this:

via The nausea as a modus of thinking

The nausea as a modus of thinking

We live in times, which Arendt would call “darkening times for democracy”. Lene Auestad, leader of the “Psychoanalysis and Politics” movement reads Arendt’s concept as a description of “moments in history, when public speech fails to illuminate”, and I would add, even more, it fails to enlight.

For me, these are times, in which inexusable events happen; events, thinking for which gets “stuck” due to deficiency of modes and modalities of the mind: disgraces, such as the “Ivantcheva and Petrova” case (mayors of Mladost municiplaity in Sofia who were framed because of their work against construction works and are now facing severe charges and are imprisoned under inumane conditions); the case of the arrested two investigative journalists while photographing the burning of documents surrounding the #GPGate affair in Bulgaria; the Bulgarian Constitutional Court voting the term “gender” unconstitutional on the background of severe and pervasive violence against women and children; the expressed outrageous attitudes of politicians towards protesting mothers of disabled children; systematically creating conditions for the burn out of care providers to an extent that new-borns are being severely beaten by midwives, women in labour being murdered by means of springing upon their belly, toddlers are harassed and beaten by their  governesses in the kindergarten; and many more disturbing precedents from the recent reality in Bulgaria.

One should not miss out from this list ongoing evacuations, in the sense of evacuating toxic and even radioactive psychic material, via projections into those who are different, like the scapegoating of Roma, for example – such phenomena have not gone, but have been expanded by other phenomena with the same function, say the projections into refugees and people seeking international protection.

In Europe, as well as in the so called democratic world more widely, very similar things happen, especially with the rise of the far- right on the everyday and on the official pollitical and societal levels.

I talk with young, bright people and I follow the moods on social media. Such phenomena, as the listed above, evoke in us bolackages of thought and a specific stuckness, which necessitates a new modality of our professionalism – as psychologists, or as whatever we call our work with the individual and the collective psyche, a modus which I call “the nausea as a modus of thinking” (following Sartre and his concept in the novel of the same title).

“The nausea”  is different from “disgust” and “recoil” since it does not result in “vomiting” in the public space, nor does it cause withdrawal from the issues at hand.

Of course, the nausea, can also produce nothing and this is also a good outcome – as Adorno says about the only possible reaction to one of the most disgusting events in human history, the only possible response to events like the Holocaust, is silence. And that poetry is no longer possible after faschism, as a historical fact about the capacity of humanity to unchain the human condition.

The nausea is a modus of thinking, which is beyond knowing, and which is a comprehension beyong knowing – a knowing that one is beyond knowing, as well as a comprehension of that, which is beyond knowing. This is a modus of thinking, which becomes meaningful only by accessing what Levinas, for example, calls the “infinity” at the next layer beyond the collective unconscious.

The difficulties in accessing that, which is beyond knowing is also one of the reasons for the decline of psychoanalityc practice nowadays – the classical face-to-face psychoanalysis requires sustained work year after year in order to develop this type of sensibility in both the analyst and the analysand. Moreover, it requires even longer to distil meaning and to applying it in our everyday being.

The nausea is a modus of thinking about the pervert and the disgusting in the individual, the social and the political life. It has meaningmaking properties only in a group context and via artistic devices, i.e. the psychologists and other practitioners who seek to work at this levels of the disgusting, the dregs of the public sphere, which is also the most needed  at the present moment work, need a spesific equipment as well as a collaboration with professionals from other fields specialising in knowing, not only those from the scientific sphere and from the professional community.

One way to resist the nausea is by accessing deeper layers of the unconscious in a group, or what Gordon Lawrence called “the matrix” – a womb created by the minds of those who participate in real or in imagined ways in a group or a community, a womb in which, as Bion said, the thoughts are in a search for their thinker and are born by the storm of minds. The work with free associations, transferance and counter-transferance, though, is not sufficient when we work in the “mud”, the most challenging social fields, whic Trist calls  the “problematique” or just “messes”. Trafficking of human beings is one such field, in which the most perverted associations of violence, sex and money are inter-twisted and in which we face the greatest difficulties to make sense.

The art is isolated as a form of entertainment, as one of the “battery-charging” compartments in our difficult everyday life, together with intimacy, love, activism, which are all no longer a part of our lives but isolated spaces for retreat. The art, however, is a very serious and effective tool to access unconscious, repressed, emergent and so on material, and because of these qualities, it is a tool, which makes accessible, conceptualisable and therefore thinkable this material in the individual, social and the political space by facilitating the containment of anxieties, the management of vulnerability and the working through of traumas, so that one can be-in-the-world and can be also capable of action, even in the shape of being-in-another-way as a form of protest and resistance.

It is important to work with artists and artistic techniques, especially with music since music has universal properties and language that can produce associations in a variety of contexts and resonates with a number of people woth different attunements. The music is a peculiar type of a mediator, a research and psychoanlytic tool from a meta-analytical, second-order level of hyper-analysis.

I work a lot with visuality (with drawings, photos, video material and dreams) and I am deeply grateful to all the authors who have worked with me in my attempts to conceptualise darkening times for democracy and how they reveal themselves at the present moment – all works with modalities of the mind which allow the nausea to operate in a meaningful way and allow the psychologist, or whatever he or she calls themselves, to formulate mutative interpretations. Music and poetry particularly make a point when encountering the meaningless and that which kills meaning. Also improtant is to work with the underdog artists since they have access to the depository of the oppressed, which – as Benjamin says – is the depository of the historical knowledge.

In the scientific field, we live in times of disllved and re-drawn boundaries between disciplines. It is, I believe, the end of the roles of the psychologist and psychoanlyst as such, and their re-birth as trans-disciplinary experts, as leaders of dissent, as enlighteners/activists and as whistleblowers. Crucial in these effort is to work at the deepest levels and to provide collective interpretations and conceptual frameworks that facilitate meaning-making.

My thanks go to Plamen Dimitrov (Bulgarian Society of Psychologists) and Prolet Velkova (Darik Radio) for hosting a conversation on this, to the independent artists Stoyan Stefanov, Mitko Lambov, Bewar Mossa, Sultana Habib, Sam Nightingeil and Juliet Scott (the Tavistock Institute) for working, thinking and feeling with me (and instead of me) and to Mum for saying that all this makes sense to her.

