WORK AND THE MEANING CONFERRING CONTEXT

OF THE CLUBHOUSE

by Marc Angers

This paper grows out of two previous efforts (one published, the other not) to clarify aspects of clubhouse culture that are related to, or interrelated with, — and, thereby, also partly explain — the restorative efficacy of the primary daily activity of clubhouse life, namely work. In short, although it is a more complicated matter, I have stressed in these previous papers the importance of the social context in determining the unique rehabilitative effect of work by stressing the sense in which the social context itself partly constitutes the meaning of work done in relation to it. This has then been considered in light of what may be called the intrinsic value of the activity of work itself.

Which of these, it may be asked, is more fundamental in conferring meaning to work: the activity itself or the context in which it is carried out? This is an important question, as the relative priority of one or the other is crucial to understanding how work might be rehabilitative for individuals needing it for that purpose.

It is clear enough that the basic meaning conferring element which grounds meaningful work, is the purpose for which it is done. Collating papers for the sake of merely collating papers, though activity, is, in itself, pretty meaningless. We want to know why we are collating papers, what the purpose of such activity is and, ultimately, is it worth it. Jobs we perform without feeling them "worth it" are not very meaningful. In fact we might put the matter more strongly and be on just as safe ground by saying that jobs without real purpose are not only not worth it, but constitute meaningless activity. And it seems reasonably arguable that meaningless activity could in no way, except perhaps in the most cynical or Sisyphean sense, be called work.

One of the principal defining characteristics of work as opposed to mere activity, then, is that the activity we call work must be meaningful; and the reason, or purpose, for which we do what we do when we work is what fundamentally determines this meaningfulness. As Robby Vorspan once succinctly put it: "You Can't Vacuum in a Vacuum." Her point is not that one could not run a vacuum sweeper merely for its own sake, indeed that would be easy enough, but rather that such purposeless activity couldn't properly be called vacuuming. That is, what is properly called vacuuming is something done for the purpose of sweeping and cleaning the carpet or rug; and we sweep the rug in order to keep the room clean and perhaps even beautiful.

The reasons proliferate as the purposes for what we do presuppose more and more purposes deeper and deeper in the grounding of what we are doing until, as in peeling back the layers of an onion, our doing defines more and more who we are in the world. For example, we want to keep the room beautiful because we are proud of our house. But keeping it beautiful makes us feel good about ourselves and such a feeling gives us a sense of efficacy in the world and keeps us open to the challenges of daily living and better able to cope with them. Thus, in this example, the reason we vacuum is fundamentally connected to how we are in the world and who we are in the world: whether we feel good about ourselves or not and how that feeling is built up from what we do and what impact that has in the world.

Can activity without purpose, then, ever constitute work? Or, is there an intrinsic value to work that is separable from the framework of purposes within which it is embedded? Here, it seems as if the answer might be yes. Let us consider, for example, the work of an artist, work which is perhaps furthest away from any apparent concrete purpose. Here, though, even though it seems that there is no purpose in particular associated with the activity, yet we would not want to say that an artist's activity is not really work. Is making art, then, an example of activity for no particular reason or purpose, but yet is, or would properly be called, work?

But even here, it is quite plain that the activity of an artist is not without purpose or a context of purpose which might be said to constitute it as work. For indeed, there is clearly a reason motivating the artist in the activity we call his work. And that reason is the purpose of expressing him or herself by creating something that by definition is such an expression. Here again, the meaning of this self-motivated activity is to express something of who the worker is in the world.

From here it seems to follow quite naturally that just as in the old adage: "you are what you eat," we might say: "you are (in large part) who you are by virtue of what you do"; or more simply - even if not quite as accurately - "you are what you do." But this accords well enough with ordinary experience, for not surprisingly the question most often asked after the question of "what is your name?" is invariably: "what do you do?"

It would seem, then, that we are intrinsically who we are by virtue of what we do because what we do expresses who we are in the world. And it is because our work has embedded purposes within it that makes it work, and it is these purposes expressed in our work that define, or partly define, who we are. Our work, then, is fundamentally a self expression.

If the context of activity is crucial in giving it the meaning it has, then it is useful to here ask: What are the purposes of our work in a clubhouse? What does a clubhouse do? Answering these questions will tell us what constitutes the meaning of the work for members and staff who work in them.

But here, we need to clarify in general the sense that clubhouse purposes are part of individual purposes for working in a clubhouse, for it is easy to imagine situations in which such individual purposes may not at all explicitly coincide with the clubhouse or collective purpose of the whole. Yet here it is clear that even though the purpose of a clubhouse may or may not be any given individual member's conscious or explicit reason for doing what he or she does in a clubhouse, yet, just as in playing a game there are at least two or more levels of purposes underlying the activity, so in a clubhouse there are more than individual reasons that constitute the meaningful activity or work that goes on in the clubhouse. And, again, these additional reasons are to be found in the overall purpose of what a clubhouse is. Just as in a game of chess where individual players pursue their own individual strategies, their overall activity is still guided by the purpose of the game which, constituted by its rules, is that of getting your opponent in check mate, and thereby to win.

