Anger and repetition: a non-Kierkegaardian excursus

 

In Repetition, Kierkegaard’s founding binary is that between recollection and repetition.

As founding binaries go, that is a good one.

Myself, though, I have been thinking about anger and repetition. And here there is a psychology that, I believe, escapes the Kierkegaardian remit.

My own experience of anger, phenomenologically interpreted, is peculiarly driven by repetition. That is, my anger will express itself to me, in my head, as a sort of dialogue with the person I am angry with. This could be someone I know, or it could be someone on social media, or it could be someone with whom I have a bad encounter, etc. The anger will flow into formulas in my head that keep repeating themselves. Anger, I have noticed in angry arguments, does take that blamemaking, repetitive form. I would wager that if you record any angry argument – from societies as different as the Irish-Americans and Balinese – you will find a significant percentage of phrases or words repeated. Repetition is not only the form into which the feeling of anger is pressed, it becomes the motor of anger as it is experienced.

Now I would contrast this with that particular form of happiness called satisfaction. This is not Kierkegaard’s notion of happiness. It has a utilitarian spirit that is alien to his question about repetition – when repetition becomes conceptualized as a part of, or a critique of, dialectic.

But in my own experience, the thing about satisfaction is that it is shaped by refusing further repetition. It is not only absolutely of the moment, it is, in a sense, a refusal of both the past and the future. That is, of recollection and repetition.

My son used to have a very cute trait. When he was happy about, say, a meal, he would say this is the best thing I ever ate. And in that moment he meant it. Neither the past nor the future would alter the satisfaction that here, this food I am devouring, is the best I have ever ate. This did not express a real quantitative judgment. I don’t think he was actually remembering a series of foods. Rather, the food presented itself, in the moment, as overwhelmingly satisfying.

Consumer society is, in its fundamentals, opposed to this peasant satisfaction. If satisfaction as stasis is encouraged, consumer demand will flatline. Satisfaction, from the corporation’s view, must be edged with dissatisfaction. No perfect moment – no satisfied moment – can be, theoretically, allowed. As this is impossible, the corporate compromise with satisfaction takes many forms. One of which is to take some satisfactory situation and make it more uncomfortable. To, in other words, make the customer just a little unsatisfied, without losing the customer. An unsatisfied customer might be willing to pay a bit more for a higher level of service, meaning discovering, once again, that satisfaction. In this case, satisfaction becomes positional – it becomes competitive, a minor triumph over other customers.

And we know how that goes. That is, if we have ever gone to the airport and flown on a plane. That is the whole business plan of airlines nowadays.

Repetition and anger can well become a political norm. I am not sure how I’d quantify this, but I do think periods of ebb and discontent are partly articulated by an increase in the use of wooden language – which is designed to be repeated. It is so designed that it can be used without actually giving the words any semiotic seriousness. This is a fact noticed by all polemicists – from Jonathan Swift to Karl Kraus.

I should ps this post: Freud, of course, conjoined repetition and anxiety - finding anxiety dreams that were curiously rife with repetition. Freud eventually used this material to develope the notion of the death drive, in which repetition is used as a control mechanism. I could go on... but I won't, except to point out that repetition as function sees repetition as subordinate to the drive, whereas I think that this misses the way repetition can take control of the control - the song, so to speak, is subordinate to the tempo, becoming a different song - a deformed song, a song varied beyond its canonical essence - as the tempo alters.