Cool Yule

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, celebrated as Yule in the old Celtic calendar.

This solstice was well known a long time before people developed instruments to measure this sort of thing. People were aware of it because they were aware of the changes in the seasons and the wider world around them. From tomorrow the days start getting lighter and the nights start getting shorter.

When the 'pagan' celebrations were taken over and lost by things like christmas, we lost.

I hope you can enjoy some sort of celebration tomorrow - have a cool yule!

I'll also wish you a happy new year, and all the best for 2007.

(Although actually the Celts celebrated new year at the Spring Equinox, 21st March, when the daylight becomes longer than the night. This is also the New Year in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish lands amongst other places, known as Newroz.)

visctrix

visctrix is an important name for me, and now seems the right time to say something about it. As I explained on my Wikipedia user space, a visctrix is a space of creation of bodily affects that cannot be put properly into our usual words or names. I use it as my email address and as my online identity, especially in web forums, ICQ and games.

This comes from the Latin viscera or visceral - relating to feelings, affecting the internal organs - and playfully mixed with the end of the word matrix which is Latin for womb (a space of creation).

This name was created about six years ago when I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to run a 'cultural studies of the internet' course in the Fine Art dept of Leeds University. It picked up on a range of themes that can be found explored both in internet based spaces, but also in various discourses around art and identity politics (I prefer the word ethics to politics).

It is a name that doesn't like the concept of naming, a name that is constantly, hopefully, in progress or transition. Right now I'm certainly in a process of transition, and this needs to be managed carefully somehow - the aim is to be able to sustain myself and to be able to create... Part of this is a re-evaluation of where I find myself and where I'm going - a process in itself that people often write about in journals, diaries, and today, blogs.

So I am going to try to remember and rethink what the name visctrix means to me. The aim is to bring together some of the previously sustaining pathways that are beginning to diverge and disappear, and to try to reinvigorate them. I do think that this will be relevant to readers as it's also another way of naming my approach to life and philosophy, and hence my work, my thinking about advocacy, and this blog.

1. The Name
It seems Plato bears a lot of responsibility for this one, which has dominated the way we think in the West. Many people, including myself, think that the Name (with a capital N, meaning that it is somehow special, and Known, and a sort of fixed thing) is damaging and restrictive. Writers and artists and mystics and all sorts of people who fall outside the mainstream economic system have instinctively realised this and used pseudonyms and false names throughout time. The Name comes from the tendency towards control, originally from the wish of various people in history to control power, money and knowledge, now prevalent as the managerial and bureaucractic system we're all so familiar with.

Three examples will be quite grounding and constructive here. The first is about Joanne Bloggs whose community care assessment identifies eligibility for substantial access to care services. Unfortunately Joanne presents as a very angry young woman, so angry in fact that services are beginning to be withdrawn or withheld. I'm sure most advocates have met some people in similar situations where social care professionals simply seem to have labelled them 'Joanne Bloggs' - meaning aggressive, demanding and difficult. Of course they are demanding and difficult because their lives are demanding and difficult, but 'Joanne Bloggs' is well documented and she just can't sit down quietly and gratefully accept the help we offer. Often, not documented, there is joanne, or jo, or josey, or... These others don't have capitals, and in some ways they may feel they're better off without all that paperwork and managerial pressure. Outside the realm of paperwork and benefits and housing they put a brave face on life, have a laugh with their friends if they have any, and work their way through various problems in between. But then people come along and call them Joanne (even if they say 'Jo'), and ask horrible questions, and don't seem to listen, and they get upset and angry, and then the police are called or they get sectioned and everything goes even further downhill. Joanne is a Name, jo is a person, and tomorrow jo could feel much more friendly and pleasant because the sun's out - if only you'd come for the assessment the next day...

