Theorizing community in and through Third way ‘alternative’ praxis: a Critical psychological analysis

Giouli Tsirtoglou/ clinical psychologist

In: Stenner, Paul & Cromby, John & Motzkau, Johanna & Yen, Jeffery. (2011). Theoretical psychology: global transformations and challenges.

SUMMARY

The rise of the NGO sector in Greece changed the way psychosocial expertise and communities relate with each other. NGOs’ impact on communities is monitored, registered and evaluated through official processes and this is one of the ways communities are turned into seamless, coherent objects of study and intervention under neoliberal governance. Reflecting on our praxis working with communities we came to realize how our viewpoints and impacts on them were at the same time excessively promoted and obscured in the NGO objectifying practices. Hence, what we shall critically introduce and explore here are: a) the conditions under which the notion of community, as a psychosocial concept, is legitimized and serves the legitimization of Third Way ‘alternative’ social policies, b) the meaning the notion of community acquires in the context of such social practice and finally c) the way the notion of community mediates the social scientist’s subjectivity in the framework of Critical Psychology.

COMMUNITY MEDIATING SUBJECTIVITY

The concept of ‘community’ is apparently serving as designating a socio-cultural contextualization of a behaviour/conduct such as communality (Tovey, 2009), sociality (Studdert, 2005) or intersubjectivity (MacIntyre, 2012). As such the abstraction ‘community’ is useful to further analysis and research when it delineates alternative approaches (e.g., being open to theories of socialisation or communication etc.). Still, of such a concept should also be demanded that it be ‘fertile’ in the sense of outlining it as being the result or the object of people’s activities, knowledges, institutionalising efforts, of social networking, etc. Yet, even this is not enough either. What is also demanded is the reference to the effects which such an objectified product has in turn on collectives and individuals (e.g., beneficiaries, community workers, vulnerable social groups etc.). Taking these demands seriously, we might achieve a dialectic understanding of “the ways in which that abstraction is alive as a material reality, objectified in institutional structures and knowledges, and in turn forms collectivities and disciplines subjectivities” (Nissen, 2008, p.62).

The issues discussed here had been critically analyzed in the context of a previous research project with my colleague Fanis Dedes on the (trans)formation of subjectivity in the provision of psychosocial services in Greece under neoliberal psychosocial policies. Our research object emerged from our praxis working in the NGO sector, as neophyte psychologists, for a community, called Finikas, running the high risk of social exclusion due to socioeconomic vulnerabilities. This means that the research object was not ‘given’ to us but formed in the course of our active participation in the NGO psychosocial practice, having a particular position. Thus, we developed this research as an attempt to work out the social ends of the means of our own productive involvement. Facing the preliminary and imperative questions ‘working for whom?’ and ‘which is the impact of our work to ourselves and others?’ we sought for the materialization of a dual intention: the critical reflection on the meaning of our work as a social practice on the one hand and the development of our working potency on the other.

Drawing on Critical Psychological theory and practice then appeared as a mere necessity not only because of the way ‘subjectivity’ is theorized in this field but also because of the way our work was lived as a praxis – research project, in the order of subjectification – objectification dialectics. While we were trying to work properly and conscientiously and constantly asking ourselves ‘what are we doing then?’ “the two determinations, that subjectivity consists of” (Nissen, 2002), were becoming more and more obvious to us: (a) “the subjectivity of labour, or praxis” as the means of forming and transforming the societal living conditions and (b) the inescapable way of realizing our work through “intersubjectivity” where subjects develop in “relations of possibility” through and in the form of objectified societal meanings. So, working in this context could be seen as a circular pattern of action and reflection – ideally in the order of planning, acting, observing, reflecting and planning again. In this pattern, which could not surprisingly lead into a vicious circle, subject’s personal introspections manifest themselves as possible and negotiable recognitions or negations of the subject itself or of the meaning that s/he echoed until then. Hopefully, then, working on the basis of a “cooperative introspection” (Nissen, 2000), as we did for the needs of this research also, would serve the transformation of a forced cooperation to a willful societal engagement.

