Fulfillment as a Process of Becoming 7
Releasing into the Flow
Radical Freedom
Life as pure difference is a living process. It is not handed to us divinely or through reason. Life is created by immanently living life.
Part circumstantial, part intentional, difference lives through everything and intervenes. But we have the critical freedom to disengage from our projects and find new projects.
We have the freedom reject our created meanings and values and seek out new ones.
Any particular narrative is part social necessity and part personal resonance, but when we are directly in contact with the force and reality of pure difference, we are radically free. Radically free to release and re-engage and re-invent on a pure plane of immanence.
The Open Self
Values and meaning and narrative crystallize from time to time. They actualize, but they float on a process of virtuality. They evolve, open up to new possibilities, and sometimes completely dissolve. Life is “schizophrenic” in this sense, not “Oedipal.”
The static snapshot of the self is a social formation, and identity is an effect. But the self always remains open. At any time, we may disengage from our projects and experience the dissolution of identity.
Seen through a Deleuzian lens, this is not a breakdown of reality. It is reality overflowing a specific image of life.
The dissolution of the self, into delirium, and the re-formation, re-invention of the self in new circumstances, and through new experiments, creating new singularities and multiplicities, is the creation of the new in the open whole.
When we experience this, we are in touch with virtual forces. We experience life as a body without organs.
Affirmation of the New
To be sure, there is an overall meaning to all of this, an overall value, an overriding normativity. It is the affirmation of life itself.
At this juncture, or from this perspective, in our lives we experience directly the affirmation of the new, pure creativity; and it isn’t always pleasant.
It can erupt in violent storms and change our lives completely.
But to see it as antagonistic to life is to miss the point. It is life in its fullest abundance; and there is energy there that, if we open up to, and allow to run through us, has the power to eternally create the new.
Flow Over Stuckness
Life as a process of becoming is the return of difference. No engagements, meanings or values actualized over our lives can short circuit or override the process itself.
When we get stuck, we are fighting process. And though we may cling to a crystallization of life, when we attempt to clog up the process, territorialize our identities, in the end we must always release back into the process.
Affirmation of the return of difference is the thick value and meaning in life. It is where process / authenticity meet meaning / value, where problems court and dance around solutions, where authenticity resonates in strong evaluations.
It is the realization of being as becoming, a release into the flow.
The Pathless Path
Rather than searching for a hidden true self, one should attempt to shape one’s life as a work of art, proceeding without recourse to any fixed rules or permanent truths in a process of unending becoming. (Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture)
Life is a work of art. Fulfillment is pure flow, overflowing desire as creativity, the unbounded energy of becoming. Renewal lies in the open, in the stillness of becoming. In abundance not lack. In creation not judgement.
It is realizing life as a pathless path, an endless journey, an exploration, an adventure, and an experiment all at once.
It is simultaneous and direct participation in the new and open whole; and the open wholeness of pure difference.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!
Tomas
Please join my email list here or email me at tomas@tomasbyrne.com.
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.
