Impressions of an Online Group Discussing Online Groups

Thus then I answer: since thou hast not spared
To twit me with my blindness – thou hast eyes,
Yet see’st not in what misery thou art fallen
—Sophocles, Oedipus the King (trans. F. Storr)

The online discussion group convened for Contexts by Peter Zelaskowski ended on a high, with the image of a “cloud flake”, which members of the group regarded as proof of its creativity. The cloud metaphor was introduced by Bob Hsiung late in our group’s four-week existence (post #107). The source of the image was technological – cloud computing – but Bob’s associations were ethereal. He envisioned a skyscape with clouds floating and overlapping. The vista darkened as a storm blew in, but Bob’s invocation of lightning reinforced the imagery’s almost Romantic naturalism at the same time as it affirmed an implicitly healing, even redemptive idea of group work (“weathering the storm”). Other members developed not only the image but also its connotation of ultimately benign group-analytic collaboration. The technology itself, and in general the sheer magnitude of the online revolution, which has “reformatted” so much of everyday life so quickly that it is almost impossible not to have been caught by the digital tide, were easily forgotten. It was an example of this group’s tendency to “keep its head in the clouds”.

Maria Puschbeck had previously pictured our group as a snowflake (#94) and it was Liat Warhaftig-Aran who synthesised the two meteorological images in the idea of a soft “cloud flake” (#124). (I didn’t think of it at the time but I subsequently remembered that “snowflake” is a right-wing term of abuse, especially in the USA, for advocates of identity politics.) Peter then recalled a sudden snowfall at the Northfield Revisited Winter Workshop in January 2018 – “it was a magical moment, visiting a mythical place” (#125) – and thus he added a nostalgic vignette of pilgrimage to the shared revery. To round everything off Bob offered a further, erotic elaboration: “I’m delighted that we’ve procreated / co-created the ‘cloud flake’” (#133), so that in the end the composite image managed impressively to encompass natural beauty, the melancholic pleasures of memory and the social prestige of childbirth. The image-making was cheerful, yet the metaphor evidently had a gloomier dimension too. A “cloud flake” doesn’t after all actually exist in nature; it is an artificial construct, nothing more than a literary “device”, a contrivance with a salutary effect that nevertheless involves obscurity (clouds block sunlight), fragmentation, depression and disgrace (to be “under a cloud”). Because the group longed for a comfort zone, these darker meanings of the images weren’t explored, but in retrospect the “cloud flake” conveyed the things our group struggled to confront. The image was an x-ray of the group’s concealed anxiety as well as its proud creation.

The group experienced two boundary disturbances, the first a sort of minor diplomatic incident and the second, much more serious and potentially damaging, an outright crisis. The first incident occurred after Peter informed the group that Tiziana Baisini, the GASi Forum Administrator – or “Forum mother” as Bob called her (#58) – had belatedly accepted his invitation to join. The group was asked for its consent to the late admission of a new member, and a short but difficult negotiation ensued (#23–37). Haim Weinberg, who had earlier been the chief advocate of strong leadership in online groups (#6, 12), objected on the grounds that Tiziana had “emptied” the role of Forum moderator (#29). Suddenly there seemed a real possibility that the group wouldn’t be able to achieve a collegial consensus. The situation was saved when Haim, facilitated by Bob (#35), announced with a pun that he had withdrawn his objection (#36). The group could then welcome Tiziana, but it never subsequently revisited the conflict which had briefly loomed between older male and younger female styles of online authority. A long silence followed Tiziana’s arrival and there was no investigation of how she responded to the debate about her admission or even of whether she had read the posts about it. Though Bob (#48, 58) and Tiziana herself (#108) did tentatively try to start a conversation about her presence, peace was maintained by avoiding this thorny issue.

