Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare

Transcription

1 Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare

2 Also by Paul Haggett CONTESTED COMMUNITIES ORGANISING AROUND ENTHUSIASMS (with Jeff Bishop) PARTISANS IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD THE POLITICS OF DECENTRALISATION (with Danny Burns and Robin Hambleton)

3 Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare Paul Haggett Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Social and Economic Research University of the West of England Bristol Foreword by Fiona Williams Professor of Social Policy University of Leeds Consultant Editor: ]o Campling

4 First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstokc, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, LLC, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. N.Y ISBN Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hoggett, Paul. Emotional life and the politics of welfare I Paul Hoggett ; foreword by Fiona Williams. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN I. Welfare state-psychological aspects. 2. Public welfare-psychological aspects. 3. Emotions- Sociological aspects. 4. Social psychology. 5. Social policy. I. Title. JC479.H '5-dc Paul Hoggett 2000 Foreword([: Fiona Williams 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Totten ham Court Road, London WI P OLP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources I 00

5 For fohn, fames and fenny

6 Contents Foreword by Fiona Williams Acknowledgements 1 Unreasonable Subjects 2 Strangers to Ourselves? 3 Conflict, Difference and Dialogue 4 A Place for Experience 5 Building Castles in the Sand: Racial and Ethnic Identities in Civil Society 6 Finding Your Voice 7 Mobilising Fictions 8 The Internal Establishment 9 Hatred of Dependency 10 Ethical Foundations of Welfare Universalism References Index ix xii vii

7 Foreword Now is the time to re-imagine our welfare futures. The transformations currently taking place in welfare states in the west are as significant as those that followed the Second World War. In Britain, the aims, purposes and values of welfare reforms are central to the articulation of the 'Third Way', a new democratic programme that seeks to transcend both 'old' social democracy and neo-liberalism (upon whose parentage these new politics are predicated). The attempt to articulate a new (or not-so-new) social, moral and welfare order gives ideas about future welfare an enhanced currency. If we are to use this new space to the full, we need the freedom to roam across disciplinary boundaries, over the terrain of our own and others' experiences, in and out the caves of our imaginations, unleashing our minds and vocabularies to the elements. What a paradox, then, at the very political moment when such intellectual roaming is so important that, for academics and practitioners, the constraints against this have never seemed greater. Audits and assessments discipline us (in both senses) and time-regulate our productivity, driving our creativity into devising strategies to release ourselves from these bonds. Paul Haggett's book is therefore a refreshing and invigorating intervention, which seizes the moment, and, as he puts it, 'mobilises fictions'. These fictions, or imaginings ('illusions which know themselves') are the stuff which connects our internal world of fear and need, of hate and envy, to the social world of relationships, groups, networks, communities and organisations. The mobilisation of these fictions emerges from three important themes that underpin the book. The first, which transgresses the disciplinary divides, is that we have to pull together the internal world of the human subject on a continuum of understanding with the social world in which that subject exists. This pushes social and political theory beyond the point that it has so far reached. That is, it demands not simply that we examine the relationship between agency and structure, but that we examine that which constitutes agency. Our agency - our capacity and motivation for action - needs to be understood in terms of our intersubjectivity. ix

8 x Foreword Developing from the Object-Relations school of psychoanalysis and drawing on Klein, Bion and Winnicott, among others, Hoggett argues that at the core of ourselves is fear and self-alienation which is received and fed back to us by the social world - by our families, friends, colleagues - in ways which make us less or more able to deal with it. The capacity of that outside world to contain our internal fears, and by the same token, our own capacities to contain the fears of others, marks the quality of our social relations within society. That which characterises the quality of social relations of gender, race, generation, between providers and users of welfare, within and between communities, is a second theme of the book. His analysis of the 'good enough conditions' for the containment of fear lead him to examine care, (inter)dependency, mutuality and solidarity as its key constituents. In doing this, he resurrects Titmuss's concept of the gift relationship but unlocks it from the bureaucraticprofessional setting in which Titmuss placed it. This elaboration of care, interdependence and solidarity provides a welcome relief from the contemporary obession with paid work and enlightened selfinterest as the motor of society's moral regeneration. It also reminds us, as Nikolas Rose has pointed out, that it is on the terrain of ethics that our future political battles will be fought. These conditions, Hoggett argues, also make possible the acceptance of difference within communities, and this relationship between difference and universalism marks out the third theme. The capacity of communities to hold their differences, while neither essentialising nor inferiorising some, is the crucial prerequisite for the development of locally run and locally organised welfare services. The final chapter follows this through and attempts to sketch out the key features of a welfare society that is universalist in principle and diverse in practice. Haggett's visions of a welfare society pick up those threads from the political struggles over welfare of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s which were rendered invisible and invalid following the ascendancy of the New Right. While learning from the mistakes of this time, he captures its spirit through an insistence upon emancipatory politics organised in emancipatory ways. Such recall is important. The focus today upon global markets and quasi-markets and upon modernisation and managers threatens to consign any pre-1990s movements to the dustbin of the old and unreconstructed. In fact, these earlier local experiments in welfare services - from women's

9 Foreword xi refuges, to community mental health services, to telephone helplines, to self-help housing schemes - now constitute the basis of some of the best practices in welfare. They emerged from and sustained a political analysis which questioned the false universalism of the welfare state and the social relations through which it was delivered. What that analysis lacked was an understanding of the human subject, which could connect interiority to emancipatory goals. Finding this inner voice is what Paul Hoggett's book so ably helps us to do. We must use it to develop further these imaginings. FIONA WILLIAMS Professor of Social Policy University of Leeds

10 Acknowledgements Like most of my writing, this book has taken a full decade to accumulate. Two of the chapters are based on work I have published elsewhere. Chapter 4 is based on the article 'A place for experience: a psychoanalytic perspective on boundary, identity and culture', which first appeared in Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 1992, 10, pp (Pion Limited, London). Chapter 8 was given as a paper at the International Centennial Conference on the work of W.R. Bion, in Turin in 1997 and appeared in the edited volume of conference papers Bion's Legacy to Groups, by Parthenope Bion, Franco Borgogno and Silvio Merciai (Karnac Books, 1998). For Chapter 5 I owe a great debt to Lyn Harrison and particularly to Syd Jeffers, two of my former colleagues at SAUS, University of Bristol. Anne Marie Cummins, Elisha Davar, Robert French, Liz Lloyd, Chris Miller and Fiona Williams have offered really helpful feedback on all or parts of the text and Jo Campling and Nicola Bion have offered advice and encouragement for getting the book published. Thanks also to Sue Ollis and Sandra Stanleigh for helping me with some of the messiest bits of typing and to Angela Brooks and Karen Cox for help with text layout and just generally for being fun to be with. Inspiration for the book originally came from students on the Masters in Policy Studies programme at SAUS who first gave me the confidence to believe that the emotional life of individuals and groups might have some relevance to understanding struggles within the welfare state. Over the last decade the book has benefited from collaborative work with many people. I'd particularly like to thank Danny Burns, Linda Martin, Caroline New and Simon Thompson. Other sources of insight, support and encouragement have come from David Armstrong, the Bristol Forum for Bosnia, John Clarke, Bob Gosling, Robin Hambleton, Gordon Lawrence and the Bion Reading Group, Julian Lousada, the Psychosocial Studies Research Group at UWE, the Red-Green Study Group, Erica Stern, Eileen Smith, Tara Weeramanthri, Bob Young and, in a less tangible but more enduring way, from Kate Barrows. xii