Razorsmile:
Hello and welcome to Conversations About Concepts, which is a podcast exploring our experiences and encounters with a range of contemporary concepts. Here we try to listen in to the constantly shifting whisperings of language, in order to get a sense of how concepts are actually being used in our everyday lives. This is not about defining things or teaching the truth, or showing how something should be understood. Rather, it’s about assuming that we don’t yet know what we mean when we speak, and that the first task is to open our ears to the world around us. Today we are going to discuss the concept of anxiety.
I want to ask each of you perhaps to say a little something about your relationship to the concept of anxiety. And I know that’s a little odd since we’re often focused on how we feel when discussing anxiety. And I want to begin by thinking about whether the concept is useful for people and if so, how and your relationship to it in sort of the context of that sort of idea of its use.
Anastasia:
I’m happy to kick off.
I think anxiety permeates my life and it’s a signifier of being alive, but at the same time, it helps me to weigh when things are better. So it also gives me a comparative lens when I feel more relaxed and less anxious rather than extremely anxious. And my relationship to it, to the feeling and the concept and the situation of being anxious or in a situation of anxiety is that I’m constantly trying to eliminate it, to erase it, to control it, to situate it, to understand it, to juxtapose it with other feelings so then I can actually delve deeper into those feelings. So when I’m not anxious, am I happy? Am I relaxed? Am I in control? Am I understanding what’s happening around me and within me?
My relationship to it is that sometimes I feel that there’s external stimuli and forces and energies that trigger and exacerbate and enhance a state of anxiousness. And at the same time, I feel that there’s internal dynamics and thoughts that I’m grappling with that also trigger or continue or shape the degree, the intensity, the duration of anxiety. I feel that as I grow older in various stages of life that a lot of the external political and social and community environments have drastically changed and have contributed further to my sense of anxiety. And a lot of institutions like the media and politics in general, but also a wider culture of fear. I relocated to this country completely accidentally just after 9-11, and that was, it wasn’t planned obviously, just happened existentially in my life to relocate to the UK from New York around several weeks after 9-11 with a prior stop elsewhere in Europe, in Greece, in my ancestral homeland. And that was a culture of fear, a context that exacerbated my anxiety. But at the same time, I didn’t want to decrease, for example, my travel, my sense of adventure, my interactions with people. I wanted to become more aware and more intensely an activist against Islamophobia. So levels of anxiety keep changing in my life and they are shaped by temporalities and space and situations. But above all, I try to be an active agent to try to understand why am I feeling anxious? What can I do about it? Is it becoming really toxic when it comes to my relationships with others and my everyday life. So these are my initial thoughts about the concept and my relationship to it.
Morrigan:
Even the question is interesting, what is my relationship to anxiety? It sort of suggests, because of the relationships I’m accustomed to, some sort of equality. And I don’t feel that I have any equality in my relationship to anxiety. It’s more like a battle, kind of almost like a trench warfare, you know? Because you never quite know when the, you know, when the gas is going to come over or the trench is going to flood or something like this. And then on the other hand, I kind of try to rationalize it and I’m not sure whether that’s possible and that I believe might frustrate me a bit. And my old boss once said to me that anxiety, you know, it can be useful. You don’t want an anesthetist who is not anxious. You want an anesthetist who is always going to ask what is the worst that can happen. Because that way they’re going to plan, they’re going to check, they’re going to check again, they’re going to… Because they have to almost be neurotic about what they’re doing.
And I’m also kind of, there’s a writer called Maya Angelou, who’s an amazing writer. And it’s Maya Angelou that says, hope for the best, but plan for the worst. You know, so this idea of the worst, you know, and actually what is that worst? And I think sometimes with anxiety or in my relationship to anxiety, that worst can be anxiety itself. It’s some sort of crazy, crazy loop.
The other, the other relationship I have to anxiety is one of irritation and annoyance and anger, because, you know, if words are meant to be containers for ideas, then anxiety is just not a very good container for the idea. Yeah, I think I, as someone who’s been kind of in the mental health system since I was about nine, backwards and forwards, there is a sense that sometimes diagnoses have a sort of power that they shouldn’t really have. And I’m not sure whether we’re talking about anxiety, you know, in their sort of GAD7 or PHQ9 sense or whether we’re talking about anxiety as a you know a way of being I don’t know which, so yeah
Anna:
My relationship with anxiety has become one of a lot of curiosity and I think that was very helpful to me personally. Now I haven’t experienced anxiety as so paralyzing as so many people I know have but I’ve experienced anxiety too. But I got to it as a researcher and found in anxiety a very compelling measure of our times. The promises of getting rid of anxiety have been made in a specific ideological and medical manner. So what anxiety came to mean reveals what we can think as a grammar of suffering. So what are the words that we have available to us to describe what we feel? And this word anxiety came to mean certain things. So it’s almost like a word from outside to describe something that is going on inside. And that relation is very complicated. But we also can find value, and I speak for myself, in being very curious about that word and what it really means to us, you know, not just take that word in the way it’s composed in this grammar of suffering. So what is going on medically speaking, what can be done to anxiety, again, mainly medically speaking, but to figure out anxiety as this compass, you know, this compass between in and out, this compass between a movement of staying the same or a movement of rupture in our lives which can be very paralyzing but it’s also an opportunity for a jump. So that’s my relationship to this affect, to this concept. It’s one that if we study it for ourselves but both as our experience and as an intellectual concept in the history of ideas, it just, you know, it doesn’t stop giving. There’s so much to it. There’s so much to think about when we think about anxiety. So that’s, yeah, that’s how I came into it. And where my curiosity lays.