The second example is something I touched on in my note about the NAN Conference. This is about the Name of Advocacy (if Advocacy is a proper Name, it gets a capital too). It's a constant question, not just of Rick's, about whether we should rename 'advocacy'. No one understands it, some say. It gets confused with legal advocacy. The definition is too long and unwieldy, or too short and imprecise. To define something is the same as to Name it - once it has a definition we Know what it is, it's somehow special, and it's kind of fixed. This is useful for the legislators and commissioners, even the managers and the trainers: we can give people rights to it, we can manage contracts, and we can construct advocates to do the work. Maybe that's enough reason for you - we have to live in the real world, and if that's the way to get more advocates what's the problem? I would say wait though. Think for a moment about the link between Joanne and advocacy. At the moment advocacy has no capital - it's still a fluid concept, and it's practised in different ways. Without a capital, advocacy is a bit like jo, slightly out of reach of the catogorising tendencies of some of the people we work with. At the same time we seem to be able to communicate better with jo and others like her than many professionals. It's a subtle prediction, but something I think many of us kind of feel in our bones (or our viscera), that if we move too far into the realms of Advocacy, everything will become more defined and controlled and we'll end up only being able to communicate on Joanne's level again just like all the other Names. I think it's also important to remember that most of the people like jo seem to cotton on to what advocacy is pretty quickly after they start working with a good advocate. They don't need paper definitions, they need feelings, and I think many advocates, and many other people too, also work very productively in this space: let's celebrate and protect this slight vagueness and stop talking about burying advocacy under the tyrrany of the name.

My final example is just a quickie. Of course Social Worker, Psychiatrist, Police are all names, all names which are used to limit, constrain and abuse ordinary jos and johns who are often trying to give something back to the world, who often do extraordinarily sensitive work, and who are not described in my examples above. We are stuck with this tyrrany in some ways, and stereotypes are always breeding other opposing stereotypes. I am just trying to indicate the positions we find ourselves in as advocates when we meet the clients of some of the less accomplished practitioners.

Now this has already got long enough for one post. The other things I wanted to write about are listed below (they will become links as I write them up, hopefully soon). Feedback welcome as always.

2. Creation
3. Communication and movement
4. Community
5. Spirituality

Advocacy and therapy

I'm usually keen to distinguish advocacy from other disciplines, especially advice, mentoring, mediation, and the model of support work that underlies so many professional roles.

Some other roles, notably interpreting and befriending, are still different but have a more interesting and closer interplay with advocacy work.

Recently however I've realised that advocacy falls wholly within the realm of therapy, and we should see it as part of an 'art of healing'.

Some quick notes to begin to explain and explore this:

• There are lots of modern therapies (whose practitioners can guard the boundaries jealously) but the art of healing has been practised for millennia;
• Healing isn't just based on specific medical symptoms - it's wider than 'curing' for example. In it's more holistic sense it's more about re-adapting people to their environment (and sometimes trying to adapt the environment for people);
• The idea of 'just therapy' developed by the Family Centre in New Zealand makes these observations, but also describes therapy as helping people to place new and more positive meaning structures on their experiences, to replace problem-centred meanings that can make life seem so difficult;
• There is an analogue here with the description I wrote about Helping someone not to get angry, and with many other advocacy interventions: people feel they can't communicate with services, or people are not listening to them, but working with an advocate helps them to develop communication skills and strategies that can overcome these difficulties, so they can get services and live more easily.

I think there's a lot of interesting potential in exploring the links between therapy and advocacy further. I know some other people have got some ideas in this direction too. Watch this space.

The boiling water principle

There seems to be an expectation today that we should all be better: that we should learn more, work more, achieve more and produce more, be tested, monitored and assessed more, and at the same time keep fit, cook, clean, look after the kids, and keep up with your social and cultural interests. This is only the beginning, but it's already exhausting.

It seems that the main reason for this improvement drive is economic: the growth economy. The idea is that development, health and happiness requires that the economy must grow year on year: it would be nice if the total of all the economic transactions in 2006 will be 2.5% (or even 5%) bigger than the total in 2005. The alternative is apparently depression, in every sense of the word.

I don't agree with this. I can't help thinking about the image of a pan of water sitting on a gas flame. As the water is heated, the temperature grows. Quite quickly we get to a point where some of the water gets so hot it's transformed into steam and evaporates away. The more we heat it, the more we get out of it (that is the more water turns to steam and gets out of the pan). Gradually all the water disappears and we're left with an empty pan (or, under other circumstances, perhaps an explosion).

