The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Lies

(First published on Kiltr Apr 2017)

(I’ve written before about how and why I write. This one’s been in the cooker for a while and after finally putting pen to paper, old epilepticus interrupticus had a significant say on progress. So, having dragged it stutteringly over the finish line with some semblance of the original ideas clung onto, I realise it may be a tad lengthy for some; I have done an edit and it was actually a third longer than this version! I kind of need to put this one to bed with the clusters still lurking so, although I realise it could be punchier, if you’ve enjoyed anything I’ve written before, stick with it, it gets there and I think it matters. Try and enjoy, maybe not too much.)

Two previously seemingly incompatible ideas have jostled, intermittently grasping at my attention, for a few months now, the collusion in their new and telling synchronicity almost undeniable. There is more to it than the numbers, isn’t there always.

They begin somewhere, those ideas, with where we find our notions of surety, of certainty and how they determine identity, opinion and their nebulous connections to ‘truth’. They seem wholly relevant to me right now, just a matter of context.

As the modern dawned and was swiftly eclipsed, faced with the collapse of certainty, of faith in the grand, over-arching, structuring meta-narratives of modernism, laid waste to by the surety of nationalisms they gave rise to, what is called the existential attitude grew out of the resultant, prevailing disorientation. Confusion, or even dread, is an understandable response when faced with a world rendered meaningless and absurd. It seems a little more than coincidence these are current common responses to similar issues.

Those philosophers we have come to call existentialist, despite a lack of systematic cohesion in reaching forward from Kierkegaard’s 1840’s to their popularisation in the post WWII period, and despite profound doctrinal differences between the proponents of an existential attitude, have come to profoundly influence much of philosophical and theological thought, as well as the fields of drama, art, literature and psychology which have evolved since. It has become almost too easy for us to conceive of an existential crisis. We live in a world which seems to lurch from one to the next on an hourly, if not more frequent, basis.

Back, before the collapse of certainty, and before that certainty was invested in the seemingly empirical worlds of rationality and scientific reasoning, in those meta-narratives, human beings would look to the spey wife, the wise man, shaman, or elders of their tribe to make sense of crises. Somewhere in our ancestral memories, perhaps this allowed us to be, at least partially, soothed by the later organisational ministrations of a paternalistic society. Leaders, ministers, politicians, ‘homo-social males’ convinced us they knew best. All too often they would, believing themselves to be engaged with some greater good endeavour, consider themselves to be practically minded, yet would lend proof to Keynes’ assertion that:

‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’

Ideas form continuums, spectrums. It is rare for them to stop or start abruptly in cultural, societal or even individual terms. As political solutions, and the philosophical base they have been grounded in, responding to a seemingly near constant slew of global, societal and individual crises, appear to retread the answers and follies of decades further and further past, it seems odd not to have looked to the existentialists for at least a modicum of understanding. Surely when faced with an existential crisis, consulting an existentialist, or their works, on how to deal with it might have been a good place to start.

In our understanding of a world underpinned by the increasing ridiculousness of political machinations in defiance of scientific realities, there can be few more profoundly relevant philosophical conceptual aids to understanding than the existentialist notion of the Absurd. When Camus claimed, as his response to the existentialist (Camus always maintained he was an Absurdist if he was anything at all) declaration of there being no meaning inherent in the world other than that which we ascribe to it, with this meaninglessness encompassing all of the absurdity of amorality or ‘unfairness’ in the world, ‘there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’, despite being forever associated with a philosophy said to begin with the individual, he was as much describing the world in crisis as he was any single experience of the human condition.

Existentialism may begin with, as a matter of first principles, individual existence and the primary virtues of its authenticity, but it is far from restricted to it. Often it has been the resonance for the individual in existentialist thought which has seemingly precluded its extension into the societal or organisational spheres, but it was not always so nor was it intended to be by so many of it’s proponents. It turned inward as an inevitable reaction against the trajectory of the world.

The existential attitude, the only approach which can really be said to be common amongst most or all of what have only really been retrospectively called existential philosophers, is a rejection of the systemic organising philosophies which precede them, rather than being a systemic or systematic approach in and of itself. This has led to notorious difficulties in fully defining existentialism as a philosophy, it’s very founding notions seeming to resist the organising principle. It is it’s blessing and it’s curse.

So, the damning empty summaries of history have ascribed dominance, among existentialist philosophers, to personality, to individuals rather than a system of existentialism. And this has extended perceptually to stereotyping. For most people the image their mind assumes of an existentialist philosopher, all Gauloises, goatee, turtle-neck and pontification, is barely distinguishable from those conjured up for the beatnik or jazz musician of the late fifties and early sixties.

Asked to name the most pointed existential literature, even to those with more than a reductive stereotypical interest, many would reach for Sartre, Camus or even Kafka. Few would automatically realise the warranted inclusion of a Scottish variant, acknowledged and regarded highly by existentialist thinkers, beat writers and situationists.

The journey this errant scribbler takes into the philosophical world of unremitting absurdity and meaninglessness reaches somewhere further than any of the more familiar touchstones, beyond the eternal recurring crises of the individual and the world they are thrust into described by existentialism. It has been reduced in the scope of its appeal, the resonance of its depth, its absolute resistance to quietism, by the brief resurgence of interest brought about largely through the more salacious elements garnered by process of association.