Eric, do you want to say something about your relationship?
Eric:
Sure. I suppose my relationship to anxiety, it’s like a relationship to a lover. And sometimes I love anxiety and other times I hate anxiety. But I suppose when I think about it now, it’s very different to when I think about it in my 20s. In my 20s, I was crippled by anxiety. I mean, I really was crippled. These panic attacks, this terror, et cetera, et cetera. and I had to come up with a whole lot of self-help strategies and I started reading extensively Herman Hesse, I started reading existential texts on anxiety, which I thought were wonderful, that it was about a new possibility, a new relationship, a new sense of freedom, about bad faith in the Sartre sense, these kinds of things and they were really helpful and then I also just had little self-help things like imagining myself like a cork in the ocean and a wave comes and it pushes you down and it pops up so I’d do these visualizations, like I’m a cork in the ocean. But it’s changed a lot, it’s changed a lot with age. And in my clinical work, I find anxiety so useful, so useful, so amazingly useful. I do think anxiety offers a new relationship to the world which can reveal all kinds of things. In my clinical work is just very much about sitting with people when they are anxious and it allows for wonderful transformation, amazing transformation. But I suppose just the last thing to say on that is it took me a while when I was in my 20s, in my 20s I didn’t realize that it was so crippling and you were so bound by it and it was so one-dimensional that I didn’t know that there was a past, I didn’t know there was a future and I kind of got all the other relationships I have to the world and then it took me a while to learn to understand that actually this moment is going to pass, all moments will pass, literally like waves and that was profound realization that actually moments can pass there was a profound profound realization yeah I’ll stop there
Razorsmile:
I think I should probably say something about my relationship to anxiety, which is primarily, I suppose, unsurprisingly, from within philosophy. So unlike most of you here are involved in analysis or therapeutic relationships or those kind of things, I’m kind of, I came in contact with the very concept of anxiety in the context of the existentialists, in the context of Kierkegaard, in the context of Heidegger, in the context of Sartre. And there it appears, it emerges, as a concept of freedom, of liberation, and as a kind of positive in many, many ways. Or authenticity, or realness, or some sort of, this is a connection, it’s an insight moment, it’s these kind of things in this kind of philosophy. And there’s a sort of curiosity because I had worked inside mental health and there was no immediate connection between this kind of philosophical concept of anxiety and anything I saw amongst actual people. And so for a long time, I think my relationship to the concept of anxiety was disembodied. And I think this is one of the things I’m kind of curious about. I know that there are people here who are aware of some of the shifts that have occurred to the concept of anxiety, but one of the shifts is plainly it’s now far more central to our psychological wellbeing, but in a sense, in a way that is almost irreconcilable with the kind of philosophical sense that it’s often given. So it’s in a sense that that philosophical moment of encountering anxiety seems ridiculous, seems ludicrous. It seems…spurious to anyone who actually experiences anxiety or suffers from anxiety. And it seems almost like, as we’re often called as philosophers, like ivory white tower thinking. So, but that, but the thread that runs through it, of somehow this relationship to the body or to something along the outlines of how the concept connects, there has obviously been a fundamental shift, but what sort of fundamental shift might have occurred? Do you think what options or what suggestions might you have for if you think a fundamental shift has occurred? Has anyone got any thoughts on that?
Anna:
Maybe it’s helpful to think about, briefly together, the history of anxiety, you know, very quickly. So anxiety appears in very early psychiatric texts in the 17th century, in the 18th century. There are mentions of both what would be the physical experience of anxiety, usually to do with breathing and digestion, and the psychological experiences of anxiety, repetition, you know, disaster. But it is only in the very late 19th century when psychoanalysis emerges that anxiety becomes a category to really qualify something united as anxiety. You know, all this loose aspect of what we now understand as anxiety has become something. Freud was one of the first thinkers to really take anxiety seriously and propose an examination of experiences of anxiety that was not just a description.
