Social Prescriptions and Protopia

The Royal Ontario Museum reports on social prescriptions in action

About Social Prescriptions

Social prescriptions are a means for healthcare, community, and social service professionals to refer people to non-clinical and non-medical services that, along with existing treatments, can be a therapeutic tool for improving health and well-being.

In Ontario, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care funded a one-year pilot project with The Alliance for Healthier Communities in September 2018. This program offers social prescriptions in 11 community health centres to address the growing problems of loneliness and social isolation, particularly among older adults. The ROM will be collaborating with the Alliance throughout the year to better understand the impact of museums on health and well-being. Research resulting from this collaboration will help inform the ROM Social Prescription Program as it evolves.

This encounter with the notion of "social prescriptions" in a message from the ROM made me wonder about "digital social prescriptions." What would they look like?

I'm slowly making my way through Kevin Kelly's The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. This material is way better than his previous work. I remember being put off on his hive mind riffs. This seems more measured and asks the reader to be attentive to the bits of the future that are already here and he clears away any tension between utopia and dystopia by coining the term "protopia."

[N]either dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is take us to protopia. More accurately, we have already arrived in protopia.

Protopia is a state of becoming rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress. The "pro" in protopian stems from the notions of process and progress. The subtle progress is not dramatic, not exciting. It is easy to miss because a protopia generates almost as many new problems as new benefits.

Sounds as if he is inspired by Eastern philosophy. Perfect prescription to balance out unchecked teleological inclinations.

And so for day 2337
07.05.2013

traversée du texte traversé de textes

In the Robarts Library copy of Louis Marin Utopiques : Jeux d'spaces (page 182) marginal note in pencil by a previous reader

Picture
Theory
de
Brossard

Next to this marginal note, this is what is underlined:

Ces espaces blanc de la carte utopique que le discours utopique signifie aveuglément, sont en quelque sorte les lieux de concepts théoriques impensables dans les forme où ils seront ultérieurement pensés. Aussi l'analyse comparative des différences qui animent l'espace utopique dans le text et du texte, conduit-elle à la formulation des conditions historiques de possibilité de la théorie.

I like the snippet that precedes this without being underlined and so emphasized by a sort of inversion: "déplacée ou condensé, sous forme figurative."

p.182
Louis Marin
La ville : espace du texte et espace dans le texte
Chapitre 6
Utopiques : Jeux d'espaces
Minuit, 1973

A few pages later (p.184) this footnote by Marin

D'où sans doute également le système d'interdictions et de réglementations concernant les voyages des Utopies dans leur île : voyager c'est rompre les alternances ritualisées de repos et de travail en lieu déterminé, c'est introduire l'imprévu. C'est au fond frayer, dans le temps et dans l'espace, de nouveaux chemins. Là encore, il y a dans le voyage une forme de rupture et de violence à l'égard des totalités, qu'il s'agisse de l'habitude du rite ou de l'espace.

There are in this copy of Marin's book other instances of marginalia referencing lesbian authors: Brossard again with Mauve Desert and Wittig's Les Guérillères. Someone was constructing a relay between lesbian imagination and utopics.

(( route via exstasie ))

Marin's notion of travel as a form rupture and as the founding moment of Utopian space certainly is taken up in Brossard's notions of relays and the access to abstraction in Picture Theory which are accessed through the erotic contact of women with women. Three excerpts:

la lumière éclipsant sur le livre
le titre sans l'ombre d'un doute
je traduisais réellement par le nombre
puis venait la transparence les corps portés
comme des relais je disais aussi
bras de femmes l'espoir

Claire Dérive retrace exactement le circuit
des espaces conditionnés nôtres
et les zones libres tout autour
spiralées, ce sont les musiques sans lesquelles
il n'y aurait ni utopie, ni abstraction
ni aucune lèvre à jouir

Ce mot ne pouvait non plus servir à élaborer quelque utopie qui aurait rendu les femmes à leur genre. Je disais, avec dans la bouche un goût de sel, à propos de l'utopie en commençant par le mot femme que l'utopie n'allait pas assurer notre insertion dans la réalité mais qu'un témoignage utopique de notre part pouvait stimuler en nous une qualité d'émotion propice à notre insertion dans l'histoire.

