Fleeting minds

Ideas and mental representations are floating and fleeting events and experiences – that is why it costs us a constant effort and commitment to sustain them. We seem to largely resist abandonment to a present sensory experience that would not bring guarantees of safety as to our capacity to respond to sollicitations from our social world and existence. We have to maintain a mental conditioning that would allow us to respond as spontaneously as possible in the most appropriate way, so not to risk the awkwardness or outrage of being off mark in some way. That comes down the tension exerciced toward our moral environment which would work in a prescriptive way, pressuring from the outside but internalised and anticipated from the inside.

However, maybe one of our worst fear is to lose track of our own mental continuity in line with that prescription. Psychoanalyst’s Jacques Lacan’s idea of a ‘chain of the signifier’ does point to that anxiety of finding support on any mental representation that would do, at least momentarily. There is a constraint to that effort of conformity that is not that much based on care for oneself and others, but on the fear of their sanction and rejection. Our drive to attachment from an early age (in psychologist John Bowlby’s sense) confronts us to the way that family and its extensions are structured within societal boundaries to relational engagement and expression. Local dialogues and agreements between living beings are most of the time constained within those boundaries that affect the ways that we come forward with our needs up to their very possible question. If the way to conduct oneself is prescribed as one and unique possible way, there is nothing to ask if not being led to question the very foundations of such an exclusive way. And again, if we cannot ask that very question, the call for an answer will go on trying to find its own way within the limited available possibilities, especially when those carry the weight of an often unspoken violence.

Memory was never meant to be fixed, as its sensorimotor and neural roots are always sollicitating connections and self-generation. So, what we do, is try to put on hold micro-spaces in order to grasp onto those mental generations into something that could remind us of some idea of what might be expected in such or such social environmental conditions. In an earlier talk with a physicist working at the Paris University of Jussieu on astral particles and black matter, he explained to me to how they were looking for those particles of black matter that would be able to cross the surface of the mountains of the Pyrenees deeper than most particles do from the universe. By removing as much particle noise as possible around the site of their measurements, they hoped to catch something about it. The problem was that with no reference to configure their settings, as black matter is supposed to interact with no other particle, they could not be sure about anything to be found at this point. That is the inertia of indetermination, as a straight line needing no force nor effort to push itself through.

Our body knows how to sink into its own absoption within its sensory triggers and motor response impulses. We have been maintained very much in a strong state of dependency to others in order to seek our material vital needs, especially and up to a breaking point within our Western societies, as the generalised practice of externalisation and increase of social precarity induces insecurity upon them. Here, we are always in debt to someone else, and ultimately, to capital. So, it becomes often complicated to create our own questions, anything that would at least to belong to us so to address the issues of our potential insecurities. We have to borrow another language, so it goes circle. We are virtually sollicitated everytimes within our capacity to abstract relations and rarely get to fully take the time and space to dialogue with one another in whichever way. What we grasp on is often merely the hope for a momentary truce from the constant pressure to adapt a cycle of aggression, though we know that much of our difficulties have identified political roots. We cannot heal while being complicit to the way that our society models are built on the ruthless exploitation of the ressources and the living, but in the state where things are, we can merely survive without it on the individual level.

There is a spiral in the insecurity of living this way in this particular political and economical setting. The chain of the signifier is always a form of a chain of authority. The way that our mind works is and will always be floating and fleeting. That it should be a problem only relies on our fears, their causes and their consequences, but is also equally a matter of individual practice as it is of the collective.

Credit : « Moth », by La Fille Renne ❤