Anxiety, Ambivalence and Sublimation: Ontological In/security and the World Risk Society/Kaygi, Kararsizlik ve Yuceltme: Ontolojik Guven(siz)lik ve Dunya Risk Toplumu.

• Author: Cash, John

Introduction

Over the past 15 years or so, a focus on ontological security and its disorienting and destabilising other, ontological insecurity, has developed in the broad research field of International Relations (IR). This very focus has itself produced a further broadening of IR research. It has encouraged a new awareness of the significance of psychic processes operating at the level of individual human subjects, as they confront the disruptions of globalization and as they negotiate attempts by state institutions and political elites to address and/or exploit the psychological need for ontological security. (1) Beyond that focus on individuals, the foundational work ofJennifer Mitzen and Brent Steele has extended the range of ontological security concerns by directly addressing the state and its interactions with other states. (2) While this scaling up beyond the individual to the state as subject and agent has met with criticism, it has generated significant research outcomes and has demonstrated its value in the analysis of states and their mutual interactions. (3)

Another major pay-off from the incorporation of ontological security theory into IR is the enhanced focus on emotions and affects that it has delivered. Profoundly disorienting anxiety is the central affect and emotion highlighted by Ronald Laing in his harrowing accounts of those individuals who succumbed to the terrors of ontological insecurity. (4) Likewise, Anthony Giddens recognises the place that emotions play in both the loss and maintenance of ontological security. (5) In both cases this focus on affects and emotions arises from an engagement with psychoanalytic theory, even when, as with Giddens, that is supplemented by his ethno-methodological concern with the maintenance or collapse of the routines of everyday life. Laing also highlighted how routines serve as defences against disabling anxiety and the ontological insecurity it generates.

In this article it is my intention to build upon the insights of the ontological security literature, while also attempting to extend it. (6) To do so, I reach beyond the usual reference points for the discussion of ontological in/security by addressing parallel discussions that, while not directly referencing the term "ontological security", nevertheless address the same psychic, cultural and political issues and dilemmas that are integral to its discussion. These parallel discussions share with the explicit ontological security literature an engagement with psychoanalytic theory, and that engagement will be central to my own discussion.

In analysing contemporary world politics from the local to the global, Slavoj Zizek refers to the demise of "symbolic efficiency", Ulrich Beck to the loss of trust and the excoriating effects of "linear doubt", Julia Kristeva highlights the risks entailed in human subjects remaining "strangers to ourselves" and Judith Butler highlights human vulnerability, commencing with the helplessness and dependency on others of the human infant and thereafter develops an account of precarious life that is always already deeply embedded in "variable norms of recognition". (7) All four recognise how globalisation and/or the world risk society have heightened anxiety by destabilising established ways of being, thinking, feeling and relating, especially as these have derived from ideologies of nation, class, gender, race and ethnicity. Despite some significant differences, all four converge in recognising the declining capacity of established cultures and institutions to quell or contain anxiety and, implicitly, to support defences against ontological insecurity. Yet, at the same time - and this is a principal part of my argument - ontological insecurity is so destabilising that it must be defended against with whatever means are either already available or can be created. (8) Further, these means of defence are both psychic and cultural and, very significantly, they are qualitatively variable. Some defences promote qualitatively different constructions of the international, the national, the sub-national and the personal, as against others.