Many may have found their way to Alexander Trocchi’s ‘Cain’s Book’, reprinted after a resurgence of interest, following the rise of grotesqueries in Irvine Welsh’s particular brand of ‘junky chic’ fetishisation, with some carried over from the initial surge following Trocchi’s death in 1984. Few appear to have drawn out the existential regard which it deserves. Certainly not enough to publish much about. Fewer still have followed those thoughts through to the philosophical drive behind Trocchi’s other situationist and philosophical tracts.

Certainly, as it appeared to lay waste to his talents and not a few peers, you could define, as has been done plentifully, reduce the life of Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi to junk. His words, his ideas are much more than that, allowing them to be defined by it only means there will have been little point to his embrace of it in the first place.

There are more than a few familiar retro-spectre narratives we apply to profligate drug users of the past. They speak more to our own societal or cultural apprehensions than theirs. Any moral probity we may ascribe to consternation (likewise too any glorification of the apparently implied hedonism or debauchery) is a cultural appropriation through time, which fails to acknowledge it’s passing or the conceit of moral superiority in that failure.

Wherever we look, and particularly where we have manufactured monsters, and see the looming demons of mass societal addictions, there are all too often convenient scapegoats and there is always more to the story. In the UK, US and across Europe, at the end of the nineteenth century, working class families used opium for all manner of illness and injury. Across class divides, opium and morphine were popular for medicinal and recreational purposes. Many of those supplying the drug were not doctors, or even medically trained. Accidental overdoses were not unusual.

When the Bayer pharmaceutical company, in 1898, began an aggressive marketing campaign for its commercial preparation of diacetylmorphine, which they called Heroin, it was heavily promoted as being non-addictive and an excellent treatment for opium, morphine or cocaine addictions, as well as a treatment for bronchitis, tuberculosis and other cough inducing illnesses. Treatment of morphine addiction in war injured soldiers, where it was the only available tool for pain relief from gunshot, shrapnel or amputations, was a serious social concern, which Heroin was thought to redress.

Despite realisations of the continuing dangers of treating opiate addictions with another opiate, and resultant changes to domestic law on either side of the Atlantic, there were few options for injured soldiers returning from both World Wars. During WWII, opium trade routes, for legal and illegal trafficking, had been blocked or broken and the flow of opium from India and Persia waned. Fearful of losing what had been developing as something of a monopoly, the French encouraged Hmong farmers to expand their opium production.

In the post WWII period, as Burma, now Myanmar, gained its independence from the UK, opium cultivation and trade flourished in the Shan states. US, UK and to a lesser extent European efforts to ‘contain the spread of Communism in Asia’, came to involve forging alliances with tribes and warlords of The Golden Triangle (an expanse covering Laos, Thailand and Myanmar). In order to maintain these relationships and in the struggle to fund the fight against communism, the US and France supplied the drug warlords with arms and transport for the production and sale of opium. The result was an explosion in availability of heroin and other, legal and illegal, opiates in the West and a steep rise in the social issues created by increasing levels of addiction.

In the meantime, Methadone, first synthesised in Nazi Germany in 1939, in the laboratories of IG Farben, as a synthetic opiate substitute, had it’s patent and supply confiscated by the US Department of Commerce Intelligence. Despite all previous trials, in Germany and in the US, showing the high likelihood of addiction and increased serious health issues through it’s use, US manufacturers of Methadone as a treatment for Heroin addiction claimed it had ‘little risk of addiction’.

It is against this backdrop, amidst demob junkies and cycles of addiction peddled as state cures to addiction, absurdity as solution to relentless meaninglessness of a particularly societally poignant kind, Trocchi first embraced the reduction of junk. For him it becomes a metaphor, as well as a lived authentic reality, of the simple existential binary alternatives of all life, those of necessity and choice.

Heroin for Trocchi is a narrative device, as much for his own existence, his fierce resistance to quietism, as in its authenticity in fulfilling that role in his work. It is a moveable void which he carries with him, in him. As Tom McCarthy has pointed out, Trocchi, the man, the author, the philosopher, ‘ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at it’s most basic level (the two are the same).’

The wild and tragic stories, profligately echoed during Trocchi’s reductive resurgence, are the stuff of infamy. Many leading cultural figures ascribe much to Trocchi and lament it’s loss to junk. In their rush to offer up votives at some oxymoronic shrine to qualified hedonism, to avoid smear by association, something else is inevitably glossed over.

Yes, it seems Alex came to love the junk a little too much and apparently wanted to fuck up as many of the great and good he encountered as he could with it. They admire his commitment but lament the loss of talent as if the two are somehow separable, ignoring wholly for their own ends the nature of his existential project. In so doing they may just deny something else in the nature of validity in his existentialism. In covering their own ass with virtue signals, they miss the point.