 

 

A brief history of identity politics

…infinity is produced in the relationship of the same with the other, and how the particular and the personal, which are unsurpassable, as it were magnetize the very field in which the production of infinity is enacted…

Levinas in Totality and Infinity, p.26

The combined workings of technology, positivism and post-Fordism lead to largely exaggerated claims of understanding how the mind works, which can be illustrated by the real story of a dead salmon scan which detected brain activity. Being an independent scholar I am not afraid to embrace the doors of perception hypothesis, instead, and especially the idea that our brains need a bit of an effort to awaken. And I am not going back to Huxley and Blake. In fact, I would even argue that mescaline etc are not needed to reach the depths of our minds. Although some Romanticism and slight melancholia may be helpful, definitely, a bit of a fusion of psychoanalysis and politics will do the job.

Politics and psychoanalysis?

‘Politics and psychoanalysis do not come easily together’, though, says Hinshelwood in an unpublished 2015 paper with the title Reflection or action: And never the twain shall meet. ‘Psychoanalysis’, he further says, ‘is concerned with what is driven by individual unconscious while the political is more clearly concerned with social and economic influences that exploit individual dynamics’ (Hinshelwood, 2015:1). I don’t think they are incompatible, though. I guess the reader may need an overview going back to phenomenology to bridge them in a meaningful way, but let’s try without Heidegger & Co (yes, this link is better than the Wikipedia entry on phenomenology, for a change).

Psychoanalysis, sociological imagination and group relations theory can help us understand the mind and how to boost its workings by intervening to shift power one way or another. To save some 10,000 words making the parallels between the basics of psychoanalysis, group relations and sociological imagination, these Triangles illustrate how the three approaches can be seen as related. Ford and the likes would be upset to find out that history does exist, it is not made by them, and history, indeed, makes the present and the future. To those who observe that my work is ‘just about working with concepts’, History with a capital “H” is, in fact, built on and understood by concepts. A particularly good one is that of infinity (yes, Wikipedia didn’t do a very good job here again), and I will get back to infinity and how it can be accessed towards the end – if you can’t wait, take a break and look at this paper of mine.

If we head for infinity off from psychoanalysis alone, we will be most likely stuck in our own darkness. If we depart from mescaline or recreational drugs, we will be amazed by the beauty of your own madness, but that’s it. If we explore group relations, the most likely outcome would be a despair from the workings of organisations and how they reduce us to just another cog in the machine. If we look at the depths of history, through the sociological imagination, with a bit of a luck and a lot of Benjamin, we may encounter the working class consciousness as deposited in the oppressed – slightly better than the previous trips, but still no good. Let’s have a look at what comes if we try to put all of those together by pulling my triangles together (download the ppt, then click “play” and click to move the figures in). That is – the short story, the next three sections explain the figures in a slightly longer overview.

Symbolic interactionism

For the purposes of tracing back the grounds for bringing together politics and psychoanalysis and the roots of identity politics thereof, it is worth having a look at the symbolic interactionism of George Simmel. Simmel postulated that creative consciousness is found in diverse forms of interaction. It is found in the ability of actors to create social structures and is proven by the disastrous effects those structures have on the creativity of individuals as the social and cultural structures come to have a life of their own.

Simmel refers to ‘all the forms of association by which a mere sum of separate individuals are made into a “society”, which he describes as a, “higher unity,” composed of individuals’. He was especially fascinated, it seems, by the “impulse to sociability in man” expressed as ‘associations…[through which] the solitariness of the individuals is resolved into togetherness, a union with others’, a process by which, ‘the impulse to sociability distils, as it were, out of the realities of social life the pure essence of association’, and ‘through which a unity is made: […]the free-playing, interacting interdependence of individuals.” Simmel defines sociability as

Simmel further defines sociability as the play-form of association, driven by ‘amicability, breeding, cordiality and attractiveness of all kinds’. In order for this free association to occur, he says, “the personalities must not emphasise themselves too individually…with too much abandon and aggressiveness’ bringing thus to life a ‘world of sociability…a democracy of equals…without friction’. That is, as long as people blend together in a spirit of fun and affection to ‘bring about among themselves a pure interaction free of any disturbing material accent’ (From the Wikipedia entry, of course).

Thus, this line of thought also suggests, creative consciousness, as well as identity itself, are a product of bonding and bridging associations. Gemeinschaft (German pronunciation: [ɡəˈmaɪnʃaft]) and Gesellschaft ([ɡəˈzɛlʃaft]), generally translated as “community and society” respectively, are categories which were used by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in order to categorise social ties. Weber wrote in direct response to Tönnies, and argued that Gemeinschaft is rooted in a “subjective feeling” that may be “affectual or traditional”. Gesellschaft-based relationships, according to Weber, are rooted in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, the best example of which is a commercial contract.

The two concepts were revived recently, sadly to announce the decline of their real-life occurrence, by Putnam (2000). Putnam describes bonding associations (around shared identity) and bridging associations (around shared or contractual interest) – a distinction based on the socio-economic diversity within an association. There is a bit of a history that goes back to de Tocqueville and how democracy is different in Europe (built around bonding associations) and the US (built around bridging associations), but let’s not bother too much with that for now. This is all about the ‘horizontal’ built of identity which is good keeping in mind as it shows us that we are chained by our associations via groups and organisations.

The historical making of the self

A most amazing account of how identity, as we have it now, is chained historically, is provided by Charles Taylor in a fascinating book with the title ‘Sources of the self: the making of modern identity‘. Taylor shows how Thomas Aquinas and other good people, long before Led Zeppelin, have made us the inward looking creatures of today (or at least those of us who have managed to keep their inwardness-looking gaze intact in the current busy-ness) alongside the Renaissance affirmation of ordinary life through the arts (yes, not the pop and falk-pop, but much older works apparently). For those interested in pure psychoanalysis, this is all slightly cancelling Freud, as it shows that his account of the unconscious, being based on Greek mythology, is skipping more recent layers of our cultural makeup and is perhaps also proving that we should not look into Eros and Thanatos for our driving principles of today but in the tension between Start Treck and Star Wars.

This is all, of course, very difficult to work with. So medicine and psychiatry soon took over, as Foucault shows with The Birth of the Clinic and Madness and Civilisation  – in particular, to help the world deal with ‘the sad, the mad and the bad’; that is, with nearly everyone who has issues with the status quo and is, as such, a depository of historical knowledge, and thus, of progress. Going largely unnoticed by the world they were seeking to develop, but being powerfully present, a few key people stood up against the growing powers of pathologisation by which the order stream was gaining momentum.