In this cooperative introspection we provoked and accompanied one another – approaching also what Pierre Bourdieu called a “provoked and accompanied self-analysis” (Hamel, 1997) – so that both of us reflected critically on our working experiences and activities with relevance to societal structures and practices – not only as colleagues but as research subjects and co-researchers too. Taking our praxis as a situated encounter between subjects, activities and objects (material objects and subjects objectified) that participated in the context of this particular NGO social practice we analyzed thoroughly each other’s interactions with these subjects hoping that we come a bit closer to the way where the personal everyday perspective of the subject associates with the perspective of society. Inevitably, we came to realize that any critical reflection on our agency as community workers should also include a more sustained look on community as a mediating subject and object, realized and transformed in and through subjectivity.

Sketching the “portrait of the practice” (Nissen, 2000) as interactions between ourselves and the other subjects that participated in this practice became more and more relevant to our job’s core method, which is the intersubjective relationship between the provider and the recipient of the service. In our perspective these subjects were the NGO’s administrator, the children of the community, their parents, the local authorities of the community, our co-workers in the context of the NGO as well as in the context of transnational partnerships and the European authorities. In the context of these interactions we delineated our working routines, our duties, the challenges we faced and the content of our work, along with the meaning that all these bore for us and those that we were working with, the other subjects that is, trying to disclose a “prototype” (Nissen, 2009) of our praxis development. In doing so we felt bounden to comprehend the relevance of the particularities of the local social context to “life trajectories” in a personal and historical perspective (Dreier, 1999).

THE LOCAL CONTEXT

When we conducted this research – two years before the beginning of the economic crisis in Greece – the NGO sector could be considered as a thriving socioeconomic sphere. Therein large, medium and small national or international organizations and corporations ‘played’ in the social arena of an imperfect competition, which was primarily affected by the personal and political affairs over the state’s or the European Union’s funds.

The NGO that we worked for was of a medium ‘stature’ maintaining branches in four Greek cities and one in Albania, even though it was facing ups and downs in terms of funding and personnel. We saw this pattern of irregularity, indicative of the general precarious terms under which its activity was being realized, as one of the cohering components which (trans)form the NGO practice as a “model artifact” (Nissen, 2009). Other components would be: the longstanding tenure of the founding members at the helm of its activity, as pioneers associated with the ‘common good’; the accentuation of a principal more or less utopian aim like combating social exclusion; the use of adaptable means (tools) for the realization of its aims, that is the provision of counseling, educational, recreational and socializing opportunities; the continual search for funding sources (reproduction means) that could be of national or European agencies along with the ‘in kind contribution’ of local administration actors; and last but not least the expansion of the organization in the form of various units (Youth Centres, Hostels for the Homeless, etc.) aspiring to secure or enhance a bit more the funding opportunities.

So, both of us worked for the only Youth Centre founded especially for the needs of Finikas community. Finikas is located at Thessaloniki’s margins, to its northeast end, and was established, in the early ‘60s, under the auspices of a special project for the restitution of people living in temporary hutments. Since then Finikas was legitimized as a social housing district, inhabited by low income, working class, extended families and in more or less irregular and occasional manner still needs a ‘project to be’.

The Youth Centre was established with the contribution of the municipality, the local authority of the greater area, which provided the place of 120 m², to accommodate the needs of the young people from 7 to 22 years old. Every day at least eighty youths visited the Youth Centre hoping to find an interesting way to spend their time. For us, though, the NGO’s representatives, the Youth Centre should also be able to ‘accommodate’ the priorities of the projects that funded its operation – meaning that if the priorities of the funding project favoured educational workshops on ‘interculturality’ then we had to find a way to make this priority meet the needs of the youths by adjusting their needs to the priority.

In this context, our working routines were intertwined, our duties overlapped and our working tasks exceeded both the locality of Finikas’ community and what we reasonably anticipated to be the core content of our work, Finikas’ community empowerment that is. What we came across was loads of paper work, consecutive meetings, contacts and negotiations with national and transnational partners and agencies, travelling within borders and abroad. What we also had to face were unpredictable working and payment shifts and lack of insurance. All these taken together meant for us anything but a well contained and fixed working context; rather, they constantly allowed for the eruption of what one may term ‘precarious margins’, the semantic field where the meaning of our work was being materialized and reconstructed under the semi-explicit terms of hope and hopelessness, investment and divestment, power and powerlessness, construction and deconstruction.

