Swiss social work

The new collection “Le geste social”, directed by Marc Breviglieri at the Haute école de travail social, opens with the work of Thierry Gutknecht, who brings to bear a reading of Michel Foucault in contact with official prescriptive texts which order Swiss social work.

Fresh again, the author (re)plays issues that we thought were buried under the ambient positivism – a denunciation of social control, of the domination of the working classes, of speech from below – and allows us to measure the gap between what were the great convictions of the 1970s and certain glooms that inhabit the present of social work. The revolts of May 68 had stimulated criticism of the associative and private world that managed social work, its ladies of the heart, the confinement of rebellious girls and boys who “delinquent”, authoritarian placements without discussion with relatives, and proposed debates that would then be carried by the journals Social field, Psychiatric field, Logical revolts and a whole series of works published at the time by Maspéro editions. Among the authors invoked more or less skillfully by these reviews, Michel Foucault served as a standard-bearer.

This time, we are offered a completely different reading of Michel Foucault in order to shed light on the social space.

Social work as a problem

Social work is presented here as a problem, in the strong sense of the term, a problem simply because the latter must precisely reformulate a multiplicity of urgent problems – to the point that dictionaries and states of the world are made of them – and echo them to decision-makers. That is an understatement. What is the problem when one has the mission of solving problems? It is both being confronted with untenable borderline situations (precarious health, lack of housing, mental disorder, existential weakening, etc.) whose diagnosis between professionals varies, and drawing an emancipatory horizon that it is up to the political community to define and reaffirm.

Holding the two ends of local knowledge and global knowledge, from the order of interaction to the social order, is not done without pain or fracture, so that action is always shaky. But it is above all the uninterrupted gap between these borderline situations which are apparently attached to people and this horizon of liberation of principle drawn by the aid procedures and the social institutions which it is a question of exploring – of filling? – for social workers. Faced with fears and security discourses, calls for individual competition, the fracture between in and the outat the urban dividing lines, social work has the means to point out problems and make a public diagnosis, a political assessment. The author responds to the challenge of thinking in motion, proposing in the three parts of the book a mosaic of cleverly shifted readings that multiply the documentary layers, on a scale that goes from procedures, rules, laws, specifications; to public debates between professionals via specialized journals; and finally to the external view of the human sciences, which bites into politics.

Assistance, insurance, prevention

In each example, the author places social work in power relations electrified by politics, acting in the name of and for political orientations, and conversely, this work is responsible for publicizing the limit situations it deals with. With the help of M. Foucault, Thierry Gutknecht keeps on the same waterline the prevention of these limit situations and the action that aims to bring them to the attention of the public and make them an object of debate. Foucault serves here to identify the rules of silence that surround the bodies of young minors, the closed doors of the institution, to undo the discourses that claim to speak “in place of”.

The subtlety of the book consists in unearthing in a series of bureaucratic prescriptions (Directives for the application of LaSoc standards, Social Assistance Act, Implementing Regulations for the Social Assistance Act 1999, The Swiss Code of Ethics) in the outline of a sentence, the affirmation of a right of users, their participation, respect for their dignity, the obligation to accompany them, even a “mandatory dialogue”, in short a quantity of statements that the author proposes to take seriously. It is no longer a question of reading the notion of power in Mr. Foucault in a univocal way, but of seeking the point of interaction or co-production of power through the folds of local action and global action, between the forces from below and the points of resistance. The same goes for the notion of control, widely used in the bibles of social work, the pair “help” and “control” going hand in hand, and finding the springs of a reversal or at least a rebalancing.

It is indeed surprising to read in the code of ethics or in the Competence Framework for Swiss social work professions, the affirmation of the “principles of social justice, human rights, collective social responsibility and respect for diversity”. Furthermore, professionals are encouraged to make their knowledge of social problems known to the public, to commit themselves as citizens to a democratic society, to assume their duty of disobedience when what is asked of them is in flagrant contradiction with their convictions or with the ethics of the profession. Taking these statements seriously means formulating further courses of action to support new subjectivities, experiences, and speaking out.

And the author draws on the experiences of “peer helpers”, a traveling exhibition on social assistance, the documentary The Night of the Bear which tells the story of a night in an emergency shelter. Instead of being secluded in technicality, of locking oneself in individual reports, of being the business of specialists, the knowledge of social work is paid into the public deliberation of the cantons which weighs in the definition of social protections, the quality of care and the formulation of the social question. The author is particularly interested in two sectors, that of child protection and that of probation, in which conflicts of rules are obvious. In this last field, the imperative of controlling risks must meet the mission of support, for example, and the “power to act” of users on their own lives. However, the author is not fooled. He sees the divide between the words which give impetus and the much greyer reality. Nevertheless, he calls for a critical gesture on the part of social actors, to say what is intolerable, to denounce all attempts to blame the poor and their increasingly violent stigmatization, to combat the injunctions which homogenize practices.

Conclusion

Overall, a very structured path of questions is emerging that social workers should address, and which, although full of noise, should be at the forefront of the Swiss social question. “Gaining relative autonomy” could be the focus if we agree to act on several levels, to establish a principle ofheterochrony for users, that is to say a principle of openness to the rhythms of individuals, and an open legislative power. T. Gutknecht reports on the “exercises of power” in which social work acts, perilous exercises where it is necessary to show strong attention to tiny events while shaking up institutional norms, to free up spaces of autonomy of action while publicizing them, to take principles of openness at their word and to carry high the statements of users.

In a rounded and still very timid language, T. Gutknecht supports the exposure of subjectivities, of ways of choosing one’s life even when one is poor or imprisoned, of these mistreated lives that never cease to demand increased attention. It is this language that social work must carry high and relentlessly. An attention towards the drain of ordinary gestures, of forgotten words, so often silenced.

This public dimension of social work reconnects with the ideals of the 1970s: to give voice to the voiceless, to speak “in place of”, not by substitution, but “from the place” of others, in order to create possibilities, to amend systems, to invent others.