“The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness” (R.D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, 1960) and “The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise” (R.D. Laing, 1967) made the point that psychiatry is inherently flawed, since it treats mental illness following a biological model, whereas how we feel, and how these feelings are expressed in thinking and behaviour, is an existential question. The already mentioned “The Birth of the Clinic”, “Madness and Civilisation”, and “The History of Sexuality” (Michel Foucault, 1970s) further explored how our identities are socially constructed through the use of bio-power, claiming that physical, mental and sexual disorders are caused by medicine, not treated by medicine.

These books paved the way for a deeper argument by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L’Anti-Œdipe (1972). Trans. Capitalism and Schizophrenia Anti-Oedipus (1977), which I don’t dare to summarise but strongly recommend adding to your reading list if you are interested to see how and why schizophrenia is present in capitalist societies only. Alongside these powerful voices, psychiatry itself gave rise to some emancipatory critique through “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror ” by Judith Lewis Herman. She basically explained that Freud was wrong – our inner worlds are formed not as a result of phantasmic activity, but following real-life traumas and the denial of their reality.

The Dialectics of Liberation 

The emerging hypothesis, therefore, is that, if we cannot use our minds because the society has historically first created them and then locked them up, by ‘the democratisation of accessing our minds’, as Mark Fisher explained at the 2015 edition of the Dialects of Liberation Congress, we can overcome the limitations imposed on us by an anxiety-inducing and pathology-producing world by applying the same processes reversed. The original Dialectics of Liberation Congress was held in 1967 precisely to “demystify human violence in all its forms, and the social systems from which it emanates, and to explore new forms of action” (see more here as well) – an endeavour to capture as well as to galvanise ideas circulated at the time, which are still alive (although somewhat suffocated and twisted by neo-liberalism and an all-pervading market logic).

These ideas were powerfully shaped, promoted and re-enforced by music and the rock culture, but were far from simply an aspect of the entertainment industry. How the industry killed the most brilliant minds giving a voice to these ideas, and how good ideas are twisted by the market and employed to serve the very trends they seek to destroy, is too painful to write about (for now), but the ideas themselves were grounded in five programmes for liberation based on suppressed aspects of our identity:

• The anti-war movement which increased the understanding of trauma

• Somewhat paradoxically, the anti-war movement paired with the feminist movement to give impetus to liberating women and children from violence and abuse in intimate relationships

• Which was in turn linked to highlighting human rights and liberating people from respecting their sexuality

• Not unrelated was the revival of the struggle for the rights of black people and minorities as well as

• The struggle for the rights of people with disabilities

The glorious victories of these struggles and their contemporary defeat (or not) are worth looking at in another post or by someone else. If there is a defeat, though, it is very much rooted in the divorce between theorisation and practice of these struggles – this recent piece is worth looking at. Friends and I are working in our separate little words to somehow bridge the two, coming together every now and then, or reaching out to practitioners (or theoreticians, depending on which aspect of our identities we were made to be identified with, in each discrete piece of work while riding the hyphen of practitioner-theoretician and other dichotomies). This post is based on a guest lecture I gave last year at New Bulgarian University, so it assumes somewhat an audience of (future) practitioners and will follow the summary so far with an overview of a bit of theory that may have been neglected in current practices.

Post-modern blends of social and political thought  with psychoanalysis

The image above is somewhat misleading as post-modern blends of social and political thought basically assume that there is no box, or at least that there is no escape from the box unless we connect with the roots of who we are (as my beloved cousin also often reminds me when I get stuck). The use of ‘post-modern’ is rather loose, but in my course in Social and Political Thought, it came to mean the search for meaning that came after the inability to comprehend the Holocaust as the ultimate event of manufacturing death in a “civilised” world.

Most notable is the work of the Frankfurt School in the pursuit of trying to make sense of the Holocaust. The key authors assumed that traditional theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, so the marriage of critical thought and psychoanalysis is the road to understanding and new paths of social development. A key, but very simplified hypothesis was, that modernity has shaped humans as submissive beings who would not resist authoritarianism due to their upbringing, which was in turn rooted in cultural conditioning that led to easily unchaining the human nature. A culminating point was Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil, a degree of evil that goes, in her view, beyond just a ‘radical evil’ – the terrifying discovery that evil has ordinary qualities, and that it is rooted in losing our humanness in everyday processes that can turn ordinary people into executioners of atrocities. The search for an antidote has shaped, implicitly or explicitly, a lot of the contemporary works in the field of critical theory below.

That the modernity project contained the roots of constructing identities in a dangerous way received some further impetus by the emergence of large fields of study concerned with colonialism and its effects on identities and post-colonial selves. Important authors that I would not dare to summarise are Frantz Fanon (1925 – 1961) and those building on his work to explore the psychopathology of colonization, and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization, most notably the continuous work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942 -) against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world. These works were largely not only theoretical and have huge implications at the everyday level, empowering people to tell their own stories, independently of prevailing colonialistic discourses (here is one of my favourite speeches on the subject).

The most exciting analyses, though, have come from feminist epistemologies that look at ways of thinking, doing and being that are attributed to women and thus rendered to be unimportant and insignificant, thus moving the discourse from womanhood as a disorder to women’s ways of knowing and being as legitimate and worthy. This all perhaps started to be taken seriously with Simone de Beauvoir, most notably with the 1949 publication of  The Second Sex and psychoanalysis recognising the more contemporary work of  Jessica Benjamin (see 1988, The Bonds of Love, New York: Pantheon Books.1998, Like Subjects, Love Objects, New Haven: Yale University Press. Chodorow, Nancy, 1978, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley: University of California Press).

The work of these and other women philosophers (see when you have the time to indulge in alternative philosophy these exciting four volumes) made the case stronger for modalities of thinking and activities of the mind that are usually seen as somewhat female, hence not taken seriously and ascribed to areas not worthy or legitimate beyond the private sphere or the field of entertainment at best. The blueprint resulting from the work of contemporary women philosophers, such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Lucy Irigaray and, to some extent Julia Kristeva, powerfully shapes a new framework that criticises in a caring and preserving way what Derrida called (in his own critique of Logos and of metaphysics as violence), the ways of knowing of ‘the white, male, carnivore and capable of sacrifice’ beings.