But in the middle of the 20th century something really changes and anxiety becomes very peripheric to psychiatric diagnosis and to the vocabulary, you know, to this grammar to describe what’s up with people and I find that very curious. So you have you know a number of decades very influenced by psychoanalytic thinking in which anxiety is not a problem in itself but a signal of something that is going on that is particular to that person and whatever else might be going on with them in their experience. When that discourse of psychoanalysis gets out of the way in mainstream mental health texts and what we call biological psychiatry takes over in the late 70s, it is depression that becomes super popular. There’s a series of manoeuvres in categories, you know, what can be diagnosed as anxiety, what can be diagnosed as depression that takes shape. So anxiety is divided in different categories and you can’t have any of them if you experience the next one too, which is very strange because often anxiety is very blurry, general, all-encompassing and not isolated and clear about one thing only. What I find even more curious is that when antidepressants medications become very popular in the 80s, then in the 90s, then anxiety comes back in the 2000s as a popular diagnosis, but often associated with depression and the medications are often the same, not only, but usually and more so the same as the medications for depression. So I’m very curious about this, you know, this timeline of anxiety in these diagnostic texts, in the name that people give and receive to what’s going on with them. I always feel curious about what happens to anxiety when it disappears, you know, in that period of time when it was barely diagnosed. Clearly people didn’t stop being anxious. But a new name was given to it, to her discontent. And I think that invites us to also think about those names. What’s our relationship with those names, this diagnosis, these categories, and equally the promise of a fix to it. When there is a treatment that is proposed as easy, it’s going to work for everyone because the cause is just this one biological cause, take the pill or do this one kind of therapy, it’s gonna go away. When that becomes a promise and when it doesn’t work with us, then what happens? How do you even feel after that? So that’s something that I always find interesting to think about, you know, the context of anxiety across the last 150 years or so.
Eric:
I suppose I was curious about to what extent this is framed by a Western narrative and I was thinking too about the concept of the ego and the rise of the ego. And you were highlighting particular moments in terms of psychiatry and classification. But I was also thinking there was a moment that people in the West started going through a crisis in the 60s and they turned to Eastern philosophy about this loss of self, the loss of ego, these false attachments and then there was this characterization that the West suffers from anxiety and the East suffers from shame. I mean these are obviously gross characterizations but I was curious in this rise of the ego, the self, the individual, but the Western ego, the Western self, the Western individual and then there’s other narratives going on, there’s other narratives going on, so I’m just trying to think that through, I’m just pondering that.
Anastasia:
I’m fascinated by the discussion because it’s highlighting a lot of medicalized and cultural approaches to understanding anxiety. And I’m also quite curious if colleagues, friends in this discussion group feel that there could be a national sense of anxiety or the nation state in anxiety, a kind of ethno-nationalist collective sense of anxiety. And here I’m thinking about the UK and its post-Brexit hostile environment crisis, the narrative of being a welcoming, open, multicultural society to a very claustrophobic insular, with this culture of fear of the other and not understanding diversity, no longer celebrating it, but in a sense kind of fearing it and being vocal about it, where previously there was a sense of reflexivity and shame. One would not in public voice racist or homophobic or sexist commentary, they would be a bit cautious and polite, but I, I, I sometimes, and this is kind of my social research to my neighborhood, I actually try to find some time to read the NextDoor app threads of what is being discussed, in terms of not being able to book an appointment with one’s GP, and for everything, it’s the migrants at fault. It’s the migrants and the migrants and the migrants and the refugees and they’re all criminal. And it’s, to me, it signifies a sense of national ethno-nationalist or a sense of collective anxiety. Even if we strip away the ethno-nationalist element, there is a collective sense of anxiety. And I understand that this is a period of protracted financial crisis. We seem to go from one recession to the other, from one cost of living crisis to the other. But there’s resurfacing fears and a sense of collective anxiousness that I’m fascinated by because should we distill that as being medical? Is it a medical phenomenon? Is it a socially constructed phenomenon? Is it a phenomenon stimulated by political and economic circumstances? Is it just a discourse? So what kind of categories of anxiety do we have? And can we attribute anxiety to wider collectivities like, you know, a group of people, a neighborhood, the nation, a particular class anxiety, for example? I completely understand the medical and the medicalized and psychoanalytic approaches to anxiety, but in terms of everyday life, ordinary mundane people, lay persons, how do we understand anxiety emerging in our neighborhoods, in our streets, in our cities, in the countries that we live in? And can that have positive elements or is it all destructive, dysfunctional and negative?
