Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

Agonal autism lacks the prerequisites of agonal partnership, i.e. it lacks the option to change from a first level of antagonism (fighting each other) to a second one consisting of communication about the conflict). Lacking such a normative framework on a meta-level, a party to a conflict is condemned to a radically self-centered perception, conceptualization, and action within a conflict. Parties fight each other, but with regard to the codes of right/wrong, good/bad, legal/illegal, etc., their autism confines them within the conceptual walls of their own subjective world view and reality. All of this would be innocuous were it not for the fact that - as the Thomas theorem goes - "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences" (Thomas & Thomas 1928: 571-2). In other words: If a party to a conflict believes that the enemy is "really" neither willing nor able nor worth to negotiate, then there will the real consequence that there will be not negotiation - even if in the objective world the enemy were of a kind that did want to negotiate, were able to do it and were worth dealing with peacefully. The "real consequences" of the mere belief then could be the annihilation of the enemy believed to be unable, unwilling and unworthy negotiations.  

:"A given item of A's behavior is a stimulus insofar as it is followed by an item contributed by B and that by another item contributed by A. But insofer as A's item is sanwiched between two items contributed by B, it is a response. Similarly A's item is a reinforcement insofar as it follows an item contributed by B. The ongoing interchanges, then, which we are here discussing, constitute a chain of overlapping triadic links, each of which is comparable to a stimulus-response-reinforcement sequence. We can take any triad of our interchange and see it as a single trial in a stimulus response learning experiment. - If we look at the conventional learning experiments from this point of view, we observe at once that repeated trials amount to a differentiation of relationship between the two organisms concerned - the experimenter and his subject. The sequence of trials is so punctuated that it is always the experimenter who seems to provide the 'stimuli' and the 'reinforcements', while the subject provides the 'responses'. These words are here deliberately put in quotation marks because the role definitions are in fact only created by the willingness of the organisms to accept the system of punctuation. The 'reality' of the role definitions is only of the same order as the reality of a bat on a Rorschach card - a more or less over-determined creation of the perceptive process. The rat who said 'I ahve got my experimenter trained. Each time I press the lever he gives me food' was declining to accept the punctuation of the sequence which the experimenter was seeking to impose. - It is still true, however, that in a long sequence of interchange, the organisms concerned - especially if these be people - will in fact punctuate the sequence so that it will appear that one or the other has initiative, dominance, dependency or the like. That is, they will set up between them patterns of interchange (about which they may or may not be in agreement) and these patterns will in fact be rules of contingency regarding the exchange of refinforcements. While rats are too nice to re-label, some psychiatric patients are not, and provide psychological trauma for the therapist! (Bateson & Jackson, 1964, pp. 273-74).  

:"Suppose a couple have a marital problem to which he contributes passive withdrawal, while her 50 per cent is nagging criticism. In explaining their frustrations, the husband will state that withdrawal is his only defense against' her nagging, while she will label this explanation a gross and willful distortion of what 'really' happens in their marriage: namely, that she is critical of him because of his passivity. Stripped of all ephemeral and fortuitous elements, their fights consist in a monotonous exchange of the messages 'I withdraw because you nag' and 'I nag because you withdraw.' (...) It can be seen that the husband only perceives triads 2-3-4, 4-5-6, 6-7-8, etc., where his behavior (solid arrows) is 'merely' a response to her behavior (the broken arrows). With her it is exactly the other way around; she punctuates the sequence of events into the triads 1-2-3, 3-4-5, 5-6-7, etc., and sees herself as only reacting to, but not determining, her husband's behavior. In conjoint psychotherapy with couples one is frequently struck by the intensity of what in traditional psychotherapy would be referred to as 'reality distortion' on the part of both parties. It is often hard to believe that two individuals could have such divergent views on many elements of joint experience. And yet the problem lies primarily in an area already frequently mentioned: their inability to metacommunicate about their respective patterning of their interaction. This interaction is of an oscillatory yes-no-yes-no-yes nature which theoretically can go on ad infinitum and almost invariably is accompanied, as we shall see later, by the typical charges of badness or madness."

Nothing is more tempting than to transfer the husband-wife-conflict with its mutually exclusive narratives about causes and responsibilities ("you started it all") onto the level of international conflicts and to refine it a little bit by adding game theoretical concepts. As a matter of fact, Watzlawick et al. (1967) themselves suggested the application of the concept of discrepant punctuation to the arms race. In a way, though, such a focus on faulty communication tends to belittle the relevance of socio-economic interests, power structures, and legitimizing discourses. To say that conflict parties just do not talk enough and that they do not talk enough because they have different perceptions of  who started it all and who is responsible for the conflict ("discrepant punctuation") simply does not grasp the fact that international politics are not governed by naively distorted perceptions, but that - as a rule - they at least contain a large portion of strategic modelling for purposes of generating sufficient support on the home front. In the end, the official political discourse and the mainstream media discourse might look very similar to the one-sidedness of a husband's narrative in a couple conflict, but while the husband may be given the benefit of naiveté, the White House Syria (or Iran) narrative should be given credit for having been more carefully constructed to serve the foreign policy interests as defined by those in that house.