as we are sinking, like peacefully drowning zealots, deeper into a reality that disavows its lifelessness by locking disorder and strangeness – already awfully scarce – in the golden cage of laws, norms, principles, identities or “-isms”, one must look for weird intensities elsewhere… possibly in a pulsation towards disintegration…
> modern ideologies aim towards integration: towards clarity, completion, organization, knowledge and control. they dream realities preserved in a state of eternal transparency and constancy, purged of anxiety and uncertainty and bolted in place by phallic myths.
> disintegration is a composition of forces that tends to pull these realities apart.
modern integrationism
> uncertainty might be the only thing that we can be sure of, the irreducible condition of any human reality. no symbolic system – social, of representation, of knowledge or of power – can close onto itself becoming airtight and flawless. any system contains a kernel of uncertainty – of unknowable and otherness – that threatens to undo everything[1].
> but modernity teaches us to hate and fear uncertainty, to always seek its opposite: certitude, universal and eternal truths, the inalterable and inalienable essence of people and things, the measurable, predictable and controllable patterns of reality, the laws that rule and explain everything. Enlightenment promises to insert the scalpel of reason into the darkest areas of the world, opening up to its gaze, technologies and civilising interventions[2] all that which is unknown, unruly and wild: the lands, forests, and mountains, the oceans and skies, the strange souls, bodies and minds of the savage, the mad, the criminal and the rebellious, of women, queers and so on.
> the modern drive to know and govern is a terrific ambition to integrate all of life into a system understood not as homogeneity, but as a dispositif of ordering and managing “difference” and “diversity” so that, in the end, nothing escapes its capillary network.[3]
disciplinary integration
> little wonder that modern subjects feel unbearable anxiety whenever faced with uncertainty. to escape this – inevitable – encounter they are ready to swallow any anxiolytic pill. And the most widely available such pill, possibly, is identity. all univocal identities (“I am this, this is this!”) tend towards coherence, purity, formulae, algorhythms, rituals, routines and reflexes, towards stable frameworks of perception and reaction, towards seriousness and commitment, towards predictable forms of life: towards higher integration. integration lets live no other form of life except those that come out of its moulds. which is the excision of life from life.
disorderly pulsations
> pushing against the centripetal force of integration, disintegration de-centres, disperses, complicates and disorients. if modern governing aims to organise life, disintegration strives to deeply disorganise it.
> if the centripetal drive aims to eliminate weird forms of life, disintegration aims to multiply them. if integration is obsessed with measuring and comparing, disintegration aims towards incommensurability. and if integration is the drive to normalise, disintegration is a pulsation towards an abnormality so pervasive that it makes the concept of “normal” inoperative.
> disintegration tends to rip apart the ideals of “social harmony”, dislocates the joints of the disciplined diversity curated by multiculturalism or by any dispositif that aims to coagulate life around centres and structures.
> disintegration threatens the naturalistic “sameness/difference” dualities sanctified by modernity. it dissolves the “common” systems of perception, knowledge and subjectivation that keep modern subjects and groups “together” (humanity/humanism, society, civilisation, culture, nation, ethnic group, etc.). the differences between people that disintegration registers are of politico-libidinal nature, not those catalogued by the modern “atlases of identities[4]”.
> it goes without saying that disintegration is not a recognisable, repeatable, translatable thing, a set of principles and actions that can be easily defined and disseminated. since it aims to make forms of life illegible and unintelligible by the coding machines of integration and, why not, by ourselves, it has an abundance of meanings and shapes.
> disintegration might seduce those living in this world but not desiring to be part of it. those that feel that they are citizens of the world have deep libidinal bonds with the given: with the pleasures of traditional or bohemian urban life, travelling, consumption, personal growth, classicism or avant-gardism, “normal”, hipster or alternative lifestyles, institutions and infrastructures created by someone else (governments, corporations, cultural establishments, dispositifs of entertainment, supermarkets and so on). in them, disintegration will most likely provoke outrage and terror.
> who might be keen to plunge into the permanent sunset of disorder and inscrutability remains uncertain. but hopefully some of our trajectories will intersect.
[1] A thorough ontological and epistemological discussion of why I believe this to be the case would be long and complex; it would fast become academic and summon lengthy lists of references from various starchy fields. It would be tedious. Let’s just say that, since human truths, realities and experiences, including our bodies and subjectivities, are shaped in the symbolic field, they share this field’s openness. A genealogical analysis of any human practice can show that no system manages to completely eliminate from itself error and the unknowable. Some call these fragments that cannot be integrated by the symbolic system “reality”, or “the Real” or things like that. I am less interested in the – unknowable – nature of this Real than in the fundamental ambivalence and precariousness of any experience and system of meaning making. Which is not a bad thing, on the contrary, it is the thing that allows the construction of new worlds and forms of life.
[2] The holocausts that modernity continuously stages are all performed under the marble frontispiece of civilisation, progress, truth and knowledge, usually represented as light and vision (“enlighten, bring to light, make light on, see the truth, visionary intervention, fight obscurantism” etc. etc.). This is a secularising of the Christian representation of divinity and its truth as light and all-penetrating vision.
[3] Any organising table or scheme is a good example of this form of integration – Mendeleev’s table is exemplary but this is as valid for geological or zoological systems of knowledge, for the great hierarchies of human ethnicities and races, for the classifications of mental illness created by modern knowledge or for the categories that the music industry applies to songs. All such systems use a set of “organising principles” that fix its elements in a two-dimensional frame.
[4] To what extent we can get rid of identity is to be seen; however, even if eliminating identity might be impossible, the tension introduced by a drive to undo univocal identities is sufficient to fissure most governing dispositifs.