social work as art revisited

INTERNATIONAL

J O U R NA L O F

SOCIAL WELFARE

ISSN 1369-6866

© 2008 The Author(s)Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare.

182

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2008.00548.x

Int J Soc Welfare 2008:

17

: 182–193

Gray M, Webb SA. Social work as art revisitedInt J Soc Welfare 2008: 17: 182–193 © 2008 The Author(s),Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and theInternational Journal of Social Welfare.

In this article we revisit ‘social work as art’, noting that it isjust over 20 years since England’s book on the subjectprovided a direction for the profession’s early defence againstempiricism. Those who picked up the ball handed to them byEngland tended to focus discussions of social work’s ‘art’ onits

soft

side, embedding it in notions of ‘creativity’, ‘meaning’,‘self-expression’, ‘intuition’ and ‘quality’, all of which weresaid to characterise the ‘aesthetic dimensions’ of social workpractice as a counterpoint to the rising tide of

hard

empiricism,proceduralism and managerialism. Within these ‘aestheticdimensions’, proponents of social work as art sought to

resolve

tensions through advocating a value-based ‘artistic’approach to care. Against this we argue that art is struggle andresolution, soft and hard, joy and grief. Further, we posit thatsocial work’s art lies not in the social worker as artist butrather in social work as the ‘work’ of art, which is implicitlya ‘non-productivist’ endeavour. In a fundamental sense weargue that it is the art of social work and not the social workerthat assembles what is practice, that provides bounds and letseverything stand in relation to everything else. This enablesus to construct a speculative ‘radical agonistics’ for socialwork that draws attention to the relation between art, truth andevent. In so doing, we substitute a subjectivist reading ofsocial work as art with an ontological analysis drawing onHeidegger’s phenomenology, supplemented by the work ofAlain Badiou, to cast social work as art first, as artisticattunement, and second, as an art in the service of a politicsof liberation.

Mel Gray, Stephen A. Webb

Institute for the Advanced Study for Humanity (IASH), University of Newcastle, Australia

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKIJSWInternational Journal of Social Welfare1369-6866© 2008 The Author(s), Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social WelfareXXXOriginal Articles

Social work as art revisitedGray & Webb

Debate

Social work as art revisited

Key words: radical agonistics, phenomenology, Martin Heidegger,Alain Badiou, attunement; non-productionist, subtractive ontologyof truth

Prof. Mel Gray, Institute for the Advanced Study for Humanity(IASH), The University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan,New South Wales 2308, Australia E-mail: [email protected]

Accepted for publication August 15, 2007

I am convinced that art represents the highest taskand the truly metaphysical activity of this life(Friedrich Nietzsche).

Most of those who write about the art of social workwrite about that

art

as inhering in the individual socialworker. We take a radically different approach in thisarticle. As a general strategy, this article avoids tryingto reduce everything to ‘subjectness’, i.e. to‘subjectness’ in its various guises in the practice ofsocial work where the social work practitioner orindividual client or worker are seen as subjects, that isto say as the fulcrum on which everything turns. Ratherthan an attempt merely to construct theory or to achievea unity of theory and practice, the article intends toprovide an ensemble of ideas that integrates theory, aspeculative orientation to practice, and experience andsensibility through the particular formulation of a non-

subjectivist phenomenology of art. In so doing, ourintention is not to provide a comprehensive review of‘social work as art’. Instead, we view it through thelens of Hugh England in tandem with advances inphenomenological research. England’s pioneering book(England, 1986), published just over 20 years ago,remains a pivotal analysis of the concept of social workas art – and debate about the fundamental nature ofsocial work – and, as such, is worth revisiting givendevelopments that have emerged since he wrote thisbook. England portentously saw the rise of theevidence-based practice movement and his bookexpresses his ambivalence about it. On the one hand, hewanted to embrace it, yet on the other, he anticipatedthe way in which instrumentalism and reductivismwould stifle social work’s art.

A parallel to what we are attempting to do can befound in Nel Noddings’ (2003) much misunderstood


© 2008 The Author(s)Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare

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ethic of care. She is at great pains to show that care isnot primarily an individual virtue, something thatinheres in the subject. It is not enough for the socialworker to claim that s/he cares. If the client feels thatnobody cares, then an ethic of care does not pertain.Hers is a relational ethics, and not a virtue ethics. Anindividual’s virtuous character or good intentions is notsufficient in an ethic of care. An ethic of care dependson a potentiality within the boundaries of possibleexperience and the reciprocity between the ‘one-caring’and the ‘cared-for’. It inheres, or better still, is immanentin the mutuality of the caring relationship and notmerely in the qualities of the individuals doing thecaring or being cared for. In other words, Noddings’ethics of care is ontological. It is based on the view thathumans are relational beings and for caring to eventuate,a context must be created where the one caring and theone cared for both derive benefit from the caringrelationship. I cannot care for you if you do not wantto be cared for by me and I am not caring for you ifyou do not feel cared for by me. By the same token,the mother filled with good intentions who smothers herchild is not a caring mother in Noddings’ terms. Nor isthe father who over-protects his daughter, not allowingher to develop her own sense of independence (seeSemetsky, 2006).

Like the ethic of care, our concept of social work asart does not rest only on the virtuous social workerdoing all the right things, but on the myriad factorswhich create the art of what social workers do: theclient–worker relationship, professional requirements,agency environment, social policy and so on. We willargue that the art inheres in the work of the social.There is a relationship between what the individualsocial worker does and the broader context in which heror his work is situated. The choice is not the individualsocial worker’s, but the work, which conveys what mustbe done.

Generally, there is at least tacit agreement in socialwork that the work, that is to say the processes ofhelping, embodies what is variously called an inductive,creative or intuitive dimension, and that it expresseshumanistic concerns with values and beliefs. Largely,the worker’s talents are typically lumped together intosomething called ‘the art’ of practice, but without cleardefinition about the meaning of the term. All too fewscholars have approached the question about socialwork ‘as’ art (England, 1986; Goldstein, 1990; Gray,2002; Gray & Askeland, 2002; Siporin, 1988), andhowever art is considered, it remains elusive and forsome, chimerical. The essence of the art of practice,when valued for its own sake, is, according to Goldstein(1999a: 5), ‘expressed in many humanistic genreswithin the text and dialogue of the relationship, [and]is the foundation for a narrative approach to workingwith people and their ordeals of living’. He saw this

‘narrative’ as one’s ‘inner connection with the outerworld – a means of explanation and preservation ofintegrity and worth. When it comes to understanding,the narrative can say – albeit often cryptically – muchabout how the teller wants to be known and treated, andwhere the teller stands in the larger world’ (Goldstein,1999a: 7). Goldstein believed that the social workercould ‘learn how to be a creative practitioner’, that hertalents could be ‘exploited and augmented by anappreciation of what the arts and humanities can teach’(Goldstein, 1999a: 5).