Accessing infinity

Instead of seeking to destroy, or even deconstruct conventional ways of thinking, such works endeavour to re-imagine our world through a kind of a female imaginary that is well analysed with a reference to the work of Irigaray here. Irigaray provides a most exciting analysis of how and why such a re-imagined world would be a better place to live in her juxtaposition of the world based on survival anxiety that we inhabit now, versus a world based on desire.

We and our ancestors have designed a world that aims to help us unsuccessfully deal with the fear of death, hence the greatest contribution to society and history is the gift of death – a point well traced back historically much earlier by Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred. If you think this is no longer the case, think of how decent beings, including yourselves, offer their devoted humble self-sacrifices on a daily basis – by sacrificing precious time for yourselves and the things you love and that make you who you are, for example. In my work with groups and organisations, more and more often I witness that at times of crisis, and the time now is more of an all-encompassing catastrophic crisis than the oridnary crises before, redundancies are used to re-enact sacrificial rituals of ancient origins with an underlying hope for redemption (let alone that making my services as an organisational consultant redundant is often used as a meta-sacrifice of a kind).

This analysis of the world, as constructed around survival anxiety, Irigaray illustrates with the organisation around violence, exploitation and abuse between classes, generations, genders and so on which aims to ensure that those on top are able to preserve their lives and the lives of their ingroups. By contrast, she sees a world in which being, thinking and action stems from desire as built around sexual differences and the drive to create and to be beautiful inside and outside, an inspiration-driven, not driven by fear, world in which everyone aims to become the best they can be and not the fittest to survive. Instead of production (of safety, knowledge, material stuff, money etc) that only produces an overall surplus value and not the safety, knowledge, material stuff, money etc that would provide for survival, such a world will create genuine value, truth, peace, harmony, justice and beauty.

We can extend this argument to a world based on aspects of identity, not just sexual differences, where suppressed aspects that would hinder progress and actualisation are freed from teleological efforts and will flow in creative and rich ways to spread beauty and justice and to help us access these aspects of ourselves that make us carers of the knowledge about the world since the creation that we carry in our bodies which I believe is what was meant by infinity.  This perspective is not only instrumental in the liberation movement but has always been inherent in the arts before they were cornered in the entertainment industry. The seeming failure of conceptual art to make a similar point is deeply rooted in the material frameworks that embody survival anxiety as a driver, hence a shortcut to imploding such frameworks may lie precisely in using the very frameworks to cancel themselves – going back to good old Marx, by seizing the means of production and turning them into tools of creation.

A kind of wrapping all this off for now

“History is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

Henry Ford, 0n 25th  May for the Chicago Tribune

Bauman tells us bluntly what Ford meant: ‘Progress? Do not think of it as “the work of history”. It is our work, the work of us, who live in the present. The sole history that counts is one not-yet-made-but-being-made at the moment and bound-to-be-made: that is the future […]’ (Bauman, 2011:131). Prompted to finish the post on the International Women’s Day (failed), and powered by a profound discussion with a friend on oxytocin and other chemicals of ours that boost creativity and overall our minds (and whether to get those from love, recognition and the arts or from a number of over-the-counter and other drugs), I have quickly put here an overview of a guest lecture at New Bulgarian University last year. To sum it up, it was basically about the tension between order and progress as the two driving forces behind the project of modernity (I’ve learned that from Charles Turner in a course I was teaching at the University of Warwick with him as the convenor).

Democracy going forward by means of causing a creative tension between progress and order was the story before Fordism and post-Fordism came to power, though. A few would know that positivism was born in an attempt delegated to Comte to promote order. The commission was meant to make revolutions, that is progress, more manageable and less bloody after the blood spilt during the French Revolution. How this mistaken belief that progress is to blame for bloody revolutions has led to Fordism, post-Fordism and the merge of the two in the current state of a fusion between services and technology is a different and yet to be written story. This would perhaps be a story written alongside the stories of those falling victim to the presentism of today, or more of the the-future-is-now moment in which we live.

Still, I would like to believe that progress is one of our driving forces – suffocated, tortured, ridiculed, suppressed, managed. The NBU lecture and this blog are, therefore, more about the story of how the progress stream of modernity sustained some momentum via the push in the 1960s and 1970s and how psychoanalysis may contain some potential to drag us out of neo-liberalism, as the perversion of order. I have reviewed how identity politics, as possibly the most promising invention of progress to date, may pave the road to a differently imagined world since the real revolution has to be first imagined. One of my teachers in psychoanalysis, Dr Alberto Hahn, reminded me last year in a supervision session that phantasy (and fantasy) is more real than ‘the real’. It is in this spirit that I have tried to make the point towards the end that imagination, hence creativity, is powerful and legitimate political tool in which we, through our identities, are the makers of the world we inhabit and construct for those to come after us. As this is all very long, I haven’t spoken sufficiently of the ways through which our contemporary world contains the basics to cancel so to preserve itself, which I have started exploring in the three blogs on the search for the virtual pitch.

Reasoning by reductio ad absurdum: the case for universal entrepreneurship

In logic, reductio ad absurdum is a form of argument which attempts either to disprove a statement by showing it inevitably leads to a ridiculous, absurd, or impractical conclusion, or to prove one by showing that if it were not true, the result would be absurd or impossible.

From the Wikipedia entry

My friends would remember my resolution last year to be a woman punching Nazis with a handbag. In a world shaped by all types of Nazis reducing existence to survivalism  – the receiving end of capitalism, in my view – this is more easily said than done. My way seems to be writing. Writing is an activity very different from other modalities of thinking. Writing is supposed to be slightly more meaningful – as it can make visible, hence more possible to work with, the différance. One key attempt at punching Nazis this year was a piece of work for a genuine and much-respected client who I will keep anonymous in the hope that their work will be pioneering successfully a new and much-needed approach and will speak for itself. Grounded in this piece of work, this post is about venturing from critique to praxis and back, towards a proof that theory is not the opposite of practice.

Danuta Danielsson, hitting a neo-Nazi with her handbag. Her mother was a concentration camp survivor. [1985]

‘One common objection to the idea of universality, says Badiou in Theoretical Writings (pp.154-155), ‘is that everything that exists or is represented relates back to particular conditions and interpretations governed by disparate forces or interests’. If that sounds too vague, here is some more detail by Badiou further in the same text:

Thus, for instance, some maintain that it is impossible to attain a universal grasp of difference because of the abyss between the way the latter is grasped, depending on whether one occupies the position of ‘man’ or of ‘woman’. Still others insist that there is no common denominator underlying what various cultural groups choose to call ‘artistic activity’; or that not even a mathematical proposition is intrinsically universal, since its validity is entirely dependent upon the axioms that support it […] What this hermeneutic perspectivalism overlooks is that every universal singularity is presented as the network of consequences entailed by an evental decision. [If] the event is subjectivated on the basis of its statement, whatever consequences come to be invented as a result will be necessary.

