Two women talking
Unpsychology, tragedy and new conversations of promise
This post started out as a much longer piece about change, contexts and knitting contexts together. That one might get written in time, but it might just be sufficient for it to lie there as a foundation for others. However, what sparked both that original (unpublished) piece and this one was an email and a video, so I’m going to write around those and hope that all of this offers something to you.
The contexts are personal and global. They always are, of course– and everything between. The global contexts are terrible enough to lead to despair. Perhaps they always have been, but something has changed. And multiple contexts (or transcontextuality), as Nora Bateson would put it) are always intertwined with mind, and exploring this transcontextual unpsychology has been a project that Unpsychology - the magazine - has been engaged in since its launch in 2014 (Nora’s work has undoubtedly helped us greatly with the language and framing of this!)1
When I started working with issues of ‘climate psychology’ a decade and a half ago (conversations which led to Unpsychology being launched in 2014) there was hope still that there might a collective climate mind-shift that would open to the truth of climate change. A belief that “something would or could be done”!
At the same time, there also seemed to be a growing socially liberal consensus, in the Western world and beyond, around anti-racism, feminism, supporting LGBTQ+ communities and, most of all, seeing these things are interlinked – ‘intersectional’ was the word being used. So there was an awareness that some things were crumbling, but also that there were common causes to be shared. There was hope that something could be salvaged from the ruins.
Anyway, to cut another potentially long story short, the backlash has been vicious and surprising – for those who hadn’t been following the signs. It turns out (as it always has) that powerful, white people don’t give up their influence, riches and power without a fight. And fight they literally have, to turn the tide of humanitarian values towards an amoral, transactional world in which anything goes.
All this is enough to make anyone despair, and sometimes I do, but it hasn’t all been hopeless. While we see the authoritarian right growing across the the world, and now firmly centring its intellectual and political power in the USA - ironically the place where many of the most effective liberatory, anti-imperialist ideas have been fermented – it is clear that we have to find our inspiration where we can, these days. What might be needed are new alliances and new conversations – a kind of revolution of eloquence, perhaps. One that sustains the practices and values of speaking truth to power, and maintaining personal and collective dignity – even in the face of wilful ignorance and uncaring brutality.
I said that this piece was promoted by a mailing list email. It was from Naomi Klein, who has been writing eloquent and insightful books and articles on the state of things for the past twenty-odd years. On the personalisation and globalisation capitalism in No Logo; on Disaster Capitalism, with The Shock Doctrine; on the climate crisis in This Changes Everything, and on the current state of things in her most personal and brilliant book yet, the excellent Doppelgänger: A Trip Into The Mirror World, that takes apart the agendas and conspiracies of the far right, even as their plans were being formulated and coming to fruition.2
Over all that time, she’s kept smiling and encouraging people to keep the faith in both complexity and resistence. As a Jewish Canadian woman she’s maintained a clear anti-Zionist line on Palestine for years, pushing back on the disingenuous conflation of criticism of the Israeli government (currently in its most right-wing, authoritarian form) with anti-semitism, and keeping a keen eye of the sleight-of-hand and political/ economic trickery that capitalism uses to keep itself afloat in these troubled times.3
Her email introduced her latest essay, an excellent and terrifying piece on the apocalyptic nature of the far-right project in the USA and beyond, entitled The Rise of End Times Fascism. It’s well worth a read and you can find it in the Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk
However, one other link she shared in the email was to a video. She wrote: I’m also thrilled to be able to share video from this onstage conversation with the transcendent musician ANOHNI. Honestly, it changed me forever (and we quote from it in “The Rise of End Times Fascism”). There are so few artists who really speak to the scale of the crises we face; ANOHNI is one of them, producing bold, beautiful, soulful, mournful, daring work that can inspire us all…”
I’m posting it here in full, in the hope that you will love it as I did, and maybe even glean some hope, optimism and inspiration from it, though it’s also deeply sorrowful and moving in parts.
Those of you who follow my music blog, Ziggy’s Lament, might know that Anohni is an artist I love and admire. Her work is, as Klein says, ‘transcendent’ and each album - each piece of work she releases - has a deep ancestry in it, often carrying a searing cry for justice and change. In the specific contexts of the attacks of trans rights in the USA (by Trump) and in the UK (by a High Court ruling on who constitutes a woman in law), and the growing tragedies of climate change and genocides in Gaza and elsewhere, it is extraordinary to hear a conversation that brings these things together in such a moving and intelligent way – and it feels apt to share it here now.
These two women, Naomi Klein and Anohni spend an hour talking in what I can only describe as a space of complexity, love and liminality. They show that the polarities we are forced into are not inevitable, and that campaigns for the freedom of LGBTQ+ people are part of the same struggle as those against neo-colonialism, patriarchy and the ravages of climate destruction. Anohni describes how she felt she had been struggling alone with the pain of awareness of climate breakdown for many decades; this going alongside her sense of isolation and discovery as a trans woman, and all this has been pouring out in her music in fierce combinations of anger and deep love.
