Agonal Autism in the Syrian Conflict: Unterschied zwischen den Versionen

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 Building upon Michael Lüders' (2015) ''Wer Wind sät'' this paper looks into the (f)utility of one or the other conceptual tool to further our understanding of what went wrong in Syria - and what continues to push the whole region ever closer to the abyss.
-= Agonal Partnership =
+= Nostalgia and Dystopia =
+==Agonal Partnership ==
 Here is one hypothesis: while it has always been difficult to make the step from sword to talk, communication is much more difficult in the new age of asymmetric and unconventional warfare with its recurrent complaint by state parties to be suffering from a "lack of partners for peace". It was a great advantage of "old" wars that they were culturally embedded in a network of practices, customs, rules, and meta-rules that allowed for institutionalized (meta-) communication even while the fighting was still going on. That permitted phenomena like the Christmas Truce of 1914 (Blom Crocker 2015) to happen - or the story of a German flying behind the British lines to deliver a letter written by an enemy he had shot down himself (Seamark 2012):
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 Their irregularity makes unconventional parties vulnerable to be defined as terrorists. This label paves the way for extermination rather than negotiation. As White House Speaker Scott McClellan said when asked how the United States would react to Usama bin Laden's offer to negotiate a truce in 2006, "We don't negotiate with terrorists. We put them out of business" (Buncombe 2006). As soon as you call your enemies "terrorists" you promise yourself and others not to negotiate with them for both pragmatic (lack of trustworthiness) and deontologial ("thou shalt not negotiate with terrorists") reasons.
-= Agonal Autism =
+== Agonal Autism ==
 If we try to find a way to describe the Syrian situation today, we have to look for an antonym to the Mühlmannina term of agonal partnership - a search that could produce a term like "agonal autism". That would refer to the lack of communality, and the non-functioning of social communication and interaction including a basic lack of reciprocity. In people with an autistic personality disorder this comes to show in the problems that appear in everyday rituals like meeting and leaving, asking, giving and thanking, reciprocal smiles, frowns etc. - To be sure, the clinical term of autism has quite a varied use from Eugen Bleuler's first use in 1911 as a central symptom of schizophrenia over Sigmund Freud's equation of autism with narcissism, and all the way to today's everyday use to refer to persons with an excessive self-centeredness and who are in need of help because of their living mostly in their own imagination. While it may certainly be seen as objectionable to pick a term of individual pathology to draw analogies to political strategies, one may decide to provisionally accept this manoeuvre - and be it ''faute de mieux'' until some more appropriate term emerges.
-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 the reality will be shaped accordingly: there will be no negotiation (even if the enemy were willing and able).
+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 the reality will be shaped accordingly: there will be no negotiations (even if the enemy were willing and able).
+= Do Governments Need Therapy? =
+== Agonal Autism as a Problem of Communication ==
+What we have called by the provisional name of agonal autism seems closely related to the phenomenon of so-called ''discrepant punctuation'' (Watzlawick et al. 1967), i.e. a narrative that reconstructs a sequence of events in a conflict in favor of the narrating participant. Just think of two children reporting their fight to their parents: each one will tend to ascribe responsibility for what has happened to the other one, claiming that he/she had only reacted to what the other one had done: "He started it all - he left me no choice!").
-= Discrepant Punctuation =
+Why people develop such a perceptional and interactional self-centeredness is not really difficult to understand. It is a function of self-preservation. Even extreme self-centeredness is a natural phenomenon. At least in developmental psychology. There, narcissism is the dominant trait during the first months of a human baby's life. As development proceeds, narcissism is being refined and reduced and ends up as a healthy "ego-ideal" in the adult (just like the super-ego can be seen as what is left in the adult person of the earlier Oediupus conflict).
-Why people develop a perceptional and interactional self-centeredness is not really difficult to understand. It is a function of self-preservation. Even extreme self-centeredness is a natural phenomenon. At least in developmental psychology. There, narcissism is the dominant trait during the first months of a human baby's life. As development proceeds, narcissism is being refined and reduced and ends up as a healthy "ego-ideal" in the adult (just like the super-ego can be seen as what is left in the adult person of the earlier Oediupus conflict).
 Of course, there are all kinds of risks and hazards on the way to what is considered a well-balanced adult. In developmental criminology, some theorists (e.g. Kaplan 1980) contend that the need for a defense against low self-esteem (brought about by low performance in school) can be seen as a motivating factor for delinquent behavior (with defensiveness operationalized as a discrepancy between scores on measures of high conscious self-esteem and low unconscious esteem).
-In social psychology, a certain self-centeredness in the service of the defense of self can be seen manifesting itself in dyadic conflicts between individuals, such as in long-standing conflicts between husband and wife. Here, each partner tends to have his/her own narrative of who treated whom unfairly first. This is what interactionist communication researchers have come to refer to as the phenomenon of ''discrepant punctuation'' in a sequence of events (Watzlawick et al. 1967).
+In social psychology, a certain self-centeredness in the service of the defense of self can be seen manifesting itself in dyadic conflicts between individuals, such as in long-standing conflicts between husband and wife. Here, each partner tends to have his/her own narrative of who treated whom unfairly first. The fundamental reason why different narratives about conflicts exist has to do with the fact that - in any longer chain of events - every item in the sequence can simultaneously be seen as stimulus, response, and reinforcement. As Bateson & Jackson (1964: 273-4) explained: "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 have 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."
-The reason why different narratives about conflicts exist, is, for one thing, the fact that - in any longer chain of events - every item in the sequence can simultaneously be seen as stimulus, response, and reinforcement.
-:"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 have 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" (Bateson & Jackson, 1964, pp. 273-74).
 Every party to a conflict tends to see the other party as the cause of the grievance, and its own actions as a reaction to the other party's misbehavior. According to Watzlawick et al. (1967), disagreement about how to punctuate a sequence of events is at the root of countless relationship struggles:
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 The evident function of clinging to one's own version of the sequence of events is - again - the defense of the worth and integrity of one's own self. The longer and the more costly those discrepant punctuations of sequences of events become, the more it will turn into a threat to a common good (the existence as a couple as such). In such a situation it is good to reach out for a third party (a therapist) who can observe the couple from a meta-level of communication and devise methods of cautious interventions with the goal of slowly opening both partners to the perceptions of the other.
-= Do Governments Need Therapy? =
 Nothing is more tempting than to transfer the image of the husband-wife-conflict with its mutually exclusive narratives about causes and responsibilities ("you started it all, I only react to what you are doing to me") onto the level of international conflicts.