Deleuze, Jung and the Impressionists, Part 2 of 4
The Archetypes à la Deleuze
Intuition and duration, as per Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, connect with Jung’s ideas on synchronicity, an a-causal connecting principle of reality.
When we experience synchronicity, time opens up as a multiplicity of relations, and opens on to enchanted encounters with all of reality, both the virtual and the actual.
As per Hamlet, “time is out of joint” when time subordinates movement, and we have become dead to life. Experiencing synchronicity, time is subordinated to movement, to change, to events of pure difference. And our resulting enchantment with reality restores us to and connects us with the vitality that flows through us and is our genesis.
Jung’s Psyche as Process
Jung’s thought has often been criticized as structural and foundational. But it is possible to interpret Jung as non-foundational and not constrained by the walls of rigid structure.
For Jung, the unconscious is fluid, a nebulous mix of psychic and cosmic forces; not founded on any particular objective, eg., sexuality, but instead a subterranean sea of psychic and cosmic energy.
In the unconscious, forces within and without connect producing pure intensities, never unified but always forming, de-forming and re-forming multiplicities in rhizomatic creativity. The unconscious is the virtual and the conscious is the actual, played out in the human psyche.
By accessing the unconscious, we access the virtual of our selves, and thence encounter the virtuality of reality.
The Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious need not be viewed as a static group of trajectories passively inherited by all human beings; dormant psychic energies that wake to control us.
Instead, the collective unconscious can be seen as the virtual of the psyche, a nebulous matrix of energies of pure duration, disconnecting and reconnecting in a continual process of pure difference.
Deep within the unconscious, forces are at work, rolling all of the past as duration forward, and creating the new.
Inexpressible forces flow, connect and disconnect but at all times remain unarticulated, beyond words.
The Archetypes
Only as those forces flow into consciousness, actuality, can we articulate them as specific images or themes. The archetypes of the collective unconscious are such articulations, always subject to change and adapting to the ongoing dynamic of reality.
The archetypes are symbolic articulations, immanent symbols of the virtual forces that flow within and criss-cross over us without, both psychic and cosmic.
In a moment in the temporal process of pure change, the archetypal symbol flows into actuality, into consciousness, as image or theme, expressing forces otherwise inexpressible; symbols of the forces and energies of the psyche and cosmos.
The archetypes are limitless, the creation of the new, never constrained by form insofar they connect, disconnect and reconnect in infinite permutations and combinations, only to release again into pure intensity.
The archetypes are symbolic images summoned by us or presented to us via intuition, that signify the forces of pure difference and becoming from which we are created.
And so, the evolution of the collective unconscious as process is never detached, but at all times open and connective. In a process of actualizing archetypal images, deterritorialized subterranean becomings form lines of flight, transforming the inexpressible into the expressible.
The collective unconscious is a human perspective on ontological duration, rolling forward our collective history of pure change, providing the energy for pure creativity, and the return of pure difference.
Dionysus and Apollo
Nietzsche spoke at times in terms of archetypes: the Dionysian and Apollonian; Dionysus a force of chaos, change and passion, Apollo a force of order, stability and reason. And Jung would apply these images to the psyche.
But Dionysus and Apollo need not be considered only as pure psychic energy; they can be viewed as ontological forces played out in the cosmos and in the psyche. And they need not be opposites, but instead moments in an ongoing process of becoming in which a multiplicity of forces at work within and without fold, unfold and refold.
Dionysus the virtual, ceaselessly driving creativity forward; Apollo the actual, a momentary crystallization of order and conformity, only to dissolve, or in some cases be shattered, by ongoing chaos and change.
Dionysus as the collective unconscious is a symbol of the ongoing force of duration creating light out of primordial darkness, intoxicating flux into pure ecstasy and, if repressed into the shadow, pure horror.
When the Apollonian represses the Dionysian, when the process of individuation is temporarily blocked, when psychic and cosmic energies not yet actualized are thrown back into darkness, when light is cut off from its genesis in darkness, cut off from the genetics of creativity, the virtual crashes through, annihilating order, often with catastrophic result:
Wotan, the shadow, reigns over the personal, the social, the historical, until the new and open revitalize in an unstoppable process of becoming.
Symbols and Diagrams
Psychic forces collide with the cosmic, are both internal and external without a border, are of one continuum. Psychic and cosmic connection, the dynamic between psyche and cosmos, is the creation of lines of flight having their genesis in pure differentials of intensity.
The archetypes of the collective unconscious can be thought of as artifacts of repetition-for-itself, the return of pure difference; forces in new shapes and forms, only articulated once actualized, otherwise inexpressible.
The archetype is a symbol, a momentary diagram of immanence; symbolic, not a representation of what is, but a sign of transformation itself; a signpost of the process driven forward by creativity and experimentation.
The archetype is symbolic of the threshold between virtual and actual, of a process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, in which anything is possible.
The Gateway to Enchantment
The forces underlying the archetypes of the collective unconscious are based in the being of the sensible, the becoming of sensation, accessible only via intuition; the pure force of transformation, and not the product transformed. A boundless connectivity, a dynamic interface with the pre-individual, sometimes a violent encounter, but always real, virtual, genetic, moving, temporal, becoming.
The archetypes are signs that turn us toward life, enchant us with life, and hence create relations with the forces of life, articulated in the language of the psyche.
When cut up and dried out, symbols lose their power, become static and transcendent, and are sometimes wrongly attributed to the historical. But provided symbols connect with immanence, duration and the eternal return, they provide a door to the flow of vital energy inside and out.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