Classical economists would reject this image out of hand: they say the economy is a closed system and all the profits get reinvested. Today it's clear to many people that this is a scandalous conceit which completely fails to account for the raw materials that are being turned into landfill and pollution on a massive scale. Our oil, gas and mineral reserves are being increasingly relied on and depleted, intensive forestry and agriculture is taking all the nutrients from the soil and replacing them with pesticides and other chemicals, and on a human level we seem to be suffering in ways we don't quite recognise from our past.

It seems that we cannot go on as we are: certainly not indefinitely, and maybe not even for as long as 20 years. It seems quite likely that in 20 years the environmental and economic restrictions on many materials that are basic to our lives today will make them largely unavailable to the majority of people and change our lives drastically. And what does this insistence on an ever growing economy really mean to the working lives of people? I don't think we can really know, although I feel that some of the stories in this blog are indicative of some of the trends. Can you see yourself becoming 2% more productive every year for the next 20 years? Can people and communities and societies manage to average out at this growth level for ever? And even more importantly, what is the cost? What is it in these people that's going to evaporate off like the steam from the pan?

I think we need to start to take a look at some of our services and their cost and sustainability and maybe use some economic questions like these to develop new critiques and alternatives.

This will be an ongoing discussion, comments welcome...

Delivering the world from its exhausting boredom

I've been slowing down a bit with the posting over the last week, but partly because I've been having so many interesting conversations. This seems to be turning into an interesting project, with lots of potential.

To try and make more sense of it all I feel I need to keep some kind of 'clinical' and 'methodological' diary. In other words, I need to break down the different elements and find the links between them (in a clinical way); and develop a practice and an ethic that will propel the project and give it a sense of consistency and direction (a methodology). I've already started in a small way, for example clinical: the April summary, What's this blog about, links and refereces in the text and the sidebar, etc.; and methodological: the advantage of ignorance, the space not enclosed by words, and in a practical if not objective sense in protecting vulnerable people from objectivity, etc.]

You don't need to understand the jargon to understand the situation. Some people have already suggested that I need to be careful about the contents of my blog. This would be a simple truism if they clearly hadn't meant a whole variety of other things behind these plain words. Even my mother is concerned that I might get myself into trouble, and many of my friends have urged caution.

At the same time, most of the same people are very positive about the blog and its contents, which are important to them too. Also many of these people see me as quite cautious and responsible really, and it is true that I've spent a lot of time and thought and caution on my words so far.

OK, so I need to work out what we mean by caution, and what I need to be cautious of.

I think the key to my response lies in the idea of the 'greying society'. I'm sure loads of people have written about this, but I don't know where. The greying society sits around in meetings, often without clear agendas, or without a clear vision of how they are going to act on their decisions. They often struggle against the constant chaos around them, or they sail obliviously through it (they're managed by Scylla and Charybdis). They're exhausted by a constant demand to do more work, to fill in forms, to be assessed and reviewed. They can be stressed and irritable, although usually they manage to put on a brave and professional face. They have to spend lots of time doing admin work. Their task is Herculean, and their performance heroic, but they achieve about as much as Sisyphus. And finally, amongst other things, they do a funny little dance between trying hard not to upset each other on the one side and occasionally flaring up into threats and retribution on the other. We could find similar images in people's experiences of education and in the general lives of the many and various adults that cannot or are not 'working' (earning money in the system).

I use caricatures like this to briefly summarise various aspects, to make a general picture of a society that may be developing. I think this way of characterising ideas is a useful way to go about thinking - in an important way, it is a subjective thinking. [I think I'll have to come back to this in another post as there's no space here, but one claim I want to boldly make is that you cannot accuse someone of a subjective crime, which is also to say you should not be offended by a subjective statement. N.B. There are important scholia to this.]

