Getting stuck is what we do best. We’re so good at pyramid building, corporate protocol, policies that outlive themselves. It manifests in our expectations of ourselves and other people, our routines, what we consider our sensible ways of looking at the world. Yet there is this fluidity of things and people we tend to admire, what we often misinterpret as rarified genius, magic even and sociopathy. Our systems, even those that are most rigid, are found to have leaks that will let minute tinctures of this substance in, this loosener of things, just to keep their bones from cracking when the ribcage needs to expand and contract just enough to keep its animal alive.
After all, innovation drives the economy. Whether it’s tablets and smartphones, and the technologies that connect them, give them something to do, as in the countless apps and games ever in production to keep them busy. A couple of decades back it was the Internet itself, the WWW, e-Commerce, operating systems that would allow you to run several applications simultaneously on your personal computers. Before that, the game changer was the mere fact of personal computers, not to mention the technologies that underlie all of it, integrate them with larger networks of systems, secure and efficiently. And not least of all, the brilliant and innovative marketing behind it all, and all the new technologies in healthcare, sustainability, financial systems, homeland security, entertainment, infotainment, soft technologies of personal performance and achievement.
It’s dizzying to think about. It really takes one’s breath away. But how can these two tendencies exist so comfortably side-by-side, this anal retentiveness, on one side and on the other, that fountain of ever-expulsive novelty?
To Gilles Deleuze – likely the most important philosopher of late twentieth century Western Civilization, dead for two decades now, but yet to be discovered by the world at large – this sort predicament is to be expected. All of nature, he says, is made up of this relationship of difference and repetition, difference being the predominant principal, and repetition being the tendency for the flux of things to form habits. We therefore find the ever expanding and entropic universe generating patterns of star systems that begin to behave with a degree of predictability, things orbiting other things in regular spatial and temporal arcs, planets that can sustain life because they maintain consistent distances from their suns, the accretion of life itself, the repeated shapes and patterns of leaves on plants and trees, quadrupedal and bipedal forms that continually go back to the same nest, hole in the ground, home that they or someone else built for them.
Habit and structures of repetition sustain life, but life is in a sense a chaos of nonliving forms, a thinking-outside-the-box of the basic elements that might otherwise just sit there dead, like a number of businesses and ways of doing things we thought would always be there.
To be continues…