One listens to a great musical piece or surveys a great architectural work and the mind boggles: how does one begin to think about where to start? How was a masterpiece such as this created?
But it often starts with rhythm and logic. Such fundamentals can be compared to a skeleton or scaffolding. Great things are built off of a dependable, repetitive rhythmic/logical base. Its hardness is derived from a dependability of the positioning of matter. Its form stays, while the notes make themselves heard at dependable positions.
From such a base great ornamentations arise, ornamentations that can curve and tower in wild directions, but in the end the ornamentations are anchored to the shape of a great form that has been repeated into existence. Such patterns not only arise in the arts and crafts, but in nature, in the cosmos. What is life but the extension of eternal principles whose instantiations owe their existence to the dependability of a great rock, held together by gravity, whose perpetual existence allows the flourishing of things both ugly and beautiful?
There is a tendency in progressive metaphysics to emphasize perpetual change, as in Deleuze and Guittaris metaphysics of immanence. Such a philosophy serves as a powerful counterattack to conservative ideology which posits capitalism as a natural and just system, and its related social rigidities such as the delineation and enforcing of gender roles and sexual mores as natural standards. If nature is in a constant flux and its only true animating principle is to engage in every possible variation, then what is posited by conservatives as a natural formation is actually artificial blockage. This is only a caricature of D and G's total work; I'm just using it as a launching point for now until I read more of it.
Conservatives see liberals as disintegrating agents that destroy the fabric of society with their deviating tendencies to violate established social mores, while liberals see conservatives as a sort of calcification that is itself artificial, a limited conception of humanity that seeks to sustain itself by constraining the lives of others. What is natural in both cases has to do with the true emotional nature of each group. True nature itself demonstrates both tendencies.
I myself sympathize more with a conception of nature that is in constant flux, and that all biological variations of human beings, whether they violate seemingly arbitrary gender and sexual mores or not, deserve life and the exercise of their own autonomy. But the fact of the matter is that there will always be a proportion of the population that assents to the conservative impulse, and that we are necessarily all bound together in the end. The conservative impulse does lead to a regularity and dependability in life's processes which we all depend on to live, but then to try to extinguish whatever deviates from that regularity necessarily rends the fabric that holds everything together.
The objective should not be coming up with a way to permanently discredit one of the other camp, but to conceive of a way to harmonize completely contradictory impulses: love and fear.