I will write more of Anohni and her work over three decades in other places, but her most recent album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, is as beautiful and inspiring as anything she’s produced. In their conversation, Naomi Klein mentions a song from that album that she loves and which moves her: Sliver of Glass. It’s one of my favourites too, so I’ve posted it below as a kind of unpsychological gift to you all.
Note: If you’re want to explore new sounds and how music, culture, community, politics, relationships and, yes, unpsychology, might come together, then you can find more stuff a bit like this on - my music Substack. I’d love to see you there!
Notes
A few years ago, I came across Nora Bateson’s work and was immediately enthused by what she had to say; which wasn’t/isn’t theory as much as practice, and ideas about how to learn from, relate to and engage with the living world, and each other as humans. It seemed to me to address the questions of the ‘ecological mind’ in a way that few other theories of contextual psychology and complexity were doing. The key idea and practice in Nora’s work is something she calls Warm Data – which is “the information about the interrelationships that integrate elements in complex systems”. Warm Data provides a context for mutual learning in living systems – what Nora terms symmathesy. Importantly, though, the practice of ‘warm data’ also provides conversational space and rituals for people to contextualise and understand the complexities of systems in which the ‘trouble’ has been created, and to do this together. From this, it’s clear that we can’t just plan or goal-set our way out. What we can do is experience the shared learning of vitality and creativity that might just help us re-create and craft something out of the ruins.
Her books Small Arcs of Larger Circles (2016) and Combining (2023) are published by Triarchy Press and you can find them at: https://www.triarchypress.net/bateson.html. Download the Warm Data Anthology edition of Unpsychology Magazine FREE from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pt0v8_Vb3DSseFUvKVIr1dBqErL9Sg7u?usp=share_link and in print from https://www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk/search?type=product&options%5Bprefix%5D=last&q=unpsychology
Doppleganger - A Trip into the Mirror World is Naomi Klein’s latest book which tracks what she calls the ‘mirror world’ in which what is real is reflected back as alternative truth – often explicitly – by right wing strategists like Steve Bannon and others. She also shows how among progressives and idealists there has been a shocking realignment, as people once regarded as allies have drifted diagonally towards the right – initially with ironic justifications like ‘not taking sides’ or ‘avoiding polarities’ or ‘just asking questions’. Some swallowed wholesale this faux-radical conspiracism. Others moved explicitly towards more hardline positions – sometimes using recently acquired or appropriated ‘religious’ beliefs and tenets to justify their new world views. Which, of course, were almost always ‘traditional’ and ‘conservative’ and are deeply exclusionary and discriminatory towards already excluded, exploited and marginalised people and groups. Klein’s book is both hopeful and sad and in parts, very funny, as she write about her own ‘doppelganger’, Naomi Wolf, a writer with a similar background to her, who took that diagonal journey to spout conspiracy theories as part of a burgeoning MAGA-adjacent movement (see also Charles Eisenstein, Russel Brand and many others), and with whom she has often been mistaken…
In the latter part of Doppleganger, Naomi Klein addresses the issues of what she calls Israel, Palestine, and the Doppelganger Effect. According to Klein, these particular passages: “…wrestle with many tricky themes, including the persistence of antisemitism as an ancient conspiracy theory, and the dangers of a particular kind of trauma-forged identity politics as they play out in Israel. These are themes I have been writing about since I was teenager, yet this time, I found that the figure of the doppelganger, or the doubled self, opened them up in new and surprising ways.” You can find these passages on her website at: https://naomiklein.org/doppelganger-effect/
So grateful to you Steve for sharing this conversation - moving not just because of the scope and complexity of 'vistas' it contains, but also because of the palpable edge between breath-taking vulnerability and fearsome courage displayed by ANOHNI. I wonder how many of us resonate with her intensity of love and grief in relation to the living world and yet find we have hidden this away from the shaming of a 'civilized' society in which the capacity to feel deeply is seen as quaint (at best) or deranged (at worst). I know that behind my conventional exterior I have felt 'alien' most of my life because of the message I received that my feelings were 'too much'. Of late I find myself cherishing this capacity to feel. I guard it fiercely. I remember that those of us who feel are not the mad ones. Not too much of anything. 'We are the great souls, in a world that cannot see the cage.' (www.susanholliday.co.uk/inklings/cage)
Thank you for sharing this, Steve. I am so glad to have sat with this deeply moving conversation in this quiet morning before the mad rush of the day. It has prompted much thinking, my mind and body shifting between contexts, relationships, heart cracks and in-between spaces, the song a further offering and a gentle ushering towards more. And thank you for introducing me to ANOHNI.