Individual strategies in playing the game are thus guided by the rules and the purposes implicit in those rules, which, in a game, is to win. Whether we are actually thinking of these rules or purposes or not, in playing the game they nonetheless become part of the rationality and hence, in this context, part of the meaning of the activity in playing the game. Likewise, in a clubhouse part of the rationality of our work in the clubhouse is guided by the purposes of what it is to be in a clubhouse, and hence, in a certain sense, by what it is to be playing the game of clubhouse, a game guided by "rules," guidelines, or Standards with implicit purposes, values and norms.

Here we are inclined to say, however, that the analogy is a bit stretched, for clubhouse is not really a "game," but more a way of life. Yet the suggestion is that in living a life, the meaning of that life is constituted not merely by our own individual reasons for doing what we do, but is further constituted by the rationality of the context in which the activity takes place and is enmeshed or embedded.

The other equally important question, especially in light of what we have just seen above, would be: "As a clubhouse member or staff, what are my own reasons for doing what I do in the clubhouse that makes my activity an intrinsic part of who I am in the world?" By answering both this and the question as to the clubhouse's purpose, we will have a more complete understanding of the meaning associated with the work that goes on in a clubhouse.

The question as to individual reasons for working in the clubhouse will perhaps be different for members and staff, though not necessarily, and it will be interesting to see where we come out on this. Just as in a game, it is important to first know the rules, and thereby what constitutes winning, in order to adopt individual strategies in playing the game; so in the case at hand, we need first to consider the community reason or purpose that underlies work in a clubhouse before we consider the individual reasons or purposes motivating such work in each individual case. And though we have said this before, now, after a slight detour into the logic of games, we begin to see the force of this proposition and so are finally ready to answer the question.

Here, in answering, we are on a pretty well trodden ground. Indeed, there has been much written on what the purpose of clubhouse is. For a start - and in brief - it is agreed that a clubhouse is a place providing membership in a community where such members are needed, expected and wanted; where members know they have a guaranteed right to a place to come; a guaranteed right to meaningful work; a guaranteed right to meaningful relationships and a guaranteed place to return (Beard, Propst, & Malamud, 1982).

Interestingly, knowing this much about clubhouses already gives us a clear picture that we are not talking about just any social club, private or public. Indeed, for most other such clubs it would be a bit odd to guarantee meaningful work and meaningful relationships. Yet these guarantees are crucial to members of a clubhouse. We would be helped in understanding these guarantees if we knew who, in general, the members of clubhouses were, and why they come to a clubhouse.

Clubhouse members are persons suffering from severe and persistent mental illness. And, of course, knowing this helps us know what clubhouses do and, at the same time, gives us a better appreciation of what membership entails.

Without getting into technical specifications of what we mean by severe mental illness, we need only know for our purposes here, what we see in the behavior of such persons and what we know about the matter from hearing first hand from members. And what we know is that such individuals often experience a profound sense of isolation; that the world can be confused by voices and hallucinations; and that thoughts can be mixed up and their expression hard to accomplish clearly. Such individuals often feel a profound sense of inertia and inwardness. Communication with others is difficult and it is sometimes hard to have a clear sense of one's boundaries, or where one ends and another begins. ("Are these thoughts and feelings mine or someone else's?")

Clearly, such profound distortions make it difficult to experience anything like a productive life. Without the connection to others and the world it is hard to feel like a person in the world. And as we know by the way the mentally ill have too often been treated by the medical model, they are likely to experience significant others as purveyors of treatment and themselves as mere objects of treatment. Our members, then, with no place to turn in society at large, are caught in a cycle of dehumanization, caused first by the effects of the illness and then secondarily reinforced by the social framework of institutionalization and medical model day treatment.

Clubhouses offer an alternative to this by offering a place with the express purpose of providing such persons an opportunity to become reconnected to the reality of having a life through productive activity and work mediated relationships. The purpose of clubhouses, then, is to facilitate this process, to save lives by providing the conditions for its members to "have a life" and, thereby, to experience the reality of personhood in the world, for some, perhaps, for the first time.

These conditions for the possibility of "having a life" are given in the fundamental belief held by the clubhouse community that having a life must involve the whole person in a vital community offering respect, hope, dignity, mutuality, and unlimited opportunity to access the worlds of work, housing, education, and friendship.

