A multifaceted mirror for individuals (3)

In my previous post I said that one has to go further (as Kierkegaard himself went further) than the two Kierkegaardian models discussed earlier. More specifically, in the last section of Either/or, II — entitled “Ultimatum”, which consists largely of a “sermon” (supposedly by a pastor-friend of Judge William) with the heading, “The edification implied in the thought that as against God we are always in the wrong”, one finds the means to delineate a different model of personality and of art.

At the same time one is struck by the extent to which it adumbrates the poststructuralist logic of thinkers like Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida and Deleuze. In fact, it is mainly Deleuze’s thinking on different kinds of cinema (that of the movement-image and of the time-image, respectively) that I am using here for the purpose of re-interpreting Kierkegaard.

I do not wish to pursue the religious-philosophical implications of the (Kierkegaard’s) meditation on the judge’s part, but instead draw out its fecundity for understanding the complexity of the human subject, and of art. This lies primarily in the tension between “infinity” and “finitude”, implied by the contrast between “God” and “we” humans (who are always in the “wrong”, according to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous character).

What it amounts to is this. On the one hand, one can think about the aesthetic and the ethical models as embodying finite, creative-existential paradigms, both of which fall short of the unpresentable infinity represented by “God”, as it were (as Kierkegaard argues here via the meditations of Judge William). In ordinary language, whether one lives a life of separate, successive “masks” to avoid boredom (the aesthetic model), or whether one tries to be “one kind of person” in every situation (the ethical model), sooner or later you will fail in your attempt, because humans are not infinitely, superhumanly, “perfect”. No one can be the perfect aesthete or the perfect embodiment of ethical living: we are fallible and finite.

On the other hand, however, one can think of these models as corresponding to two different “kinds” of finitude. The aesthetic model, which resembles the postmodern moment of fragmentation, flux and (according to Fredric Jameson, in temporal terms) “schizophrenia”, corresponds to a finitude of the arbitrary, fluctuating movement of creativity, while the ethical model, in so far as it instantiates a psychological or an artistic paradigm, corresponds to a finitude of the unifying, integrating and stabilising movement of creativity (even if this movement is conceived of as traversing time). In other words, the aesthetic and ethical models are the key to distinctive approaches to personality and to art, which one may call the postmodern and the modern, respectively.

These two models must be contrasted to the religious model, however, which (for Kierkegaard) takes the infinity of God seriously, which one must “resign oneself to infinitely” and in the face of which you should eventually adopt an attitude of faith as a kind of liberating “leap into darkness”. One does not have to affirm Kierkegaard’s turn to religious faith, however, but it does suggest an alternative route.

If one follows Kierkegaard in quasi-analogous terms, in reflecting on the “upbuilding” or edifying thought that, as compared to “God” (infinite), “we are always in the wrong” (finite), it does not necessarily lead to the insight, that there is an exemplary, perfect subject (or, for that matter, art) which, like “God”, can be conceived of as “infinite” (in contrast to the aesthetic and ethical models for living or art). Rather, it implies that, avoiding the either/or of the modern and the postmodern, subjectivity and art could reconstitute their respective “terrain” differently: NOT in terms of two different kinds of finite, creative movement — the one fragmentary and arbitrary, the other unifying and integrating — but in terms of in(de)finitely creative temporal modification. This is what a Deleuzian interpretation of Kierkegaard’s turn to a religious model seems to me to suggest.

What does it mean? Such a subject (or kind of art, in painting, cinema, architecture, literature, or music) would not be susceptible to different kinds of movement, from one distinct position or fragmentary, fleeting subjective identification to another (the aesthetic), or alternatively, to a movement of constant integration of past, present and future into an ostensibly unitary subjective stance (the ethical), neither of which can be faultlessly maintained. Instead, such a subjective position would seize upon the fundamental function of time in human subjectivity — it would seek to appropriate the inescapable temporal dimension of human life through self-invention, or rather re-invention, in relation to what has gone before.

Previous positions occupied by the subject or “self” become the “presentations” (“making present”) of the past, which are imaginatively modified (re-invented) in the present in light of future possibilities. Living like this is nothing less than taking seriously the Kantian, Husserlian and Derridean/Deleuzian insight, that time (not motion) is the very fabric of our subject-constitution.

This time-oriented conception of the subject has the advantage of evading the identity-fragmenting consequence of the aesthetic model, as well as the tendency of the ethical model, to engender an illusory unity, which easily degenerates into a kind of ideological fixity (where people believe that they ARE a certain person once and for all, unchangeably, whether conceived of in racial, cultural, religious or political terms).

Similarly, an art based on the “religious” model (and modified with Deleuze’s help) would not be subject to the motions, however creatively reconstructed, of experiential space and time, but would “present” (note: not re-present) movement, form, sound, colour, mass, itself as a species of time, freely modified or transformed through in(de)finite imaginative invention (as opposed to convention, but, importantly, presupposing convention, only against the backdrop of which invention is intelligible). The Qatsi-trilogy, which I discussed on TL recently, is a splendid instance of this.

In simpler, more “practical” terms, what this means is the following. From time to time everyone is given the opportunity to “revise” their lives, and he or she either uses the opportunity to do so or they waste it. For example, when one accepts a new job, even one in the same line of work as the previous one, one has the opportunity to revamp one’s work persona in the way described above, not by severing the link between the two, but by re-inventing the way one does one’s work in the process of revising one’s earlier working identity in light of the future, that is, of the challenges that the new job holds.

To take another example: many individuals experience the disruption — sometimes the trauma, depending on how much one cared for one’s wife or husband — of divorce in the course of their lives. To move beyond this (that is to resist, successfully, the incapacity of doing so) requires a concentrated effort at “pulling oneself together” — an expression that acquires new meaning in light of the Deleuzian interpretation of Kierkegaard’s religious model.

It means that one should resist the inclination to resent the person with whom one has parted marital ways or to regret and deny the experiences of the past with this person and instead look at these as the valued material on the basis of which one can refashion oneself with the future in mind. Invariably, of course, this involves other people — or another person — without whom the attempt at re-inventing oneself would probably be a lonely affair.

“Refashioning oneself” does not here amount to a new mask (the aesthetic), or an integration of the present with the past, with a view to attaining unity of sorts (the ethical), but a temporal process of acknowledging the past — allowing it to “present” itself as memories and the like, in the present — with a view to actualising inventive future possibilities, which will therefore, once actualised, always carry the “trace” of the past in them.

In short, it means accepting our temporal, historical being as the ineluctable realm of what is constitutive for us as human beings, and negotiating the extremes of illusory unity and dispersing fragmentation, imparting to one’s sense of self both a measure of relative stability and one of revitalising dynamism.

This is by no means easy; it requires concentrated effort. But it is the only way, I believe, to live a fulfilling life — without any guarantees of enduring happiness, perhaps, but with a growing confidence in one’s ability to elaborate creatively on what life sometimes unpredictably, disruptively throws at one. And if my attempt to explain my Deleuzian understanding of such a poststructuralist interpretation of Kierkegaard seems complex or difficult, I apologise — admittedly it is not an easy notion to understand. If it is any consolation, I constantly struggle to understand these things myself; that is why I write on them.

(Should anyone be interested in exploring this theme of a poststructuralist conception of identity further, see my recently published paper, “That strange thing called ‘identifying’ ”, in the South African Journal of Psychology 39 (4), 2009, pp. 407-419.