In so doing they also deny us something of Scotland’s cultural life. They deny us its arch-existentialist, its only bona fide beat and situationist, or at least cannot allow him to pass without associations to the spurious moral connotations of social attitudes towards addiction and towards heroin in particular. The accounts of doing drugs with Trocchi, of which those by Marianne Faithful and Leonard Cohen between them give a measure of the man and the junk, are multitudinous and almost all focus away from the main truths, from the existential nature of Trocchi’s habits.

For Trocchi, the junk was the reduction. It forced a stare down the barrel between necessity and choice. What came after was the dérive. No less than Ginsberg himself considered Trocchi as consummate a master of that situationist’s art as there was to be found.

But then and since, all wider cultural context seems able to put Trocchi in is junk, some beautiful, bleak words, but...junk. Ultimately, he is rendered irrelevant by moral dismissal based on incomplete understanding, or wilful ignorance, of the drug, the man or the societal context of either.

So much so that for many Scots he is doubly damned for it and for his association with the infamous flyting between him and Christopher Murray Grieve (aka Hugh MacDiarmid) at the 1962 Edinburgh International Festival Writer’s Conference. As Andrew Murray Scott notes in his 1996 essay, ‘Where Extremists Meet’, Trocchi’s fall from grace and demonization by the nationalist writers, once the outsiders then the canonical, in the aftermath of this incident, meant he was more than ‘the victim of neglect in his native land. He seems to have failed some kind of secret nationality test.’. What the tunnel vision of MacDiarmid et al may have missed in their assessments following the situation, which saw Trocchi claim there to be only one or two works of then recent worth in Scottish literature and they were written by him, whilst his goading of the parochial nature of the conference saw him labelled ‘cosmopolitan scum’ by MacDiarmid, was exactly the type of culturally confrontational ‘situation’ beloved of Situationists International.

Here was a direct challenge to accepted cultural norms which resulted in Trocchi’s assertions of sodomy as inspiration and his intention from then on only to write of lesbianism. This was the shock tactics of situationism deployed to render a sense of Scottish modernism absurd, the world had turned and Scottish literary life had some catching up to do.

Whilst the infamy of the situation was made much of, very few saw the constructed nature of it’s confrontation, of it’s reflecting the nature of a world beyond the restrictive borders of Scottish literary and cultural discourse. The absurdity of it all must have folded in on itself, disappearing over a redundant event horizon for a rueful or vindicated Trocchi, depending on which side of the existential binary divide of necessity and choice he fell towards in appreciating what transpired. Little of what writing reports the truth of events makes mention of Trocchi’s efforts to explain his position to MacDiarmid, or of the somewhat conditional friendship which grew between them. His own letters show his efforts to understand their differences and they do not appear to have been much reciprocated by compromise.

Trocchi’s genuinely internationalist credentials had seen him rise in defence of the inclusion at the 1962 festival of other international writers like Burroughs. MacDiarmid had dismissed them as ‘vermin’. For Trocchi, the figure of MacDiarmid wielded a power over Scottish cultural and literary endeavours, which was not challenged on the grounds it should be. He saw MacDiarmid as ‘wielding the long rifle of John Knox’, as an authoritarian, centralist nationalist with neo-Calvinist and neo-Reformation overtones. He wrote to many influential figures in the Scottish cultural scene of his concerns following the ‘situation’, at great and eloquent length. It garnered some sympathy, not least from Edwin Morgan. For most though, given the retrospective realigning of their stars, Trocchi is the junky who dared challenge the grail-bearer of Scots culture with sodomy and lesbianism and was dismissed as cosmopolitan scum because of it. Situationism apparently fell flat at the 1962 Edinburgh International Arts Festival.

When Trocchi sent out copies of his Sigma Portfolio, the basis of much of his interest and work from 1962 to 1977, he sent it, according to Morgan, to five prominent Scots: to Morgan, MacDiarmid, Tom McGrath, Kenneth White and Ian Hamilton Finlay. His will towards compromise and inclusion was apparent if not always engaged with or in ways he may have wished. Critics of the project say it was well intentioned but accomplished little other than allowing Trocchi to avoid writing a sequel to Cain’s Book. Perhaps if there had been greater engagement with the ideas it tried to promulgate among those he tried to engage with it would have counted for far more. The nature of cultural disruption promulgated by Trocchi is something we are far more familiar with in our non-linear, post-truth cultural landscape, yet the ideas appear to barely have been engaged with by but a few. For most of his wider cultural contemporaries, as a novelist, Trocchi should write novels, however prescient his project may prove.

For Trocchi, Project Sigma operated as ‘a tactical experiment in metacategorical interaction’ as an attempt to establish an international network of countercultural activism. The Project targeted media, universities, workplaces, any socially based institutions or structures which were perceived as limiting free expression as a consequence of control over existing channels of communication. It was intended as a subversive outflanking of centralised power through a dispersed base. Trocchi emphasised ‘seizing the grids’ of cultural expression through a removal of the mediating presence. The portfolio did not, does not function merely as a printed manifesto but exists as ongoing direct performance and situation. It’s terms of expression and inclusion may have been misunderstood by many of those invited to participate, it reached so far beyond what had previously been conceived of as a cultural, artistic or literary project, in Scotland or anywhere else.