Goldstein, then, drew attention to the stories clientstell and to the social worker’s skills in attuning thesewith the life-world of the client. But, on another level,if that work be art, then art too has its own rules; art isnot always about resolution or harmony or beauty.There is a conception of art that wholly reflects thisaesthetic view and it is the one most commonly putforth in social work. But the creativity and playfulnessof artists positioned within a risk-averse environmentare stifled by instrumental rationality that simplycalculates. In such situations, artists have no choice butto rebel. Real artists play, and certainly this is one ofthe most immediate forms of direct experience. Pathos,joy, humour and fear combine in an endless flow ofintense moments. Bela Bartok’s modernist musicbeautifully captures this ambivalence in the way heexploits tone and dissonance to reflect the pungencyof his Eastern European roots (Forte, 1960). Modernart survives its assimilation to the functional totality –its relegation to mere entertainment – by becomingdifficult, introverted, dissonant and shocking. With animaginative reverie, artists must possess their ownirreverent rules. Bey (1994) insists that artists ‘mustoften sacrifice the social to a tyrannical muse’. Art dieswhen treated fairly. It must enjoy a caveman’s wildnessor else have its mouth filled with gold by some exoticPrincess. Artists struggle for their art. Bureaucrats andmanagers eschew it and spit it out. Art resists themundane and the normative dimensions. We shallcontend that social work in the service of art isincommensurate with what Heidegger calls the dominantproductionist metaphysics of calculative reason andtechnical rationality. Moreover, the agonistic relation ofart to the social world brings centre-stage the formativeaspects of art in a way that conveys the possibilities forunderstanding the very sense of the work of the socialas art and the authentic truth such work can bring forth.

How then does this extreme characterisation of artbode for a social work audience? We are cognizant thatsuch a perspective may be rubbished as quirky. It mayalso be regarded as incommensurate with the ‘realities’of frontline practice and out of step with the austeregovernmentality of policymakers. So be it. It is exactlythese kinds of so-called ‘realities’ that we are pitchingourselves against. The idea raised above about the

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evacuation of the social by art is especially telling ifsocial work is to ground its endeavours in a terrain ofpolitical change and move beyond paying lip-service toa transformative social work. If we are to avoid the tame– and lame – constructions of social work that are cutfrom the cloth of the artistic genre, this type ofreckoning must push the boundaries further than havehitherto been expressed. It must penetrate to revealsome vitality commensurate with the angst of art, orwhat we refer to as ‘radical agonistics’. It is our contentionthat like all other human beings, social workers needthe ‘peak experience’ of art. This necessity rests notonly in the ‘free space’ of the imagination, as Rimbaud(in Robb, 2000) contends, but also in the work of artitself in giving value and meaning to social work. Andit points to a different kind of ‘transformative socialwork’, starting with a phenomenology for practice thatinterpolates the flow of peak moments as a tenserelation in the work of art. To develop this perspectivewe draw on the recent writing of the French socialtheorist, Alain Badiou, to supplement our pheno-menological analysis. Thus, we consider the relevanceof art for social work not only in terms of so-calledmetaphysical qualities of the sublime and the charming,but also with the tragic and grotesque, both dimensionsof which are experienced as intense and fragile, perhapstransformative, moments. From such a perspective socialwork is cast as, first, an artistic attunement, and second,an art in the service of a politics of liberation. Putanother way, the work of art requires an attunementwith or direct experience of the truth that reveals itselfand, in so doing, creates its own ethic that puts us inthe service of those whom we seek to free fromoppression.

Typically, the social work as art mantra has invokedcreativity, intuition and self-expression as a counterpointto a stale set of normative and prescriptive practices.The mantra is also indicative of sentimentality for a lostsocial world where people connected in some ‘deep andmeaningful way’. This mantra was partly set in placeby the classical text by Hugh England written in 1986.Today this small book,

Social Work as Art

, resonateswith certain affirmative sensibilities among practitionersand researchers alike. Put in plain terms, there issomething that ‘feels right’ about a work such as this,which explores the importance of the ‘intuitive use ofself’ for social work practice. As epigones working inthis tradition, for us this is suggestive of much morethan an aesthetic appeal towards the creative aspects ofsocial work. Rather, it is also indicative of a reactionarysentiment that partly relates to a sense of mourning, ora loss progressively engendered by the deskilling ofthe task, the degradation of work, the reduction ofprofessional autonomy, the break-up of professionalidentities and the consumerist marketisation of clientsas ‘service-users’.

The

work

of the social as art

So what does it mean to practice the work of the socialin an artful way? Better still, what is the art’s work insocial work? Is it simply to find oneself imbued withsome artistic temperament or disposition? Or perhaps itis about practicing direct work in a creative andexpressive manner? Maybe it is about recognising thevalue of art as a form that has special significance tothe aesthetics of working with clients? But what is this‘value of art’ implicit in each of these characterisations?As we shall see, Hugh England certainly did notaddress these aspects directly in his much-cited book.Art, when usually experienced as creativity, inspiration,representation and poesis, can take on an enigmatic –or chimerical, to use Goldstein’s (1999a) term – aspectwhen the usual questions are asked. Is it an affectivedisclosure of a special kind of subjectivity? Acaricature? A more elementary relation with creativity?Yet, despite these current and quite reassuringmetaphors, the ‘value of art’ for social work cannot bereduced to the simple aspect of expression through aform of symbiosis between practice and art. That is, itcannot be configured as something that has value initself simply because it is artistic, or because it conveyssome positive aesthetic aura of experiential practice.For us there is a deeper reading that shifts the horizonof interpretation beyond a narrow psychological schemathat joins personal experience to creativity. We suggestthat the problem associated with this kind of treatmentis that it relies heavily on an ontological-aestheticaccount of subjectivity. Here is the criticism. Thistreatment reduces to what is ultimately a solipsisticaccount of the value of art relating the practitioner asartist to the object of art – sculpting, canvas, musicalscore, artful practice – using a flawed correspondencemodel of truth. This perspective regards ‘truth asconsisting in a relation to reality, such that it involvesa relational property involving a characteristic relation(to be specified) to some portion of reality (to bespecified)’ (online entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia ofPhilosophy).

