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.

 

 

In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 1

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 pure tone or spectral component. Virtual pitch is called “virtual” because there is no acoustical correlate at the frequency corresponding to the pitch: even when a virtual pitch corresponds to a physically present fundamental (or first harmonic), as it often does in everyday harmonic complex tones, the exact virtual pitch depends on the exact frequencies of higher harmonics and is almost independent of the exact frequency of the fundamental.

The Wikipedia* entry on the work of Ernst Terhardt (1970)

This is the first of a series of three blog entries that will track my search for what I call “the virtual pitch” in virtuality. The blog entries outline the three strands of my exploration of pathways towards:

• Recovering the phenomenological, inter-subjective and epistemological status of the concept of virtuality, in its richness and beyond the current uses as a mere property of computer-generated objects or sets of objects;
• Testing, via online group events, applications of the unfolding in this way theorisation of the virtual today;
• Exploring virtue as the under- and over-looked virtual pitch that we need in order to harmonise today – more than ever – and develop the overall melodic of the online space.

A lot is written in critical social theory on the contemporary meanings of technologically-mediated mirroring, simulation, augmentation and enhancement of reality (Cf  Donna Haraway, Steve Fuller and Rosie Braidotti, for example). I am taking a different road, to review in this and the next two blog entries the following:

“In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 1”: Fruitful ideas related to the blurring of boundaries between what is loosely defined as “real” and “virtual” in industrial times. The purpose is to explore if this blur can foster progressive emancipation;

“In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 2”: Some under-explored contemporary dangers arising from not making thinkable a concept of virtuality in the public domain. The purpose is to show how under-conceptualisation of virtuality renders it inaccessible to critical appraisal and oversight;

“In a Search for the Virtual Pitch 3”: Lines of defence of the virtue at the core of virtuality, both as a concept and as a contemporary phenomenon. The purpose is to amplify the ‘virtual pitch’ of online spaces (by analogy with Terhardt’s discovery in music) so that such spaces can be fertilised by advanced methodologies applying phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories.

The first documented marker of invasion of the virtual (i.e. “as if experiences”) in the real world (i.e. positively accessible, through the tactile sense, environment), is the act by which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brings back to life Sherlock Holmes in response to his fans’ protest in letters to the author. The glamorous return of Sherlock was a massive breakthrough in the literary prehistory of virtual reality, a prehistory featuring also the imaginary landscapes of H.P. Lovecraft and J.R.R. Tolkien (Saler, 2011). Subcultures, and particularly fan cultures, were the first virtual communities because they were not just captivated by and did not just appropriate features of the simulated reality created by their favourite music, film and literature. To varying degrees, they impacted this simulated reality in ways that can often be seen as political.

The post-modern turn of the twenty years after the 1960s marked a conscious effort of deconstructive researchers and critical theory informed political activists to engage with and through sub-cultures. They utilised literary, musical and visual domains for clever experimentation. This emancipation was emancipatory charged, primarily political, and -above all – highly aesthetic. 1950s rock music idols have often played with the “bad” guys to legitimise, through fashioning, elements of violent subcultures. When rock musicians started wearing their famous jackets, they also promoted innocent, at first glance, wide pockets in which everyone, and not only members of street gangs, can hide knives. In more recent history, through fan cultures, designers began working with artists and activists in order to side with the “good”.

From using gangster rap fashion to mainstream hoodies that can hide faces of graffiti authors, via female musicians and artists wearing skinhead boots mirroring feminists re-appropriation of elements of neo-nazi uniform and combining them with floral dresses and scarves to fight racism, to anti-war correspondents bringing to us access to combat trousers so they can hide cameras instead of weapons and military equipment, fan cultures and their fashion at the end of the 20th century became a vehicle of liberation. Despite 2.0 (and beyond) claims to the contrary, the use of gaming, social media and more widely technology and the internet, for elaborated domestic political projects, falls behind.

One reason for such lagging behind can be seen in contemporary academia-based critical theorists loosing sight on the everyday life whilst drowning in the practicalities of living in academia. Great ideas often get buried in defending their judgement, epistemology, methodology and findings on a daily basis, in response to constant attacks from a growing culture of bureaucratisation and marketisation of research and academia (let alone the decades-long science wars). In the created vacuum, these are the artists themselves who work increasingly as critical theorists and activists to translate theory into praxis (Cf. the work of  Dub FX and Tool).

Another reason is perhaps the way in which commissioning of research blocks creativity and, at the same time, guides applied researchers into troubled domains as defined by policy makers and interest groups. In these frameworks, subcultures are seen more as cultures of violence that have troubles and are thus primarily “a trouble” for the mainstream, for policy makers and those in power more widely. The creativity of subcultures, like any other not-us culture, is ridiculed, pathologised or  commercialised in order to suffocate genuine voices from below. The means in this process often involve the misappropriation of their own creative tools for working through the misery they are forced into. Consequently, artefacts of cultural and symbolical capital are mobilised to manipulate rather than to lead.  Subcultures of online geeks, and social media users, facebook users (in particular), are not an exception.

Furthermore, the repercussions of “21st-century wars” (on drugs, cybercrime, terrorism, the economic crisis, etc) involved imposing austerity measures not only on economics but also, subtly, on a range of freedoms. Rules, regulations and procedures working together hit badly the first and second world population (including the current generation of representatives of radical and progressive thought). Particularly devastating for those who are not in power are the effects of limiting the opportunities to play – meaning “to be creative, liberated and transgressive” – in order to re-draw boundaries. At the same time, as virtuality (and whole fractions of social life overall) moved into technologically-mediated spaces, some of the most skilful social scientists are cut off from the domain of new technologies as the world of unlimited opportunities to influence and engage. Some withdraw consciously, as a protest to the perils brought by the massification of the internet, and others (including myself) fall behind due to lacking the skills.

Consequently, and sadly, contemporary robust value-driven and ideal purpose projects usually limit their use of tools to online publicity, the “copy-paste” and recycling of half-baked ideas for research papers in blogging, and the “click activism” of social media campaigns (again including yours truly). More worryingly, contemporary theoretical explorations of virtuality gravitate around understanding what happens with systems created and facilitated primarily inside a computer or a computerised device. The delusion that virtual reality means a technologically-mediated reality is partly stimulated by the growing marketisation of the internet and, linked to this growth, the massive and high-turn-over technological industry.

This growth is itself made possible because the unprecedented acceleration of  production of new gadgets feeds into (and from) Aquarius age phantasies of omnipotence, omni-scientificity, and – ultimately – immortality, on one hand. On the other hand, the resultant technological enhancement opens a new Pandora box for manipulation, surveillance, enslavement, and all types of exploitation for those who seek to abuse power. Unfortunately, social theorists often side with or, at least, turn a blind eye to, the consequences of equating the virtual and the technological.

Those who create the frameworks for technological mediation themselves loose a sight on the virtuality of “virtual reality” because those who bear the questions, as a result of the processes described above and more, do not feed back into their pool of ideas. Virtuality is a concept well developed in phenomenology far before the advance of technology and contains at its core the roots of virtue. In philosophy, the Wikipedia entry reminds us, “virtual” is a term used by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda to “denote potentiality as being equally real to actuality, but in a different manner”. According to another definition, virtuality is “the quality of having the attributes of something without sharing its (real or imagined) physical form”. Virtuality, therefore, is primarily a phenomenological and an epistemological, meaning primarily subjective and inter-subjective phenomenon, rather than a property of a concrete object or a set of objects.

I am somewhat concerned that, making an argument to defend the aspects of virtuality in what is seen today as virtual reality, may be abused to allow for the use of the all too human fear of pain, ageing and death, trapping people into unchartered areas of the application of new technologies. However, I am also mindful not to contribute to amplifications of critique of the use of technology. Critique of technology and its uses to perfect brainwashing, soul destruction and the propaganda machinery is not a new phenomenon. From Orwell, Heidegger and Benjamin (if not before with the Luddite movement) via Chomsky to Baudrillard, otherwise brilliant and impactful work has partly contributed to a neglect of the emancipatory powers of internet and technology by social and political theory – at the expense of those in power embracing the powers uncritically.

The resultant under-theorisation of this emancipatory potential subtly feeds into efforts to suffocate what I see as “augmented virtuality”. By augmented virtuality, I mean the virtue-driven resistance of the first generation of gamers to marketization, instrumentalisation and consumerism. Examples are those emancipatory movements behind Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Anonimous, the growing repository of open access archives as well as, perhaps more importantly, the value-driven open source movement in software development and the wider hacker culture (often sitting admirably on the fringes of legality). Exceptionally promising otherwise platforms of social media and serious gaming are often rich in technology and poor in depth. This is just two examples of how the recent notions of virtuality have an under-explored and under-utilised political, intellectual and aesthetic element of its overall harmonics. This element enriches the overall melodic qualities, and can be further enhanced systematically and rigorously to guard against both “real” and “virtual” threats to humanity, or what I refer to – in a deliberately old-fashioned way – as our souls.

*In this  series of blogs and beyond, I cite only Wikipedia (where possible) as a tribute to the huge work done by its editors and contributors. The uses and impact of this work on advancing not only transparency but also research go u  unacknowledged due to what counts as a legitimate reference.

Nkisi Nkondi

Nkondi (plural varies minkondi, zinkondi, or ninkondi)^[1] are religious idols made by the Kongo people of the Congo region. Nkondi are a subclass of minkisi that are considered aggressive. The name nkondi derives from the verb -konda, meaning “to hunt” and thus nkondi means “hunter” because they can hunt down and attack wrong-doers, witches, or enemies.

From the Wikipedia entry

What makes certain groups and individuals in care and policy development settings to effectively fight despair and inner flight in the face of hopelessness – a hopelessness about the circumstances of the beneficiaries of their work as well as about what Darlington (2013) describes as ‘brilliant stupidity’ in their own organisations? My search for an answer to this question is also a search for the ingredients that will create a more fertile ground for leaders of dissent, will encourage more people to take up the role, and will thus stimulate democratic strategies of change instead of the usual bureaucratic management of anger and masking pathologisation under ‘duty of care’ regulations.

Exploring what goes on beneath the surface in care and policy systems helps to understand the powers driving these systems and how these powers can be worked with to enable meaningful change. A key is how this dynamics mobilises genuine activists, trade unionists, opinion leaders, leaders of dissent and whistleblowers in such systems to ride waves of anger, passion and hope during periods of turmoil and upheaval and within ‘limbo’ social domains and at the fringes of society. Equally key are questions of what leads to the tendency of scapegoating such leaders and authorities and how scapegoating can be avoided.

Henderson (2015) identifies an unconscious projection that he refers to as ‘the Nkisi Nkondi’, an image of transference and projective identification in the individual analytic process. The original Nkisi Nkondi is a ritual figure made of mirrors, human blood, saliva, sperm, menstrual blood, sweat, tears, tissue, bones, hairs and so on. It is activated by bringing the figure at the end of the village and sticking nails into it, a ritual which some authors also link to injecting the power or ‘respect’ in them.

In my reading, through projection and projective identification, the aim is to turn phantasmatically the analyst into a Nkisi Nkondi. Thus, the analyst becomes an embodiment of a gate to other worlds and super-powers representing a hope for salvation for those suffering a despair in the face of deep injustice. By extension, I argue, those providing meaningful group, social and political interpretations are used in the same way. Understanding the social and political dimensions of Nkisi Nkondi, as an unconscious projection, links to the context in which leaders of dissent are mobilised, and then annihilated, by the epistemological, psycho- and socio-dynamics that I will try to shed light on below.

Discourses, rhetorics, underdeveloped concepts and other epistemological aspects operating in the public domain are often used to navigate power dynamics rather than to deal with underlying actual phenomena. Such a neglect of the importance of concepts (and worse, their misuse) subtly undermines otherwise genuine efforts. Examples are the use, or lack of use, of terms such as ‘modern slavery’, ‘violation of labour rights’, ‘labour exploitation’, ‘workplace abuse’ or ‘harassment’ and ‘bullying’, ‘precarious employment’ and so on, as well as labels of the resulting conditions such as ‘trauma’, ‘burn out’ and, in specific fields, ‘secondary PTSD’ and ‘vicarious traumatisation’. Using such terms to criminalise, discipline and pathologise, in short turning their application into the very opposite of what they seek to achieve, is a way of perpetuating the phenomena they refer to.

Similarly, completely neglecting what these terms stand for, is a way of systems and organisations to swipe under the carpet pressing issues resulting from blunt exploitation and dehumanisation. Consequently, the systems become a boiling cauldron of unconscious and not that unconscious powerful, often murderous phantasies, that drive the people at all levels in them to despair. The qualities of these phantasies are so powerful that the individuals need to operate by imposing on themselves a forced separation between their self and their role. This splitting is intended to help them preserve a self-respectful image of themselves. This splitting allows for their colluding with, or even very often producing, in a role, practices that they would not otherwise tolerate – cutting budgets to the bone or deleting and cancelling posts (because they are not seen for the standing behind them human beings) are just mild examples for illustrating purposes.

This splitting, however, gives rise to psychodynamic issues related to the most annihilating fear, that of survival anxiety, which seem to operate routinely within this specific workforce. Unlike mainstream experiences of such anxiety, their state of mind extends to phantasies of loosing one’s soul, not just life, sustenance or resources. This anxiety is also the source of mobilising inner and outer resources and new highs of professionalism, albeit at the expense of personal sacrifices and intense emotional labour. The 1990s produced a new hope that capitalism is not that bad after all, and gave birth to Buffy, the vampire slayer (to fight the fear of those without souls) and to the organisational consultant (to teach those in high-risk businesses how to live and work with their self, but without their soul).

I hypothesise that linked to the psychodynamics above is the socio-analytic phenomenon of the care and policy workforces constantly operating under an unconscious basic assumption that I refer to as ‘apocalypse now’. The ‘basic assumption’ is a concept introduced by Bion to refer to the unconscious phantasies that operate to sidetrack groups from their working task and into second agendas. These ‘second agenda’ modes are presented as work on the task but are, in effect, acting out the phantasies behind the basic assumption. Bion postulates three basic assumptions, and I suggest this fourth category as the unconscious phantasy that is mobilised at larger groups and in times of social and political crisis or in contexts that can be described as social states of ‘limbo’ or at the fringes of society. Those who are not swept away, stay sane by an anchor in integrity. These are precisely the individuals that are turned into Nkisi Nkondi and activated by nailing to inject ‘respect’ and, therefore, power.

That a lot has changed since the times of Nkisi Nkondi is evident from the ways in which the ritual has moved away from symbolic figures into projections on human beings. The nailing is no longer displaced, but targets real individuals and very often the time between nailing and injecting respect is delayed by decades and even centuries. You may wonder why you no longer see activists and whistleblowers around. The nailing today involves discrediting, finding ways to get rid of non-comformists by mobilising the disciplinary apparatus or just deleting inconvenient posts to create new positions with the same functions. After all, as Faucault, once observed, why do we need violence under a regime of democracy if we can perfect shaming?