The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to us by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing is any longer of real consequence. We cover our eyes; we forbid ourselves to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thrusts far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living that are still fresh in our minds, and which slaps our future onto an opaque horizon, heavy with thick clouds and miasmas.
— Félix Guattari, For a remaking of social practices
What if we begin to suffer from symbolic indigestion?
I walk past a tree. It stands alone, separated from the rest of the vegetation by an invisible barrier. It grows in someone's garden, lonely, twisted. It seems rejected - around it the green crowns of other trees grow luxuriantly. Summer has begun, and the twisted trunk, full of thickenings reminiscent of the joints of a rheumatist, resembles a wintery void. Dusk falls, and only the orange light of a lantern illuminates the rough, sickly bark. It blinks from time to time. The bulb is fighting for life. Faces bloom on the bark of the tree, one by one, about to disappear as soon as I move another meter. Step by step, the scratches on the bark shimmer and distort. I look at the tree through the glowing parallax. I spotted it by chance, walking past a green metal fence behind which an invisible dog once lived - invisible because as a child I could hear its barking from behind the lush tules. I never managed to spot it, but to this day I remember my mother's warning - don't go near it. So I didn't go near it. But today, as the evening burns with silence waiting to be broken, behind the tules I hear nothing. The tree has been growing there forever, it's probably older than I am, but I've never noticed before how many faces hide in it. It resembles a totem, changing depending on who looks at it. A totem without belonging. A totem of a specter. One face twists in my direction, and another, having assumed an expression of suffering, sends a wordless lament into the ether. I look at them and try to remember them. To capture them before they disappear. None of them stay for long. Every smile and fleeting glance blurs. Just a blink and the place of old faces is replaced, by new ones. My brain can't stop its search. It adds blurred outlines to their features, gives them meaning, guesses their moods, their ages. It tries to create a whole figure from a tiny suggestion on the bark of a dying, though still resiliently upright tree. When I leave, passing the tree and the garden hidden behind the green fence, I leave dozens of unfinished worlds behind me. Feverish symbols yearning to be put together. I will abandon them, and then forget them. They will merge into one mass in my memory - I can already feel it happening. I feel the laughing face merge with the despairing one, and I see the cracked bark turn into a rotting face, only to become a mere wooden surface an instant later. My thoughts grind the symbolic contents of the inconspicuous tree into tiny pieces and then stash them deep in the depths of memory. I can reach into them when I want, but I can never bring them out in their entirety, frozen in time, ready to be viewed from all sides. Reaching into memory, I will start the whole symbolic process all over again, because symbolic creation is one of the senses. Not only sight, not touch, not hearing, not smell, not taste creates the world. Symbolization, as a feature of the mind, is another tool of experience. Walking past a tree covered with faces resembling war trophies hung on it, the heads of enemies, shrunken and wrinkled, my symbolic sense digests the visual stimuli, drawing from them something that was not there before. It adds a whole reality to them, seeping them through memories and the conjunctural power of symbolic metabolism that is a function of the human mind. The tree grows into a world where it did not exist before. This world is not merely a private space. It does not remain in the imagination. By sharing it, I trigger the process of symbolic metabolism in others. We digest each other's imaginations, creating something resembling a shared world. The face in the tree travels among us, becoming one of the many centers of human imaginative existence. This brings us to the basic problem I would like to confront here: what if we begin to suffer from symbolic indigestion?
The world, undigested, disappears slowly
I swallow space with every glance I cast at it. With every breath of wind I let into my lungs. The reflex to create meaning works before I have time to notice it; to separate what I add from what pure perception conveys to me (we can never call it pure, because meaning does not function as something superimposed over it, but something constituting an integral thread of the intricate tapestry of sensually woven reality). The creation of meaning exists as one of the basic functions of perception. I devour lights, I devour plants, people and animals, I devour my own thoughts and the walls of buildings on which the sludge from the street has collected, and from among the shapes of spots I manage to pick out ghost-like silhouettes, perceptual waste, unwanted children of meaning production. I try to separate what I see from what itself rushes to meet each image, but I can't do it. The tree growing behind the green fence cannot exist separately from the faces that call out to me from its bark, twisted and barely human. I devour every word I hear. I feel it unfolding inside me, changing into something else, as more words blossom out of it, making it expand like a painting to cover the whole space with another layer.