We take a different route in considering the value ofart for social work by drawing on the luminousphenomenological writings of Heidegger and morerecent works of Badiou. In so doing, we bracket termsthat normally dominate considerations of this kind, suchas ‘individual creativity’, ‘aesthetic experience’, ‘artisticintention’, ‘subjective taste’ and ‘artistic judgement’.These aesthetic terms have dominated our thinkingabout the value of art in modern times and wereencapsulated in the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ movement ofthe late 19th century. Thus, we wish to resist the kindof sentiment expressed by Oscar Wilde in his 1891essay

The Soul of Man under Socialism

where he tellsus that ‘A work of art is the unique result of a unique



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temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that theauthor is what he is.’ As we shall show, this subjectivistaesthetic with its vicious self-referential autonomy isquite plainly wrong. As Noddings shows, goodintentions can harm. It is worth reminding the readerthat while we wish to avoid the gushing sentimentalityoften associated with discussions of art and social work,we want to attenuate the radical agonistics of art byviewing the imaginary realm as (in)tensely configuredin events via reference to depth phenomenology. But weare moving ahead of ourselves here because it isnecessary to retrace and critically evaluate the stepstaken by England in his defence of social work as artbefore developing an alternative line of thinking. It isfrom this vantage point that we can better assess notonly the distinctive contribution he made to the socialwork literature, but also provide some constructivecorrectives to a perspective he developed some 20 yearsago. While others have toyed with variations on thistheme, most acknowledge the seminal nature of England’swork and have tried to augment his arguments about thevalue of social work’s art (Goldstein, 1990; Siporin,1988).

England’s

Social Work as Art

revisited

In

Social Work as Art

(1986), Hugh England conceptualisedsocial work as a process by which practitioners, throughthe ‘intuitive use of self’, give meaning to the client’sproblem as interpreted through the practitioner’s ownexperiences. An interactive model between socialworker and client is developed on the basis of a strongnotion of intersubjectivity. The book takes a defensivestance in the sense that England uses the claim that theintuitive use of self should be recognised as the basisfor social work as a rebuttal against the burgeoningproceduralisation, formality and objectivity that wereregarded as most important to social work organisations.His main concern was the encroachment of the increas-ingly dominant scientific, empirical and evaluativemodels of intervention that were emerging at the time.Looking back over 20 years, let us examine moreclosely how England made sense of social work as art.

It is not always easy to discern the sense in whichEngland views social work’s relationship with art. It isthus not clear whether England sees social work as anart – as opposed to say a science – or as art. At timeshe appears to use the concept metaphorically – socialwork is like art – and at other times metonymically – artrepresents those elements of social work that are art-like or are usually found in the arts. As an art, Englandseeks to locate social work within the broad field of thearts and humanities (see also Goldstein, 1997) drawingon the work of Rickman (1967). Thus, he uses the ideaof social work as an art in order to distinguish thatwhich it is not, rather than just that which it is. He

wants to group social work – as a form of art – withother categories of art to show how it differs fromscience (see also Goldstein, 1992).

Social work as art, on the other hand, is not aboutthe play of creative difference but about discerningwhat it is at its core. In this sense, England sees socialwork primarily as art, as having the qualities of art,particularly when referring to components of goodpractice. But he wants to show that even as art socialwork can be evaluated. Here he draws parallels with artcriticism as an evaluative method. The fact that socialwork is an art – rather than a science – does not put itbeyond the realms of science but rather demands thatwe find different means of evaluating it than we mightdo if it were only a science.

Thus, to justify his depiction of social work as an arthe has to discern the essential elements that make it so.But this presents him with a dilemma because it leadshim into normative definitions and having to articulatewhat social work as an art is and what it comprises. Hesees the fact that social workers have extreme difficultyin describing and explaining what they do and why asbeing evidence in support of this claim, because hewants to show that social work is more than itsconstituent parts; he is adamant that definitions, nomatter how comprehensive, cannot sufficiently capturewhat social workers do in practice. In this way, socialwork defies scientific precision, which requires thatphenomena can be broken down into measurableconstituent parts. There is, he says, an implicitness insocial work such that ‘Good social workers knowthrough their experience the value of their helping workwith clients’ (England, 1986: 4). They work with thewhole cloth or a populated, busy canvas and see thewhole of experience – and, in practice, makejudgements ‘about unique circumstances’ (England,1986: 15). Social work is not just about bureaucraticprocedure; for social workers, the helping role is nevera matter of uniform provision but always involvesdeliberation and heuristic judgement. This does notmean, however, that social work as an activity cannotbe subjected to critical scrutiny; it is not beyondevaluation. Essentially, then, England establishes,following Timms and Timms (1977), that the boundariesof social work are loosely drawn and permeable andthat social workers are always concerned with thedelivery of personal services and with change andproblem solving.

What then are the core features of social work as art?To establish these we have to know what its centralconcerns are and these England sees as revolving aroundcoping – or people’s social functioning – and meaning– the way people see or perceive things (see Camilleri,1999). Social workers help to improve clients’ copingcapacity and their attempts to make sense of theirexperience. Much rests on the social worker’s interpretation

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of the client’s world and this is always about judgementand meaning. England sees it as a necessary conditionof life that we try to impose order and coherence, tocreate some sense of certainty in an uncertain world. Itis not just about reporting facts but also aboutunderstanding the meaning people give them. In short,social workers are concerned, not with problems

per se

,but with people’s abilities to cope with them. In sodoing, it focuses on the understanding and communicationof meaning (Goldstein, 1999a). But herein lies the rub,for the social worker’s understanding is an ‘elusivecreation’ (England, 1986: 27; see also Goldstein,1999b). However, it is not necessarily mysterious, forsocial workers draw implicitly from their personalunderstanding and experience, and the meaning theygive intuitively to the clients’ experience even thoughthey might be guided by formal learning.

England is more concerned with knowledge builtfrom direct experience than abstract knowledge, for hesees this as evolving into an intuitive understanding thatguides judgement; phenomenologically he talks aboutan attunement with the client. Thus, he sees creativityas central to social workers’ ability to understand theirclient’s world and to their use of expressive, persuasiveand evocative language to communicate this understandingto the client. England aestheticises what the socialworker does, creating the impression that ‘art’ inheresin what social workers do in communicating meaningand understanding – a ‘lived understanding’ (England,1986: 31) conveyed with genuineness – where there iscongruence between the words and behaviour of thesocial worker. England depicts this as a ‘play within aplay’ as the worker searches for meaning within thesearch for meaning. Importantly, though, England isbuilding his pivotal notion of the worker’s ‘intuitive useof self’. He sees this as a stubborn ambiguity in practice:no matter how many procedures are put in place, socialworkers make decisions based on their intuition andemotions in the moment. This places the emphasis onthe workers themselves and their essential capacitiesand competencies, such as an ability to relate to people,to listen and respond empathically and so on.

