The Preoccupations of the Citizen - Reflections from the OPUS Listening Posts

OPUS - an Organisation for Promoting Understanding of Society - has developed a programme of ‘Listening Posts’, meetings where participants draw on their experience in their roles as citizens to reflect on what may be going on in their society, for example, on the privatisation of the individual and displacement of feeling and on absent leadership in a context of transience. Societies and their citizens are having to explore new ways of structuring the experience of the individual in relation to the whole in what has been thought of as a turbulent environment (Emery and Trist, 1973) or, now, as a complex adaptive system (Stacey, 1997). Political parties, manufacturers, service industries, all look to citizens as consumers of their products. They use the social sciences to analyse both economic interest and social and psychological identities. OPUS, in its work on reflective citizenship, has retained an emphasis on the consumer as citizen rather than the other way round. Having developed hypotheses about the failed dependency of social institutions, it has wanted to continue to explore the relationship of the individual to society.

After a brief account of how Listening Posts have developed as a way of engaging with the experience of the reflective citizen, this paper will describe some themes from discussions that have taken place over the past decade.

From February 1991 OPUS has run an annual study day, with a Listening Post followed by small group discussion and review. The meetings have been ‘scribed’ by OPUS members and their content provides the data for the main part of this paper, reflecting on the pre-occupations of the citizen in the last decade of the century. These explorations of citizen affect have seen the identification of a privatised individual in an anaesthetised society with the displacement of violent feelings onto an alien other; individuals have struggled with