The second boundary disturbance was much more uncanny, invasive and paradoxical, at least according to my interpretation of it. It was traumatic in a fully complex sense: the breach wasn’t a simple wound but rather a disaster which couldn’t be properly acknowledged at the time it happened. The crisis began innocuously, halfway through the group, when Maria posted an old German photo of a bourgeois-looking couple with their son and the slogan, The best part of having a family is that you are never alone, the worst part is that you are never alone (#72). Then Bob immediately pasted a hyperlink (#73). For the first time group members exploited the medium’s techniques of bricolage. They did this casually and as a matter of habit, as though online methods of inter- and hypertextuality were mere tools to inform and illustrate. I commented on this development right away in order to question the implicit idea of utility. I asked whether the “sudden arrival … of symbolically contrasting texts from the outside” indicated “some sort of online unconscious process” (#74) – I inquired, in other words, about the meaning of the form. Both Carla Penna and Liat replied but downplayed my commentary. Then Haim did something completely unexpected. He posted thousands of words extracted from his book, purportedly to explain “the Internet Unconscious” to the group (#78). Whatever enlightenment was to be found in these extracts was massively outweighed by their sheer volume and inundating impact. I had no doubt that the importance of this mega-post wasn’t its content but its mass. The attempt to impose theoretical order on the problem of the online unconscious inadvertently exemplified the overbearing force and and never-ending repetitive intrusiveness of the Internet. The virtual online world’s cultural hegemony burst into the group in this symptomatic fashion just at the moment when the group was trying to suggest that the Internet was nothing but a tool.

There seemed to me to be something not only traumatic but tragic here. In tragedy, the attempt to escape fate is itself part of destiny. In our group, Haim’s theoretical intervention through bulk quotation was meant to regulate but it actually brought chaos. The mega-post was determined by what it tried to control. It brought to my mind the founding sorcerer’s apprentice myth of psychoanalysis – Freud’s claim that Breuer was overwhelmed by the transference during the analysis of “Anna O.” – except here what had the power to turn therapeutic authority back on itself wasn’t sexuality but technology. It might have been possible to use the appearance of the mega-post to reflect on what it means to have one’s life, or even a whole way of life, turned upside-down, by analogy with the way the discourse of the group had been drowned under this torrent of text, but such reflection didn’t happen. The instinct for professional solidarity and safety was too great, and so perhaps was the unconscious fear of the digital Brave New World. Later I remembered something the poet Hölderlin wrote about Sophocles’ Antigone concerning how difficult it is “to reverse the striving out of this world into the other into a striving out of another world into this” (Hölderlin, 2009, p. 328), which suggests both the tragic difficulty any human mind has in conceiving of an inhuman agency much greater than its own, and the abyssal or even mad experience of truly making such a vast conceptual leap, the like of which may be what is required to understand what the Internet really means.

What followed from Haim’s mega-post was confusion and the possibility that the gender and generational contest implicit in the debate about whether Tiziana could join the group would actually ignite. Liat felt that the mega-post suppressed what she had said just before it (#83) while Carla defended Haim: “Thank you Haim for bringing us parts of your book. It is a nice learning…” (#81, see also #84). I think here the GASi context was important: Haim is a former Foulkes Lecturer, while both Carla and Peter are GASi officers. I challenged this “ruling class” (#82), only to beat a hasty retreat (#84). Supported by Bob (#92a), Haim stood firm: “I got tired of seeing topics that I’ve researched and written about being discuss[ed] as new revelations and I wanted to avoid repeating what I’ve written. I’ve spent years thinking about Internet forums dynamics and writing my book and articles. I thought that I was invited here because of this expertise” (#90). I then resumed my challenge to authority and indeed “patriarchy” (#93) and it was left to Peter, who had been silent for a long time, to find the terms needed for reconciliation. It had become clear that the group didn’t accept “leader” and “expert” as unifying ideas because they were not only gendered but also too individualised. What was needed was a relational compromise, which Peter tactfully found (recalling Carla’s praise of Haim): “The wish to learn and the wish to teach appear equally present. Do the teachers, and we have some of the most experienced and informed here with us, feel they have something to learn? And the pupils something to teach? The needs to be heard and to relate also feel strongly present” (#98). It was the most effective act of leadership the group experienced because it recognised the requirement for group-analytic leadership to be inclusive, to lead without appearing to do so. The emphasis on pedagogy was crucial because it reminded the group of a common stake in GASi as a “learned society” where the pursuit of knowledge is a shared undertaking even thought it is hierarchical. The group settled down afterwards, reassured by Peter’s reminder of reciprocity. Later I thought about times in GASi large groups when attention turns to matters like the election of officers or event organisation. Such discussion is usually intense but there is often also an uneasy feeling that by turning inward the group is retreating from a world where specialist knowledge is increasingly worthless in the competitive online marketplace of opinions.

