wallpaper animals

The Conservative government in the UK is producing some eye-watering policy statements at the moment, the most striking one of which appeared today in the form of a proposal to prevent under 25 year-olds from accessing housing benefit. The press speculation is that this is a political move within the Conservative party designed to appeal to hard-core Tory voters (the ones who bemoan scrounging youths who have babies to get council housing).

I don't want to criticise the policy in this post. I want to think how something which appears so oblivious and cavalier regarding the stresses bearing on young people, can be considered by the Conservative party and their supporters as a good idea. I think that in explaining this, we might get a clearer picture on the  real effects of the policy, rather than simply mud-slinging at the government.

Family attachments are complicated. Whether you are wealthy or whether you are poor, the meaningfulness of your life depends on the well-being and success of those closest to you.  Consider that you are a banker, Peter, with two children (Jonathan, 10 and Rebecca, 12) living in a large house in the suburbs (say Harpenden). You have about £1m in investments, some of it in property which you have purchased in London. Your children are at private school, because you passionately believe that anything less will damage their chances of doing well in life. Your wife looks after the children and doesn't work (her zero income is useful for balancing out the tax burden of property income!). You love your children, and your marriage ticks along in a orderly manner without too much undue stress (of course, the healthy financial situation helps with that). You work very hard, rarely getting home before 9 or 10pm.

You are obviously worried about the economic situation. The government being broke and the ensuing recession will threaten your business. Losing your job (which is highly paid) is a possibility. If that happened, then those you love will be affected. The children will have to leave their schools, the houses may have to be sold, the children will not inherit them and get that precious foot-on-the-ladder in the property market. And your marriage, whilst ticking along fine in times of abundance, will be much heavier-going if times are hard ("did she really only marry me for my money?" you think). In short, there is a dark fear lurking in the background. How to avert this?

With the same clarity that  you apply in your professional dealings, the answer is obvious. The government cannot continue to go overdrawn by an additional £2bn a month. The country must live within its means. Where does the money get spent? Housing benefit? For the young? Why can't they live with their parents (everyone should do their bit)?

But the motivation is a fear for security. In fact, the security which has been built up, and which now is protected probably has its roots deep in the childhoods of the bankers themselves. The fears of loss, the memories of their own parents' struggles, of the desire "not to repeat their mistakes" all play in the minds of those who would gladly rip into the public sector in a cleansing ritual of 'financial responsibility'. Jonathan and Rebecca themselves are only the latest in the production-line of this kind of biological programming.

But Brian,21, is the butt of this particular social experiment. He's not worked for 6 months (an apprenticeship in a local garage finished recently - badly). He grew up with a mother who was barely in control of her life. Numerous men passed through the family, some nice, others not. She herself struggled to give Brian her attention - there was too much to deal with; she was too tired. Brian has struggled to maintain relationships, either romantically or socially.

He still sleeps at home. Although he doesn't really sleep - it's unbearable. He longs to get out. But he can't. There is nothing he can do. If he is thrown out, he will be on the streets (he has spent a few nights on the streets in the past). Nobody seems able to help him.

With damaged attachments like this, it is hard to see what is meaningful in Brian's life. Yet there are things which cheer him up. He sees pretty girls - they cheer him up; he watches the football in the pub; and a packet of cigarettes or a spliff will do the trick. He dreams, as anyone else dreams, of love and security. Yet when he wakes, the dream only feeds the frustration of the disconnect between fantasy and reality. There used to be people to help him (that's where the apprenticeship came from). But those support programmes have been cut. Everyone around him, like his mother, has no time, is too tired.

The point about this is that the malaise the Brian suffers from is the same as the malaise that drives Peter to want to make Brian's life even less bearable. Peter's worries have led to the  cuts to the services that might have helped Brian. Yet the similarity between the situations is lost in the political rhetoric.

What it is to be human is precisely what it is to live together. We know this from our own families and those we love. The question about government expenditure and Conservative policy is a question about where we draw the line between those we care for immediately near us, and those whose fates have a causal bearing on our own. David Cameron, and Peter, would like to draw the line around their immediate family. Yet the security they crave cannot arise from exacerbating cruel circumstances of those who are not in the immediate circle. Seeing the connected attachment situation makes this clear.

The £2bn deficit is a sign of a regulatory problem. But in order to identify the causal relations that underly this  regulatory problem, the deeper mechanisms of human living and loving must be inspected. Greater realism about attachments at all levels of society may shed a new light on these problems. 