This precariously open spectrum of potencies and restrictions from the beginning until the end was for us a great opportunity to work with relevance to our studies and our critical stance towards the mainstream psychology of pure individualism. But it was also the only opportunity that a psychologist normally has, in Greece, to enter the job market when s/he has no other relevant working experience or a relevant postgraduate degree. Likewise, from our initial commitment until our last report, community as the critical recipient and analytic category of our work – certainly experienced and conceived as something exceeding instrumental cooperation or social bonding – , was desirable and gratifying. But it was also something demanded and demanding to the point that it also became difficult to develop or to cope with for long, especially when coming closer and closer to the economic crisis in Greece.

PARTICIPATING IN THE NGO OBJECTIFYING PRACTICE

For the last three decades psychosocial services, NGO practices and community were discursively connected, in a Third Way gray zone between market and state (Rose, 1999), right and left (Driver & Martell, 2000), liberalism and socialism (Studdert, 2005, p. 47). Third Way’s advocates proposed forms of active, productive, and participating welfare, inherently and unbreakably bonded, and discoursively interwined with the local, community component. New legitimizing strategies and partnerships of all sorts were asserted and accorded a key role in the reform of welfare to welfare–to–work projects. Welfare–to–work projects which are quite usually conceived as the stick and the carrot in work policy, according to Nicolas Rose “deploy a mixture of remoralizing therapies, pedagogies for inculcating citizenship competencies, and punitive measures” (Rose, 2001, p. 13). For Nicolas Rose (2001, pp. 4-5) in this we find “an attempt to create some novel links between the personal and the political […] a new politics of behavior”, which he calls “ethopolitics” and outlines in the following way:

“The Third Way aspires to a contract between those who exercise power and those who are obliged to be its subjects. Although the former must provide the conditions of the good life, the latter must deserve to inhabit it by building strong communities and exercising active responsible citizenship (2001, p. 3).”

In this political schema, community serves as a discourse construct valued in an instrumental way for what it could produce. That is social cohesion and social embedding in a voluntaristic manner. Free and autonomous individuals can be governed through community, in the here and now. Thus, in such “alternative” practice community is legitimized – all the way from the top – “as an instrumental cockpit for the enactment of objectified, rational and frequently psychologised ‘means and ends’, as a fabricated object for the enactment of individual subjectivities and pre-conceived projects” (Studdert, 2005, p. 105).

In this landscape we could easily speak of the NGO’s ideological leverage in legitimizing social injustice along with psychology’s power of victimizing the socially injured, through the so called “ameliorative interventions” (Nelson & Prilleltensky, 2005) – and one could be well aware of this. However, such a line of argument could as easily lead us to bottom line verdicts – for example ‘eventually, our work did or did not serve the one or the other reproduction end, for the one or the other body of power etc.’ This would inevitably beget community’s cynical ostracism, as a subject/ agent, on behalf of which our psychosocial services were being realized. For us, though, in a sea of mediations, this recipient remained the most foundational: by affirming and resisting, by legitimizing such a social practice in certain ways, by constructing subjectivity and sociality as activities among subjects.

For us to work for the community – and thus acting in the community context – was being experienced as a ‘tug-of-war’ of demands and investments, between the providers and the recipients of psychosocial community work. Instead of conceiving it purely externally either as a “buffer zone” (Kivel, 2000) for the demands of the oppressed or as a support practice for the treatment of social fragmentation, working in such a community context rather involved what our colleague Stavros Psaroudakis (2008) has described as “symbiosis of precarities”, meaning: the constant abrasion and the imperative conciliation, traction and coalition, in the social field, along with intersubjective mutual understanding, between the neophyte precarious NGO worker and the precarious neophyte recipient. This symbiotic micro interactivity, through which community was being realized, was a condition of a social potential versus alienation, exploitation, oppression and rights’ deprivation and at the same time a circumscription of the subjects involved.

The general context of this psychosocial inconsistency was given by the projects and the funding determinants. This determination, although precarious, was at the same time an opportunity for us to engage in the community’s matters, as working subjects, apart from making a kind of living. What had been at stake was the meaning that all this attention and funds would attain for the community itself. In other words, what we did not know was the form of community that this social determination would produce, or the way community would participate in this nexus of interactivities in order to constitute itself as ‘acting subject’. A project for the community was a change of the community – but a change in which direction?

