I am currently researching The Orion Grid, a new model of connecting beautiful people to create beautiful things in service of recovering the status of the soul, wondering and reason. The Orion Grid is an Imaginarium, your own space to become the best you can be - and if you can dream it, you can become it. It is also space where you and I meet. I work with an initial Theory of Change Map presenting the logic of the Grid as an intervention and a referent organisation.

 

The concept of a grid builds on my earlier ideas of what space means. However, it makes a more explicit reference to the galvanising qualities of being in a group. My notion of space, which is inherent in the idea of a grid or what Gordon Lawrence called a matrix, also takes into account what Derrida refers to as gramme or trace. I evoke the concept of a trace to emphasise the multi-layered nature of our living and working within the social domain – a constraining as much as a channelling framework for meaningful action, in which the trace is the smallest ingredient.

 

My use of the word grid emphasises that the group dynamics, as Kurt Lewin suggested, is always charged with an emancipatory potential. More pessimistic authors, such as Bion and Menzies-Lyth, observed that groups (and even more so the resultant social structures of, say, organisations) fail to actualize this potential as they serve as defences against anxety - sometimes mature defences, but very often dysfuctional distortions from the working task. I am therefore particularly curious about Kurt Lewin's ideas of how group dynamics allows for tapping on richer and deeper layers of the unconscious and their sources of meaning.

 

My work on artistic projects suggests that we cannot see the unconscious as a singular entity that ends up with the Eros and Thanatos, or the Pleasure and Death Principles. There are layers beyond, perhaps closer to what Jung observed, that link to archetypal structures and processes. For me, these layers spread even further beyond, into what Irigaray calls the infinity; or what, I believe, Plato described as the world of ideas, what Heidegger explored as the essence of things or their qualia and perhaps what Kandinsky was searching for in his paths to absolute abstraction.

 

The dramatic failure of groups seems to be due to defensive basic assumptions that make groups drift away from the working task and towards second agendas. Accessing and naming phantasies permits their understanding and utilisation in service of a specific working task (through mutative interpretations and, I would suggest, by means of artistic expression). Fresh judgements in choosing interpretations, each time a new, are the key to unlocking this emancipatory potential by diving into these deeper layers and, as such, these interventions belong to the aesthetic domain.

 

The emancipatory potential differs from the healing potential - if the two can and should be separated - to the extent to which the former carries the energy to galvanise action, whereas the latter ideally creates the possible conditions. The quality of the group dynamics would depend on the capacity of the hosts, or the facilitators, to guide the group not only into the aesthetic domain (creativity), but also backwards to the domain of production - with its practicalities of being, living and working. This journey through domains is necessery in order to allow for the action to actualise itself rather than to be engineered or forced.

 

I understand action not as a mere act of doing or implementing any working task, but as what takes place in a space where people can appear as political and creative subjects, or what Arendt understood by praxis. The galvanisation I refer to provides the transmitter for a group or a space to become a praxis, a matrix or even a virtual referent organisation to address pressing contemporary social issues or what Thrist called simply a mess.  A core element of a skilful facilitation then requires interweaving deconstruction as a part of making an interpretation of group, social and political processes a mutative interpretation and of making the use of an artistic technique an inspiration for action - that is, an art.

 

This is, in my view, where the trace enters the scene. The trace is at the heart of deconstruction and ultimately at the core of all processes of meaning making. Derrida introduced the concept of a gramme, translated usually as trace, in Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology. In French, according to Wikipedia, the word 'trace' has a range of meanings similar to those of its English equivalent, but the article suggests also meanings related to the English words "track", "path", or "mark". The meaning of a sign, or rather perhaps its path through meaning, is generated from the difference it has from other signs. The difference especially includes the other half of the binary pair that the sign refers to - for example, the meaning of gender is contained in the continuum of the 'male'/female' dichotomy, 'high' is always paired with 'low' and so on.

 

I observe that groups are excellently positioned to unpack such continua and to deconstruct meaning. An advanced group I worked with yesterday noticed that members find themselves in a space of wondering and curiosity whether the link between the last and the current session is the hope they hold for the group or whether the link is the resistance to be in a group. At the same time, they were curious (and somewhat confused perhaps) if they have forgotten or, in fact, if they remember too well the last session. As one of its members put it, it is as if the group is reading an invisible ink.

 

The link to this invisible ink is exactly the trace and is explained well further in the Wikipedia article:

 

'the sign itself contains a trace of what it does not mean and as such it is "the nonmeaning that is inevitably brought to mind along with the meaning" [...] Derrida does not positively