Project Sigma grew out of Trocchi’s association with Situationist International. Guy Debord acknowledged him as a founding and active member. His essay, an important grounding aspect of Sigma alongside its ‘Tactical Blueprint’, ‘The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’ appeared in International Situationiste Review No.8, in 1963. So much of the context I have given is to frame it’s publication, to engender an understanding of it’s significance, it’s relevance internationally and to Scottish cultural import and influence in that regard. This was weighty, heady stuff and yet was barely considered in Scottish cultural terms, almost inversely to it’s reception internationally. Nowhere was it considered the ravings of junky scum, cosmopolitan or otherwise, except perhaps behind the twitching net curtains in the drawing rooms of Scotland, if it was considered at all.

There are terms upon which Project Sigma may be considered a success and terms upon which it could be considered to have been far too wide reaching in its aims, failure designed in. It is a moot point now of course, time has moved on, ideas have changed. Much of what Trocchi sought out to challenge has shifted, is as indeterminate as his posited spontaneous universities. His notion of ‘community as art...exploring the possible functions of a society in which leisure is the dominant fact...in which the conventional assumptions about reality and the constraints they imply’, may still seem idealistic but with shades of foresight. There was much unintended in Sigma, it was in the nature of the Project, to grow and respond to societal and cultural pressures. I didn’t expect how directly, despite first having encountered it as an undergraduate back in the early 1990’s, trying to give a context to Trocchi’s fiction other than that emerging as somehow attenuated to the Trainspotting phenomenon, aspects of ‘Invisible Insurrection’ would jump back out at me recently after so many years. And for previously completely unappreciated reasons too.

Something seemingly unrelated was occurring as a matter of international perception right, smack, bang in the middle of Trocchi’s Sigma consternations. Bear with me a little, while I try and connect their dots.

In 1968, another international committee, far removed from the concerns of Situationist International or those of the Edinburgh International Festival, made an appeal to graphic designers. A brief was issued to design a universal symbol which would preclude developing confusion over varying symbols used at the time in Australia, France, Germany, Canada, the US and the UK. The stipulations for the design were that it must be identifiable from a reasonable distance, must be practical, must be self descriptive and must be aesthetically designed with no second meaning.

The winning symbol, from the hundreds submitted, came from Danish graphic design student Susanne Koefeld, and was subsequently adopted by the International Commission for Technical Aids (ICTA), a committee of Rehabilitation International. The design was for what we now know as the internationally recognised sign for disability access.

The sign is now called the International Symbol of Access (ISA) and is one of the most recognisable symbols in the world. In many ways it helped create an advance in the perception of rights as they pertain to people with disabilities. As perceptions have changed, however, as ideas have moved on, the flawed semiotics in the symbol have become increasingly exposed.

The ISA was initially created for ICTA and as such the primary concern was with access to facilities for people using aids to mobility. Adoption of the symbol for a wider remit, as denoting the International Symbol of Access has, with a somewhat increasingly poignant irony, excluded access to the purported benefits of universal access for millions of people internationally, with disabilities which are not defined by their mobility or even their physicality but who are nevertheless restricted, in the social model of disability, from ‘access’ in many ways, some of which can be seen as exacerbated not eased by the symbol. In practice, international deployment and adoption of the symbol has led to widespread further exclusion and stigmatisation in inverse proportion to the benefits it has afforded those with outwardly apparent, physical or mobility related disabilities.

'Invisible disabilities’ have just as substantial, disabling and chronic an impact on a person’s ability to carry out ‘normal’, day to day activities as any visibly perceived disability. Unlike visible mobility and easily perceived, common sensory impairments, invisible disabilities, by their nature, are not always apparent. Epilepsy, Multiple Sclerosis, autism, chronic spectrum conditions, diabetes, arthritis and mental ill health are all examples of clinical health issues which can manifest no ongoing or obvious signs to the onlooker but are seriously debilitating and disabling to the person experiencing them.

Living with an unseen or invisible disability can be an immense physical, mental and emotional challenge.  These difficulties are often exacerbated by public misunderstanding and stigmatisation. The associated, and in many ways indefensible, prejudices which can arise are complex. It is fairly reasonable to assume though that many arise from the misinformed belief that ‘real’ disabilities are, and need to be, obviously discernible.

The government and media ‘othering’ of disability through cheerleading of policies, which provably contravene UN definition of the rights of people with disabilities, as part of a wider narrative, has been ‘seeding’ in the collective unconscious for decades. Sometimes this is most easily packaged as safeguarding the rights of people with disabilities who fit the visible stereotype, making arbitrary political distinctions where there are none. Such distinctions further underline the definitions within the social model of disability, which sees disability as being caused by the way society is organised, rather than by a person’s difference.

The long term effects of the ISA have been conclusively and overwhelmingly negative for people with unseen disabilities and has only been an absolute positive for those with physical mobility issues. In terms of meeting it’s original brief, to universalise the symbol for people using aids to mobility, it has been a resounding success. It has, however, been given a much wider perceptual job in which it is failing miserably.

When the design was first adopted by ICTA, mental health was barely acknowledged or understood in any of the ways it is now. This is true of most invisible disabilities, not least those of a neurological nature, which have benefitted in terms of understanding from huge leaps recently in neuroscience research.