Sometimes silence comes. Sometimes I hear nothing, feel nothing, see nothing, touch nothing. I exist in the void and the void fills me. My body implodes, hungry and weak, devoid of the nourishment of meaning. Something breaks down every so often. My symbolic sense - or perhaps a symbolic organ, a center of symbolic metabolism - spits out every morsel of the world, which suddenly ceases to have meaning because I stop producing it. The symbolic organ dries up. Its insides peel away, tear off, leaving behind brittle, rough, bleeding tissue. Faces cease to have expression, the future blurs, once so clear in the process of producing images of the world. The symbolic organ spits out the remnants of its former contents. Meaning spills over the ground like a puddle of vomit and I can no longer digest anything. It soaks into the ground. It dies. There comes a moment when I feel small, shaky, broken and tired. I feel hungry, but the symbolic metabolism stagnates. I can't put into myself - or give out of myself - anything anymore. Writing becomes meaningless. Words sound like empty sounds. Asymbolia creeps into the very center of the body, which rejects any meaning in an autoimmune, aggressive reaction. Asymbolia, black sun, depression, melancholy, all-encompassing despair, sheer dark emptiness - we can describe all of these in metabolic terminology. These moments of eclipse, in which the world ends and death seems closer than before, are a digestive problem, a problem of the body, a problem related to the whole system of which life consists - both inside and outside the body. They involve what we put into ourselves and whether we have the capacity to digest it. Do we have the strength to chew every stimulus, to attach it to a mush of images and meanings. If the symbolic organ functions properly, symbolic metabolism allows us to function in the world. Experiencing reality is based on symbolic metabolism. If it doesn't work properly - as it does now, when I feel something in me fading away, dying, drying up, like an unused organ, like a dead fetus floating in its fetal waters, with no movement, no chance - the world almost ceases to exist. It continues to operate only out of momentum; out of habit. It slowly loses speed. I recoil from the pain I can't feel. The symbolic organ shrinks, blackens and dies. Sometimes, when it stops working, it happens only for a moment. A brief spasm. At other times it immobilizes me for months. Its dysfunction affects other organs. The world, undigested, disappears slowly. It dissolves into a fog that covers it with a worthless shroud. Symbolic indigestion can lead to death.
Symbolic indigestion does not come by chance. It is not an affliction of a particular organism. It stems from a system of production focused on capturing it and redirecting every imaginative effort into its own sustenance.
The disruption in symbolic metabolism, however, does not come from nowhere. It does not arise from the images I have evoked so far - it does not grow on trees in whose bark one can see faces. It does not float in the air carrying the warm smell of early summer days. There is something else going on in the background. The industrial rhythm of symbolic production rumbles beneath the surface of things. Every image I come into contact with is subject to the same mechanism. It dies in the factory rush. It emerges in pains only to be crushed by a ton of meanings. Symbolic oversaturation. A diet of processed, synthetic images, of flashing snatches of life, of repetitive actions whose symbolic nature either disappears or never existed. The entire production system has been moving into the realm of images for years. It invades our tissues, takes root in the symbolic organ, captures its capacities, squeezes, restrains, crushes it, bringing it to the brink of inefficiency, while maintaining the pace of production. The symbolic organ undergoes degeneration. It becomes small, bruised and dirty. It works at full capacity and slowly dies. Symbolic indigestion does not come by chance. It is not an affliction of a particular organism. It stems from a system of production focused on capturing it and redirecting every imaginative effort into its own sustenance. The production of the images that make up the world is flattened and taken to the extreme by saturating the individual's environment with tools designed solely for the reproduction of dominant representations. Dominant representations restrict the imagination, limiting its primary function - to create the new. Developing in unpredictable directions. The production of sensations - making sense. All this is fading away.
