Transgressing boundaries creates those boundaries
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
The role of boundaries in individuation
Let’s talk about transgression. Indeed, let’s transgress. When we step outside the accepted truth, when we don’t behave the way we are expected to, when we disrespect the norms of our society, when we deliberately disobey authority, we set up a new boundary and a new sphere of thought and action. As soon as we take a step into the void, we get a different view of everyday things. And often, synchronous events happen to reinforce the significance of what we just did.
This is the place where the subjective/objective split is most obviously revealed to be false. We do something in an inner space that we have been schooled to think is subjective and private, only to find things in the public and external world are entangled in the moves we make.[1] When we transgress we find a different truth that is no less true and objective than the one we just left. Making balanced judgments about the significance of what we discover is difficult and dangerous.
For instance, I know people who believe in the power of prayer. Their stories of having prayed for things to happen, and of the answers to their prayers, are entirely credible. That is different language for what we just described: a move on our part and a “response” on the part of the world. If we allow ourselves to get to a way of thinking where prayer in the answer, we have a new orthodoxy, a new norm, that we may need to transgress in order to see more and differently. This is some polar opposite of a search for a single truth.
The easiest transgression to feel for is doing things outside the law. A colleague reports just how enlivening this is.[2] Of course we all know intellectually that some laws are plain wrong, or not written for the situation we are in, but there is still a step to actually “take the law into your own hands”, something our culture decries. There is a position that says that laws are passed to apply to all members of a society. And there is a position that you can find by transgressing that and seeing what the laws look like in a different sphere of reality. For some members of society, the way the law is applied puts them outside the law without them having to make a choice.
The Topography of Terror
I visited the exhibition in Berlin called the Topography of Terror. It is on a site in central Berlin that was occupied by some of the key institutions of the Third Reich that terrorised the population of Germany. Topography refers to the physical geography of where these organisations were located in grand old buildings, and also to the network of inter-relations between them that eventually sealed the fate of the nation.
I was struck by the emphasis on officialdom. There are endless photographs of particular bureaucrats, each with name and role, each trained in special schools so that qualifications and rank and position and power all slotted together. If the state moved against you it did so on the basis of law and of detailed documentation and order. There are endless official documents on display to prove that all this network of terror was implementing the law as it stood.
Our own topography of endless disadvantage has largely been financial. The banks, while swimming in corruption and taking the law into their own hands, have been good at enforcing petty bureaucratic rules and conditions on people who cannot meet them. I saw a figure of 100,000 attempted suicides in the UK last year because of debts and debt collection procedures. I have worked in this field myself and know just how arbitrary and punitive financial institutions can be.
And so I think what we have in terms of this story is really not just a failure of the banks and the regulators, but also a failure of our prosecutors. I mean, a lot of the statutes that could be used — criminal statutes, even, that could be used to hold these executives accountable are not being used, and they have not expired; we could have prosecutors holding these people accountable. Robert Scheer[3]
We are clearly moving back towards something more recognisably Third Reich or Stalinist however. People with power want to impose their own ideas of what constitutes being an upstanding citizen or a model worker. The level of surveillance by various states brings this possibility ever closer in terms of being realizable.[4]
Boundaries
Many people would want to believe that the boundary of the law was a creation of the law itself: this action is legal and this action is illegal. This is fantasy however.[5] When we step into taking an action from our own resources, our own imagination or what might be possible, we see the law in a different light. Or any other boundary. The move is closer to Kafka or Havel than to soap opera or Daily Mail.
From the perspective of a person individuating, the move creates the boundary, at least potentially. You take a risk — it is always a risk — and suddenly and inexplicably things look different. One of the problems with this, one of the risks indeed, is that communication with people who have not made such a move becomes difficult. Writing this blog each week in some ways takes me further and further from easy communication with readers.
When people talk about surveillance and say that if you haven’t done anything wrong you have nothing to fear, they are making this mistake. How you see the question of wrong will at some point be different from the people exerting the surveillance, be they plodding policemen or kinky spooks or salivating marketeers. When you are grist to someone else’s mill you don’t get to have a point of view at all, and effective democratic oversight has never existed.
To bring this back to the world of organisations, the implications are these. If people act with any intrinsic imagination, to exert the variety that we wrote of last week, then they will create boundaries as they do so. Any attempt to impose boundaries (this function, that department, this training) simply limits the moves into imagination. Those imposed boundaries tell people that the world is this way, that this is the rule and the law. But it isn’t — as soon as you move!
Dependency
The imposition of a structure on our experience keeps us in a state of dependency. Dependency is the opposite of individuation. It is not so much that we need to assert our independence, which often merely reinforces existing structures, as that when we act from our imagination we are no longer in the world that power and dependency creates for good and ill.
