ON CRISIS AND MEANING
And the liminal revolution in-between
From Cristina Morales
This essay is part of a pandemic trilogy and you can read the final one here.
Crossroads of Humanity by Doze Green
As soon as 2020’s pandemic hit the country I am living in at the moment, I wrote a piece about my political and philosophical reading of what that could positively mean. While in that piece I talk about systemic-derived facts — such as indoctrinated, trauma-bonded and propagated fear-driven behaviour and a few ideas on how to transgress it during the first stage of the pandemic — there are psychological aspects of this process which are not entirely polluted by the system we live in such as grief.
Again sinking in associative thought and what life experience teaches us, it is often after significant grief that after going through all its stages (denial, anger, bargaining, sadness and acceptance) we find a pivotal catalyst and new or refined purpose with the deepest of meanings found and built throughout life. As a sequel of that first writing, and deep in a second stage of the pandemic on the UK’s end, I’m proceeding to break down what I meant when I talked about the exposure of the colonial myths we have lived by so far. And the reencountering with and building of meaning.
Here are four lessons — aligned with our four elements — that whether we like or resist them or not, a virus embodying nature is teaching us, explaining what an internal and external ecosystem’s health is about. Passing through the power of liminal spaces showing why a revolution is — while on ‘dystopian hold’ — already happening.
BACK TO SELF
In a hiatus where our colonial education, capitalism and mostly ego-driven social interactions are pseudo-paused there are not that many distractions, no materialistic consumption of that kind, not that much ‘productivity’, no competition, no ‘success’ race, no money/market almighty and hence no self-alienation. We are pretty much forced to slow-down and encounter nothing other than our raw selves. The reason why — along with a natural and human grief for several negative (from habit) and positive (from deprivation) things — this is at one level or another so challenging and discomforting for all, especially if we add a core-needs threat on top. However, stepping into life-changing self-consciousness is also stepping into collective consciousness as follows.
BACK TO SOCIETY
The apparent life-threat we are facing is the kind of threat that sheds all the superficial and delusional things, beliefs and relationships layers for a literal, or healthy and meaningful survival. What shows up as globally essential and interconnected core human values are: Health. Nature. Balance. Consciousness. Creativity. Belonging. Community. Purpose and meaning itself. And the radical alliances genuinely caring about us, and them. The same harmonious values, our first communities have always been based on and supporting life with. And as core human and social values show up, core solutions do too. Bringing up grassroots and transgressive — not capitalistic/exclusive and colonial-minded — direct action alternatives embodying epistemic disobedience to thrive through. Self-care and social-care lead inherently to global-care and that’s not co-dependence nor narcissistic hierarchical abuse but functional interdependence which leads again to the next point.
‘Keys to build a Global Movement’ by the Center for Artistic Activism — New York, 2020.
BACK TO POLITICAL EQUALITY
We have found common ground in our natural and beautiful diversity. Our core values are the same everywhere. Plus finally an event gives us an empiric big picture of our interdependence. In this context, the colonial and abusive constructs of othering — being the stratified and coerced foundation soil of our hierarchies and everything else as we know it today: classism, sexism, racism, faithism — together with colonial products such as nationalism, neoliberalism, eurocentrism and modernity, don’t make globally any further sense. A local and global organisation respecting our life-supporting core values means self-determination. Global commons. Co-operative economic systems. Decentralised organisations. Global coalitions. Changing from triangular to circular thinking. Understanding that solidarity is a reversible compromise which does not only give away but invests within. That self-agency is a reversible compromise which does not only give in but invests outwards. It means that politics start from our bodies, that nothing is more political than our choices. And the correlation in our pluriversality leads once more to the next point.
BACK TO SPIRITUAL SURRENDER
Connecting in full circle with the first point, once we have questioned our sick background, stepping mentally and timidly into the beginning of the reinvention of our psychological, social and political organisms and inter-function — making inventory of other ways — we don’t have but our spiritual one to face. The big meaning-related lesson in front of us is about dropping the ego-driven/unconscious false safety-seeking illusion of control and surrendering to the fact that we are in no other control than the one of ourselves in this very present moment. That’s our ultimate and only responsibility, positively influencing — when conscious — the whole.
Suffering comes from unprocessed trauma, unconsciousness and its lack of understanding, from then not exercising agency over what’s truly in our best interest while reproducing unhealthy learnt patterns and coping mechanisms on autopilot and survival mode, and from there resisting what was/is and projecting an imaginary worry of what won’t be. Basically pretending to control past, future — resisting the present — and others in the story instead of what we can, which is a nonsensical, confused, victimising and perpetual passive energy waste. A dark space we all literally know by heart. What differentiates two people under the same oppressive circumstances from being or not a victim, as in adopted role, is self-agency. However, with all the self-agency in the world, there are external factors outside of it influencing the unfolding too. The reason why exercising self-agency genuinely supporting us, here and now, means one event at a time. We often think that will compromise and enter in conflict with the group we ‘belong’ to but in depth, conscious health-driven decisions benefit a healthy collective, and if they turn revolutionary they benefit a heavily sick collective too. In that case, regardless of how challenging and hard it may be at first, self-betraying non-agency is just an unconscious/unhealthy and enabling constant perpetuation of suffering for everyone involved, in a mess which often is not originally of our own design. Since what we are responsible for and can fully enact is our healing — hand in hand with the influence we indirectly or directly choose to have on our collective — engulfed in a generational trauma scenario or not, letting go of the illusion of external control, or even of what does not benefit us, is probably and paradoxically (due to our personal and ‘social upbringing’) our hardest lesson in life.