Part of the rationality of what members and staff do in a clubhouse, then, whatever else their personal motives or reasons may be, is a consequence of the purposes of the context in which they interact which, as we said above, is that of saving lives through a community who have come together for the express purpose of facilitating for its members the conditions for the possibility of guaranteeing a meaningful life as spelled out above. An amazing corollary to this is that members working in such a context are partly involved, just by working in a clubhouse, in an act of saving their own and others lives just because that is the most fundamental purpose underlying clubhouse practice. And, as in the game analogy, this fundamental rationale of clubhouse infuses all the individually intended action that falls within this context.

In short, the activity of the clubhouse in this fundamental sense is meaningful because it is done for a purpose: to save lives by fulfilling for each member the conditions for the possibility of having a life. This is accomplished by providing a framework within which a member can regain a more coherent sense of self by finding a way of self expression through meaningful activity, work. This work is at first engaged in for the community reason which amounts to - however indirectly - supporting the clubhouse. But also, this overall framework provides a ground for the expression of a member's own personal and unique vision or plan for his or her own life independently of, but not disconnected from, the clubhouse purpose of saving lives. This purpose then takes over and becomes a primary motivating force in a member's participation, along with the community purpose of working together to sustain the clubhouse.

Interestingly, it is the relation between these two realms of purpose and meaning that creates the conditions for a sense of clubhouse community in general. In general, community arises when the purpose of the collective coincides with some or all of the purposes of the individuals in the collective and they, for this reason, consciously identify with, and feel part of, the larger whole or the collective.

There are two different kinds of communities, totalistic or non-totalistic, reflecting the two basically different ways in which individuals can relate to the collective in which they identify. A totalistic community is one in which the purpose of the collective dictates all the purposes of the individuals. It does not allow for the emergence of individuality, but rather seeks to have the individual meld completely into the collective purpose. In political life, such communities are often totalitarian.

It is easy to see, in this framework, that clubhouse communities are non-totalistic in this sense, because the community purpose of the clubhouse is merely formal; that is, merely to provide the conditions for the possibility for having a life for its members. Fulfilling these conditions in any individual case requires an individual purpose or plan which, though perhaps dependent on the collective purpose of the clubhouse community, is nonetheless uniquely oriented to the individual's own life project.

In political life such non-totalistic communities are often described as liberal democratic because of the emphasis on individual rights and freedoms. Yet, though clubhouse is liberal democratic in a broad sense, it is not, thereby, also another version of selfish individualism. Indeed, because the fundamental purpose of the clubhouse is to create the conditions of its membership to reengage the lived reality of having a meaningful life, then self participation for one's own individual particular vision of the good life is, at the same time, because it is pursued in the context of the collective purpose of clubhouse, an activity that connects one to the lives of others by creating the conditions for the possibility for such others to pursue their own individual particular vision of the good life. Clubhouse participation, then, is intrinsically moral in the formal sense that self action and self expression is, at the same time, action that secures the possibility of the self exression and self realization of others. In this sense, unbridled individualism is tempered by the formal collective value of clubhouse that insures that by acting to realize onself, one is at the same time, acting in the interest of others to realize themselves.

While the clubhouse provides the conditions for its members to start down the road to having a more meaningful life, it is only the beginning to the realizaton of meaningful life in the larger community. Yet it is the bridge from the clubhouse to the larger community. Transitional employment is a natural bridge to this sense of "beyond the clubhouse," as is supported education. Indeed, the whole emphasis of work in the clubhouse is to enhance this sense of possibility, first beyond the illness through the clubhouse and then beyond the clubhouse through the clubhouse. The clubhouse becomes the basis for self expression and self realization because of the unique person constituting framework of work in the clubhouse: it is both the

In this sense, then, the nature of community that is created and sustained by both members and staff, fulfills the need we all have, members and staff alike, of living out a common goal. We all want to fulfill the age old wish that defines the human condition: to have the opportunity to experience and enjoy free, happy, meaningful and productive lives; to share in a sense of community or being together in this enterprise; and to have the sense of active participation in a community where this sense of life is not only not taken for granted, but is celebrated for the express purpose of promoting and preserving its value.

To live such a life, which is supported and reinforced in its essential contours by a community that both celebrates and facilitates it, creates a doubly resonant experience of both having a life and having a life that is profoundly in accord with the human purpose of realizing one's human nature in identification with some essential kernel of what it is to be a human being in general. It is this sense of participating in one's own humanity when working and relating in a clubhouse, that creates the feeling that one's own involvement is meaningful beyond merely the clubhouse community, but reaches to something basic in what it is to be part of a community of mankind where each person is intrinsically valued and celebrated. Ultimately, it is this experience that so enlivens, inspires, empowers and enriches clubhouse, both in concept and practice, for members and staff alike.

Marc Angers is on the staff of the ICCD in New York City.