Translated by Barbara Godard

This word could not be used either to elaborate some Utopia that would have restored women to their gender. I said, with a taste of salt in the mouth, on the subject of Utopia beginning with the word woman that Utopia was not going to ensure our insertion into reality but that a Utopian testimony on our part could stimulate in us a quality of emotion favourable for our insertion in history.

Travel is textual.

p. 154

Where one expects "Dérive" one finds "Drive".

Is this a typo that is corrected in the 1989 revised edition text?

Picture theory ; Hologramme
Montréal : Nouvelle Optique, c1982.

Picture theory : théorie/fiction
Nouv. éd. rev., corr. et augm.
Montréal : L'Hexagone, 1989.

Language drives the drift. Text traces the access to the impossibilities of utopia and from there to the possibility of theory.

And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

John Donne, The Extasie.

And so for day 2331
01.05.2013

Embracing A Most Peculiar Aside

A Summary Account . . .

(I should say somewhere about here that when I say "he" I also mean "she": as the late President Smith used to say, man generally embraces woman.)

Northrop Frye By Liberal Things (1959). This is his address upon his installation as Principal of Victoria College.

The aside can be read as a humorous touch of heteronormativity. Tone is all. But for even the tone-deaf, it is the "generally" that once spotted works its magic. It signals exceptions. Other ways.

Indeed the context of the aside is set in the commonplace of attending university to find oneself.

Finding out why they went is something that comes much later, if it comes at all. An inscrutable Providence has decreed that they should be at university during the mating season, and for some students, going to college is partly a sexual ritual, like the ceremonial dances of the whooping crane. More thoughtful students are fond of asking themselves and each other why they came to college, and their reasons are generally [there's that keyword again] given in terms of usefulness. But the thoughtful student soon realizes that the university is not there to be useful to him; he is there to be useful to it. It does not help him to prepare for life: life will not stay around to be prepared for. [...] There is no answer to the student's question, for the only place an answer can come from is an experience that he has not yet had. [enter the aside quoted above].

How is it that I come to read "generally" as offering a sliver? By training as a reader. Training I generally received at university.

Such close reading partakes of the moves made by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009). He draws upon the work of Ernest Bloch (The Principle of Hope) to carve out space for the work of the experience-not-yet-had.

The point is once again to pull from the past, the no-longer-conscious, described and represented by Bloch today, to push beyond the impasse of the present.

Between the then of Frye and the then of Muñoz lies the publication of The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing: For writers, editors, and speakers was first published in 1980 by Casey Miller and Kate Swift. And after them all a challenge to recite the specificity of desire: "Every gay person has been in a situation where less specific pronouns are useful, perhaps even a safety measure [...] “you” has fallen out of favour and pop seems joyfully full of new young artists not only being candid about who their songs are lusting after, but celebrating that point of difference, too."

I remember as a youth before attending university listening to "I Don't Know How to Love Him" lifted from Jesus Christ Superstar and performed by Helen Reddy. Long before I learnt about shifters like the pronoun "I" (Émile Benveniste), long before I could claim experience of many before, long before the mysteries of incarnation shone for me, I was queering the text:

I don't know how to take this
I don't see why he moves me
He's a man he's just a man
And I've had so many men before
In very many ways he's just one more

Muñoz again:

Queerness's form is utopian. Ultimately, we must insist on a queer futurity because the present is so poisonous and insolvent. A resource that cannot be discounted to know the future is indeed the no-longer-conscious, that thing or place that may be extinguished but not yet discharged in its utopian potentiality.

insolvent - discounted - discharged
Bills come due. But who is doing the accounting? Who keeps the general ledger?

And so for day 2128
10.10.2012