Abstract
In this chapter, a more unfolded analysis is presented, of practices called ‘aesthetic documentation’ at a Copenhagen facility for counselling young drug users. A general introduction places those practices as prototypical for one way to develop ‘post-therapeutic’ approaches in this field, and especially for taking up aesthetics as a way to cultivate meta-motives. The specific activities studied, in close collaboration with participants, are those of a ‘creative writing group’. This requires a contextualization in the current cultural revolution of forms and genres of writing and of self-writing, in art, self-help and beyond, spurred not least by technological developments. Introduced by a sample poem, we then discuss the writing group in dialogue with the writer of the poem, before we dive into a recorded sequence of the writing group activity, to see how the aesthetic dissense of poetic re-/presentation works as a form of externalization and generalization that allows meta-motives to be addressed in a caring way.
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Notes
- 1.
By June, 2023: https://uturn.kk.dk/
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
In local political terms, ‘counselling’ is used as argument for hiring relatively more skilled professionals, including psychologists, more than they can do at neighboring youth work facilities (e.g., street-level work) – even as U-turn also emphasizes the importance of their trans-professional staff and insist on common supervision, so that, for example, psychologists have problems with getting recognition for it in their specialist training.
- 5.
EMCDDA, see https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/emcdda-home-page_en.
- 6.
- 7.
It is quite typical in social work institutions to name activities and collectives by reference to time or place; this probably reflects their often hybrid nature.
- 8.
To get an impression of this diversity, browse the wonderful http://www.scriptopolis.fr.
- 9.
“Hi Hash. We’ve been good friends now for 5 years I wish you were easier to let go of you, You’ve been part of both good and bad things. But now I’m getting to the point where I want to part ways and show who’s in charge toward brighter days! PhiliP” (errors ‘translated’ from similar errors in the original Danish).
- 10.
Another example, for the Scandinavian readers, is the Norwegian sociologist Yngve Hammerlin, who wrote a sociology of family violence mixed with an account of his own father’s regime of terror throughout his childhood – first using a pseudonym, later, after his father’s death, in his own name (Møller, 2000, cf. also Nissen, 2017).
- 11.
- 12.
Cf., e.g., (June, 2023) https://www.turningtables.org/ or https://www.kennethbalfelt.org/
- 13.
This kind of ‘kitch’ romanticization is far from exclusive to cheap B-films or TV shows. In fact, I would criticize that romanticization is predominant in ‘quality addiction movies’ such as Candy (Armfield, 2006) or Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000) – whereas Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996), Traffic (Soderbergh, 2000), and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (Van Sant, 2018) are much more dissensual and aesthetically edifying. These latter films problematize, while the former repeat and invoke, the easy common-sense emotions of fearful empathy with and attraction to the beautiful young self-destroying protagonists (see also Høgsbro & Nissen, 2014).
- 14.
The widespread, and, in my estimation, increasing emphasis on energy in live performances of rhythmic music (high volume, dominant and simple rhythm section) can be said to accentuate this question.
- 15.
We have also began writing/curating together “Tankesten” (Thinkstones), a website (in Danish), which serves as a “noo-diverse” (Stiegler et al. 2021) publication of the analyses and the artworks that emerge from our collaboration.
- 16.
See the resulting video (June, 2023) at http://www.stuffsite.org/galleri/.
- 17.
See (June, 2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Strunge.
- 18.
Famous contemporary Danish poet, see (June, 2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Ulrik_Thomsen.
- 19.
Note that the concept of ’assemblage’ has been rearticulated here in a way similar to that of ‘affectivity’. Its abstract negation, its thingness, is viewed as a moment in the unfolding of care.
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Nissen, M. (2023). Writing Poetic Selves. In: Rearticulating Motives. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43494-5_5
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