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The enjoyment of turmoil

We often talk about ‘turmoil’ as an unpleasant experience we seek to avoid. But the meaning of turmoil is clearly more complex than this. As Tad DeLay puts it, “Because they lend a sense of security or clear standing, I wager anxiety* and turmoil are actually sources of enjoyment rather than something subjects prefer to avoid. There is a precise order to the relationship”. In turmoil we find a meaning and shape to experience which might otherwise be shapeless, opening up enjoyment of circumstances even if it comes through discomfort. This turmoil can be embraced as a protection from insecurity and/or more disturbing feelings, such as shame, lurking beneath the surface.

We might say it anchors in Taylor’s moral space, providing the coordinates through which we approach our existence. In a psychoanalytical register this means acknowledging turmoil as symptom, asking what function it serves and the enjoyment which the subject takes in that function. It follows from the enjoyment of turmoil that not only can its resolution be resisted, it can actually be disorientating to no longer be in turmoil. Because it confronts the subject with the role that turmoil served for them, depriving them of coordinates which had previously anchored them. It gave an answer to the question “what does this all mean?” which is suddenly absent, leaving the subject confronting a reality which can be more unsettling than the turmoil itself:

This process involves the recognition of the Other’s deficiency, the realization that the unconscious fantasies that have been directing one’s desire and contributing to one’s suffering are both relative and doomed to remain unfulfilled and, hence, that there is no transcendent meaning to be found for one’s existence, no ultimate object that will satisfy one’s desire, and no single, fundamental jouissance that will of itself make life worth living.

Lacan, Discourse and Social Change pg 72 [my emphasis]

*He’s writing from a broadly Lacanian perspective but I understand ‘anxiety’ to have a very specific meaning for Lacan (the terrifying reality of the Other’s desire) which he seems to skip over here, perhaps using anxiety in a more idiomatic sense. This is why I’ve focused on turmoil instead.

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