Though leaning more towards an intuitive, pheno-menological approach, England tries to cover all bases,agreeing with those who see social work as a combinationof art and science wherein the ‘disciplined use of self’and ‘intuitive understanding’ do not negate a rationalapproach. In trying to discern ‘good practice’, he sayswe need a model that can grapple with the intuition andsubjectivity inherent in social work. Thus, he asks: ‘Canthe arts . . . offer a paradigm for knowledge and practicein social work?’ (England, 1986: 83). Yes, says England,for social work is an ‘artistic’ activity: there is a sensein which the social worker can be seen as an ‘artist’(p. 84). A theory of social work that incorporates a theoryof art could help deal with the problem of subjectivity

in social work. But he does not want to use art as ahold-all for subjectivity and ‘intuition’ (p. 86), i.e. forscientific imprecision wherein art is seen as some sortof intuitive skill such that theory is scientific andpractice is artistic. He is against giving art a residualrole as anything that is not science or cannot beexplained, as a ‘vehicle for disposing of the obvious andimprecise subjectivity of social work’ (p. 87). Notingthe similarities between art and social work, he drawson early definitions that described ‘casework as an art’,which made use of the ‘science of human relations’ (p.89). Richmond talked of ‘scientific mindedness and theartist’s practised skills’ (p. 89), which merge in creativepeople, implying that art is a practice skill. In movingtowards social work as art, he refers to Millard’s notionof the ‘therapeutic imagination’ (p. 97) and Rapoport’semphasis on creativity and style: ‘it is possible to applysome principles of aesthetics to a given piece of socialwork practice (which we sometimes describe as) . . .beautiful’ (p. 99) (see also Siporin, 1988). But thus far,says England, these authors have not gone far enoughin grappling with ‘subjectivity’ in social work (p. 100).

England attempts to take the exploration further byexamining ‘art appreciation’ and ‘art criticism’ as avehicle to help us learn to work with ‘fluid reality’ and‘aesthetic experience’, which requires more thanintellectual effort. Social work, like art, demands the‘realisation of experience’ (England, 1986: 104) throughthe development of an aesthetic sensibility – a particularkind of perception, appreciation and understanding inart and in social work – and ‘consider how perceptionsform themselves into a sensible structure’ (p. 105). Heresocial work’s search for coherence within complexity leadsto a focus on the ‘whole man’ (sic) – person in context– and to an acceptance of ‘the infinite complexity ofexperience’ (p. 105). For England, like the poet, thesocial worker brings ‘together (and synthesises)disparate elements of the ordinary world’ (p. 106). Heis not just a critic, but a creative thinker able to give‘expression to his own understanding in a way which isof value’ (p. 107). ‘If social work is to be seen as art,then such concepts may help social work to construct agenuinely viable approach to the criticism and assessmentof practice’ (p. 108). Here, England is trying to developan argument for what we describe today as criticallyreflexive practice. He sees the objective world assubjectively created, anticipating social constructionism,but his main focus is communication and meaning: ‘Artrecognises and affirms social work’s emphasis not onlyupon expression, but upon the necessarily intimate,personal character of that expression’ (p. 114). ‘Theartists’ role is to be skilled in helping others experiencemeanings’ (p. 116). Like art, social work is involved inclarifying the personal and moral meaning of socialissues and events (Goldstein, 1987, 1992, 1999a). Itbelongs in the sphere of education, not health and



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treatment, and it cannot be confined to clinical activity(the latter being the area developed by Siporin, 1988).

England wants to locate social work in the traditionof art and sees debates in art as relevant for social work;to identify social work as art is to attribute essentialsocial values to the individual – the whole person. Thislies at the root of art, especially in literature (England,1986: 115). Thus, art criticism teaches us to realisesubjectivity, not to deny it; to embrace social work assubjective and value-laden (p. 125). Anticipating a trendthat is to follow, England begins to outline a ‘criticalapproach’, wherein the worker must evaluate hiseffectiveness with his client (p. 126). He experiences,analyses and evaluates his own behaviour. He believesthat ‘through criticism [in other words a criticalapproach in the philosophical rather than Marxist sense]we may achieve certainty about the real, experiencedworld . . . through criticism . . . there is the possibilityof arriving at something outside ourselves, which mayprovisionally be called

truth

’ (Kermode, in England,1986: 125, emphasis added). Rather than beingimpediments to evaluation, values, intuition and the likecolour the way we evaluate what we do and or come toknow. The ‘identification of social work as art makespossible the identification of discernible stages incritical practice’ (p. 126); the possible validity of art isestablished by a process of experience, then analysis,then through discussion and comparison of analysis, ashared understanding (p. 124). In highlighting thesignificance of creativity, imagination and art, Englandleans heavily towards an existentialist ‘lived experience’approach, but neither he, nor anyone else to date, hasattempted a ‘comprehensive modelling applyingphenomenology to social work’ (Webb, 2006: 17). Insome key respects, Harry Ferguson is heir to England’snotion of social work as art, and certainly has looseaffinities with the project. He brings some key issuesraised by England back onto the social work agenda:

Critical social work discourses tied to emancipatorypolitics are . . . unable to deal theoretically, politicallyor practically with defining features of how peoplehave to live in a post-traditional order. What gets leftaside are most of the questions posed by thesequestration of experience and moral issuesconcerned with death, sexuality and the new intimacy.In emphasizing the negative impact on so manysocial work users of their structurally limited lifechances, such critiques

pull practitioners away fromthe moral questions and existential dilemmas posedby the new choices, decisions and the strategies toshape meaningful lives and relationships that nowface people in their daily lives

(Ferguson, 2001: 47,emphasis added).

What concerns Ferguson (2001: 49) is that this has‘hindered the development of a critical approach which

takes seriously the individual life’ and ‘the contributionof the “active citizen” to the reinvention of politics’.While it is beyond the scope of this article to reviewFerguson’s contribution, it is clear that his work on lifepolitics points us squarely in the direction of existentialphenomenology.

Phenomenology of art

There is a paucity of phenomenological thinking insocial work, particularly in relation to the applicationof the phenomenological method to aspects ofprofessional education and practice. Given the neglectthat phenomenology has received at the hands of socialwork, it may be helpful for readers if we sketched somebackground contours highlighting several key featuresof this important philosophical tradition. We shall payspecial attention to considerations involving thephenomenology of art. It is our contention that suchconsiderations of the phenomenological rendering ofart are instructive in the way we conceptualise thepossibilities of the work of the social as art.