Peace comes from consciousness (making the unconscious conscious so we can drive instead of being driven) and from a disciplined lifelong-practised grounding in our ever-evolving conscious self. That allows us to be able to read ourselves, and others by extension knowing how human psychology works, helping us identify what belongs to us and what does not. It comes from then embracing the responsibility of committing to self-agency and self-growth. And from there knowing that despite our original conscious or unconscious will at a given moment, everything has a consequential root and evolving purpose, with no option to be otherwise at that point. That’s the learning mirror in every single event of our lives, pointing out — when conflicted — what needs healing. That means accepting and understanding the consciousness evolution state of ourselves, others and hence the story outcome — influenced by unpredictable or at some point unavoidable, natural or other factors — determining how all components meet there now. And exercising our biggest responsibility in a meaningful direction as our wisdom grows: how we choose to evolve forward in our margin of possibility, being able to hold space for shared growth or having to move on with our own. That’s why when the grief process ends, in acceptance and letting go of external control, meaning can step in next.
Although talking about universal laws feels quite colonial, in the realm of nature some principles are not. Different human sciences from different parts of the world agree that if we could apply this one to every aspect of our existence, our experience of it would be way easier, allowing, deeper and hence more significant. To paraphrase part of the first article, we would be, despite the challenges, working with — rather than against — us. Socially, our alienated and ego-driven history has been so self-destructively sick — clogged in a collective matrix of ‘power’ — that in this case it really does feel as if only an ‘insurrectionary nature’s riot’ could enable a simultaneous global mirror and intersection, disrupting the addictive hold of ‘normality’. Interrupting a habit is to make it visible/conscious in its compulsivity. And disruption comes in one choice at a time.
In anthropology, liminality is a threshold, and the quality of reinvention that occurs in the limbo middle stage of it. Far from an abyss to the void is an intense container and vessel holding space for change. Its attributes are necessarily ambiguous because one’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives. It is the boundary between unconsciousness and consciousness. Between inside and outside. The space between me and the other. The known and the unknown. Between the no longer and the not yet. The in-between of growth. During a rite’s liminal stage, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their old way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which on completing the process is set up. Concepts like ‘liminal space’, ‘liminal thinking’ or ‘liminoid experiences’ have been later adopted by other fields. During liminal times of all kinds, social organisations may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that makes room for new organisations and customs to become established.
This is not only about how we generally find meaning in misunderstood crises. It is not about how we are going to overcome a punctual physical health and life threat with undesirable collateral consequences either. This specific healing we are facing right now is about how we are recovering and building meaning from an imposed meaningless-driven unhealthy past which — exercising our respective political self-agencies — is not in our nor anybody’s best surviving and thriving interest to return to. Historically pandemics have forced humanity to a rite of passage. From this imminent crossroad, we can go back to reproducing further ill-patterned, indeed collateral, and cyclic overall suffering towards guaranteed extinction, or take advantage of this revealing break to relearn ourselves, self-monitor and breakthrough, turning onto holism in the web of life.
Bibliography
1. Alschuler, Lawrence R. The Psychopolitics of Liberation. Political Consciousness from a Jungian Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
2. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Martino Fine Books, 2010.
3. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth; Kessler, David and Shriver, Maria. On Grief and Grieving. Simon & Schuter, 2005.
4. Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Beacon Press, 1969.
5. Mignolo, Walter D. and Walsh, Catherine E. On Decoloniality. Duke University Press, 2018.
6. Rolnik, Suely and Guattari, Félix. Micropolitics. Cartographies of Desire. Traficantes de sueños, 2006.
7. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-structure. Cornell University Press,1969.
8. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Mouton & Co, 1969.
Cristina Morales
Cristina Morales is a London-based Spanish cultural activist. With a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona and a MA in Arts & Culture Production from the Open University of Catalonia, she has become a socially engaged curator, writer and self-taught artist linking art with politics. She works for freelance projects and public, private and nonprofit organisations using arts & culture as an agency tool to challenge society on identity, decolonialism and community development. In addition to being the founding curator of the first decolonial thinktank mapping Cultural Activism worldwide Counterspace, and the founding artist of the Situationist brand of political designs and performances Totem Taboo, she also writes on decoloniality and counternarratives, human and community development through art, and African and African Diaspora arts & culture for national, international and specialised media such as El Mundo; Humanities, Arts & Society; Gods and Radicals; Wiriko; and Radio Africa.