The old German family portrait Maria posted was a reassuring image and also a sort of distraction or optical illusion. It was a visual presentation of a wished-for stable foundation provided by psychoanalytic and group-analytic tradition. As an inline attached digital image, however, it also exemplified, though in a much less intimidating fashion than the mega-post, the “phantom menace” of the Internet, which recycles infinite amounts of information without evaluating it or considering its emotional significance (as a sort of paradoxical protective armour, the image perhaps resembled Carla’s tablet, mentioned in #85, which for lack of space and time I haven’t been able to discuss in these remarks). The photo stood for the hope that family ties, including the surrogate ties of professional kinship, can withstand cultural change. However, the very fact that the picture came from a pre-digital and pre-group-analytic era undermined this hope. In our group, longed-for family safety was always more endangered than the group was ready to admit.

The group’s desire to believe that the virtual world couldn’t threaten its security emerged again after several passing remarks about family love  (#39–41), centred on the group’s younger mothers Maria and Tiziana, which were vaguely sentimental. A sort of defusing or soothing process then began as a reaction against my suggestion that new technology might fundamentally change the mother–child relationship which the group believed in dogmatically. I cited the theorist Franco Berardi, who has speculated that children may already be learning more language from machines than from mothers (#63), and this idea bothered Tiziana: “I jumped on the chair when you mentioned Franco Berardi and that a child can learn more languages from a machine than from a mother. I don’t want to deny how much technology can be useful, but I do think that the exquisitely human musicality of the dialogue between mother and baby can’t be replaced by any machine, as well as the attunement fostered by mirror neurons in a face to face encounter” (#67). I responded by saying that the metaphor (presumably it was just a metaphor) of jumping on a chair was ambiguous because while it expressed a frightened response it miniaturised the cause of the fear. The inhuman scale of the digital system was reduced by Tiziana, “as though it were just a little mouse or a Halloween spider”, as I put it (#70). Was Tiziana’s metaphor therapeutic, a way of getting unrealistic fear into proportion, or on the contrary a disavowal of all-too-reasonable fear? Another nightmare of inundation was now in play, or so it seemed to me, the horror of a computer–person relationship involving an addictive feeding that never stops. It was Bob who objected to my take on the online “feed”, claiming that the Internet is just like old-fashioned newspapers and online consumerism no different from going to a mall (#73), but such arguments were, as far as I was concerned, just further minimisations. They certainly didn’t help me to shrink what I saw as a vast enveloping automatism to the size of a mouse, and when Tiziana unexpectedly posted again about Berardi, I was equally unconvinced by her claim that the image of a gruesome futuristic contraption had been tamed: “I was about to write to specify that I am not a technophobic at all – I use technology quite a lot both in my personal and professional life – even though I had that strong reaction to the quote from Franco Berardi. Then, when Maria this morning mentioned her child I realised that I misunderstood the meaning of that quote: I got it in a completely black-or-white way, as if the machines should substitute the mother instead of offering further stimulation. I had the image of a sort of robot invented in order to soothe crying newborns – a truly grotesque thing whose advertising was forwarded to me as an horrific curiosity” (#104). The shock of this robot horror seemed still real, present and undiminished in the group’s unconscious.

I thought that a fantasy of family security dominated our group. My technologically preoccupied dissent couldn’t dispel it, but something else did. When Liat referred to her ancestors who were killed during the Holocaust and then wrote about her daughter’s military service (#124), it was necessary to look beyond the group’s contented preoccupation with the successful mothering of young children to take account of how families and whole societies are torn apart by terrible circumstances beyond their control, which no amount of good parenting can alter. And the group also had to recognise for at least a moment the unpredictable and sometimes disastrous life which everyone has to live in adulthood, which not even the best professional therapy can ever fully mitigate and which will almost certainly include warfare of one kind or another, relying on whatever resources childhood has given us, which may be very little.

