My theoretical identity is perpetually fluid and without fixed coordinates. It’s a genuine lack of rootedness and fixity

The madman’s declaration is not a happy declaration. It is the declaration that the world has lost its arche, its ordering principle. It is the declaration that we have lost our naivete and no longer believe that beneath the chaotic flow of experience there is some law or order. There has been a collapse of our sense of who we are as individuals, (the “selfness of our self” as Kierkegaard might say), the orderliness or lawfulness of the world, and of purposes and goals. Or maybe this is just me. I cannot seem to find any fixity for my identity. I am suspicious of any goals I set for myself, suspecting some hidden catch behind them. And the world appears chaotic to me. Where is the joy in schizophrenic processes of desiring-production promised to me by Deleuze and Guattari? Why do I experience this as so anxiety provoking? ~ by larvalsubjects on April 18, 2007.

I really think one needs to be careful with their use of language here. I spoke of an experience, and I quite literally meant an experience. To speak of assumptions is to speak of cognitive-theoretico attitudes towards something else. I’m more than happy to concede that I might be overgeneralizing and that this might not be a widespread experience but my own personal neurosis, but I am very seriously talking about a phenomenological experience. I wrote the post in ten or fifteen minutes before teaching so I didn’t have the opportunity to expand on this:

1) My theoretical identity is perpetually fluid and without fixed coordinates. One month I’m deeply engaged with Lacan, Freud, and Zizek. The next with figures such as Deleuze and Guattari, Luhmann, DeLanda. The next Hegel. The next Marx or Whitehead. The next Burke. The next Husserl. The next Levi-Struass and other structuralists. The next Dewey. And so on. This isn’t simply shifting interests. It’s a genuine lack of rootedness and fixity. This lack of rootedness is reflected in my personal identity, professional identity, and intersubjective relations as well. This is not something I find enjoyable, though I certainly do learn a lot.

2) I can’t speak to others, but I very genuinely experience a lack of purposiveness in both my professional life and my intellectual life. What is it all for? I really couldn’t tell you. You put one foot in front of the other and keep going, but as for some deeply held purpose… They all seem fake or without claws to me. For instance, I often have the uncanny experience that the sort of politics described by Badiou or Zizek is more a posture than anything else. That is, it too often strikes me as a sort of game belonging to a highly theoretical vocabulary (more in the case of Zizek than of Badiou, but all the same). Any sort of engagement seems suspect in advance. Once again, I am speaking with regard to my own experience.

3) The world is experienced by me as lacking any sort of order, law, or arche to it. I can filter it through Spinoza or Lucretius, now this or that religious experience, now complexity theory or ecology, now Marx, now Hegel, now semiotics, now this or that. That is, every frame marginally works and I’m left without a means of choosing among these frames.

Consequently, to write a phrase like “the felt perception that something has collapsed” is to deny an existential lived experience that is very much real, as if this were simply a cultural diagnosis. I do suspect that there are reasons for this existential lived experience, that the nature of capitalism is such as to “deterritorialize” connections between certain elements, always tearing them apart and rendering fixed identities fluid, but I don’t think this is simply a “perception”. Historically I believe that there are very real reasons that the figure of the hysteric emerged so forcibly as a clinical entity during the 19th century– the hysteric is the one who demands to be told who they are –and that we have seen such an explosion in mild mental illness in the United States (I can’t speak to other countries) in the last 20 years.

It is not a mistake that Freud emerged when he did, in the aftermath of human life being calculated in terms of abstract labor metrics of production, where one laborer is every bit the same as another laborer, thereby erasing any personal or specific characteristics of the person vis a vis family roots, ethnic roots, gender, orientation, etc., etc., etc. All that counts is the person’s ability to produce x amount in x amount of time, so all persons become exchangable. Hence we have the rise of equal rights and civil rights, insofar as capital, in principle, already counts everyone as the same. With this also comes to first person erasure of identity.

The last statistic I heard at one of our collegewide faculty meetings was that an astonishing 300,000,000 Americans are treated yearly for depression and anxiety disorders. I have a very difficult time believing this statistic, but there it is. Sure, there are potentials here: Marx made this point, Deleuze and Guattari makes this point, Lacan makes this point, Lyotard makes this point, etc., etc.

However, we again and again are given optimistic discussions of these “potentials”– it’s almost a professional requirement among academics steeped in critical theory and postmodern thought –but we seem to have little genuine discussion of the high toll that seems to acompany this state-of-affairs. About the only serious discussion I’ve been able to find of these matters would be among clinically practicing analysts. The rest seem enamoured with a highly stylized vocabulary of self-creation and potentials that does little to ameliorate these anxieties and the great suffering that accompanies them. No wonder fundamentalisms then become appealing. larvalsubjects said this on April 18th, 2007 at 11:19 pm