From where I am writing, the point of power systems is to maintain dependency and complicity even if this is not understood by anyone. Powerful people and institutions have an unconscious intuition about people who do not comply. There is a surgeon in Tasmania, Gary Fettke, whose job was mainly to amputate the limbs of diabetics. When he advised his prospective patients about how a low carb diet might salvage their situation, and especially when his work with them showed good results, he was banned from speaking about low carb diets. His institutions would rather patients lost limbs than have their authority undermined. After some years of campaigning by Gary’s wife, Belinda, the ban has been overturned but the instinct remains.
I have talked to people who have been various sorts of civil servant, in the UK and in the EU. They have a mindset that has been cast, because they can do no other. For instance, there were some ruffled feathers this week when central government in the UK issued a toolkit for local government to help them become more efficient. Of course, from the perspective of local government it is precisely central government procedures and rules that prevent them from becoming efficient.
Linking to the Fettke story, I was talking to an eminent (retired) EU civil servant who worked in agriculture as a biologist. We spoke of the two distinct metabolic mechanisms in the human body, the glucose cycle and the ketone cycle. His comment was that the ketone cycle was a whole other biochemistry. What he meant was that the establishment can’t go to ketones and all they imply. What it means to me is an ocean of possibility to get out of the health crises we have generated. I don’t take this to be a deficit on his part, just an accurate reflection of a lifetime’s dependency in employment, with all that that implies.
I also had a conversation with a German friend who is very bullish about what technology can do. We spoke, again, about self-driving vehicles. His central point was that AVs just need to be better than cars with drivers. When I pressed him on what better might mean he said safer, fewer accidents. This is the answer from inside the technology system. Once you step outside, then you create a new space for thought and a new boundary. From there it is clear to me that the presence of AVs will mean new rules restricting other road users: cyclists, pedestrians, horses, wildlife.[6] Whether AVs are “better” is not even a question really. It is a statement about how technology and the freedoms of people who can afford it will be privileged again.
The dependency in technology domains is on particular social arrangements which, when questioned, appear undesirable. The 1%, and even more the 0.1%, keep their offspring away from the social media and other technology that made their billions for them.
Individuation and freedom
We used to talk about freedom and freedoms. As I hear the language, freedom has been annexed by the far right to describe their right to trample on other people. Freedom to carry automatic weapons. Freedom to hate-filled speech. Freedom to amass wealth at the expense of others.
Individuation, by contrast, is certainly not a right and often is largely involuntary. Either it feels like an instinctive drive or it is thrust upon us by events. In creating boundaries and beyond them new perspectives and new judgements in does indeed generate freedom. Freedom from dependency, the only freedom worth having. But it is not a freedom that can be claimed the way the right think they are entitled to do. It is an existential stance that is as much a curse as a blessing. It is a road that has no end and which has its own momentum.
Individuation is not a club either. I don’t need you to agree with my views on AVs, for instance. I will recognise in you whether you have stepped outside the system and you may recognise it in me. We are not trying to establish new truths, just to make sure we are not dependent on a logic that will mince us up if we let it.
There was a tribe of indigenous people in Colombia who got caught up for years and decades in the fighting between rebel groups and the government troops. As the fighting moved back and forth they were always co-opted and abused by both sides. They made history by going into both lions’ dens and insisting that it was not their fight, that they were not partisan in either direction and that they would get on with their own lives no matter what. They moved to a place where the awful consequences of the fighting were not the central facts of their existence. Because they had to: but we tend not to be able to make this move.
Choosing individuation
Individuation tends not to look like a choice. But the failure to individuate when the situation arises can be deeply damaging. The deadness and emotional atrophy that characterises much of modern life speaks to a life of chances to express ones own imagination that have been flunked. I listen to people saying that their life is just deadening. That it is their situation that makes them as they are. And while I would never join the positive thinkers and the self-help brigade saying that challenges are there to be overcome, I am very much of the view that we can see things differently.
Hat-tip to Eric Lynn:
The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another. — Krishnamurti.
[1] Even the folks who cling to the objective/subjective divide admit to there being some sort of ‘reticular activation’ that means you notice things in the environment that you’d previously overlooked. The classic example is just how many cars just like yours are also on the road, now that you’ve bought it.
[2] A minor personal anecdote: in Canada, jaywalking is illegal. One of the joys of living in the UK is walking across the street, against the lights, sometimes in the company of a police officer who is doing the same thing…
[3] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/wall-streets-corruption-runs-deeper-than-you-can-fathom/ Talking about Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street by Carmen Segarra
[4] Witness China’s recent move toward quantifying how compliant each citizen is, with a view to tying that score to the ability to access travel, education, jobs, and other benefits.
[5] Lao Tzu noted 2,500 years ago that by making laws you create criminals. Related quote from historian Will Durant: “The intellectual man is a danger to the state because he thinks in terms of regulations and laws; he wishes to construct a society like geometry, and does not realize that such regulation destroys the living freedom and vigor of the parts.”
[6] Someone told me that at some point in the early days of motorcars, horses and other slow-moving traffic were banned from the ‘motorways’. A similar segregation seems likely to happen for AV to become reliable and not a danger to the vehicle’s occupants.