Before it fades, however, there is agony. The symbolic organ revolts. It stops assimilating anything. There are moments when I feel that the whole world is moving away from me. I can't touch it. My teeth become blunt. I can't sink them into the tissue of the images. I vomit every word, the taste of which ceases to resemble anything. Whole days seem empty. I sweat out the remnants of meaning, I tremble as if in a fever, and my heart beats as if it is about to stand still. I feel the black sun (Julia Kristeva came up with perhaps the best metaphor I've encountered) appearing in the place of the dying symbolic organ, burning with a cold flame. The tongues of its rays lick my insides and I feel how they burn me from the center. How they leave behind an impenetrable, icy void. No word can fill it. Images become incomprehensible. My body rejects them. Symbolic indigestion leaves behind only a quivering wreck, an empty shell, an overwhelming sense of loss. The inability to produce sensual experiences. The senses dull on the hostile surface of emptiness. They can't conceive of it. They let it consume them. Ossified fingers seek warmth, but all bodies seem too distant, too unreal. Do I myself cease to belong to this world? Asymbolia resembles death. Total removal. Erasure from the world. Everything is lining up hostile to my nothingness. I can't get up. Trees blacken and fall. The rumble of cars fills my head. Every whisper resembles an explosion. I chuckle at the images I'm trying to swallow, and I hate myself the most in the world because I can't overcome what has taken hold of me on my own. I forget that I don't have to do it alone - and that here lies the key to returning to the world of the living; discovering a sensory diet for the symbolic organ.
A symbolic organ is subject to the same processes as any other element of the ecosystem
I never feel more isolated as an individual than in moments when dry mouths beg for words that don't come, and every activity seems too difficult, too worthless, equated with the repetitiveness of production and service of everyday life. The symbolic body, fed on symbolic fast food, forgets the richness of the world. It cannot digest it. It begins to hate it. I can feel the feeling of rebellion against existence itself growing within me. Thoughts of resignation. Removing myself from the world seems too laborious. I persist, hungry, hunched over, crawling in the tangle of signs falling out of my hands. None of them tells me anything. Everything hides behind a veil. I am left alone - an individual, a self-sufficient being, an independent entity, existing only for myself, by myself and in myself. Others seem to stand somewhere in the distance. A wall - invisible, as if made of the purest glass - grows between us. It envelops me on all sides with its cold surface. It takes away the air. I suffocate in it, and my breath settles on the wall as steam. I don't have the strength to draw calls for help in it. I don't believe that anyone will come across them - and if they do, they will only see silence, thinly covered with empty words. I am left alone and unable to find my way back. I look around and see the same destination on all sides. Wherever I go, I move in a loop: the symbolic organ stops producing anything. It only reproduces the spasms of life to which I have accustomed it. It reproduces the gestures and words, the formulas that accompany me at work. It reproduces the routes and courses of meetings. It reproduces the shadows of plans that have long since died. They withered, fed by toxic food. I become empty, empty myself of everything, reject myself, the world and every word - and only then can I reopen to experience the symbolic realm in a different, fuller, healthier way.
To cure symbolic indigestion and return to life is to go through the landfill, to get over the feverish delirium produced by the diseased organ, and to redirect the automatic process of symbolic participation (and cocreation) toward something that is not actively killing us. Creating conditions for the liberation of symbolic production. Preparing a material and spiritual space in which the symbolic organ will receive duly valuable nourishment. Any symbolic disease has this systemic nature. It needs tools for externalizing the perceptual function of weaving reality from signs that merge into whole ecosystems - mental, social and environmental. The three ecologies, Felix Guattari's idea, are inextricably linked to the symbolic sphere. Our health depends on the ecosystems in which we turn - from which we obtain our food, in which we form our social bonds, building structures that allow our symbolic bodies to survive. Disease is not about individual failure. It doesn't come out of nowhere, randomly. The symbolic organ is subject to the same processes as every other element in the ecosystem. It takes part in it in its own way, exerting a real influence. Its creative power makes us see faces in trees and see love in the faces of the people we love. It makes us weave together threads of text and fabric. It allows us to experience memories when we smell the food of our childhood. The abstract, symbolic body acts as a bridge between us and other people, adding meaning to the smallest interactions. It makes us feel present in the tapestry we weave together. It allows us to notice others not only as individual bodies, but as a dynamic system of meaning, growing and enriching if all three ecosystems are conducive.