Bridging Badiou’s universal (as an implicative structure) and the practicalities of living, this post invites you to become a companion in my ramblings around the possibility of all of us becoming entrepreneurs. But what does this has to do with punching Nazis?

There is a growing disenchantment with the integration project, a trend identified by the ISD (2012) as early as 2012 and I suggest that this is why we are sliding down the road. And, yes, the ISD document is no longer available online, l.a. 2013. To sum it up, the rather progressive regimes of multiculturalism and the likes have been replaced by mere toleration policy frameworks – with a high cost for democracy, diversity, the potential for innovation, enriching growth and so on. This decline is often justified by blaming on multiculturalism the series of Jihadist terrorist attacks and the growing radicalisation. I see nothing wrong with radicalisation, nor with anger in the social and political domains for that matter, and I am not an expert on Jihadist terrorism which I see as a threat largely exaggerated.

I am more concerned, therefore, with the unprecedented rise of the far-right, which is definitely not related to radicalisation and anger. This rise of far-right activation has reached a pick into a stream of domestic white terrorism in the wealthiest countries, including lone terrorism masked as ‘ill mental health’, and an alarming intensification of neo-Nazi activity across Europe and beyond. Believe it or not, the support to Roma and refugees developed under cohesion regimes, may well be the needed solution for us all to grow, to become emancipated and to mobilise us all to boost culture, economy, communities and the society at large.

Far-right feeds of what a 2010 UWE study identified as politics of resentment.  The study demonstrates how resentment is mobilised by implicit and explicit blunt manipulation to incite hatred towards, and self-hatred among, the underdog. It is all too easy for the mainstream to see ring-fenced funding as the ‘evil’ in a context in which the 99,9% are strained to a breaking point. The usual survival threats under capitalism are exacerbated in the light of dismantling regimes of welfare (yet to be analysed in a process starting around authors such as Ebbinghous, 2012; Arts and Gelissen, 2010; Brockhoff, Rossignol and Taugourdeau, 2011), unchaining social cohesion (ISD, 2012 email me for the disappearing report above), as well as other inadequate policy-induced responses to the 2008 economic crisis illustrated by the more recent refugee crisis.

All this is too complex, though. It is easier to think that someone else is to blame, without considering that there is no someone else – as there is no other on the first place. The real trouble I see is that, whether by evil intentions or by careless attitude, those in power have allowed ring-fencing support, thus building a stigma to using “support” and on those “using support”. While some have been quick to conclude that the social cohesion projects, especially those linked to employment have failed, it may well be that projects based on identity politics were blocked and even unchained by recent socio-economic and political events and stuck in bureaucracy. Investment in certain groups only is counter-productive, not investment in cohesion or in human and professional development (with apologies to those stealing from their private time to collect CPD points, I don’t mean this type of professional development).

Mainstreaming support to entrepreneurship

Being a female white moral entrepreneur, running an enterprise on interest-free micro-credits from Mum and friends, I have no illusions about the reality of entrepreneurship, let alone social entrepreneurship. I am wondering, though, whether the “mainstreaming while targeting approaches” (EC, 2007) are not holding some potential. Yes, the link to this EC report is also dead, but to summarise, cutting edge social cohesion strategies were just about giving new hope for social innovation and economic stability before they seem to have disappeared in someone’s drawer. These strategies are anchored in cross-fertilisation between societal sectors and in mobilising diversity to give rise to solutions to new and inherited challenges. Utilising a ‘mainstreaming while targeting’ framework means developing ‘[g]eneral programmes [that] promote […] integration as an integral part of activities that are geared towards society as a whole, [but acknowledge] specific needs that will demand additional and targeted measures’ (EC, ibid. 2007:17). While the effects would not be as good as with simply a universal basic income , I am confident that considering the case for universal supported entrepreneurship may be a worthy pursuit, too.

The value of labour market is largely exaggerated, but I will bracket (for now) the perils of labour market “participation” per se. For the sake of the argument here, we should consider first that barriers to the labour market are not always due to vulnerabilities, poverty, or lack of knowledge or skills or qualifications. Like any market, the labour market is inhumane, messy, exclusive, and difficult to navigate; it is complex, discriminatory, exploitative and oppressive on top of that. Finding a way out is the secret dream of any decent human being who has gone through the everyday struggles to keep their soul intact while contributing to the perpetuation of the capitalist machinery through the so-called “labour participation.”

Labour itself, though, can be creative and is indeed what makes us human and how we relate to the world around us. As the Talmud has grasped, there are two types of work – work as creation and work as servitude. While the labour market is well capable of suffocating any creativity, altruism and vitality, labour has unlimited potential to make this world a better place and guess what – we can even feel good while doing so.

The support for Roma groups

The case of developing interventions to support Roma in the EU presents an opportunity to explore the potential of cutting edge emancipatory techniques, developed in the most challenging contexts, to be adapted to the current context and applied universally. Roma integration (as well as the integration of Gypsy and Traveller groups) has become one of the key ‘hot potatoes’ and the focal point of conflicts and tensions that accompany the integration of any vulnerable groups. Perhaps it is the main point of resentment in the countries where Roma population forms a significant percentage of the population as well as in the West since Roma integration is a persistent challenge across the EU. Btw in terms of numbers, there are as many Romani in the UK, as there are in the considered as Roma “home” countries such as Bulgaria, for example; the ways in which Roma groups are pushed to the margins of society reflects similar processes to which trans-national and indigenous populations have been and are driven to extreme poverty and isolated in ghettoes elsewhere, although it is easier to blame “new democracies” for the state in which Roma are today, or of course – the Roma themselves.