To the community the project signified something that lay between a benefit, an opportunity and a right. Ideally community should gain some kind of inherent awareness of the fact that there was an opportunity to benefit from a privileged conjuncture that somebody was there to help it exercise some of its rights. What seemed to us to be rather the case, though, was that community needed our support in order to exercise its ‘meta-right of access to rights’, a right almost exclusively legitimized by and enacted through projects like ours. In other words, we should channel our work, that is the project, into the community in the form of a preferential opportunity, as if we were “redressing a grievance” that we ourselves, mediated by the project, were contributing to.

Community thus was a prerequisite, a consequence and a ‘parallel casualty’ of our work. In terms of practice this meant that while formulating and realizing the project we found ourselves in the position of having to state loud and clear that we weren’t just working for the beneficiaries’ community consciousness, by combating social exclusion, but that a ‘minimum of community consciousness’ was already at place also! Thus, part of our psychosocial/community work was not just the establishment of bonds between the community’s residents, but the reestablishment of the present bonds as ‘community bonds’ also.

So, we could say that the kind of community consciousness that we worked for was a ‘project community consciousness’, a community consciousness not for itself but for the project. The project was a meeting point as well as a ‘tool’ (mediation method), common for the NGO as well as the community. Yet, the relationship between those two poles of the project was an incommensurate one: on the one hand there was the sensitized Civil Society mediated by the experts’ work, and on the other hand there was the community of the socially excluded, that it is not even a community, and it needed all these mediations in order to be one.

All these, of course, could not be further developed if one did not take into account the particular meaning that the concept of community acquires in Greece, in its relation to the local authorities. In Greece, the concept of community does not savour the widespread use or the social resonance that it has in countries like the U.K. or the U.S.A. and some other western European countries. We could reasonably argue that it is being contended by the (concept of the) ‘local government’ (topiki autodiikisi in Greek which word by word should be translated as ‘local self administration’), which mainly has administrative power and proportional social meaning. The ‘local government’, unlike ‘community’, in a way by-passes people as communities with common traits, interests or concerns and appeals to the locally governed, that in Greek is named ‘dimotis’, in a more or less individualistic manner. The ‘dimotis’ position is basically a political position, relative to that of the citizen/ ‘politis’. This introduces a great inconsistency before the great value that the social environment, more or less construed as community, is ascribed. The same applies to the myriad of normally transient initiatives, that someday were appreciated as transformative having the function of articulating to the state citizens’ demands which elsewhere would be described as ‘community demands’.

These formations, the ‘dimotis’ position and the institutional micro-centralization of welfare responsibilities to the local government, can and often do discourage the emergence and the establishment of communities within which social issues could or would be formed and confronted. Districts or groups of people that mostly need such a community context feel a growing impotence. These people hold the ‘dimotis’ position but due to socioeconomic conditions are vulnerable and under the sovereignty of the individualizing relationship ‘dimotis – local government’ get further weakened. This is also an aspect of the distinction between ‘dimotis-politis’ and the residents who due to social exclusion become communities under the adhesive predicates of ‘vulnerability’. Eventually, society is relegated to community, and community is reduced to the ‘specifically private’.

In this complex of practices – the EU, the NGO, the local government – it appears that Finikas’ community, participated as an objectified versatile subject having multiple ‘owner-ships’, which may compete over it, and which can be differentiated in terms of their degree of institutionalization. Moreover it appears that community’s social grammar that we were realizing through this complex of funds was not to be taken for granted, but only as a derivative of the project’s performative power. Community is, to some extent, objectified through the project’s mediation but also for the project’s needs. And this quasi-administrative, bio-political process exemplifies tacitly what empowerment is about: an inconsistent modality of power. Whether community would transcend the project, to what extent and how was and still remains at stake, as well as a foundational criterion of our psychosocial work.

Community, in order to gain the opportunity, in the form of a special project, to fight over the procuration of special benefits, it ought to manifest its special characteristics – such as cohesion (or the lack of it), (insufficient) participation, vulnerability etc. This of course was part of our job; as a matter of fact, this was the main precondition in order to ‘keep’ our job as well as keep the opportunity we had to work for the community. In turn, ‘sitting on top’ of a cross-section of a variously special(- ised) situation, we were expected to deal with ‘catalyzing special effects’. Not only should we work as special scientists, but as ‘special citizens’ as well, capable of being included in ‘special communities’.