Morrigan:
Yeah, the idea of dysfunctional is interesting because obviously, you know, anxiety goes down various routes and one of those routes is to end up being diagnosed with panic disorder. Earlier, someone mentioned the idea of this too will pass, but on a more personal level the idea of things passing is, but what if they don’t? So…in my situation, I have a son who is 30 and he was born with a congenital life threatening and life limiting condition. That’s 30 years. It’s not going to pass. The only way that it would pass is if something absolutely terrible happened. So when I think of my constant anxiety, it, you know, is it bound to be associated with that in some sort of way? But, you know, yes, I mean, you know, but, it, it’s, is it destructive? Well, it kind of is destructive, but in order to be cured of my anxiety, there would have to be an ultimate destruction there. So it’s kind of like a happy continuance of mild permanent daily terror as opposed to the absolute obliteration.
Anna:
I think this conversation between the medical idea of anxiety and other forms of understanding anxiety is really interesting. The psychoanalytic in a way, I think, being a psychoanalyst, I wouldn’t put in the same category as the medical. Because there is an investigation into your life, your context, what’s going on with you, that situates that experience of anxiety within that context. In psychoanalysis, from the beginning, you know, nothing in psychoanalysis is, a concept changes a hundred times. Its meaning, especially if we go to the Freudian texts, he famously changed his mind about everything and sometimes in the same text, so it’s quite tricky. But in general terms he navigates between an anxiety that is from within and an anxiety that is from outside. And at the end it’s both, because there is a wrapping up, a construction of the subject, of, you know, who we are, how we understand ourselves in the world that is a little bit singular, a little bit to do with our history, our experiences and in reality and of the world too. So when we think about the, you know, just the basic notion of an ego, anxiety for psychoanalysis is a signal of a threat to the ego. That’s what it is. The ego is in a precarious situation. So our understanding of life and who we are is at risk. And it can be something very realistic, like what Morrigan just shared about your personal circumstances with a child and this imminent fear of a loss there. It could be not having money to pay rent and living in a country where people can be kicked out without notice and without a reason. It could be something realistic. Or it could be something, first for Freud, that’s Freud’s words, it could be something neurotic, which means it’s something from within. But in his texts, one case is not less important than the other. One case is not being more sick than the other. But of course, he uses the word neurotic to talk about internal risks to the ego. And that’s something that I find very useful to think about when we’re listening to people that are experiencing high anxiety, to kind of be curious about it and think, okay, what’s the cause of this precarity? And to situate it as something very realistic and outside, something that is to do with personal context and experience, it’s often a combination, but to make a map of where one is, where is this ego that is at such risk? And the work…you know, the psychoanalytic work, the psychotherapeutic work in various shapes and forms, usually it has something to do about what’s done to this ego then, to this sense of self. Are we trying to just reinforce some sort of strength so this ego is, you know, really strong and then won’t feel the precarity anymore no matter what happens? Or, which I find politically more interesting, find ways to make this very sense of the ego and the self a bit more porous. So when things come up, because they will, they’re not so disastrous. We can carry on, you know, even if life has no guarantees. But that is a bit less unbearable perhaps than once it was. So I guess that’s the psychoanalytic case for anxiety. But that did not get to your question, Anastasia, of what I heard as white anxiety. No? In the UK post-Brexit, blaming the migrants. What about that anxiety? I think that’s a really good question. I don’t think there’s anything productive in experiencing that per se, but maybe it is a compass too. It tells us a lot about how white subjectivity is formed, as a fear of the other that had to be also constituted through so much violence, so that there is a sense of protection from this other.
Anastasia:
Thank you. And I want to go back to the idea that, I completely understand and completely appreciate that our circumstances and our individual life stories shape the degrees and layers and complexity of our anxiety. But there’s other elements that are beyond our control, such as gender. So as a woman, I constantly feel a sense of anxiety, whether I’m walking in at night in a small town that’s supposed to be ‘safe’ versus late at night in a big urban space that it has high rates of crime. But it’s my sense of gender, feeling that I’m a woman walking alone at night and this could happen in the middle of the afternoon or in the morning, as we know, with the increase of femicide and gender-based violence. But it’s that kind of sense of subjectivity that increases my sense of anxiety, for instance. And that’s beyond my control. It is, you know, historical, it’s contemporary, it could be anywhere in the world. It’s not even just a Western idea of women feeling that they can’t claim the streets. They can’t claim their sense of space and safety and autonomy and independence being out in the public sphere and feeling safe. The other idea that again is beyond our control, climate, the climate future and climate anxiety. And to the degree that it could really interrupt our wellbeing in terms of feeling really anxious about, you know, what will happen to us the next day.