The efforts made to address the situation of Romani people, as well as that of other vulnerable groups, have led to perfecting interventions that can well be mainstreamed. Supported entrepreneurship (cf. Stock, Stateva and Junge, 2013) has become a key approach to managing talent and developing human resources as assets to bring national and regional economies back on track. Due to political equilibristic that aims to doctor the statistics of unemployment and poverty, and to mask deteriorating work conditions, when forcing people into self-employment, entrepreneurship has become a hot spot. The underlying assumption is that entrepreneurship is a way to freedom, self-sufficiency and emancipation regardless of one’s background, but under certain conditions and while embedded in a set of other structures and processes (see Stateva, Stock, Junge and Castellanos Serrano, 2013).

Promoting supported entrepreneurship usually do not account for the fact that it is extremely rare for successful entrepreneurs to have not been supported one way or another. Identifying the ingredients of the needed support has become the priority of elites for centuries, most notably via access to highly paid advanced business development and leadership support schemes or by belonging to a guild. The democratisation of support to entrepreneurship is instrumental in forming elites but underutilised among marginalised groups and those at risk of falling through the growing holes in the net. Lifting people up, giving them strength to be equal participants and beneficiaries in their societies and allowing them to develop as assets is an approach that works universally, yet cannot be applied in the conventional contexts in which sophisticated support is ring-fenced. Applying universally strategies, methodologies and techniques of supported entrepreneurship blending approaches developed for elites with those tailored to Roma groups, provides an opportunity to test, adapt and democratise ring-fenced tools of the elite that can be mainstreamed appropriately by blending with the most advanced targeted interventions for vulnerable groups. Frameworks can be developed to bring together a selection of organisational and psychosocial sets of interventions that can address contemporaneously individual, group, community, social, cultural and political dynamics.

Developing people as assets and supported entrepreneurship

People should be supported not because they are assets but because they are human beings soon to drawn in the world as it is now. In the current business-oriented political climate, politicians listen to profit only, hence “assets” replaces “humans” – not that this has not been the case before, but those in power are even not ashamed of this language now. This discourse inevitably speaks the language of “talent management”, which is by default focused on the rich or, at least, the able to pay. As far as I am aware, I am the only one who does not make role analysis (coaching) or organisational and process consultancy dependent on high income. Role analysis and process consultancy are crucial ingredients for helping aspiring entrepreneurs and other leaders thrive in contexts that are very similar across strata, generations and cultures and link not to ethnic or other backgrounds, but to malfunctioning politics, organisations and systems.

Politically, in the case of Roma, structural factors are combined with, re-enforced or over-ridden by stereotypes about the Roma among the general public everywhere (cf. Tanner, 2005; CSD, 2015). This phenomenon applies to vulnerable groups with other backgrounds in similar circumstances as well as to the mainstream when it comes to entrepreneurship. Consequently, interventions are characterised by a lack of conscious voice and real participation of the aspiring entrepreneurs, as these groups are considered incompetent to say the very least and contrary to the official marketing of such “courses”. Which is worse, “user involvement” is used to legitimise practices and not to promote participation, let alone to enrich and foster growth in businesses or the groups concerned.

Parallels between Roma groups and what we call “the mainstream” are more than what we are made to believe. Romani girls and women are especially vulnerable when it comes to kicking off a business not only due to culturally different, and not necessarily worse arrangements, surrounding reproduction and care responsibilities but also because of a “glass ceiling” generally for women in contemporary societies. The illusion of white women being more advantaged is maintained by imposing on them male styles of leadership and very often by “emancipatory” strategies of postponing motherhood indefinitely. Another evidence is that the situation of the Roma population also interweaves with issues of migration more widely. Roma is a mobile population, including both nomadic behaviours (of which many of us non-Roma are familiar and I don’t mean only the new white gipsies from Bulgaria and Romania, but also those moving from the US to the EU and vice versa). Of course, many Romani are involved in social and economic migration identical to the mainstream migration patterns.

Organisationally, there is a range of obstacles at the level of organisational behaviour and development that hit particularly badly Roma population but are expressed when addressing the mainstream, too. A study by the CSD (2015) echoes other studies across the EU that show anti-Roma stereotypes as prevailing also among public servants who work directly with Roma. This includes teachers, doctors, social workers and others and leads to exclusion, related to the provision of and access to public services and investments. Language/communication barriers in both countries of origin and especially countries of destination combine with a (justified) lack of trust by beneficiaries in social services, exacerbated by inconsistencies in language support and cultural mediation. The underutilisation of funds leads to a lack of sufficient resources for the long-term investments and interventions needed to address structural challenges and to develop entrepreneurship. A particular additional challenge lies in the practical and bureaucratic arrangements that prevent the access to funds by grass-root organisations. All these obstacles are linked to barriers to the effective and efficient functioning of mainstream interventions, too but become a particular challenge for vulnerable groups.

Systemic challenges in the areas of employment and entrepreneurship are universal for everyone who has fallen through the current net. Starting and running a business is difficult, especially in the current economic climate and a dynamic society (for a not very good intro and a lack of specialised accessible literature, see Shahidi and Smagulova, 2008). In addition, there is insufficient contact between interventions, business organisations, policy-makers and funders or investors, and a lack of wish and knowledge on their behalf to work closely with entrepreneurs and would-be mainstream entrepreneurs, let alone entrepreneurs from a migrant or other minority background. Inconsistency in policy development and patchy implementation can be a book in its own right, but Stateva et al (2013, see link above) offer a good overview of what goes wrong and some tips on how to fix that.

On handbags

That political, organisational and systemic blockages are staying on the way to all of us becoming entrepreneurs is an issue and it may well be an issue to be solved with a handbag. As an aspiring consultant, one of the best group relations consultants I have met learned to consult small groups by modelling from a woman consultant. She would come to the room and would sit quietly on the chair left by the group for her. When consulting his first group, my colleague realised that the only sign the group would receive to start the consultation with his training consultant was putting her handbag on the floor – how is he to announce the start of the consultation not having a handbag? It was a coincidence, of course, as a consultation of this type starts on the hour, but for the trainee consultants, the handbag was doing the magic.

My favourite women’s organisation started as a group of inspired women who soon received their first grants. With no security guards, not being a traditional institution, and in times when debit cards still did not exist, the women would carry the money for their operational expenses in a small handbag. The handbag was so small, that with the money for projects (mind you, there was also an enormous inflation), they had to stuff it so much that the handbag came to be known as ‘the pig’. ‘The pig’ was a good camouflage for petty criminals,  who were quite a few at the time. They would never suspect the young women with a handbag of carrying their turnover in cash. And of course, the bigger criminals would never suspect that the young women who carry their turnover in ‘the pig’, through that cash, would become responsible for one of the biggest contributions in their country for shifting the political, the gender and the social in favour of commoners and underdogs.