It is difficult to comprehend, in so many ways, that the symbol which has become emblematic of disability, was created 27 years prior to the UK Govt making it illegal to discriminate against a person based on disability in terms of employment, education or the provision of goods and services. For it to have taken until 1995 to pass the Disability Discrimination Act may in itself be deplorable but it highlights the outmoded simplicity of the design. In 2013 there were an estimated 750,000 wheelchair users in the UK, accounting for less than 10% of the total population with disabilities. As a measure of it’s universal inclusivity, promotion of access and it’s effectiveness for a diverse population with disabilities, the ISA, now and for some time, has fallen woefully short.

The ubiquity and long term use of the symbol has lessened its association with the ideas it is supposed to represent and, over time, has been reduced to propagating a wholly reductive, crude and stereotyped image of disability. It is supposed to be enabling, yet it mainly succeeds in marginalising and leaving pathways open to stigmatisation and prejudice for larger numbers of people with disabilities than those it helps. Every disability ‘pass’, ‘blue badge’, right of access defines 9 out of 10 people with a disability by a stick man, drawn nearly fifty years ago, which is not only not representative of their lived experience but is detrimental to it. Yet there is little systemic appetite for real change around how people with disabilities are given equal access, of redefining what ‘access’ means. or even of much genuine debate around any of the attendant issues. Changes made to the symbol in much of the US emphasise further how much current notions of access emphasise physical disability further and have not been adopted more widely.

Speaking to the BBC in 2013, visual artist and disability activist, Caroline Cardus, pointed out it was imperative that overwhelming percentages of other disabilities should be fully considered in a redesign of the ISA symbol. She would like to see a big ‘A’, or whatever letter ‘access’ begins with in every language. Cardus believes this less descriptive shorthand might be more easily accepted as possessing different levels of meaning. This would of course lose the dimension of there being an internationally recognised symbol.

It seems, in the absence of alternatives and political will, the ineffective and wholly misrepresentative symbol, responsible for negative prejudice, stereotyping and assumptions for the largest majority of people with disabilities, looks set to stay. For those excluded, or whose access issues are ill considered, by the symbol meant to promote access there is only the slim hope of a more concerted societal approach to the teaching of disability diversity, awareness and rights. What hope is there, amid the febrile domestic and global, political atmosphere, what encouragement is there that we may move towards adoption of a wider, patient, more considerate, open minded and understanding world view in our society in general?

Symbols are powerful, their semiotic messages speak louder than words or descriptions, louder than explanations. The original, now utterly lost, intent behind the ISA symbol, when it was adopted as universal, was to create access for all people with disabilities and to encourage compassion and understanding. But the symbol we use now represents a world view of disability helplessly outmoded and which actually disadvantages 9 out of 10 people with disabilities, creates division, stigma and ultimately restricts access whilst putting the burden of conveying understanding onto the person with the disability, is it likely to spread compassion or division and misunderstanding? What wider purpose does it actually continue to serve?

It is a common, everyday occurrence, to say nothing of the far more extreme and readily available qualitative evidence available, of people with unseen disabilities, to have to explain themselves to security guards, cleaners, members of the public, when challenged for simply using facilities like toilets, parking spaces, seating on public transport, designated for people with disabilities, supposed to make ‘access’ easier for them. Instead it becomes the opposite, a challenge, a need for justification which is likely to impact on many disabilities in ways which the person doing the challenging, given that they demonstrably don’t understand the disability, are unlikely to comprehend in the privilege of it.

For many it means simply not bothering, withdrawing from the potential of the challenge, staying home, where other people aren’t. It becomes small wonder, when this is added to all the other attendant factors, to see statistics like the one which found more than 50% of people with learning disabilities live with chronic loneliness and all the exacerbating issues this adds to many disabilities.

This even becomes true in the world of digital communication and social media, which should hold so much potential for people with disabilities excluded in other ways. And yet the impact of the damning dopamine loops now widely accepted as being part and parcel of the psychological experience in the digital world, can be exponentially more impacting on people with neurological or mental health related disabilities. Likewise the febrile atmosphere which exists in many places online precludes a fuller involvement or engagement on the part of people with disabilities without a threat of exposure to danger. In a world struggling to catch up with, to come to terms with the issues surrounding the exponential growth of online communications and all of the moral and legal implications it has for us as a society and as human beings, the implications for people with invisible disabilities seem low down the list of priorities.

Take a moment to read what happened here...then ask yourself, would there be any question over the nature of assault perpetrated if somehow, say through a hack of an electronically powered chair or by physical aberration, someone with a physically visible disability was forcibly tipped from a wheelchair to the detriment of their well-being? Would there be any question that this was assault against someone vulnerable to that type of physical attack?

Yet, few are given pause to wonder why a new precedent has to be established in order to make what happened deemed equally an assault, even though the actions perpetrated saw a person with epilepsy deliberately triggered into seizure, by the person who sent the tweet with the attachment, in full awareness it would be likely to do so. Should the seizure have resulted in worse, as anyone who has any type of tonic clonic or secondary generalised seizure will be aware, with the danger of death being higher the longer the seizure continues, would you question this was premeditated manslaughter or murder? Or would it be deemed an unfortunate accident, a ‘prank’ gone too far? Because the person sending the tweet wasn’t fully aware of the dangers? The ultimate outcome of the case will have far reaching consequences and may actually get to the nub of societal deficits in terms of how disability is understood.