I’m interested in the experiences of anxiety that stem from categories that we cannot shape and they’re just pre-given to us, be that the first example or the second. And then the other set of questions I had were in relation to the individual and society. So why do I always have the ultimate sense of responsibility to respond and cope and deal and moderate my sense of anxiety? So why can’t I seek the responsibility of others, the society, the nation state, my employer, in order to minimize or erase or help me moderate, control my anxiety, but in a genuine way, not with kind of tick box exercises, you know, just to show that they’re kind of compassionate employer giving me an app to kind of do mindfulness. So I want them to structurally decrease my anxiety, by actually giving me a reasonable workload, for example. So I understand again the psychoanalytic aspect, but I’m also expressing frustration with having to be responsible as an individual to deal with my anxiety. So my question is, can we accept that anxieties are beyond our control and ascribed to us because of our roles, our genders, our classes, our ethnicities, our identities in general? Can we accept that responding to anxiety, moderating and controlling it, is not only an individual sense of responsibility and that societies and other structural institutions have to take responsibility?
Eric:
For me there’s a question of if somebody can take getting through the day for granted or not and for me if I had to offer a diagnostic category I would want to replace the DSM with the question of can we, is it a question of taking one day at a time, one week at a time, or one month at a time, or can I just think about a 20-year plan? And I think at different moments, like with COVID, people shrunk and they were starting to take one week at a time or one day at a time. So I think these questions are very much framed by that, that becomes a personal question, but also becomes a political question, also becomes a contextual question. It becomes, yeah, has a very different context to it. But if it is a question of just taking one day or one hour at a time, there’s something there that is intimate to Matt’s original question about relationships. Because without this word, what the sociologists talk about as cultural capital or resources, without being plugged in to a network of resources, it’s tough, man. It’s really, really, really, really, really tough. You know, there is this pure presence of no sense of a future, no sense of a relationship, which goes beyond any existential philosophical framework. The reality is that you don’t have certain resources, that you are on your bloody own. It took, I think, about eight years before my mom knew what was wrong with my brother. She was on her own with that for eight years. In that sense, there’s a shrinking and it’s literally taking moment by moment. But in those moments, I think people do need strategies. There are strategies that I’ve got to somehow carry on, feed somebody, feed myself. And then there’s, of course, the question of how has this been politically shaped?
Razorsmile:
So I want to kind of refer back to this idea of a signal, which has arisen a couple of times. And it struck me that it’s one of the things that, in a sense, is in conflict in our contemporary relationship to anxiety. To take anxiety as a signal process is a very old fashioned way. And it’s in a sense, what’s been expelled within the medical formation. And so there’s something quite curious about this, even now, about this very idea of thinking of anxiety, not necessarily as a disorder or a suffering, but as a signal, first and foremost, as a signal. But I think that’s, you know, a kind of key thought that we might have is that actually, if it is a signal, would you remove a useful signal? You know, if you were to stop taking in anything from a particularly useful signal that you had in your environment, would that actually have a negative effect in the long term. And perhaps one of the sort of underlying theses there is perhaps the way in which the medical profession destroys our capacity to relate to this as signal has other cultural effects that are not necessarily thought about by the medical profession because of the model in which they work. But with that kind of sense of signal in our minds, I want to just refer to something that’s in this very interesting text. Anna has already spoken about how Freud is littered with discussions of anxiety. You can almost make him, you can ventriloquise him into anything if you would want to. So I don’t want to ventriloquise him particularly or characterise very, very heavily, but there’s a lovely moment in a text called “Inhibition, Symptoms and Anxiety”, chapter eight, where he talks about a guy called Otto Rank and a relationship of a kind of imprinting of anxiety onto us physically, biologically through our birth, through birth trauma. And Freud has a series of objections that he begins to raise to this. And one of them is, I think, a lovely objection. He asks, what is a danger? And he says, he suggests that a baby can only possibly be aware, to quote him, of what he calls “a vast disturbance in the economy of its narcissistic libido”. In other words, it can feel something vague, but it has no concept of danger. It can’t connect any of this in signal formation to anything that we would, as it were, have as a meaning of danger. And he kind of withdraws this description, he does some very interesting conversations later on about this and it’s a very interesting chapter to read and to look at. But I was wondering about this role of danger in our lives. There’s a crossover in a sense perhaps between this kind of political space where we encounter anxiety and the kind of personal space that’s very interesting, was encountered in Mark Fisher’s, in the text, “We’re all very anxious now”. This is a very big contemporary text in recent politics. And one of the things that was interesting to me and Eric is when we looked at the Auden and realized that exactly the same things in some ways were being used to characterize another moment post -Second World War, but in a very, very different way. And there’s a huge conceptual shift in the Auden. There is this kind of still existentialist moment of being doubled and seeing yourself being doubled and being an actor and these kind of odd moments that appear as your role, facilitated by the activities of the military, comes to kind of dominate your life and you feel a disassociation from that role but also an embracing of it. So there’s a peculiar kind of existential moment in Auden and whereas even in the more recent political engagements with anxiety, and you see this also in Bifo Berardi’s work, there’s a sense in which there’s just overstimulation, hyper stimulation. The danger is in fact that the signal is just overwhelmed in noise and hence the signal collapses. So on the one hand we have a kind of medical expulsion of the signal and on the other hand we have a kind of philosophical political expulsion of the signal because the signal can no longer be really encountered. We’re just overwhelmed continually with things, as we’ve discussed, that are kind of social or cultural. So in the midst of that space where it seems like in a sense the general dynamic is a kind of expulsion of the idea of a signal from anxiety, how is it possible to learn anything from being anxious? That’s what I would like to maybe sort of ask about. How can we learn from being anxious or is it even possible?