At the start of the group Maria mentioned dancing with Liat at the 2017 Berlin Symposium (#9) and this scene was mentioned often during the group, not least by me, in terms of creativity, playfulness, youthful promise, international reconciliation, sexiness and relaxation (see #11, 93, 118, 119, 123). Liat limited any homoerotic association when she added: “I didn’t dance with Maria in Berlin, we actually danced next to each other” (#124). This statement was perhaps an example of the well-known group-analytic nervousness about gay themes but I also linked it to Liat’s earlier response to the following statement I had made: “I am not much of a leader, just a childless middle-aged man who is in many ways an outsider to the group-analytic world but whose career doesn’t depend on the older generation’s patronage, which gives me a kind of freedom to speak out” (#93). Shortly afterwards I described an experience at the Autumn Workshop when I felt a conflict of loyalty in myself, like a child being torn between mother and father, and Liat possibly picked up on that remark as well when she wrote: “Women here engage in emotional and personal disclosures while men reflect more? Rob, you perhaps represent a third opportunity” (#96). Although the potential for conflict between the sexes and the generations in our group was kept in check by group-analytic family loyalty, nevertheless some possibility of transgression, deviance or marginality seemed to be located in me. Bob also suggested it when he said that I seemed “to be holding childlessness for us, and possibly the larger system. Which represents not being generative / stagnating?” (#133) – and after the group finished I tried to figure out what this possibility (or lack of it) might mean.

I was always an unlikely moderator. Although I have been involved in GASi for years, I am not a group therapist. What is more, I agreed to be the group’s “interviewer-moderator” (as Peter called it in preliminary correspondence) despite the fact that I am neither a member of the GASi Forum nor an enthusiast for online interaction. In fact I avoid social media with determination. Not only that, I soon realised I wanted to be the group’s un-moderator, the disturber of its instinct for tranquility. I resisted the tendency towards moderation, professional decorum and family values. I quickly abandoned impartiality and made no attempt at blank-screen impersonality – indeed I purposefully tried to be candid about my own emotional conflicts (see #93, 97). I even tried to stir up rebellion in the younger generation (#131), but to no avail: I consistently failed to disrupt the prevailing unity. Peter did at one point call my approach “fresh and challenging” (#125), which suggested that something about my forthright method had hit home, but mostly I felt welcome in the group despite my misfit pessimism and preoccupation with the “digital dark side” (#11). This was, as I keep on saying, a group of accomplished professionals. It was admirably capable of responding resiliently to my interventions, or perhaps I should say neutralising them.

I was “blinded” in a threefold sense – because I had no perspective on other online groups, because my “insights” about new technology were blocked by the group, and because a measure of despair clouded my perception of the issues under discussion. I couldn’t quite carry off my function as intermediary – possibly because it was precisely my role to be disabled. My flaky lack of conductor’s “potency” combined with a nonprofessional’s boldness was what, for better or worse, I offered to the group. Perhaps Liat was trying to define this particular mix when she spoke of “a third opportunity” beyond or between maternity and paternity, male and female, outside the family learning circle. It can be recalled that Oedipus isn’t the only blind and crippled person in Sophocles’ Theban plays. There is also the “nonbinary” prophet Tiresias – “Old man with wrinkled female breasts,” as T. S. Eliot calls him (if it is still “him”) in The Waste Land (Eliot, 1986, p. 59) – whom I perhaps came to resemble in the group, with the proviso that in Oedipus the King and Antigone Tiresias is a commanding figure with unmistakable knowledge of coming catastrophes, whereas in our group all that was left to me of a visionary role was an amateurish, half-empty impersonation. Maybe that debasement was something which needed to be played out. For isn’t the impoverishment of a tragic understanding of the world a cardinal sign of these thoroughly disenchanted digital times?

Rob White

References

Eliot, T. S., 1986. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

Hölderlin, Friedrich, 2009. Essays and Letters. Trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth. London: Penguin Books.