What about you?

If you are a pilot flying over Pata Rât (a ghetto of 2500 inhabitants near one of Cluj-Napoca’s derelict waste dumps, one of the biggest of this kind in Europe) the area may look to you like a bunch of cardboard huts near a mountain of garbage. If you are a person who grew up in Pata Rât, the same place may be the entire world of human relationships and histories you have ever known. 

I (a 55-year-old white middle-class male with degrees in computer science and fine arts working for an NGO) have been doing socially engaged cultural work in Pata Rât for over a decade, so I had plenty of chances to wobble between the two perspectives. I’ve co-organized over one hundred workshops, dozens of events, and even a festival – building and unbuilding, learning and forgetting day by day. So what kept me busy? The selfish agenda of altruism. The arrogance of humbleness. The ego-trip of solidarity. I don’t know.  

Since 2013 the AltArt Foundation I work for has spent over 2 million EUR (mostly EU grants) on projects in Pata Rât. When me and my colleagues narrate about our work in the pidgin of EU cultural bureaucracy, we manage to generate the honourably reassuring look of an institution heading somewhere. Then our Pata Rât friends tell us we did nothing right. 

I spent my past decade among crippling self-questionings and restarts by newfound conviction.

So what is good? What is right? For example, moral and legal philosopher John Rawls says good is something defined by a/any group of people, then right is defined by the same people as the ways of maximizing good. As long as you don’t live in a sociotope heavily burdened by power dynamics, this utilitarian approach might even sound like something you could navigate by. But Pata Rât is a sociotope where the maelstroms of structural violence, systemic oppression, racism, and classism blow at their harshest, meet, crash, and mess up your compass.

How? You negotiate day by day among institutional, group and personal agendas and agencies. Your institution is financially accountable to other institutions,  while you are morally accountable to persons. This tension, even in the happier cases of institutions that do represent the interests of your “beneficiaries”, can bless you with some cognitive dissonances. 

But caught in the midst of an oppressor-oppressed setup of the worst kind in Pata Rât, being financially accountable to the oppressor and morally accountable to the oppressed is, mildly put, schizophrenic. So how do you handle this? You move between the parties the best you can, and try to make some points. In this process you come to four realizations.

First, you’d realize your interactions with the institutions to whom you declare your financial allegiance to show they are not at all Weberian – as in not neutral and even less impersonal. Institutions are made up of people, who – given the institutional oppression breathing down heavily on their necks and fostering oppressive behavior –  will feel mildly cringed-to-annoyed-to-irritated-to-outraged by your popping up at their doors with your cases. So in time, doors start to close. And you’d realize they slowly assimilated you as the avant-poste of the oppressed. 

Second, you’d realize you initiated your relationship with the ghetto as a (non-roma) gajo, deploying a (rather uncommon) NGO discourse, legitimized and financed by an (oppressive) superstructure. As a consequence, you’d understand you started your work perceived by the ghetto-dwellers as the avant-poste of the oppressor, then working your way up on the trust-chain ever since, with variable success.

Third, you’d realize there is a very narrow and volatile strip of equilibrium between the sides – if any. Outside this sweet spot, your bargainings aiming for  glorious “win-wins” would often turn out to be utopian, while aiming for humbler “minimizations of damage” an honourable option. 

Fourth, you’d realize that once you started, the landslide of self-questionings-and-transformations cannot stop. Where does your agency come from? What legitimizes it? This is the real grinder. You might realize any identity (except the no-identity or the total-identity) would necessarily prove itself untenable, while looking for the next – a self-fulfilling curse. This sounds a bit like the You vs. Nature joke whereas you cannot win, you cannot strike a draw, and you cannot quit the game. 

But this game – as in working in Pata Rât, you can actually quit. So if you decide you don’t, on what grounds do you keep continuing? Some Kantian moral imperative? Too universalist. Humanism? Solidarity? These are the same as socially constructed – and therefore historically unstable – as any of our other concepts. Christian brotherly love? That is actually metaphysical, and can be genuinely performed only by a no-identity or total-identity, but both annihilate the object-subject dichotomy so the You (as opposed to the not-You) would disappear in the act.

My current best is looking at individual identity as an illusion emerging at the overlap of bigger illusions called collective identities. It helps, but I don’t know how long this will last either.  And I work in Pata Rât because at the time of this writing, I find I cannot not do it. 

What about you?