On the other hand, we came to realize that this subjectivity of ‘specialization’ was being objectified to the following consensus: the provision of any psychosocial service is considered to be the main psychosocial service. This meant that what counted was that some intervention was at place, and that the specific content of it was of less importance. Consensus around this point was to some extent justified given the overall circumstances and indicative of the fact that ‘anything else’ for the district nourished hope for ‘something good’, ‘something more’. So community was expected and encouraged to responsibly participate just to keep the opportunity of something good to be done there. Likewise, the relationship with the community involved an aspect of edification, a community ‘learning by example’, which promoted and at the same time constricted community’s activation in terms of the model provided by the activation per se of the NGO workers, and only then in terms of their specific action.

In the same way that our activation/activity constituted a transference of ‘practical hope’ to the community that a new project will follow, our active attendance was for the young beneficiaries as subjects a ‘wire’ to a well enough different world; the world that Boltanski & Chiappello (2005, p. 103) called “the reticular world”. And the merest of our psychological interventions had to do with a growing of sensitivity for the discernment, the recognition and the practical keeping pace with such a world’s tendencies and demands, rather than with the resolution of emotional or behavioral problems, the abolition of inequality, the perspectives’ enhancement and expression. In this perspective the Youth Centre was a preventive ‘inoculation’ against an impending ‘lethal incompatibility’.

On the other hand, though this ‘lethal incompatibility’ threatened not only the socially excluded youth but also those out of work and those working or trying to work under new conditions; rightly speaking, the community as a whole. What we experienced were young and elders competing one another as regards to the Youth Centre’s use. The Youth Centre did not signify just something for the youth, but a place within which “youth” was produced and distributed, as a historically new and unevenly distributed social good (Marvakis, 2005). We could quite reasonably see the discourse about competence building, which so explicitly guided our practices, such as counseling, non-formal education, and workshops, as a process for the development of ‘youth competences’. These youth contents that the globalized projects and psychosocial services aim at, focusing merely on the formation of dispositions which will let some of them attain the ‘maximum possible maturity’, the positive social roles of the active citizen, the lifelong learner, the non-discontented precarious worker.

REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

All the way through these reflections what was triggering our minds was an inherent need to find community bits or beats in the erratic NGO working regime. What we think we managed to outline is subjectifying and objectifying processes and interactivities which set the ground for the ‘plea’ of ‘community’ as an analytic category well-suited for the actuation of hope and mutual investment in psychosocial work as a setting for personal/ social reproduction.

Working in and on this setting we ‘realized’ again and again the mutually corroborated sense between workers and beneficiaries that anything beneficial for them was also, in its depth, beneficial for the market and that anything pressing and laborious had to do with the market’s regulations. In this correlation, the relationship between the worker and the direct or indirect beneficiary, is produced in terms of investment: the worker’s investment (investment of work and tolerance to cooperation) meets the beneficiary’s investment (investment of participation or tolerance) and is being experienced by both of them as participation in a ‘psychomoral’ economy which we couldn’t call better than ‘mutual micro-blackmailing’ and ‘micro-blackmailing of mutuality’. Both worker and beneficiary fight in a more or less cliental transaction of the form ‘if you don’t give that you will be responsible for our – that is the project’s – collapse’. They fight for the so-called “best practice”, which practically means forcing one another to the maximum of self-investment hoping that the minimum reproduction of oneself is to be accomplished for both.

Taking all these reflections into account we could argue that a dual need was inherently puzzling our minds: the need to realize the transformation of community’s meaning under neoliberal joint ventures of practices on the one hand and doing this to come a step closer to prefiguring ‘better communities’ on the other. Apparently, then, what we think we should ask ourselves is to what extent reflecting on communities make us, i.e. those who are reflecting gain the conviction that we also promote bonds between people. And to what extent avoiding, or not going as far as prefiguring ‘better communities’, allows more space for bonds to grow. Yet, the question of ‘how?’ we can have better communities cannot be isolated from the question ‘why?’ we don’t already have them.

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