Perception is in fact all. It constructs our reality around us. The ISA symbol has been restrictive in terms of how it has helped the perception of disability. Even reading this, many of you will have been given pause to wonder at the statistics. But really, 90% of people with disabilities do not use wheelchairs. The issue is with the symbol and what it represents, not with the nature of their disability or the need it creates for a wider notion of what ‘access’ means. The symbol’s adoption for a purpose it was not intended for has twisted your perception, our society’s perception, of what disability means.

Of course the symbol’s originally intended purpose is still a vital, valid and necessary one. The celebratory tone of Access Day/Weekend, for wheelchair and mobility aid users, was a vindication of its success for them. It was an underlining of it’s myriad failings for every other disabled person denied any type of genuine access. The ISA is not a symbol of universal access for all people with disabilities nor does it define or promote such a thing. It fails to represent any notion of access for 9 out of 10 people with disabilities.

All of which brings me to the core of those two ideas which had vied for my attention. Back in early November 2016, a report fell on to my research desk. It carried in it another related statistic, one which gave rise to the genesis of connection between the two seemingly previously unrelated ideas, for me at least.

The report was research carried out by New Philanthropy Capital, a charities think tank, and the RS MacDonald Charitable Trust, distributed as a guide for third sector organisations working with people with neurological conditions in Scotland applying for general funding. It aims to supply facts and figures missing before.

A simple but extremely telling statistic jumps out from the data in the report almost straight away. 1 in every 5 people in Scotland has a neurological condition which affects their cognitive function. That’s a fifth, 1,059,000 Scots. More people than voted for any Holyrood party at the last Scottish Parliament elections, other than the SNP Govt. Enough people, then, to form an official Holyrood opposition, if the political will existed.

Of course not all people with a neurological condition are considered as ‘having a disability’. There are, however, according to the latest Scottish Govt. Figures, around the same number of people in Scotland who are registered as disabled. One million people with disabilities. It isn’t all about the numbers but sometimes its difficult to get past them.

So, for at least a million people in Scotland (and the figures given by NPC are largely underestimated as percentages of UK figures eg the number given for people with epilepsy in Scotland is 54,000 but Epilepsy Scotland puts the figure, from their latest research at more like 92,000; there is also little scope in the figures, or any other fixed estimate, for those who become temporarily disabled or the vast numbers of people whose cognitive function will be altered varyingly according to mental health issues) whose experience of life lived in not just an abstract idea of our society but how it orders life, existence, is entirely different, at the experiential and cognitive/perceptual levels, to that experienced by the other four fifths. Furthermore, this difference is based on, following the social model of disability, our society’s systemic, entrenched discrimination.

Disability, visible or invisible, is not a matter of impairment, it is a matter of perception. The notion of access is key to understanding it and for over fifty years the symbol which was charged with changing those perceptions has been working in the opposite direction. For far too many people, including UK Govt policy unit head George Freeman who presaged benefit cuts by saying payments should go to ‘really disabled people’, unless the nature of how a person is disabled is physically obvious, then they are not disabled or their motivations in claiming so are questionable.

And so, to where the synchronicity of those ideas bounce up against one another in the full circle of my existential logic. It is highly unlikely, when Alexander Trocchi wrote in ‘The Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds’, of a cultural revolt which is ‘the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things’, he had the particular catalytic agents for it in mind as I am on the verge of positing here, but still. On reading that report, checking a few numbers, I then reached for Trocchi and went straight to the passage I had been reminded of. I knew it well from my undergraduate days and my honours dissertation:

‘We have already rejected any idea of full frontal attack...It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces that are at work in the world and out of whose interactions tomorrow must come to be; and then calmly, without indignation...modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking...inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection. It will come on the mass...if it comes at all, not as something they have voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; they will find themselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously at last to recreate it within and without as their own.’

For Trocchi, an ultimate aim of the project and its means of execution is to avoid the inevitable entropy of the repeated cycle, ‘organisation, control, revolution’, to break with the ‘reason for the impotence of intelligence everywhere in the face of events’ and to dispense with the futility of a resistance where ‘the energy of individuals and small groups is dissipated in a hundred and one unconnected little acts of protest’. Instead he predicates the type of change being manipulated before our very eyes now by companies like Cambridge Analytica on behalf of their right wing populist paymasters.

It is, must be, a change in perception first. It is a change drawing upon intentionally divided reality silos , wholly entrenched differing perceptual notions of how the world ‘really’ is and operates. Within the contemporary version, as in Trocchi’s, it is not necessary to convince everyone or to change belief systems en masse, all at once, to support any cause, just enough to ‘game’ whichever political system is being played in and for. Once perception reaches a tipping point, with data-mined and managed towards those ends, it will come on the mass like the changing season. They will find themselves in the situation, recreating it within and without as their own. Brexit, Trump, Le Pen? All it takes is the invisible insurrection of a million minds.

