Categorisation & Chaos

"Equilibrium is the precursor to death."
— Richard T. Pascale, Surfing the Edge of Chaos, 1999

Categorisation: our default way of understanding the world—and controlling it. The understanding-the-world part of that statement has always been obvious to me, but the control aspect hovered beneath the surface, outside my awareness. It took a visual artist to bring it to the fore. Artists and poets have a unique way of shifting one's current perception. They use metaphor to create awakening, to bring us out of our trance state. Last week I was awoken to a new understanding of categorisation, and it's rather chilling.

The French/Algerian visual artist and activist, Kader Attia1 explores the relationship between the Western world's obsession with collecting and categorising objects and its similar desire to control—the world, other races, other people. Housing poor, immigrant or otherwise disenfranchised people in tower blocks and other such edifices, in his words "open sky jails", is driven by the same desire we have to place objects in glass boxes in our museums. Our sorting and categorisation provides a sense of safety, organisation, and ultimately control over the material world, a control that we attempt to extend into non-material areas too. I see what he means. Consider our classifications of personality types, learning styles, psychiatric disorders, and gender, ethnic and other stereotypes. In the USA students are labeled by their grade: A student, B student, etc. as if this tells us who they are and what their future potential is. It doesn't, of course, but life is easier that way.

So great is our desire to categorise one another that when a person doesn't clearly fit a particular category we devise a test to determine placement, for example government means testing, health diagnostics, Myers-Briggs assessments or the infamous South African 'pencil test'. It is unthinkable that a person is uncategorisable. It will lead to chaos and ultimately the collapse of the state as we know it. This might sound like mad exaggeration. Yeah, it does—but I'm not sure it is. Government control over its citizens is paramount, even in supposed democratic societies. Categorisation helps maintain order. Indeed, it is the order.

More than an imposed order, it is an order we seem to crave and indeed perpetuate, categorising ourselves according to one or another given criteria as the situation requires. Consider job titles. The default question asked when we meet a new person is "what do you do?". It's a question about action, about behaviour even: what do you do. And yet we answer by telling the questioner what we are, what we have been categorised as: I am a doctor, I am an architect, I am a software developer, I am a tinker/tailor/soldier/sailor... Nothing there about what we do. It almost doesn't matter what we do. And nothing there about who we are which matters even less. It is how we are labeled that counts.

Job titles are the default way of assessing another person. For what? For value. Not only is job-title categorisation our way of understanding others and our own place within a group, but it is our way of assessing a person's worth. Not just literally, i.e. their net worth in terms of their financial standing in society, but their worth to us as a resource, a utility. For example an entrepreneur would value an I.P. Lawyer above a waiter. And there is also a raising of our own social status by knowing people of a higher social status than our own. Friendship with a doctor has greater worth in a community than friendship with a shopkeeper. We focus on job titles as it is the simplest way of being part of an order. Little thinking is required when we're all labeled.

A more sinister implementation of categorisation is in the field of psychiatry. The DSM-5 2 lists over 300 psychiatric 'disorders', supposedly to help practitioners more effectively diagnose patients. The downside is that anyone who visits a psychiatric practitioner must now fit (at least) one of those 300+ profiles, causing people to be diagnosed (or even to self-diagnose) with illnesses they do not have, to be treated by drugs and therapies they do not need 3. Indeed, the only practical (questionably useful) purpose of the DSM seems to be to provide a standardised set of codes for psychiatrists and psychotherapists to bill insurance companies.

Our categorisations also make us feel personally comfortable, safe in an uncertain world. True adventurers, and true confronters of the system are few and far between. Most of us just want to stay in our comfort zones and not upset the status quo. Bad things might happen. We are blinded, it seems, to the bad things that are happening by this very choice. Our freedoms are slowly eroded, other people make our important life decisions for us, we eat food permeated with unpronounceable chemicals, allow ourselves to be dosed with pharmaceuticals with almost zero knowledge of their ingredients or potential side effects, our churches, community centers, shops and pubs are closed down, we are sidetracked by celebrity gossip, emotionally aroused by news stories of hatred and horror, and distracted by mindless social media. We are safe, but our societies, or communities are dying.

Categorisation is our way of seeking order, safety, and control. Stasis and equilibrium also offer those benefits. And that's where Pascale's words at the start of this piece can be heard as a warning. When life stops evolving it starts decaying. If we want to stay vibrant and alive, if we want to thrive generation to generation we need to take a sharp look at how we live in a system of categorisations, and start challenging our own assumptions, inject some chaos and confusion into our orderly world. Today I have no job title. Today I don't identify as my mental illness. Today I won't ask what you do, I'll ask who you love, and I'll ask you to tell me about the quality of that love. In such dialogue we'll regenerate the world.

1 Kader Attia's exhibition, The Museum of Emotion, is currently open at the Hayward Gallery London, and runs until 6th May. Highly recommended. And thanks, Sophie, for inviting me there.

2 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition

3 e.g. Lam, D C K, Salkovskis, P M, Hogg, L I (2016) Judging a book by its cover: An experimental study of the negative impact of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder on clinicians' judgments of uncomplicated panic disorder, British Journal of Clinical Psychology

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February News

It's pure coincidence, but the photograph in this newsletter contains a strange reflection or optical illusion that I can't figure out, and thus it defies my effort to categorise it. I included the photograph only because I like it. It was the view from my window last week while staying at the LSE hall of residence in Northumberland Avenue. I had a few trips to London in February, both to teach and to study. I also visited Newcastle and Birmingham to run my Storytelling workshop. At the beginning of the month I spent the day with my friends Jem and Taner to produce a few more episodes of our vlog. Two were released in February with three more due in March.

Our new home is slowly emerging from the packing materials, and the warm weather has seen the girls out exploring the back garden—and bringing much of it back into the house. The cats are growing fast, and always hungry. No longer kittens they are in their teenager phase, exploring and navigating their environment. With cats around equilibrium is kept at bay.

March is here, a month of waking up; no longer winter yet not quite Spring. In the words of Garrison Keillor, "March is the month God created to show people who don't drink what a hangover is like." Enjoy the transition.

Tobias

February Writing & Video

4th March 2019, 6.00 am