Anna:
That’s such a good summary of so many important debates in political philosophy and psychological writing, I guess, to bring on to us, Matt. Just on your last point in terms of the signal, this is a really good question that you ask. So we’re in a few decades in which anxiety has been hyper medicalized and the promise of it being something to get rid of that is again the discourse that has been prominent about anxiety and depression, that has been a marketing strategy of Big Pharma, was to promise that there is something called a chemical imbalance. This idea that there is something of a chemical imbalance that is biological and it’s got nothing to do with your experience. Almost separating this organ, your brain, from us, which is very difficult. I hear a lot, especially from younger people, my brain does that, my brain. And one thing that is useful for us to think about is our brain is part of us too, like everything else. So whatever is going on there or not there, it’s part of our experience. This is stretches of entanglement. Of course, I think we can elaborate and have utopic, creative, political thoughts on how to do that.
Anastasia:
Having focused on the collective, I want to return to the individual now. I really find what Anna and Morrigan had to say really, really stimulating, really interesting. And what Matt contextualized before was really enlightening for me because I want to go back now to the individual and not think about saturation and an overwhelming kind of sense of messages or stimuli. I wanna think about absence. I want to think about loneliness and isolation. And I wanna go back to when a child is first kind of dropped off at kindergartner school and they feel that overwhelming sense of personal demise because, you know, their parent is not there and they feel a sense of a overwhelming feel of non-existing, possibly a moment where they don’t even conceptualize, but it might be a reminder of what death, absence, means. And I want to go back to anxiety as a sense of complete and utter void, a complete and utter absence. Eric just said earlier that, you know, at the end of the bloody day, we’re just alone. And is this again, another sense of existential demise and the feeling of death, or is it a political context? How do we cope with that as an individual? How do we cope with the fact that we feel that we’re just alone battling constantly in the trenches, as Morrigan mentioned earlier? What are the kind of useful tools that are above and beyond any medical support that we can harness to feel a sense of journey each day at a time.
Razorsmile:
I’m going to just respond and I can see Morrigan want to do a minute. I’m just going to respond to some of the sort of that idea about what tools and possibly what learning. One of the things that politically was interesting for me was organizing with the group called Plan C and Mark Fisher’s text was kind of central in some ways to this particular political group. But also, more importantly, some of the text that came later around what he called acid communism. And there, one of the suggestions that was attempted to be put into practice was a kind of revival of consciousness raising. And we carried out some workshops in Brighton and had people come in and we did a kind of acid communism consciousness raising kind of practice that’s done through a series of questions about people’s social lives and personal lives that they kind of answer collectively around the table in a kind of social environment and then feedback. And it’s one of the things that was interesting about the experiment was how positive the feedback was from people who saw it as political, but plainly it was kind of an odd politics for them, because it wasn’t a meeting where someone was telling them what to do or where we’re all trying to decide what to do. So it was kind of seen as political – and partly because of the context it was held at the Cowley Club in Brighton, so it’s a very political context – but the humour and the joy and all these kinds of things, this is one of the arguments from a certain section of the left is this kind of relationship to finding our own joy through collectively realising essentially we’re not isolated. So from learning from each other in these consciousness raising groups and being able to find that joy and being able to kind of make that which seems to be the human condition into something that’s a social condition. So in a sense, I think that anxiety can be quite, I think that’s a very positive experiment. I think it can be incredibly useful at one level. But I’m very aware that we’re looking into levels at which populism might be promoting widespread social anxiety and which…in a generalized anxiety disorder is breaking someone’s capacity to get through the day that there are these other vastly different levels. And I mean, as a philosopher, when I find a concept being used in such wide ranges, it tends to suggest that there are a whole bunch of other functions actually operating. In fact, you’ve probably got more than one concept of anxiety at any point in time. And so, let me maybe see if I can push the question a bit. What kinds of anxiety can we learn from? And what kinds can’t we learn from? Maybe that’s a better question. Are there certain kinds of anxiety that we know perhaps that we’ll never learn anything much from this and other kinds where we can think perhaps there’s a way in which we can learn something. So you’re right perhaps about like the anxiety of the void encountered by the child going into school, but we can push that perhaps into a category in which they can, you know, take it as an example of crossing thresholds and entering into new social spaces or something, a practice and skill they might be able to learn and be useful for them. But the anxiety that grips you in terror and stops you being able to breathe properly and enters you into a panic attack, this does not seem to be, for those who experience it, something that they can learn much from. Would that be too crude a distinction, do you think, or is there something?
Anastasia:
I think there’s a lot of nuances and it’s very helpful to contextualize each category. I think that the anxiety that leads one to self harm, would not be a useful productive category, for example, but a, an anxiety that leads to a degree of self awareness, but not kind of that… you know, I detest this happiness industry kind of fashion, where there’s all these self-help books and again, the responsibility goes back to the individual, but I’m nuancing it and I’m trying to find layers. And I think if I manage, for instance, to not prevent myself from going out one evening because of the anxiety and fear of being murdered, I think that’s a positive step. Me not being careless, but actually embracing the degree of risk that would give me some agency and some autonomy to walk the streets. And I think being very measured and reflective about a very subjective and individual sense of how I can harness anxiety to be beneficial. I think it’s fantastic to find, in a consciousness raising context, joy and to celebrate that. But I think it’s also very important to confront discomfort and to confront being angry and to be okay with being angry and to be okay with feeling anxious. And I think the realization that you can confront, embrace, accept, and that it’s okay and you’re entitled to feel that and experience it, is also a productive way to harness anxiety.
Razorsmile:
Okay, I’m going to begin to wind up shortly. So if there’s any kind of last thoughts, last comments, last contributions that you’d like to give, that would be great. This is kind of question that made me think, I can’t quite work out how I would respond to this. So there’s a relationship to anxiety that’s very much a relationship to the body, as well as the mind. And in fact, there’s some lovely comments that Freud makes about this kind of helplessness, this moment of conjoined helplessness, psychically and physically. What it made me think was, is there really such a thing, or could there be such a thing as a disembodied anxiety? Is it at its heart a kind of corporeal experience? I mean, one of the ways I thought about this is the way it came up is can we do anything other than imagine? We couldn’t actually ever have, but can we actually, maybe that we could never do anything but imagine an anxious ghost? It would always have to be a kind of imaginary character, the anxious ghost, because even if there was a kind of, the ghost had a kind of spirit form or a non disembodied in corporeal form, this entity existed. It’s like if there was a disembodied incorporeal form, it would seem almost incapable for it to experience anxiety. So there was this kind of sense of like, how deeply is it connected to the body and can in a sense that offer a response of returning to like body responses to anxiety? and how powerful body responses can be. So often the meaning or the worry or the concern is conceptualized thought, conversation, disgust and stuff. And perhaps we need to go for a walk in the woods. I mean, that’s a huge oversimplification, huge oversimplification. But that sense of like, actually, perhaps we need to go for a walk in the woods, not in the town, but somewhere else in a radically different embodiment structure. Maybe we need to change our embodied structure by something like that walk in the woods. There was that sense of like, I didn’t quite know how important the body was to anxiety. It seems absolutely fundamental. It seems to be a condition of it. So I want you to leave that as kind of the last thought maybe you can respond to or to something else. And I’m going to, if possible, suggest we all have a kind of one more go round. If that sounds OK, feel free to talk on your feet. Morrigan, would you like to start the last kind of go round?
Morrigan:
Yeah, I think there’s something wrong with the formulation of anxiety and I think this has been pulled through from various psychotherapies and practices, psychoanalytic practices that just does disembody it. So I read the first four pages and one of the things that I noticed was that it could be applied to a computer. So we were talking about signals. Every day I go to work, I turn on my computer, I look at my monitor and it says no signal. Literally it’s doing that. Yeah. And then when we talk about disconnection, well, that’s what a computer does when it stops having a connection to the network or other people. You know, we could call that isolation if we like, when we’re referring to people. And I was really reminded about things like reconnection. What do we mean by that in, you know, psychological terms? What are we doing? Resetting the WIFI when we go to therapy? What are we, you know, turning the router on and off? I think there’s something really fundamentally wrong with the way that anxiety and other related things have been looked at since. I don’t know. If I take, you know, IBM inventing the idea of multitasking in 1965 and how that gets mapped on to the human experience, multitasking was to describe what computers do. You know, and I do wonder a little bit whether we’re trying to think of anxiety in computerized terms. And I’m also thinking of the way that Hooullebecq refers to anxiety and “The possibility of an island”. Not sure whether you’ve read it, but how, in fact what happens is – it is revealed at the end, am I allowed to say this? – it’s revealed at the end that the people aren’t people. And he’s drawn that from Asimov, from Asimov’s Foundation series in the 1950s. And I think it’s then that we begin to see the real shift in how people’s mental wellbeing is taken care of and viewed in society. So yeah, I mean, I suppose my final thoughts would be around like, maybe we need a radical reformulation on the way that we’re thinking. What does it mean to ‘connect or ‘be disconnected’, to not have a signal, to have a signal? What does this actually mean in this technological light?