So what then, if that insurrection came from an entirely unexpected and different place? From a place perceptually and cognitively removed from nefarious political power machinations? What Trocchi knew as much as Cambridge is that change comes from the manipulation of perception. Where they diverge is in how the pressures of manipulation should be brought to bear; for Trocchi it is primarily a cultural endeavour, for Cambridge and their ilk it is an exploitation of failing political systems, as much as it of nascent technologies. Failing systems which Trocchi’s model also acknowledges as redundant. So what if neither accounted for an invisible insurrection of a million minds, able to change the perceptions of the wider mass because they offer entirely different perceptual and cognitive perspectives?

People with disabilities experience existence, the world, society, community in entirely different perceptual and cognitive ways to people who are not ‘differently able’, people with neurological disabilities which affect those functions in a more direct sense even more so. Fully embracing the social model of disability rejects the notion of attempting to understand disability in terms of ‘impairment’ or ‘affliction’ and the need for treatment or ‘fixing’ for full engagement with the wider world. Rather it is the wider world, society which is disabling. In practical terms the influence of this approach can be seen in legislation around disability, like the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and its successor, The Equality Act 2010.

There is a step beyond this type of legislation though. If disability is signified, symbolised universally, as physical, even though it denies the reality of most people with disabilities, a semiotic perceptual slight of hand happens. Unaffected by the legislation, four fifths of the population are inclined to draw their conclusions from the symbolism, their perceptions do not match the nature of actuality. This distance in perceptual understanding is exploited further by othering of people with disabilities as part of the ‘strivers and skivers’ narrative plied by the overwhelmingly right wing UK media for at least a decade, a longer time than the legislation has had to become a matter of mass cognitive understanding. Changing the symbol recognised as representing disability, altering the semiotic register, especially when even the legislation is under threat from the Great Repeal Bill and the looming Brexit cliff edge, becomes ever more pressing, or nine tenths of people with disabilities will continue to be excluded from the notion of what ‘access’ means.

It is no coincidence, when people with disabilities have been disproportionately hit by ‘austerity’ cuts in the post-2008 years, to hear that gap in perception exploited still further as the UK Govt attempt to enforce more cuts in even more absurd areas of disability welfare provision. The recent mandatory review of all Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants not only resulted in unnecessary stresses and anxieties, leading to much worse for some, for many people with disabilities, it brought a welfare payment which does not pay out for any living costs only for care and mobility at differing levels, into the fictitious narrative. People with disabilities do not receive PIP for living costs, so cutting it will only cut the ability to provide care and for the person to be mobile, to be able to move around their own home or to venture out of it. Many people who claim PIP do not claim any other welfare payments, with their care and mobility provided for a priori they are able to find work which accommodates their disabilities.

And yet amidst the review, no 10 policy unit head George Freeman said £3.7bn of cuts would happen to this essential and economic stimulus payment. He also said cuts would be made on the basis of payments being made only to those who are ‘really disabled people’. Which model of disability do you think he used in his assessment, the mechanical/physical model which discriminates against the overwhelming majority of people with disabilities or the social model, which doesn’t? And what is he trying to achieve in perceptual terms with his statements?

Manipulation of perception in advance of changes in political policy is a common place contemporary phenomenon but it is always a subjective process, there is no objective perceptual reality. It works because humans evolved to try and make sense of things. Every time a stimulus comes to us, our brain does the efficient thing and responds based on past experience. In so doing the brain continually redefines normality, which is being shaped literally as a process of trial and error. We perceive things according to our own history and that of our ancestors, our community, our society because we are defined by environment and ecology. Not by our biology or DNA but by our history of interactions.

Society gets inside our heads and habits, forming everything from our taste in food to our political choices. This profound social influence, sometimes called ‘habitus’, is acquired through the experiences of everyday life. Quite often relying on habitus unconsciously for context serves us well. Until it doesn’t.

We sometimes find ourselves at a crossroads, in a place of uncertainty, faced with perceptions borne of falsehood, misunderstanding, bias or disunity. According to neuroscientist Beau Lotto, the creation of all new perceptions begins with the single question, ‘Why?’. As soon as you ask the question you open up to the possibility of change, so asking it is often the most difficult thing for people to do. Lotto believes education must be about creating new perceptions when traditionally it has been about efficiency, about wanting to know what happens at the end, what the right answer is. But the right answer is never straight forward when it comes to people and perception.

Our perception is corralled in the normalising, hegemonic processes of society. It becomes self-fulfilling as people become more averse to uncertainty and less able to see genuine creativity in difference. But amidst the fights for so many other things we have lost sight of the fight for our perceptions and by extension the fight for our imaginations. The grinding relentlessness of what we are supposed to accept as the world as it must be robs everyone of the ability to imagine a life, relationships, a social world, happier, less anxious, more just.

Prison walls, barred windows have erected themselves in the minds of masses because we have not been diligent enough about cultivating the imagination and the perception which extends from it. We have to fight now for the ability to imagine a world we want. It is just as much a form of oppression to tell someone there is only one version of better, of happier as it is to tell them there is none at all.