I have recently focused on issues of 'togetherness' and 'conviviality' in my posts, highlighting problems in current conceptions of technology which talk of 'social networks' or 'online communities' which are not social and certainly not communities (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/myth-of-online-community.html). But it is not just a cosy idea of people being together that I am after. I see it really as a re-awakening of the realities of human experience, and an acknowledgement of what we find most meaningful in life. I am most interested in those issues which are foremost at the end of life: what do people worry about? How do they make sense of the briefness of life and the inevitability of its end? My experience (and the experience of many other people) tells me that it is love and relationships which are foremost in the thoughts of those for whom death is an imminent prospect. But (to exploit a play on words), death,I believe, is also immanent in life. It is the fundamental constraint or absence that weighs on us all.

But really we have to consider what is meaningful in the first place, and what might be in meaningfulness to make it meaningful. Here, I have considered the view of meaning as a "structuring of anticipations", and that when we find something meaningful it is because at the moment of perceiving something meaningful, we perceive a change in our possibilities to act which is determined by the extent to which we have confidence in the consequences of our action. It is precisely at the moment that two people declare their love for each other and have some confidence in the consequences of touching each other that the meaning is most intense. But it may be a mistake to think of this horizon of expectations (as Husserl calls it - I'm very grateful to Leydesdorff for making me aware of this literature) as some sort of logical network of possibilities. It is more like a logical realisation of the form of something.

A work of art may be meaningful to us because it makes us aware of its form, and in so doing, reveals a relationship of possibilities that allows us to anticipate our experiences as we look upon it. Whilst we may be surprised by what we see (and the greater the art, the greater the surprise), we are nonetheless ready for the surprise because we understand the form of the territory that we are inhabiting. This is, I think, because what we become aware of are the shared constraints between the artist's intention and our own: anticipation comes from a realisation of shared constraint, and by implication, so does meaning.

It is the same in love as it is in shared activity like musical performances. The score, for example, operates as a shared constraint - each person knows the limitations within which they act. That means they know the limitations of everyone else they act with. That means they can anticipate the actions of  those around them. This is where I think such performances become deeply meaningful to us.

One of the problems with technology is that it is difficult to establish shared constraints among a large group of people. They might look at the learning system or the social network, but then again, they might browse somewhere else, or do something else. Nobody is going to say "that's not within the rules"..  they are free to do what they want. But with this freedom comes atomisation of the individual - each individual operates in their own universe. Consequently the world is difficult to anticipate and can appear meaningless. Shallow forms of anticipation take over - expedient action which through manipulation of existing social structures can at least be guaranteed some predictable outcome. (So when I post this post, I will get an increase in hits on my blog). But such things are only superficial and skate over deeper issues of human existence.

Using technology to establish conviviality may provide a way of getting around this. On the whole, we do not have what Illich called "tools for conviviality". We have super-powerful tools for amplifying the individual, which in turn effectively atomise the individual. Tools for conviviality are tools for the sharing of absences, so that those using such tools are collectively aware of what is not there for each other. In so doing, they become more aware of the hidden absent forces which structure the form of hiuman engagements. In being aware of that, their  ability to anticipate, and their ability to identify meaning in the experience follows.

Most online tools concern themselves with presence. They positivise being. Convivial tools negate presence - they privilege non-being. Illich's argument was that convivial tools were very simple: a spade or a hammer. The point is that with such objects, what is absent is much more dominant than what is present. Yet it is the instinct of software developers (particularly) to throw everything into their tools: to positivise being in the usage of their tools. There is little acknowledgement of absence. But with simple tools, absences can be explored and shared. And it is in the sharing and being made aware of absences that convivial and meaningful experiences may be established.

I was until fairly recently a skeptic regarding absence. How can something that's "not there" be causal? Indeed, if we think in terms of absences, surely the pinpointing of absence makes it non-absent? With regard to the 1st point, however, I'm become more keenly aware of the causal impact of what's 'not there'. Regarding the 2nd point, however, I think there are deep problems with trying to pinpoint absences. But that is for another time. Here, as with all my thinking about learning, education, etc, I want to test the abstraction of absence and the thinking about the causality of non-being on my understanding of music.

Here, I have begun to find some compelling reasons to take absence seriously. My last post was about the role of absences on patterns of thought, and how patterns of thought are shaped by an environment which cannot be properly determined. Certainly those patterns of thought are not merely the product of their own internal arguments.

This seems counter-intuitive until you consider that the pattern of thought of a supposedly 'logical' argument bears some resemblance to a counter-melody in counterpoint. The progress of the melody is only partly due to it's internal logic and motivation; it is also determined by its relationship with whatever else was there in the first place. So consider that the following in there in the first place...

Add caption

Now this provides the 'absence' or the 'constraint' for whatever might be laid on top of it.. So I might write: