guerrilla semiotics

One of the things I didn’t know when I was a child, and that I have learned the very first hand, is how certain kinds of poor group dynamic – things that every so often slot neatly into sexual harassment, mobbing, workplace harassment, bullying, even poor management and groupwork, to even include certain kinds of peer pressure and fraught relationships of all kinds, but also tend to hover uncertainly between these categories as a generalised, undefinable interaction malaise – translate into actual assaults on one’s health.

I mean, the relationship between workplace harassment and lack of career advancement, sure, that never needed much explaining; and the relationship between bullying and not having friends, of course. But it was only between 2007 and now that I realised that all such behaviour tends to somehow, first and last and primarily, have an effect on one’s health; physical health. That it firstly and predominantly exists as a sort of tension, like permanent indigestion or effects of long-term insomnia, a tension that sends one’s body into slowly accelerating overdrive; yet it is a tension that cannot go anywhere, because it is combined with an acute paralysis, a perceived inability to do the right thing which translates into hesitant inaction. But what it really is is the load of long-term strain (like trying to do complex verbal tasks in a language one doesn’t speak too well, or fine handiwork if myopic) without any sense of upcoming relief, of it ending, of there being an exit ahead.

Interestingly, this doesn’t seem to be fuelled so much by the anguish, mentioned above, of one’s career decelerating – it is not the lack of personal gain that creates this psycho-physical torture. It is, literally, the sense of failure at a task (writing a memo), due to being structurally unequipped (not speaking the language). Added to it is the concurrent and oxymoronic sense of letting the team (organization, department, friends, school, partner) down, due to being unable to get assistance from the team (organization, department, friends, school, partner).

And here people split according to self-esteem lines. Those who think highly of themselves see the oxymoron and do any number of things: partake in the game; try to circumvent the game and rise to the top with personal charm/efficiency/sleeping with the boss/sudden and inexplicable high achievement; bypass the group and complain to HR/manager/school teacher; or opt out. But those who think lowly of themselves blame their own intrinsic shortcomings for their paradoxical problem, often along the lines of: I am not able to do the job properly because I lack the knowledge/education/intelligence/goodness of heart/listening ability/good looks, and I am only in this position because I tricked someone to hire me/befriend me/partner me, and now it is my responsibility to rise to the challenge. This road is, of course, the road to self-torture and defeat and immense suffering, and eating disorders and chronic fatigue and premature hair loss and early retirement and long-lasting unhappy relationships and whatnot, and I have not seen it work yet. (This is, thus, also the only instance I can think of, in contemporary life, where high self-esteem has a functional use.)

Because, for whatever reason, such stories of poor group dynamic have been presented (in literature, particularly children’s literature (!), films, particularly children’s films (!!), and the general upbringing ethos) as stories of individual courage and persistence in overcoming adversity (there is always a boy who has to prove himself in order to ingratiate himself with the group), I had come to think of them as great challenges on the individual of our time, situations in which the better man triumphs only if brave and hard-working, situations inevitably coming up in the future, the outcome of which will tell me whether I am this or that kind of person (good/bad, brave/cowardly, hard-working/lazy, productive/dead weight on the taxpayer).

The assault on one’s health went unmentioned, and came as a total surprise. That the first impact of poor group dynamic would show itself not as poor career outcomes or honourable defeats in clear-ruled battles, but as insomnia or vomiting in staff toilets, that shed a slightly different light on the entire proposal, and made it look understandably less as honourable coming-of-age battles than as back-stabbing or booby-trapping, some sort of passive-aggressive guerrilla warfare of unspoken manners. The glaring inadequacy of all advice I had at hand (usually involving some dealing with it and not whining and thinking about what one can do to make one’s situation better) when dealing with someone whose digestion was syncopating because of a nasty colleague/partner/member of friendship circle became quite apparent. Early in 2009 I changed tack and started dispensing all kinds of other advice: to leave jobs, to sleep with bosses, to notify next level of management – but largely to leave. Friends, relationships, jobs.

My particular sectors of employment, academia and (in particular) architecture, which are unstructured, ego-driven, with a very inequitable labour distribution between the low-paid casuals and the well-paid permanent staff, and driven by a hyper-masculine let’s-see-who-has-the-biggest-cock-in-the-room ethos (I am not joking), are particularly rich in this sort of behaviour.

But once I have come to recognise a certain kind of stomach pressure as a sign of health problems to come, it has become possible to discern the same patterns in all kinds of places: customer service, relationships, supposedly innocent conversations among supposed friends. And in each place, there is someone trying very hard to succeed at a task of being nice, being funny, having friends, being a friend, being loving, receiving love, treat a person well in public, and falling into some casually perfected trapdoor of polite nastiness in the process. Nastiness so well-mannered that I sometimes wonder if the perpetrators themselves would recognise it as such; or if they would, if quizzed, claim that they were driven to the brink, that they had no other way of making something clear to the other person, that they were simply trying their hardest not to cross the line. Which, I suppose, they always are.

This specifically.

CNP and I went to see Werner Herzog’s latest, My son, my son, what have ye done? (great film), and right in the middle of it I started thinking about something that I’ve been meaning to think through for a while now. The people in the film were all deeply dysfunctional, in a way that is so systemic, so ingrained, they are so blind to it, that I had this sense of hopelessness and superiority that came as a bit of a surprise.

Or rather, let’s do this from another angle. I grew up in Croatia in the 1990s, in a very mixed-income area. Most of my friends’ parents worked in manual jobs. I don’t know that this was actually the majority of the residents, but it was definitely the majority of the parents who had kids of my age; the two need not correlate, not at all. There was a war going on during that time. My family was exceptionally poor. There were drugs, and domestic violence, and people had guns at home, neighbours were found overdosed (well, one), there was apparently a rapist operating in the nearby park… These were the facts of life.

In case you haven’t noticed, a very large part of (non-British) art, from literature to film, is interested in extreme situations: poverty, war, rape, drugs, prostitution. Young adult fiction in particular revels in it – domestic abuse, children running away from home, abortion, heroin. And I’ve been thinking about my teenagehood, recently, and really wondering about the extent to which my own, or our own, perception of our reality was massively skewed by the fact that everything happening to us was stuff from art. I mean, all that art was validating our reality, the level of correspondence was really very high and, thinking back on it, it strikes me as really interesting that this was the case. I don’t know if this is a priori ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but it definitely sheltered us from feeling particularly deprived, or unusual. I certainly felt that everything that was happening was as per plans.

To a large extent, this is still the case for me – I think. So, when it happened that I was watching a film, such as My son, my son…, and got this eerie feeling of those people being beyond rescue, suddenly it struck me that there must be entire families of people who perceive a number of fictional stories as essentially socio-economic tragedies. Where I saw life at its fullest, or most real, I suspect a lot of people must see… how to put it… deviance from a healthy norm. And if they are at all prone to the kind of sentiment I was riding during the Herzog film, then it must seem to them:

a) that it is only normal that they are of another world, a more genteel one, much more connected to those who write, than those who are written about;
b) that those who are written about are a little bit like animals in the zoo; interesting, but to be observed, rather than conversed with; and
c) that there is nothing to be done, and thank God for our luck.

I would have forgotten this thought, until I read Chris’s:

I moved to Venice at the end of 2003, into what was, by Venetian standards, a modern apartment, dating circa 1930s. There were four of us divided evenly between two rooms, but the common area was unusually large, open in plan between the small kitchen area at one end, a living room on the other, and a table with four chairs in the middle. Occupying this table was a daily dance of tolerance and care, a quality one always finds in cultures with small homes: dinners, homework, friends and drinks rotated and intersected, usually amicably. At exam time some we made space for exams, around exam time we made space for boys and bottles of wine. Continue reading →

Back when I had a home, Sunday lunches were the thing; kids running in and out through open doors, lots of reading of newspapers at the table and slapping of full bellies over long coffee. Where I come from all houses are summer houses, in the sense of not being out of place in summer, in the sense of being quite fine with good weather, to contrast with a detached faux-Tudor. Back when home was stripping off faster than I could pull it back up, a tight succession of extraordinary Sunday lunches followed nonetheless, like an elegy or in jest: Lisbon, Umbria, Istria, Rijeka, and even Paris, atop skyscrapers, in gardens, on footpaths, orange and full-mouthed and in counterpoint (multiple voices, independent in contour and rhythm, interdependent harmonically, you know it when you hear it). I took photos of the kids that were still running in and out, to memorise and to recreate (or at least to not forget and not lose) but of course I did not memorise and did not recreate even though I did not forget and did not lose. Life was Sundayless and lunchless with devastating meticulousness until today another one happened, all of its own accord. Like a thaw.