Fulfillment as a Process of Becoming 3
Narratives: Experience and Judgement
Narrative as Process
Narrative values express the “how” of life, not the “what.”
As we express our narrative values over a lifetime, our lives gain meaningfulness.
A web of meaning develops over time and each new experience and the expression of narrative value becomes part of that web, altering it but never completely transforming it.
The act of narrating life is to seek a coherence in the flow of life, to find meaning within life.
Deleuze and Becoming
We are ready to return now to Deleuze and seek an interpretation of narrativity in the context of a philosophy of difference.
How might we incorporate the notion of narrativity in a Deleuzian manner that addresses our overall objective of explicating what we mean by leading a fulfilling life?
In order to do this, we must return to the perspective that addresses life as an overall process of becoming.
Becoming is a problematic: it is the question of how to think and engage in pure difference. Becoming is creativity and invention; it is not representation.
If we give primacy to the articulation and crystallization of values and meaning in aid of creating a coherent narrative for our lives, we have veered away from becoming and lost sight of it as process.
Creativity and Judgement
What prevents us from creating new values, new ways of being? What stops us from experiencing life, experiencing difference?
When articulation, reflection and interpretation dominate our self-reflexive thoughts, we disengage from our projects. We remove the artist’s cap and don the judge’s robe.
We exit process, adopt identity and take our first steps towards the exaltation of the transcendent subject.
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 © 2022 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.