The etymology of phenomenology derives from theGreek term phainomenon, which refers to the appearanceof things or phenomena (see Spinelli, 1989: 2). In itssimplest form, phenomenology is the description ofphenomena as a person experiences them. The mostgeneral and essential characteristic of phenomena is thatthey exist as ‘the consciousness of’ or the ‘appearanceof’ the specific thoughts, objects or things beingexperienced. A fuller definition would be thatphenomenology studies the ‘genesis’ of the phenomena,i.e. the constitution of phenomena in their essential flow,rhythm or sequence. Importantly, a phenomenologistdoes not posit or construct, but describes whatever isgiven to her or him.

1

For phenomenology we intuit to describe particularconcrete experiences of temporal objects, i.e. objectsfor which time is essential. We can also begin to detectthe way in which phenomenology unilaterally opposeswhat was considered to be the main characteristic of thenew pattern of Western liberal society, i.e. the spirit ofrational calculation and mere utility, as personified in

1

One of the earliest definitions of phenomenology wasprovided by Adolph Reinach in 1912 in developing hisconcept of premeditation for legal scholarship: ‘Pheno-menological analysis means that we are not permitted toinject the customary concepts of representation, thinking,feeling, and will in order to “build up” premeditation fromthem, a process which inevitably would involve the loss ofwhat is most essential to it. Rather we have to make an effortto transpose ourselves into the phenomenon in order to beable to render faithfully what we can intuit there’ (cited inSpiegelberg, 1981: 193). Here we can see that it was thefirst-hand intuiting of the essential core of the phenomenathat formed the main feature of Reinach’s early phenomen-ological method.

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the ‘bourgeois’ with its boundless acquisitiveness, itsmechanical time and its indifference to quality in favourof quantity. This is true for the long line of eminentphenomenological thinkers from Brentano, Husserl,Scheler and Hartmann to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,Ricoeur and Bachelard.

Contemporary theories of art have approached thequestion ‘What is art?’ from two dominant perspectives.The first focuses on the creator of art (Nietzsche’sapproach), the second on the receiver of art (Kant andSchopenhauer’s approach), and then from eitherperspective the nature of art is extrapolated upon.Phenomenology dismisses both approaches, focusinginstead on the work of art itself. In so doing, it avoidsthe trap that both the spectator and creator approachfalls into by conceiving the essence of art as apsychological state and thereby degenerating intoartistic aesthetics

2

– as we have shown England did inrelation to social work (and as many do with Noddings’ethic of care).

The Polish phenomenologist, Roman Ingarden, oneof the closest disciples of Husserl, also devoted hiswork to formulating a phenomenology of the work ofart. Like Geiger, he wished to avoid the subjectivityinherent in psychologism in constructing an ontologyof the work of art. The key to avoiding the dominantform of Cartesian subjectivist psychology for Ingarden’sphenomenology was in developing the centrality ofthe concept of intentionality, the term most closelyassociated with phenomenology (Sokolowski, 2000: 8).For Ingarden, there is a duality of structuration, whichboth objects and subjects fall within, that is derivedfrom the pre-cognitive intentional structure of thelife-world. For example, in Céderic Kahn’s L’Ennui, thestructure of intentionality in the subject–object relationis deliberately blurred throughout the movie to dramaticeffect. It starts with a fast moving car scene in aParisian city nightscape, with Martin, the philosophy-professor protagonist, telling the audience ‘I alwaysknew I’d die in a car crash, without knowing I had, ormeaning to, as if the road were make believe, and I wasoblivious to the death-bearing trees and houses that layin wait’. The narrator does not intend to die in a car crash,neither is it fate that deals an unfortunate hand; insteadthe intentionality lies in the immanence of the materialarchitecture that relates car to road at the expense ofthe driver. There is a sense, then, in which his death isunavoidable – it is engendered by material context.

The key point is that phenomenology moves usbeyond the egocentric predicament set in place by

Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes, Lockeand Hobbes. It suggests a new way of thinking aboutsubjectivity for social work. Sokolowski (2000: 15)explains this well:

What phenomenology does through its doctrine ofthe intentionality of consciousness is to overcomethe Cartesian and Lockean bias against thepublicness of mind, which is also a bias against thereality of the appearance of things. For phenomenology,there are no ‘mere’ appearances, and nothing is ‘just’an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong tobeing . . . Things that had been declared to be merelypsychological are now found to be ontological, partof the being of things.

They come to us as experience. Thus, for Ingarden,works of art were ‘neither real nor ideal beings, but hada purely intentional existence’ (Spiegelberg, 1981: 229),meaning that objects are created by and dependent onacts of consciousness. For example, the capacity toexperience a musical melody, as opposed to a singleinstantaneous note, requires intentionality, as the abilityto be conscious of the musical object as an entity thatendures through the flux of time. In the writings ofHusserl, this directedness of intentionality is explainedin terms of the fulfilment of an intended meaning:‘An intention can be empty, or it can be fulfilled ifan objective correlate to the intention is given inthe experience’ (Tieszen, 2005: 25).

There are two elements important in ‘experience’.The first is the sense that it is ‘open in time’, meaningthat it reaches beyond the now to both the retentionalpast and a possible future. Thus, we anticipate that witha musical melody, for instance, the sound will prevailuntil it reaches its end point. The second is theacknowledgement that art is always a cultural product;it is not a mere physical entity and, as such, it is never‘wholly determined’, because it contains ‘variables,some of which the hearer or spectator will fill in orreplace by “constants”’ (Tieszen, 2005: 230) based onpast experience. The recommended method foridentifying these ‘constants’, or attributes that provokea tension between the cultural product of art and theexperience of art itself, is to focus on the way in whichthe world opens up to us, to experience it directly freefrom mental contaminations formed by instrumentalinterests. Husserl claimed that phenomenology as ascience must focus on the invariant, inconstantstructures of what is out there: ‘If we reflect on how theworld is given to us, and focus on the invariantstructures of our experience we glean the structure ofintentionality’ (Tieszen, 2005: 27). As we shall see, thisprovides a key insight for Heidegger’s historicisation ofart as ‘disclosure’, his related critique of calculativereason and the important thesis on the death of art inmodernity.

2

Moritz Geiger was perhaps the first within the pheno-menological tradition to focus on the work of art from aphilosophical standpoint. In his essay on the psychologicalfunction of art as a phenomenon, art is contrasted starkly tothe ordinariness of everyday experience (see Spiegelberg,1981: 201).