Could it be, then, that DANUTA DANIELSSON marked the start of a new era consultation by women with handbags? Someone used to joke that whatever I am searching for in my handbag must be next to the inflatable helicopter. That I have all sorts of things in my handbag was evidenced by me reaching out within seconds, for even my surprise, to a box with eye cleaning drops after a dog hugged me in the park, thus splashing mud straight into my left eye. The joke aside, my handbag is actually my tiny office, full with notebooks, a laptop, memory sticks and the likes. Call me a dreamer, but I honestly believe in the power of women’s handbags and I hope that the project behind this post will be one of the good punches to come out of mine.

In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 3

[Only] actions which have a lasting quality are worthy of our volition, only pleasures which endure are worthy of our desires.

—- Emile Durkheim

“This is just a dream”, says Seven-of-Nine in the Star Trek episode “Unimatrix 0” referring to a site of rebellion against the oppressive Borg Collective. Unimatrix 0 is the place where those assimilated by (and plugged into) the Borg Collective self-organise in a resistance movement. In this space, there is again love, play, art, family and friendship; people are themselves again. More importantly, this is where the enslaved members of the collective remember who they were before the assimilation; in a way, this space enables them to reflect on their state of enslavement. The site is built on the rebels’ dreams while they “regenerate” (because there is no sleep for those enslaved by the Collective, see also Jackie Rose’s work).

Unimatrix 0 is an excellent example of a virtual, or rather an admittedly “anti-virtual”, space – but still, very much a potential space, in the phenomenological sense. Whether such spaces are actually the sites of night dreams or daydreams, of collective dreams like cinema and other art based on imagery, or probably more so, nowadays, on-line spaces, these are the places for revolutions-in-the-making. What bothers me, like it seems it also bothers Seven-of-Nine, is that the rebels remember nothing during the day when they work for the Collective – from spaces of dreaming they easily can become spaces for pipe-dreams. I am myself more of a Jedi than a Trekkie, but Unimatrix 0 may be the right metaphor to describe the displacement of dissent (and more widely virtue) in modernity, and under capitalism (perhaps somewhat exemplified by a tendency to click-activism).

By virtuality, in a radical return to phenomenological uses of the term, I mean the potential for blending technology-mediated spaces as well as mind-mediated states of potentiality. As a phenomenologically and psychoanalytically informed thinker, I see a need for critique to focus on capturing and understanding how virtual spaces, can be (and often are) turned from a place of escapism for the majority of “first world” citizens into a productive and powerful source of sense-making to drive meaningful change and lived critique. It may be even more important to consider what are the obstacles.

In a way that reminds me of Levi-Straus‘ division between the engineer and the bricoleur, critical theorists seem to be working at a cross-purpose with emancipatory-striving technological geeks, as if their mindsets are fundamentally opposed (see my previous blogs on the search for the virtual pitch). Beyond the scope for confusion of highly specialised jargons and tongues, at our end, I see three key reasons for this division, and for the resultant lack of proper engagement between software developers and critical or phenomenologically-oriented social scientists:

• Being in a group is difficult. Group dynamics is characterised by strong push and pull forces beneath the surface that may be difficult to work with online. However, this characteristic is actually a strength, because online space allows for projections to be accessed as “real”, so everyone engaged in studying a group – those providing the interpretations and those at the receiving end – have a more direct access to unconscious material in a search to be accessed, named and made thinkable.
• Potential spaces are social by default. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are somewhat confused, and even in a ‘fight for territory’ when it comes to potential spaces. As a result, most analyses of the links between potential spaces (including the Internet) and the mind, are framed in individualistic terms. As a consequence, not necessarily a cause, such analyses are predominantly used to influence individuals.
• The key question, and the core of political struggle, in Modernity, is: reform or revolution, i.e. Order or Progress? The Internet, like any other social realm, is torn between the two streams as well. Very rarely, however, this opposition is discussed openly, so as a rule people act on the contradictions intuitively, but hardly can name and speak about this, in fact, very creative tension.

Being in a group is difficult

In the Group Relations tradition, it is well documented that a group pulls us into losing our individuality, which we dread and long at the same time – dread in fear of annihilation and long in the desire for knowledge, and for accessing the group mind and the collective unconscious in particular. Once at the top of the socio-analytic wave of intervening in social settings, today work groups in this tradition are reserved for top businesses, sometimes for high-risk professions and more often for analysts (and wannabes) able to pay. Whether the mystification or the elitism comes first, is unclear. The reality is that the democratisation of groups facilitated to enable thinking crashes in the contemporary austerity of resources, including the shrunk mental space to make sense of complex realities. This austerisation encompasses all – time, space, money and available skilled consultants and accompany those below the top layers of societies, communities, organisations and groups.

The online drop-in events of the Orion Grid are designed to open the access and to modify the design of work groups; that is groups with the working task of studying themselves to illuminate thoughts and ideas in need of being named or voiced and, therefore, made thinkable. A principal purpose of these events is advancing the understanding and utilisation of virtuality as a potential space. I mean “potential space” not just in the psychoanalytic sense, introduced by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott or in the wider phenomenological sense developed by philosophers since Bergson. With the Orion Grid, I am interested primarily in the space opened by groups for accessing social, historical and political unconscious, or what Gordon Lawrence, called the Sphinx – a legitimate structure of the mind in both individuals and groups.

Potential spaces are social by default

Gordon Lawrence used the concept of the Sphinx to describe and study the structure in the unconscious that is responsible for intuitively grasping and communicating, particularly through dreams, knowledge about beneath-the-surface dynamics of the outer world. This structure is well described in his seminal work Centring of the Sphinx for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations. More recent social scientists extend the uses of the Sphinx to other forms of learning through and with imagery, such as photographs (Sievers and Mersky, 2008), drawings (Mersky, 2013) and (although without speaking of the Sphinx explicitly) film (Levi, 2012).

Recent advancements in studying the unconscious show that such modalities of thinking, and the associated states of mind, are seen as individualised activities in modernity only. For example, Gowland (2006) demonstrates that pre-modern society viewed dreams as political, a sign of divinity and a legitimation of leadership and that this was equally the case in Eastern and Western societies. Current research in anthropology develops arguments in favour of dreams being rooted in degrees of historical awareness (e.g. Stewart, 2013). Dreams are approached as an individual activity, even today, only in the Western world, with most striking examples of the political use of dreams among Taliban and members of Al-Qaida and ISIS (Edgar, 2015). Furthermore, literature, storytelling traditions, drama and film consistently took seriously dreams as literary and imaginary pointers to inform life and political decisions, with consequences of how our ancestors relied on dreams to show them the way.

