Sometimes when one is especially agitated or even traumatized, a strange thing can happen: there is a rupture in which all of the connecting discord is decoupled and wrenched out, dissolving into the ambient environment, much like an explosion. After all, what is an explosion but the violent expansion of contradictory forces which can no longer be contained in a given space?
Discord, or the agitations caused by cumulative contradictions, is resolved by its incongruous elements becoming scattered in space, re-establishing their harmony. Akin to a psychotic break perhaps, but who can know the true content of the psychotic break but the psychotic? Maybe such things are best not verbalized, and maybe they can't be, but we at least would like to learn something that can be shared. This of course takes coming back from a psychotic break, a return to coherence, as opposed to becoming lost forever.
It happens in the mind of course, but it is no less real. What I mean by all this is that one's experience of "normal society" is of a collection of shared symbols and relations in which one can locate oneself in a cultural array, attributing meaning to one's existence and using those symbols and relations to calculate one's power and standing, and to derive one's sense of justice from that calculus.
This is possible if the true nature of power is kept hidden from consciousness, and one focuses on exercising one's autonomy and one's limited power in a circumscribed fiefdom. A society remains stable so long as its constituents exist in this state, even if they rest in hierarchical tiers.
However when it is no longer possible for an individual to exist in this state, when there is no longer any power to be exercised, when an individual's pathway to dignity and enjoyment is constantly curtailed, the discord, the contradictions grow. Considering that an individual naturally seeks to live autonomously while pursuing what desires and enjoyments are perceived as possible, the denial of these things can be construed as a logical contradiction, which naturally causes great psychological agitation.
The culmination of these contradictions introduces a violent instability into the psyche which is manifested and resolved in myriad ways. One of those ways, in which the psychic violence is resolved by being ejected outward and dissolved, is one of the most peaceful ways. This comes in the form of the realization that all is ephemeral and always changing, that what one is fixated on is a mere temporary play of matter, energy, and space, and that it disintegrates as it is formed, and despite sometimes causing temporary feelings of horror, this realization causes a great release and relief. One realizes the interconnectivity and interplay of all things, and one realizes one can attach and let go in accordance with the movement of these things.
If one is economically struggling for example, one no longer has to have a nice house, a nice car, a beautiful wife or husband, beautiful children, all the cultural symbols that one traditionally uses to calculate one's stature and through which one derives enjoyment. It is no longer necessary. It frees the psyche to derive enjoyment from other things, things which may actually be accessible. There's a lot more to it - enough to go mad pursuing to its end - that I'd like to explore some other time. This is another difficult subject to talk about. I'm not even sure how to articulate these things. But maybe a little more on desire and its relation to attachment.
Deleuze and Guattari characterize desire as explosive, a force which seeks to consume in every direction and which must be shaped, contained, and directed in the life process to sustain the machines which form to exercise desire. But then as these machines are generated, they disintegrate through their very operation. And so our civilization machine begins its unraveling - as it should, one should concede.
Consider that a fire loves to consume old, dry, brittle things. A fire transforms organic formations - whether they are ready or not - back into elementary building blocks of matter and ambient, diffuse energy which dissolve into the environment. This is one way in which organic formations are broken down.
One's attachment to an array of formations through desire is an expression of this life tendency to generate formations, only that this capitalist formation has become an abomination, a hulking mess which no longer has any purpose but to expand.
Each constituent of a desiring life system seeks to grow in power at the expense of the others, so that when one given constituent or class of constituents pulls away, the rest are denied their power, the means to advance their natural tendency to live and flourish. We see the culmination of a state of affairs in which the powerful come to view organic life and even members of their own species as inanimate objects, a state of affairs that nature seems to detest, as demonstrated by the inherent instability of such a system throughout history.
All of that repressed energy has to go somewhere. So we have explosions, fire. We also have periods of cosmic awakening. States of being that more resemble the behavior of water, though water can be violent as well. Fela sings that "water no get enemy," and the Taoists speak of becoming like water, flowing down to the lowest places and enriching all, moving and forming in accordance with life's fluctuating matter forms. What is it about water that sustains life? It has a multitudinous form, bonds which manage to form and break but which accommodate all things.
Water attaches, but then lets go just as easily, flowing in all directions, curving around formations of earth and rock. In the same way, Buddhists speak of letting attachments go. Of letting one's desires, one's enjoyment flow where it will, as opposed to be being concentrated in an immovable end - something that of course is not evil on its own, but which causes grief in excess and gratuity.
And so what is it about the psyche which allows it to behave - in relation to its environment and peers - like so many natural forces like fire and water? What is it that determines such things?
We can have fire or we can have water, though we are more likely to have both. More on this theme when I can treat it with better clarity.