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Heidegger’s

The Question Concerning Technology

and

The Origin of the Work of Art

Alain Badiou (2005: 1) sees Heidegger as ‘the lastuniversally recognizable philosopher’. This is no smallcompliment from an eminent thinker who was also afriend and colleague of Jacques Derrida and GillesDeleuze. Heidegger maintained that philosophy canonly be salvaged in Western thought by a return toGreek questions of ontology. Art was the vehicle bywhich he attempted to recover this fundamental priorityand principle of ontology. It was during the 1930s thatHeidegger turned his attention to theorising art. In

The Essence of the Truth

(1930), he suggests thatthe elucidation of art works is a privileged way ofuncovering truth. He expanded this thesis in

The Originof the Work of Art

, a 1935 lecture series published in1950. He approached his theorising of art, not from thestandpoint of the artist, but from the perspective of thework of art. As Shawn Moi (2006: 17) explains, withthis approach:

we are given a highly original conception of the artwork as that into which truth sets itself. Truthhappens there. We are here of course referring totruth as aletheia.

3

That is, truth takes place and shape(Gestalt) in the work of art as the interchange ofconcealment and clearing from which the Open is won.

For Heidegger, art and truth are concomitant conceptsthat imply each other. But just what kind of place orevent is the Open for Heidegger? It is the arena whereinthe world and earth strive against one another – ithouses the Rift (Riss) – ‘that into which the strife ofworld and earth has been “fitted”’. Heidegger likens itto a tension between two opponents striving against oneanother ‘This rift does not let the opponents breakapart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundaryinto their common outline’ (in Moi, 2006: 23). Thisnotion of ‘intrinsic tension’ fits very closely with whatwe refer to as the agonistics of the work of the socialas art, which we develop further in our discussion aboutBadiou below.

There is also an important critical dimension in thework of Heidegger that contrasts the technological witha creative worldview, which is decisive for ourconstruction of a transformative social work. Heidegger’sinterpretation of the ‘technological worldview’ of latemodern times differs radically from the much morefamiliar interpretation offered by anthropology and

history. In


, Heidegger(1997) maintains that the instrumentalist or calculativeview of technology has limited validity. In social workit has become a dominant worldview with thedevelopment of new ‘technologies of care’ that narrowthe possibilities for proximal face-to-face practice(Webb, 2006: 141–168). These constitute frontlineknowledge and practice at two levels. First, they providefor ‘what counts’ or ‘works’ as pivotal, i.e. what countsas an intervention or resource about which thepropositions of empirical–analytic science give usknowledge. In other words, what counts in relation tothe calculative worldview is that which can be detected,measured, accounted for and manipulated in thesituation of evidence-informed environments. Second,the instrumentalist worldview determines the generalcharacter of standards, guidelines and codes of practiceemployed in calculating or predicting the truth andfalsity of interventions or ‘what works’. Let us beclear about this state-of-affairs. This all-encompassinginstrumental rationality is totally in thrall to the statusquo epistemically, politically and functionally (Finlayson,2003). It is slavishly subservient to the dominantworldview of advanced capitalism and its neoliberalvariant.

Heidegger fiercely contested modernist assumptionsabout the progressive accumulation of scientificknowledge and technical rationality. He argues thattheir dominance arises because of a one-dimensionalmode of understanding what things are. For Heidegger,for something to be meant it must ‘be disclosed’ ormade ‘manifest’. By this, he means that for anyparticular historical epoch, human culture is shaped bythe way in which things manifest or reveal themselvesin time. For example, if things manifest themselves asaspects of profitability of capital, people treat thingsone way; if things reveal themselves as shared orcollective property, people treat them in anotherway. Heidegger came to view the one-dimensional,technological mode of understanding – of the history ofhuman subjectivity – as calculative reason. He saw itas one stage in history initiated in ancient Greece,whereby a productionist metaphysics of being wasprivileged: For the Greek founders of metaphysics, ‘tobe’ meant to ‘be produced’. Plato inaugurated themodern technological worldview in which ‘to be’ as asubject means to be compelled to produce more andmore just for the sake of producing. This is whyHeidegger was so vehemently opposed to the ‘Artfor Art’s Sake’ and Expressionist movements. For himthey simply replicated the bourgeois productionistmentality through their aesthetic psychologism. Withthis subjectivist aesthetics, the beautiful is not regardedas a manifestation of being, but rather a product ofexperiential reasoning. As Richard Owsley (2002: 3)points out:

3

In relation to artistic judgement and temperament, Heideggerintroduces the Ancient Greek term

aletheia

, truth as anattunement of the work that depends on the necessity of thefreedom to be ‘open’ and not bound by some rigiddirectedness or purposive reason (see Rapaport, 1997).

Gray & Webb


190


Heidegger’s particular example of art in the ‘Origin’lecture illustrates his critique of the Expressionistictendency. While [others] . . . assume that the agentof expression is a particular human being, Heideggerattributes this function to Being-Itself. Aestheticexpression is less a psychological endeavor than anontological one. Art is not an instrument for anethical message or a political ideology. This trivializesthe instrument and the message. To Heidegger, an artwork unconceals a condition of Being. The incidentalproperties may indicate psychological qualities,stylistic points of view, or sociological conclusions;however, these are, at best, pre-ontological antecedentsto Being-Itself. Merely to study art, i.e. to catalogueand to classify a series of perspectives, is to fall shortof what art at its best has done, can do, and shoulddo: expose what it means To-Be. The latter qualitiesare not ambiguous, deep-seated positions adopted byhuman beings in context. They are the overwhelmingpresence of what-is.

Heidegger maintains that in order to free ourselves fromthe alienating influence of productionist technology andto recover our rootedness in the world, we mustcultivate a mode of attunement,

4

which he calls a‘releasement toward things’. To be ‘released’ toward athing is to attend to it as the particular thing that it is,rather than as a substitute for some other thing thatwould serve the same function. Towards the end of

TheQuestion Concerning Technology

, Heidegger leaves uswith the tantalising suggestion that a ‘saving power’ liesconcealed in ‘this dangerous moment’ of Westernmodernity in the de-aestheticisation of art. It is in thenature of the work of art to illuminate and bring theconcealed into view through its relation to the earth:

In setting up a world, the (art) work sets forththe earth. This setting forth must be thought here inthe strictest sense of the word. The artwork moves theearth itself into an open region of a world and keepsit there. The work lets the earth be earth (Heidegger,1971: 171).

Thus, against the backdrop of a great Greek temple, amountain is set forth just as a mountain, and not simplyas a land mass that needs be crossed or overcome, i.e.that exists for some instrumental purpose. The mountainmust be appreciated in itself. Modern technology nolonger permits nature to show itself. Instead thedominance of calculative reason tends toward processingand consuming – and controlling – nature rather than

preserving and sheltering or merely appreciating andexperiencing it.