While the study of the social unconscious, as represented in dreams and other imagery, is gaining momentum, there is little on exploring the uses and projections into online spaces. Such studies can enrich our understanding of virtuality in the phenomenological and epistemological sense. The under-theorisation of virtuality, or the one-sidedness of existing explorations, results in a neglect of the emancipatory potential of virtual states, media and environments.

I mean not only technologically-mediated but also bodily-mediated potential spaces. This neglect of the emancipatory power of virtuality subtly feeds into efforts to suffocate what I see as “augmented virtuality” that I introduced in the previous blog on my search for the virtual pitch. By augmented virtuality, I mean the virtue-driven resistance of the first generations of gamers to marketization, instrumentalisation and consumerism of technologically-mediated environments. By extension, potential spaces in the phenomenological sense, such as those operating via imagery or phantasies, also become ring-fenced – but in psychoanalytic spaces that, as a norm, are similarly closed to critical examination and deconstruction more often than not. This lack of conceptualisation of virtuality, and particularly the resultant lack of appraisal and regulation, is the reason why I am interested not only in potential spaces that are covered by the contemporary definition of virtuality. I am also interested in potential spaces that are bodily-mediated – such as thinking, dreaming, the use of phantasies (in the psychoanalytic jargon), creativity, imagery and other modalities of experiencing beyond what is conceived as being in positivistic terms.

The connection between these two perspectives on virtuality, the technology-mediated  as well as the bodily-mediated potential spaces, and how they can be brought together, is in utilising individual states related to what Bion called “reverie”, one one hand. On the other hand, the connection is in exploring an aspect known in continental philosophy as the infinite or the divine. Reverie is the capacity of oneself to sense the state of mind of other individuals, groups or organisations and the society as a separate entity, and to work through such states in a meaningful way – mostly by providing meaningful interpretations. The infinite is the domain in the continuum between metaphysics and logos, to put it in Derrida’s words, or the innate, often untapped tacit knowledge about spacetime in the phenomenological sense, or about the history and the world around us. As such, the infinite is the source of what we call qualia in social theory, the essence of things that Heidegger was looking to capture, Kandinsky’s paths to absolute abstraction and perhaps what Plato called the realm of ideas.

The events of the Orion Grid have two innovative aspects as a project:

• What we can learn from augmented virtuality about virtuality in the phenomenological sense, and
• What we can learn from experimenting together with online group events about augmented virtuality and more widely potential spaces.

Such a project has not only technical applications (by helping us to understand better ourselves and the group, social and historical unconscious and how these layers of the unconscious can be accessed), but also political implications in facilitating an intellectual circle of self-selected members identifying and dealing with contemporary social problems.

Reform or Revolution, i.e. Order or Progress?

Bauman says that we have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’, software-based modernity, with ‘all the profound changes to the human condition’. The human condition, Arendt reminds us, has already shifted away from contemplation, with the activities of making and fabricating – the prerogatives of homo faber, the tool maker, who was led to the revolution as one of the tools at disposal. The combination of a toolmaker living in a software world, who has abandoned contemplation, and the contemplation’s sister – boredom, is an explosive one.

I had a dream the other night of an orange turtle, a turtle that reminded a colleague of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, but also of something solid and enduring. It reminded me in turn of the struggle between reformation and revolution, between Order and Progress, and the ways in which a reformation – like a turtle – is toothless, but chewing.  It is through speech and action, Arendt says, that ‘men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings appear to each other, not as physical objects, but qua men’. The teleology of revolutions, as tools, prevents men from appearing to each other and replaces some people’s visions with other people’s visions, bringing peace and security at the cost of the freedom of some, exchanged for the freedom of others. As such, revolutions are instrumental, rather than linking – in the words of Bion, they are attacks on linking, antagonistic rather than altruistic, even when they present themselves as the tool towards more cohesive societies.

“What is the problem with revolutions?”, I asked a group which was concerned that I am trying to instigate a revolution in their organisation. “Blood is the problem, to say as an exile from Russia”, replied one of the members. For a world organised around evidence, the observant, the measurable, blood in revolutions does not matter. In a historical study, Barrington Moore observed that it does not make much of a difference to the ”objective”  outcome for history if a revolution was violent or not. However, recent research on the case of Egypt showed that if we look at the human cost, the revolution there was a fiasco – it suffocated the hope of the very activists who were driving the revolution, thus burying the seeds of democracy it was striving to achieve.

In a software world, war is a computer game, and revolutions are strings of social media postings that can be both presented with nice graphs and snapshots of progress. In a software world, democracy is an aquarium rather than an ocean. For Arendt, it is using making politics as a matter of living – rather than through grand revolutions – that we become subjects and the makers of our own destiny, it is

‘[w]ith word and deed [that] we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance. This insertion is not forced upon us by necessity, like labour, and is not prompted by utility, like work. It may be  stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative.’ (The Human Condition, p.177)

It is, therefore, organising ourselves to speak and think, that is inherently revolutionary and yet rather reformationist. This brings me back to my orange turtle. Another friend associated the orange turtle with communications, through Orange (a telecommunications provider) and with books, through a chain of bookshops in Bulgaria. This further blurs the boundary between revolution and reformation, in a way that is close to my aspirations in developing the Orion Grid as a space for communication and sharing resources. (Accidentally or not, as I was writing this blog, I received the first gift for the Grid – a paper to be shared, with open access, on my website; this is a paper by one of the most humane and inspirational adult psychoanalysts I have ever read, Patrick Casement, which – again accidentally or not, is called “Imprisoned Minds”).

The last association with the orange turtle came from a friend who was reminded of a Bulgarian children’s song. The song depicts the world through the eyes of a child for whom everything in the world is orange – the sky,the sea, the grass, and there are orange guitars which sing in an orange sound. This association, perhaps, makes a full circle back to the potential space in individual psychoanalysis, and in particular the work of Winnicott. For him, the potential (or transitional) space is actually the children’s domain, in which creativity and our capacity to imagine, dream, relate and create originates – somewhere between play and reality.