I woke up thinking about the classic scenes in Road Runner where Wile Coyote falls off the edge of a cliff. What makes them stand out, as Zizek pointed out somewhere, is the moment in which he acknowledges his fate; until he looks down he floats freely but when he recognises there is nothing underneath his feet he falls to his doom:
The point we can draw from this is that groundlessness isn’t a problem until we notice it. There is a momentum to our lives which keeps us motoring forward, in the absence of those critical moments which force us to make choices outside of our familiar parameters. We keep running forward until something leads us to stop running forward. This is how Roberto Unger describes groundless in his book about religion:
Existential groundlessness has to do with the limits to our ability to overcome the disorienting implications of an inescapable fact: we play a part—a tiny, marginal part—in a story that we did not, and would not, write. We can edit that story marginally, but we cannot rewrite it. In fact, we can barely understand it; we survey it only in fragments. Consequently, our decisions about what to do with our brief lives can have no basis outside ourselves. We are, in this sense, ungrounded.
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. The Religion of the Future (p. 6). Verso US. Kindle Edition.
What struck me this morning was the moment of suspension which tends to precede the Coyote recognising his imminent fate. There is a point where the momentum runs out and we stop moving forward, which is prior to though independent of directly recognising groundlessness i.e. looking down as we begin to fall. The video above doesn’t quite capture this (it was surprisingly hard to find a ‘classic’ example on YouTube) because he has been pushed off the ledge rather than voluntarily run off it in pursuit of his object of desire.
What happens in this moment of suspension? It is a point where we can’t keep moving forward in the way that was previously the case. But unless and until we look down (an interesting counterpoint to Don’t Look Up perhaps) there is a moment of (potential) freedom. The momentum which kept us moving forward has elapsed so our psychobiographies are no longer unfolding through their own quasi-autonomous logic. But we’ve yet to notice that the implicit existential assumptions which underwrote that logic have been revealed by our circumstances to have been necessary mistakes.
These are the spaces in which I think we have the capacity to become different people in quite a radical way, or at least to break with deep tendencies we have carried within us from past contexts. However in what Ian Craib describes as the ‘illusions of the powerful self’ there is the potential for a “neurotically obsessive […] way of guarding against nameless inner fears, and all too nameable outer fears” to take root here (pg 118). To imagine that with sufficient control (mindfulness, therapy, self-care, compassion etc) we might create our own grounds, rendering this groundless inconsequential through our own self-directed efforts. It brings to mind the children’s classic about walking in the air:
The problem is that groundlessness is ‘in here’ as well as ‘out there’. I initially found it hard to get my head around the Lacanian concept of the subject (hence in part my fascination) but I’m starting to understand the relationship between the two as something which sits genealogically at the intersection between phenomenology/structuralism and sociology/psychoanalysis. In this sense I would understand the obsessional response to groundlessness identified by Craib as attempting to cope with the groundlessness we encounter within ourselves:
The Lacanian subject is quite different from the phenomenological subject. Where the phenomenological subject is a seat of agency and experience, the Lacanian subject is experienced as that which is experienced as subverting our agency and experience (through bungled actions, symptoms, slips of the tongue, dreams, etc). Where the phenomenological subject says “I” and “me”, the Lacanian subject always seems alien to our sense of self. As Lacan likes to say, “I think where I am not and I am not where I think”. By this he means that our thought takes place not in our sense of conscious deliberation, but in an unconscious “elsewhere” that I can never fully identify with or assume. Where the phenomenological subject experiences itself as being in immediate identity with itself (at least in its Husserlian articulation), the Lacanian subject can only be detected in its traces— those traces being the formations of the unconscious –and is never present before us. Again, it just doesn’t have a dimension of “me-ness” to it. Where the phenomenological subject seems to have some substantial content to it, the Lacanian subject is quite literally a void or emptiness. It’s a sort of empty point, a mobile empty space, that language can never fill. Symptoms are perpetual (failed) attempts to fill that a priori hole. In this regard, the Lacanian subject is the ruin of every identity or attempt to ultimately say what we are. This isn’t as bleak as it sounds, as it also entails that no one is ever fully determined by power or conditioning.
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/object-oriented-ontology-lacan-and-the-subject/
It’s from this perspective that moments of suspension are intellectually and existentially generative; the deliberate commitments which kept us moving forward are no longer generating the momentum upon which we came to rely, but we’ve yet to recognise the deeper groundless which meant this was inevitable or experience the fall which comes with that recognition. In this gap there is a meeting point between the reflexive subject (with all his aspirations and hopes) caught between doubling down on control fantasies or plummeting into symptoms and the Lacanian subject in relation to which those fantasies were able to become operative in the first place. It’s a point where the reflexive subject is able to recognise the inevitability of falling off the edge again and again because there was never any ground to begin with, only illusion of it created through momentum and fantasy.
It’s a depressing realisation but also I think a perversely hopeful one because it opens up the possibility of learning to live with this, rather than being caught in endless cycles of being carried forward in the momentum of desire only to be once more confronted with the impossibility of its realisation. Wiley Coyote is never going to catch road runner so what else might he do with his time?
Mark Carrigan 