We have been stood at that crossroads for some time, transfixed in headlights whilst the populists and ideologues have stolen a march on the world, changed the realities, manipulated the perceptions of the masses, a million minds here, a million minds there. Whilst waiting ever more anxiously in the wings, imagining other worlds entirely, are millions more.

Reaching back through Trocchi to the birth of modern thinking, to Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, there is everywhere an emphasis on the experiential. In ‘A Treatise On Human Nature’, Hume argued for the primacy of experience over rational thought and as such it is often considered the greatest early exposition of empirical rationalism. Hume argued that all we know we get from our experiences, but that our experiences are unreliable and don’t tell us much, leading to the birth of radical scepticism. For Hume even our expectation that the sun will rise tomorrow is the result of habit and expediency rather than scientific certainty.

As a matter of practice, humans accept many ideas without actually knowing the truth of them, or even in flat denial, in cognitive dissonance, of knowing that truth. How could what emerges be a more true version of reality? It is a far more likely scenario that millions of corrupted parallel versions are running simultaneously.

Counting Hume among one of his greatest influences, Einstein adopted his sceptical world view and it allowed him to question the concept of absolute space and time. Once he was able to move beyond what his immediate experience told him was ‘true’ he was able to achieve insights which would reorder space and time, make the universe itself a question of relativity. The continuing influence of Einstein’s theories (if you think they are purely abstract, a good example would be, without the General Theory of Relativity, we would be wholly unable to use GPS satellite mapping), prove one thing beyond their scientific applications. Change comes from difference. Differences in perception, not normalisation of it, is what moves us forward as a species and as a society.

Throughout time numerous thinkers, artists, scientists have proven that disability does not make change possible in defiance of it’s own restriction, it is facilitated by the difference perceived in them. Even in the well intended book by Dr Gail Saltz, ‘The Power of Different: The Link Between Disorder and Genius’, in which she interviewed over fifty experts in the fields of psychiatry, child development and education as well as people with various disabilities who have achieved great success, there is a pervasive notion that it is disorder or impairment which makes difference. Salz’s background is in the neurology, the mechanics of many disabilities she looked at, so she doesn’t describe the social model of disability but arrives at her own conclusions which sound very much like it. She notes:

‘We’re very invested in fixing, and we tend to be focused on the negative, whatever the negative is. Make it better so everything is good. It’s an understandable means of reacting, but it becomes so embedded, and it’s not really the best path...

...I want people to recognise and to treat their children if something comes along, because they can make life more enjoyable and help their functioning, but I want them to look for their strength, I want to help them with workarounds for whatever the difficult issues are, and by utilising their strength along with those...they are giving their child the opportunity to be highly successful.’

Salz’s work has found that people with learning difficulties, mental health issues and neurological disabilities are more likely to look at the world differently and to see things others don’t, to think more creatively, to innovate, to have more empathy and to have an ability to visualise things in different ways. This has led to unusually high percentages of people with these conditions being extremely successful. Whilst Salz’s offer of workarounds to supplement a parent’s compassion and understanding are commendable, they do little to change the stultifying, pervasive social attitudes and perceptions which stop people with disabilities thinking of themselves in the ways which would lead to a greater engagement with the positivities of difference, even with genius.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006 superseded other previous protections of the rights and dignities of people with disabilities. Parties to the Convention are required to promote, protect and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by people with disabilities, ensure that they enjoy full equality under law and promote respect for their inherent dignity. Rights specific to the convention include the rights to accessibility including to information technology, to live independently and be included in the community, to personal mobility and to participation in political, public and cultural life. That’s what access is.

Yet in so much of the ‘developed world’, the freedoms and rights demanded by those without disabilities preclude those very rights for people with disabilities. The manner in which the civic space, digital and analogue, is engaged with, particularly for many people with neurological disabilities or learning difficulties, often means there is no means by which they can adequately express themselves with an equal voice. Equal participation in political, public and cultural life is denied, access to them is obscured by the demands of privilege.

Much of the experiential world is one of the visceral abstract, where imaginary ideas can be of more consequence than ‘facts’. In that sense, being able to express yourself in the fast moving world of 140 characters or less and engage with debate becomes important. It is through the ability to communicate and interact we build the future. This is what has always formed the creations spaces within which change has been facilitated. Now our creation spaces are no longer tied to a particular time or place and should no longer only be available to those with the privilege and means to participate in them. Discovery, accomplishment, genius can be a universal opportunity, if only there were the will to make it so.

And within that, imagine if you can the differential thinking of people no longer disabled by a society which others them, freed to simply be different within the limits of a health condition, given genuine equal access and an equal voice in all civic life. Imagine if they did indeed gather the political will to form the opposition in an independent Holyrood, a million minds who you’ve been lied to about over and over and whose potential to genuinely innovate must scare those who want to cut their access to a priori support before they can muster a thought or raise a voice. The invisible insurrection of a million lies instead of the lies of a million insurrections we see around us now, not least in the opposition at Holyrood.

In this writer’s assessment, as a person with a difficult to perceive disability, in a society, a world beset by existential crises, immediate and impending, and desperately in need of genuinely innovative thinking, I’d say the latter was a choice, the former a necessity. I’m inclined to think Mr Trocchi might agree.