I suppose people like John Major or GW Bush are probably up there too as prominent examples of the greying society (as in, 'thou shall not be seen to have had a life in the past...'). I don't know; I'm happier talking about people I do know (with their permission of course) and I get the feeling from lots of different people that they recognise this grey world but they can't see what to do about it. But I think you can see what to do about it. I think you have seen many times and you can see again, and many of us have made a difference and we all can in the future.

So all of this blog will be approached from the perspective of what I will call a positive ethics, an ethics that will help us to recognise and move out of this grey society. I am looking for an ethics that will help us do more and to recognise our own and others achievements. I do think that this goal is realised on many levels in good advocacy practice, and I will continue to explore this idea in the blog.

How cautious can I be? Such an ethics will inevitably challenge the greying society, however it manifests itself, and it will also challenge real individuals, communities and organisations. It's inevitable that any ethical stance, any action, is going to encourage equal and opposite reactions. It also seems clear, contrary to the objective laws of physics, that sometimes apparently small actions or events can become multiplied out of all proportion and have serious implications.

I will vigorously act to minimise conflict, within the context of the ethics that I am trying to set out. This is my promise to caution and to my interlocutors (electronic or otherwise).

At the end of this post I must quote my friend Georges Bataille, who made a significant impact on work around positive ethics in the last century. At the same time as I make this promise I can't escape the fact that life is challenge, and avoiding challenge is greyness and death. In Bataille's immortal words,

the future will belong not to those for who action is a demand for morose and disagreeable work, but to those who, on the contrary, will deliver the world from its exhausting boredom

I hope you're looking forward to that future with me.

Happy Beltane

Amongst other things, today is the first day of summer in the old Celtic calendar. It is exactly six months until Samhain, more commonly known as Halloween.

Samhain is the most important festival of the Celtic year - the Celtic new year, the time of death and also the time to begin to reflect on the new life that will bring. Beltane is the complement of this, the height of spring and a celebration of flowers, fertility and delight.

There's lots of good information on the internet. If you were more organised than me you will have been out at one of the many fires and celebrations that were held around the country last night. But many people have never even heard of Beltane, and it makes very little impression on our lives today.

On the other hand, thinking about health and self-expression, thinking about the visions that some of the people I work with in hospital have, thinking about Jung's faltering engagements with Shamanism, I can't help feeling that these ancient festivals do have an impact on us today - only we are so distracted by other things we usually don't notice.

I'll write about this again, but on this special day I just want to make the point that our society, so focused on economic consumption and growth, so focused on objectivity, knowledge and truth, seems to be quickly destroying itself.

Now I'm going to get away from this radiation emmitting screen and go far a walk...

The space not enclosed by words...

feelings - beliefs - thoughts - actions - perceptions - life - the universe - race - sexuality - culture - quiet - music - dance - spirituality - messages - dreams - movement - rhythm - light - darkness - childhood - knowledge - fire - water - art - creativity - touch - smell - ...

Mutabaruka, the Jamaican dub poet, is asked:

"Muta. All the while I 'ear Rasta talk 'bout 'I and I' - what the 'I' mean to you?"

Muta seh: "Well the 'I' is the space not enclosed by words."

And truly, although I am far from Rasta, here we meet. And we dance. And objectivity is the tool of the babylon system that we must fight.

Peace and love and respect for our brethren. And may the babylon system soon fall.

Next performance is at the annual Community Dance Platform, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Chapeltown Road, Leeds, 7-9pm on Saturday 20 May. Tickets £4/£3 call 0113 219 3018.

Big up to David Hamilton, the Reggeyeshun Dancers, and Back Bone.

Can we apologise for our beliefs?

Should we apologise for our beliefs?

If we believe something happened, if we have friends who also believe what we believe, if we have heard subjective evidence to suggest that similar things have happened to others in the past...

If someone who wields power and deals in objective evidence and makes demands doesn't believe us...

Should we apologise? Doesn't this compromise us in the deep sense of the word? Don't we lose a part of our integrity by apologising in the face of our beliefs?

On the other hand, could it be better to lose our integrity and compromise rather than suffer the fate that those with the power and authority would like to see?

We'll have to see...