In contrast to Expressionist art, Heidegger’s treatmentof Van Gogh’s ‘Peasant Shoes’ emphasises the simplisticportrayal of an earthy everyday object.

5

As Owsley (2002)points out, the painting expresses inherent feelings offrustration, pain and concern that come much closer toa phenomenological conception of art. He notes, ‘Thecare with which Van Gogh has imbued his simplesubject matter is far from the grand visions ofpatriotism, righteousness or arrogance. The shoes arenot “beautiful” but hard, heavy, bulky, and rough’ (p. 4).Such painting is in line with Heidegger’s conclusionsthat human Da-sein, existence or being-in-the-world,tenuously participates in the more expansive project ofBeing as the totality of history. Such participation isdoomed to frustration, disappointment and anxiety.Heidegger’s entrée into art occurs where Marc, Mackeand Klee leave off (see Young, 2001). Similarly, ourentrée into the notion of the work of the social as artoccurs at the point where England’s text leaves off.

There is something very important at stake in thishistoricisation of production for Heidegger in that itprovides the basis for an evaluative critique of thetechnological worldview as inauthentic. A key task forHeidegger was to contrast inauthentic with authenticworldviews, and to privilege the latter as an authenticmode of working and producing that would provide analternative to what he described as Greek productionistmetaphysics. As Zimmerman (1990) explains, ‘InHeidegger’s view, the attentive activity of “letting thingsbe” was not work as it is known under productionistmetaphysics; but instead the essence of art’ (p. xvi). Anew non-technological worldview would be possible ‘onlyif humanity were enabled to produce a work of art thatwould restore meaning to the things that had been mademeaningless in the technological era’ (Zimmerman,1990). Thus, for such a Heideggerian perspective it isnot so much that the artist is a special kind of person,but rather that each person is a special kind of artist.

Art, truth and event as radical agonistics

In this final section we consider how the idea that eachperson is a special kind of artist is relevant to social

4

The concern here is with possibilities of understandingimmanence in the work of art. Attunement as a mode ofenframing brought forth via speculative penetration into theformlessness of the work, with the effect of becoming adisclosive or uncovering event for the hermeneutic practitioner(see Stambovsky, 2004).

5

In Heidegger’s (1971) description of the van Gogh paintingof the peasant woman’s shoes, he wishes to show how thepeasant woman toiling in the field reveals how the shoesbring soil and world into a relation that establishes thepeasant woman within a historical place: ‘From the darkopening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome treadof the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness ofthe shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudgethrough the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of thefield swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampnessand richness of the soil. Under the sole slides the lonelinessof the field path as the evening falls’ (pp. 33–34).



191

work. We will concentrate on how the work of thesocial can be characterised in terms of art and, as amatter of course, shift the sole emphasis away from theintuitively plausible account of art as a subjectivecomposition for the worker. This means that our focusis not so much on an interior aesthetic process ofindividual creativity, but rather on the particularconsequences of certain concrete events within thework of the social. Following Heidegger, this willrequire us to seek out and isolate the preciseconsequences of an encounter with art as an event insocial work. In short, we need to devise a sustainableanswer to the question: What is art’s work in socialwork? In order to sustain this move, we need tosupplement our earlier reading of phenomenology, withHeidegger as its principle exponent, with the morerecent but largely sympathetic writings of the Frenchsocial theorist, Alain Badiou. This will permit us to notonly reconstruct prevailing conceptions of art in socialwork but to also push forward in developing anaffirmative agonistics of social work in lieu of the art’swork. It will also allow us to set this aestheticconception of social work against the perverse andinauthentic forms of calculative reason that have cometo dominate much of social work.

As a lover of truth, Badiou (2006) declares ‘a returnto truth’ in politics and philosophy (p. 121). Unlikemany of his contemporary French postmodernists,Badiou positively endorses and expounds a concept ofuniversal truth. He finds truth in events – artistic,scientific, political and amorous events. As Barker(2002: 83) says, ‘For Badiou, truth is the ultimate aimof philosophy, whose conditions once met, liberatephilosophy from itself’. But Badiou’s is a very differenttheory of truth from those we have grown accustomedto in the writings of Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel. It isan opposite position to the fashionable postmodernistand historicist ‘relativist’ theories of truth. Theoriginality and radicalism of Badiou rests on what iscalled his ‘subtractive ontology of truth’ thesis.

Badiou (2006) insists that truth is not an abstract,sovereign or transcendent phenomenon, but part of thegivenness of experience, proceeding as it does fromwithin experience as a singular figure of immanence.Truth is generic and infinite; it is not given as the secretof depth or intimate essence, as Freud would have usbelieve. Rather, drawing on his expertise in mathematicalset theory, Badiou (2006: 124–125) explains:

There can be only truth of the situation wherein truthinsists, because nothing transcendent to the situationis given to us. Truth is not a guarantor for theapprehension of something transcendent to thesituation. Since a situation, grasped in its pure being,is only ever a particular multiple, this means that atruth is only ever a sub multiple of that multiple, a

subset of the set named ‘situation’. Such is the rigour ofthe ontological requirement of immanence. We couldsay that truth is included in that which it is the truth of.

In other words, truth is part of experience and notsomething beyond it. In constructing this subtractiveontology of truth, Badiou’s goal is best described as theattempt to reveal and make sense of the potential forprofound, transformative innovation in any situation.Every such innovation can only begin with some sortof exceptional – though invariably ephemeral – breakwith the status quo; it begins with what Badiou refersto as an ‘event’ which reconfigures the present, i.e.which takes something away from our existingunderstanding of the situation. For example, in histransformative theory of politics, Badiou argues that‘politics must be subtracted from the State’ (Barker,2002: 83). As they reveal themselves they will takeaway something from the current knowledge we haveof the State. At another level, if your partner tells youhe is ‘going to take the dog out for a walk’, and thenlater that day tells you ‘I am having an affair and willbe leaving you’, these two different events laid side-by-side dramatically reveal the power of truth such thatthings will never be the same again. The truth takessomething away from that which you thought you hador possessed. It changes your view of love. Thus, in hismajor work to date

L’Etre et l’Événement

, Badiou(1988) explains in detail that:

truths are militant processes which, beginning froma specific time and place within a situation, pursuethe step-by-step transformation of that situation inline with new forms of broadly egalitarian principles.Only a pure commitment, one detached from anypsychological, social or ‘objective’ mediation, canqualify as the adequate vehicle for a truth, butreciprocally, only a properly universal truth qualifiesas worthy of such a commitment. Only a truth can‘induce’ the subject of a genuine commitment (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html).