Anastasia:
I totally agree with Morrigan. And I think that we need to move away from, you know, traditional notions of an experience, because there could be, you know, accounts of a spiritual sense of anxiety, not just related to belief or religiosity but a sense of spirituality and connection with, you know, what you termed Matt, as a ghost, or with a disembodied presence and, you know, experiences of anxiety that don’t necessarily have to stimulate fear, but the unknown with a presence or feeling of somebody who no longer exists in their bodily form, who no longer exists in an embodied sense. I’m not touching on Freud, but I also wanna go into dreaming and the psychogeography of dreaming, which sometimes doesn’t have an embodied kind of reaction. And it could be deeply, deeply aerial and deeply, it’s not an affective motion, but it is something that is outside of the embodied presence. It could be absence, an absence saturated by a feeling. I think that we need to dismantle and move away from boundaries and taxonomies and categories of anxiety, beyond the medical, and to look at other forms and experiences of anxiety and moving away from the body and looking to what others might categorize as a psyche, a soul, but doesn’t necessarily again have to have religious meaning. The mind, but not as in the brain, but more the memory or the post memory or the post trauma memory, you know in terms of not even knowing that there’s generational trauma in your family and then feeling that and experiencing it without even knowing for example that you’ve had, you know, people who’ve concealed family histories of incest or trauma, but yet descendants and generations subsequently feel that anxiety. And it’s not just embodied, it’s within, you know, a presence absent. So those are my thoughts about moving away from rigid categorizations and rigid categories and being open to embrace the unknown and not to be afraid to do that.
Anna:
Some of what you just shared, it just makes me think of the unconscious and what that is. This very elusive thing that is not located anywhere in particular, it’s not in the brain, it’s not in the heart, it’s not in the gut, but it’s in all those places at the same time, and its completely connected to the body, more recently, but since the beginning of psychoanalysis actually, this idea of the body and unconscious double is very important in the clinic so it’s not just things that we are conscious of and the things that we know and not just work that operates on that level but on the level of the unconscious. And this is why relating to others, creativity and all of those things, bodywork as you also mentioned Matt, that’s why all of that has an effect that is beyond questions of knowledge and meaning. Because if we think about knowledge and meaning also being a question of language and representation and mediation of experience and reality, that’s also something that doesn’t capture it all. A lot of our experiences are excessive to that. But if Freud talks about a signal, it’s a signal that is linked with the unconscious. And that’s what’s really… I loved your anecdote, Morrigan, about computer languages, because that’s so… It’s so present in contemporary discourses of the ‘mental health’, as if we can be reprogrammed, as if we are one-dimensional, that’s it. And forgetting the most complicated part of it all, which is the unconscious, and how it’s not as simple as that, and how we would not want it to be as simple as that. Being one-dimensional would lose all our political creativity and capacity to relate and love and desire and being in the world. And just to maybe think about one sentence that…it’s a feminist, old feminist slogan, but it came to mind when you were speaking Matt, is you know, don’t agonize, organize. The question of responsibility that came up before, I think in the clinic, and of course when we say the clinic, I think there are so many clinics out there. Psychoanalysis, like anything else, can be extremely conservative and just as violent as anything else but it can also be very generative, very radical, very political, very collective in a sense. And one thing that’s done there is really the fostering of this encounter and the birth of a world that doesn’t exist just yet. And that comes from the unconscious, is that the work of the unconscious. And that’s something that…Yeah, I am very taken by every day in my life. I totally lost my trail. But yes, that’s what came to mind.
Razorsmile:
Okay. Now, as it happens, I would love to go on and have a conversation about the information model. As you probably all are aware, the project that me and Eric are working on comes from to Deleuze and Guattari and wchizoanalysis and Fanon. And obviously at the heart of schizoanalysis, there is a quite strong critique of the information model and the sort of the spectrum between information and noise is replaced with a spectrum between order and command and silence. It’s a much, much more curious and interesting kind of relationship to language and questions of signaling and stuff. And so signals get reconfigured within this. But it’s an important point to note that I think not only has anxiety had a history of shift and change in meaning, but so has the notion of signal. It’s used in quite strange ways and it has been over determined in our own context in terms of computer science and information science. But in fact, it’s not necessarily a very good context, as you pointed out. It has lots of limitations. So yeah, I’d love to have a conversation about that, but there is kind of background to that as well in there. So it’s interesting that iy got touched upon and they got connected to because yes, that’s I think very important.
So with that, thank you all very much for your participation. It’s been lovely to meet and chat to you all and I hope that wasn’t too painful and it was a relatively interesting evening.