Symbolic illness is a disease of isolation and darkness, apoiesis, thoughtlessness and voicelessness
Life has no inherent meaning, but it inherently means. Not - it is meaningful. It means, that is, it is a unity with the process of symbolic metabolism. This is what I mean by invoking the three ecologies. We colloquially think only of the environmental one, associated with an obscure conception of nature, but we overlook the way our perception constantly participates in creation like a scientific apparatus defining its object and showing it once as a sum of waves and once as independent particles. The process of meaning defines the boundaries of bodies, defines the boundaries of the spheres in which we enclose ourselves like immunological bubbles. Meaning, as a product of symbolic metabolism, wraps our memory, locates us, gives us a name. It results in the continuity of identity, our social functioning, our approach to what is right next to us. The meaning we give to the world determines whether we approach it as a dominant, tyrannical force, as an individual, despotic or confused, or as a complex frame, a walking parallax, understanding that perspective is also part of the process of worlding, and that the perspective holder's actions happen in the world only because of the ability to digest, absorb and understand it, or at least try to comprehend it in an endless reconfiguration, leading to embedding in a dense context and developing a sense of belonging to an ever-shifting distorting, amorphous "here and now," not lying in any particular place because it is in the very process of meaningful fusion, the ecological interaction of two levels of the system beyond realism and idealism, and their interaction in which they collide or merge, dominating one another. Materialism, in its realist version, is also insufficient to describe the ecological aspect of the symbolic, ecological intra-action, producing all sensations of being in the world as a body, always as a body - a body that processes what it absorbs; a body clothed in a skin from which every pore leaks meaning, every scrap becoming an element of an infinitely constructed image, sinking into memory and building a path between times, places and people. The productive action of the symbolic organ is not an addition to the world. I can't call it an overlay or an unnecessary ornament. I cannot unravel the meaning and the matter in which it is created. Therefore, when the meaning disappears, when the symbolic organ dies, when I can no longer swallow a scrap of the world and feel like falling asleep and never waking up, the whole world-weave falls apart. It suffers along with me, as if it is cracking, as if it is peeling like old paint, exposing the dirty interior, under which nothing is hidden, only the rumbling echo of emptiness surrounded by an invisible wall. Symbolic illness - asymbolia, one of the primary symptoms of depression, the bane of the melancholic, who finds themselves at the intersection of two forces: the need to give meaning to their suffering and the need to disappear, to become what they feel all around them; nothing. Symbolic illness attacks the body and transcends the body, preventing it from interacting with other bodies. Symbolic sickness is a sickness of isolation and darkness, apoiesis, thoughtlessness and voicelessness. It has nothing to do with any beauty that anyone can see in suffering. It represents the culmination of decay in our lifetime and leaves us lonely and trembling, stretching out ossified hands only to catch emptiness in them. It tears us apart, diminishes us, reduces us to a singular, limited form whose mouth can no longer utter a word that has any meaning. The way out of the symbolic sickness, therefore, is to notice the ecological level on which it stands. An individual will not accomplish everything on their own. The symbolic ecosystem needs all of us, because, deprived of the process of meaning, we will disappear into the thicket of loneliness, incapable of any action in a world whose emptiness we perpetually fall into.
"It dissolves into a fog that covers it with a worthless shroud. Symbolic indigestion can lead to death."
"The symbolic ecosystem needs all of us, because, deprived of the process of meaning, we will disappear into the thicket of loneliness, incapable of any action in a world whose emptiness we perpetually fall into."
I was reminded more than once of the Phenomena of The Pale in Disco Elysium more than once here - which deals with a not strictly the same but related idea of entropy and human behaviour, culture and apparatus creating a world-eating force, that gets fed by things like personal melancholy and nostalgia, but also wide-scale crises like nuclear detonations.
"The meaning we give to the world determines whether we approach it as a dominant, tyrannical force, as an individual, despotic or confused, or as a complex frame, a walking parallax, understanding that perspective is also part of the process of worlding, and that the perspective holder's actions happen in the world only because of the ability to digest, absorb and understand it, or at least try to comprehend it in an endless reconfiguration"
This was really beautiful, and the power to name these things does real service of taking care of that symbolic organ in times of starvation and abuse. Thank you!