Badiou (1998) casts truth in terms of exceptionalevents, intense moments, rare and fragile experiencesthat lead to a form of commitment and attunement withthe world. He shows how truth can be a collective aswell as a singular experience. Ultimately, his concern isto forge a political philosophy of sameness and equalityover and against current preoccupations with differenceand identity. A collective takes shape in response to aradical break with the status quo and is defined as apolitical event if the subject of this event is collective,and if this is a singular collective practice estrangedfrom the state. A starving population or a people facinggenocide know the meaning of collective truth.

For Badiou, like truth, all artistic truth is initiated byan event and is sustained by a subject. Following

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html

Gray & Webb


192


Foucault, Badiou thinks that subjectivity is an effect ofevents. Art, as distinct from calculative worldviews, isan engagement in which sensual experience – audible,visual, verbal, olfactory and tactile – is put into form.Hallward (2003: 195) explains:

The evental site in an artistic situation always lies onthe edge of what is perceived, in that situation, as thevoid of form. Artistic events take place on the borderof what is formless, joyful or monstrous, the pointat which the formal resources of the existing arts areoverextended.

The art’s work is a subtractive intense event – or seriesof events – that is disruptive, incommensurable andcontingent. It is likely to be derived from animprovisation, whereby all past experience, knowledgeof rules and procedural thinking do not suffice topredict or produce an outcome. Art brings forth thatwhich is novel rather than the repetition of past orhabitual unproductive modes of calculative thinking. Itis transformative in the sense that it manifests itselfcontinually anew, and, in keeping with this, social workas art can never be a closed system. In a fundamentalsense it is the art and not the social worker thatassembles what is practice, that provides bounds andlets everything stand in relation to everything else.

The art’s work in social work is not imbued withinthe routine, mundane or the ordinary. Neither can it befound within the prescribed, codified or regulated fieldsof administrative practice. There is nothing task-centredabout it. You will not find it in policy guidelines,manuals, computer databases, case notes, team meetingsor conference reviews. On the contrary, the socialworker will recognise that the art’s work does not figureamong a variant range of potential outcomes. The truthof art cannot be predicted, calculated or prescribed. Itis always surprising, disruptive and often the result ofan accidental event. It cannot be grasped throughpurposive action alone. Such purposive reason traps andblinds social work into a mode of thought that insistson grasping reality through one-dimensional instrumentalrationality. The truth of art often begins with theinvoluntary and resonates as something to be undergonerather than something that is guided or imposed. Andit cannot be communicated explicitly; it is revealed inthe gaps, the rifts, the dislocations, inconsistencies andincoherence of what is said or remembered as what wassaid. To paraphrase Hallward (2003: 204), the compositionof art as work comprises the talents, actions andqualities of the social worker, which are indistinguishablefrom the process and the context – the relationshipwithin which the work happens, the situation in whichit is imbedded, personal, professional and socialexpectations or norms, and so on. This complexcomposition whereby one arrives at the art is diametricallyopposed to ‘technologies of care’ and decisionist forms

of evidence-based practice (see Webb, 2006: 144–168).The art’s work in social work extends beyond the formaland normative aspects of existing regulatory practices.Art is without mediation, and as will become clear,either through lack or excess, it performs as a radicalmode of subtraction from these formal and normativefields.

The formalisation of the art’s work in social workrests on the proximal relationship between socialworker and client as a process, duration or setting of aperformative scene. Badiou calls it a ‘sustainable sceneof the staging of the Two’. This staging of a relationshipbetween social worker and client is always–already,inherently pregnant with possibilities of truth. Thismeans that ‘Truth is already included in that whichit is the truth of’. Here is our strong claim for analternative conception of this staging of event betweensocial worker and client. The event is not a repetition,description or characterisation of what exists, butinstead a momentary pause in which participants inventor imagine what has not yet taken place. They inventnew possibilities. It is the leap of faith of the decision,as Derrida (1995) refers to this process, whereby thesocial worker and client show commitment to theongoing and durable salience of their relationship, butmake the immanence of truth ‘stand forth’ as intensemoments that initially subtract but resolve as enduringand preservative Truths. Clients – and most of us – canrecount in vivid detail a moment when some newinsight that had lasting impact was reached. The leapdoes not aim at mediation since this merely confirmsthe void of the situation rather than its pregnantpossibilities, or else it seeks to restore a normativecondition and the status quo of untruth, i.e. it leavesthings as they were. More radically, it is the in-potentiaof the opening, or potential take-off point for the art’swork, which connects positively to this revelation of thevoid of the situation, the immanence of that within it.The art’s work must wrest and agonise in order to bringforth the authentic, and that which is to be preserved.This requires fidelity on the part of the social worker–client configuration to discern in a situation anymultiples of possibility and proactively regroupconnections and disconnections to the event, whetherreal or anticipated. The fidelity procedure’s task isto decide, in each case, whether and to what extentin relation to the horizon of possibilities, theintersubjective social worker–client is faithful to theevent or not. The fidelity procedure, as an element ofsocial work intervention, thus inevitably invokes truthand draws up a repertoire of virtues and vices, whoseterms are included in a situation, and those that areexcluded. As Barker (2002: 85) explains, ‘Fidelitystands for degrees of relative autonomy’. But crucially,following Badiou, the main task of an exclusivelyaffirmative social work as art is the effort to render



193

visible all that which, from the perspective of theestablishment, the government, the State, is invisible ornon-existent. As we say in narrative therapy, togetherthe client and worker rewrite the story. The art’s workdoes not only ‘open up’ in disclosing a radical alterity,or making visible that which has been previously closeddown or excluded, but it also endures as a new narrative(Goldstein, 1999a). As Heidegger argues, the art’s workpreserves the authentic. It establishes itself in the open,whereby the intense moment of truth as in-potentiabecomes a durable and lasting monument. For us,however, the burning question remains as to whethersocial work will ever experience a collective politicalmoment of truth, which endures and shines forth.Perhaps, for now, we can at least hope for – in theBlochian sense – a fuller engagement with the art’swork in the social.

6

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6

Here we are referring to Ernest Bloch (1995) and hismonumental book

The Principle of Hope

where he describesthe world as an open system and charts the human strivingfor utopia that runs throughout history. He maintained that‘In capitalist society health is the capability to earn, amongthe Greeks it was the capability to enjoy, and in the MiddleAges the capability to believe’ (p. 465).

http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/philosophy/Gnosis/vol_viii/Moi.pdf

http://www.unt.edu/heidegger/papers.htm

social work as art revisited

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