For instance, populism is one response to ontological insecurity that is qualitatively distinct from some other possible responses. By promoting the revitalisation of populist nationalisms and particularisms, populist ideologies wage war against otherness and difference. Instead of cultivating a capacity for creative and contemplative ambivalence, in which our own internal otherness (the unconscious) and our physical vulnerability are recognised as characteristics that are common to all human subjects, populist ideologies encode and propagate psychic processes of splitting and projection. They do so in the attempt to establish as proper what Wendy Brown identifies as the social imaginary central to the desire for border walls, namely wishes for "potency, protection, containment, and even innocence". (9)

Populist ideologies construct a split world of friend and enemy, however their capacity to organise this world - their society or polity, their field of international relations, etc. - is faltering. They, too, have lost their symbolic efficiency. (10) The complexities generated by globalisation and the world risk society defy friend-enemy solutions. Rather, attempts to solve, dissolve, or resolve such complexities by relying on the friend-enemy distinction multiply the downsides of such populist mentalities, as the Trump Presidency so painfully illustrated. At the same time, this destabilisation opens the possibility for creative and productive change in which new or re-invented modes of being, thinking, feeling, and relating to others are trialled and occasionally socially instituted. The "Black Lives Matter" movement in the United States contains such a transformative potential.

This is the dilemma: as the deeply embedded discourses of nation, race, gender, class, and ethnicity lose their capacity to authoritatively organise identities and social relations - as they lose their symbolic efficiency - they nevertheless hold out the false promise of "potency, protection, containment, and even innocence" as a protection against ontological insecurity. However, even in this dystopian desert of social and political relations, Beck discovers a potential upside, Kristeva a transformative potential for subjective modification, and Butler recognises a potential opening onto transformative norms of recognition, while, contrariwise, Zizek discerns a collapse into narcissism.

For instance, Kristeva proposes an engagement with strangeness that begins with the unconscious and the recognition that we are "strangers to ourselves". She posits a world of "nations without nationalism" as antidote to the hazards of a cult of origins. (11) Kristeva counters the psychic defences of repression, abjection and splitting and projection with sublimation in which anxiety transforms into intensity, creativity, and a meditative welcoming of strangeness as the one universal quality that disarms all exclusivist particularisms. She champions what I term the capacity to dwell in ambivalence; a capacity that may be achieved, according to Kristeva, by recognising and reconciling with the stranger within and thereby modifying the effects of the unconscious in psychic, social and political life. (12) However, where Kristeva falters is in a failure to adequately address how such a subjective modification may be supported by instituted cultural formations.

Ontologica! Insecurity Must Be Defended Against, One Way or Another

After that brief overview, let me begin my entry into this complex territory by referencing Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as the play depicts what may be characterised as the ground zero of ontological insecurity. (13) It is not perverse or devastated nature that generates such ontological insecurity, but rather the loss of symbolic efficiency, in which the cultural supports that cocoon subjectivity and identity, and that also organise the character of social and political relations, have themselves collapsed or are in demise. Waitingfor Godot powerfully depicts the inherent connection between the demise of symbolic efficiency and the rise of ontological insecurity. (14)

In The Divided Self Ronald Laing writes:

"With Samuel Beckett, for instance, one enters a world in which there is no contradictory sense of the self in its 'health and validity' to mitigate the despair, terror, and boredom of existence. In such a way, the two tramps who wait for Godot are condemned to live: ESTRAGON: We always find something, eh, Didi, to give us the impression that we exist? VLADIMIR (impatiently): Yes, yes, we're magicians. But let us persevere in what we have resolved, before we forget." (15) The desperate need to defend against ontological insecurity is so powerful that, as Estragon says, "we always find something" to ward off the collapse into chaos. As elaborated in The Divided Self, even the most distressed of Laing's "patients" turned to whatever was available to hold themselves together, until even that defensive move caught them out. As Laing highlights, their desperate need to defend against ontological insecurity led them to embrace their very vulnerability as a last-resort defence. Laing explains that "(t)he most general expression of this principle is that when the risk is loss of being, the defence is to lapse into a state of non-being with, however, all the time the inner reservation that this lapsing into non-being is just a game, just pretending". The problem, however, is that "the individual may find that the pretence has been in the pretending and that, in a more real way than he had bargained for, he has actually lapsed into that very state of non-being he has so much dreaded". (16)

Fortunately, for most individuals and for most institutions, including the state, such desperate and self-immolating defences are not necessary...