This experience has plumbed new depths of value-clashery with the hierachons and I see how we are practically aliens speaking entirely different languages based on completely different epistemologies. It's no longer about the words, it's about actual MEANING...not what the words mean but MEANING itself. It's an Ontological nightmare and it's coming for all of us. It's the Lone Epistemologist and his faithful Sidekick-Onto, come riding into town on Elephants, packing Foucaultian canons in their leather saddlebags
The 'why are we here?’ stuff.
What this means for me is yet another insight (possibly) into the fractured professional world of Social Work.
Give a fool a ruler and he will happily measure all the walls and doors endlessly and record minute change in great detail. It will not occur to measure what is happening within the walls because that is quite subjective and quite complex and requires DIALOGUE focused by KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE. Imagination? Creativity?
There are two or even three cultures operating in children's social work and at odds with each other. In fact in a fight to the death. (Really? Isn't that 'fight to the death' stuff just you assuming your omniscient view?)
First there is the cult of measurement, what is also being called quality assurance and audit which is measuring the walls dressed up as a useful activity. (It is a useful activity dude!) Then there is the related target-driven results-oriented performance management which constructs new sets of relationships based on wall measuring data. (It's like you think consideration of results is stupid! It's absolutely vital!)
Then there is the traditional, necessarily beleaguered, social work neuromancers who chaotically dance in the spaces between poverty and power, creating havoc for the wall measurers and tearing down their walls and rebuilding them chaotically in devastatingly new shapes. These are the social workers/artists who are the professional monkey wrench throwers. The high end saboteurs who short circuit the organisation in astonishingly creative ways. The anarchist advocates who infiltrate senior positions all the better to lay waste, then rappel off the skyscraper chuckling like mad ninja commandos.
They are the lost professional field commanders who spend their entire lives on active service and under fire and who have become the greatest leaders of small groups in action that have ever been seen. Managing impossible levels of data and human complexity minute to minute with immense grace.
This is the social work I live and love. The social work of rebellion and revolution. Highly skilled and talented mercenaries in the service of poor children. Fighting without mercy to give children in poverty the edge they need against the machine that seeks to condemn them to a life without hope. Fighting the soulless bureaucrats and robots who mindlessly carry out the machine's tasks without question and who now believe themselves to be in charge...but who are actually...foolishly and busily...measuring the walls.
Then there is the herd mentality, 'the flock jostling nervously in their cage.' This is the culture of 'not knowing what's going on', or maybe the 'we don't know what's going down man!'
Wading through boggy ground and hoping for a city on the hill. Wading through glue without a clue. Minions. Unguided missiles. The blind leading the blind. Drone pilots. Apathetically apolitical and seeking communities of resistance-but against what? For what? Only felt dimly, like the early signs of toothache. Intimations of pain-to-come. We watch the ice cream melt and pool on the floor in stupefied fascination, and study all the facts about mops and their uses and practice all the skills of high end technical moppery. Polish and wax our mop handles. Scan the horizons for new mop designs. Carefully replace and repair the mop fibres. Never leave home without our mop. Categorise mop skills into arcane groupings-theoretical and practical moppery and classes of skills too-devise Aristotelian labelling systems of Einsteinian complexity translated into fetishised numerological texts only translatable by elite colleges of the Society of Mopperology who, for a handsome fee, will train your sheep to enter their pens happily.
A child asks 'why not just stop the ice cream melting' and is pelted with cream buns amid howls of laughter, bundled into a waiting hot air balloon and flown to a residential re-education centre just off the Australian coast and run by G4S.
'Animals' by Pink Floyd is the soundtrack in our heads. Border collies chase their tails. We watch out nervously for wolves...Shepherd crooks rob banks happily and commit daylight robberies.
An old man with a sign saying 'Eat Me!' scorns passers by. Sirens sound among the hills. Boots are on the streets.
A magical fountain, atop which Her Real Majesty stands waiting for Alice to unlock her prison of stone with the appropriately translated runes.
Interesting read dad, zombies next?
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