The Shadow Play of Fixation

We need to see through to the mechanisms driving the madness.

We all know what fixations are, either because we’ve suffered from them ourselves or have witnessed them at work in others. We are aware of how compulsive they can be, how they draw us back into their force field, letting us go again only when they have drained us of more energy than they were worth. Yet at first the opposite seems to happen, for a fixation frequently starts with an energy boost, setting us on our high horse about a cherished theme. Of course it doesn’t last, and then we end up feeling edgy and diminished, as though the thing that locked up our attention had grown in strength at our expense. Which very likely it has.

There is a superficial resemblance between fixation and concentration, but also a key difference. Concentration requires a marshalling of inner resources directed towards an achievable purpose, yet once accomplished it leaves us free to relax, having hopefully got something useful done in the meantime. With fixation it is just the reverse: there is no upfront payment of effort required to slide into it, yet it may cost us considerable pains, once caught up in its toils, to wrest ourselves free of it again.

The ability to focus attention without strain arises quite naturally out of inner equilibrium. In such a state thoughts may enter the mind but are allowed to leave it without too much fuss; feelings arise as they must do and subside again. Neither thoughts nor feelings, however, cause any major disturbance of one’s overall harmony. This enables us to have a reserve of uncommitted attention which can be mobilised as required to meet whatever challenges or opportunities may arise for us.

Unfortunately this is a far cry from the overwrought mentality so common nowadays. Inner fretfulness, turmoil and discord are the current norm, and this inner condition is reflected all too faithfully in our outer world. Given this state of affairs, the easy alternation of concentration and relaxation gives way to something far more spasmodic, a fear-driven fixation which allows us neither to relax nor to concentrate in a constructive manner. Caught up as people so often are by immediate stimuli, there is no attention held in reserve when a difficulty arises, so that every challenge is liable to turn into a crisis.

A key underlying cause of this unhappy situation is the decline of attention span. This may seem paradoxical at first, because fixation and dispersion appear to be the polar opposites of each other. And indeed they are, but they also feed off each other. For dispersion of attention leads to a loss of bearings, which prompts in turn the reflex to seize hold of something secure that can produce a semblance of order. The decline of shared meanings in society exacerbates this reflex. Fixation then becomes an attempted substitute for meanings that have arisen organically over time, but its mechanism is far too arbitrary and subjective to fulfil this role effectively.

A fixating mentality can provide only a very partial view of things, and yet has little sense of its own limitations. Furthermore, as the word suggests, it is fixed by its very nature, yet it is matched against a reality that is ever fluid, constantly in motion. Hence the views of a fixated person, even if at first they may have some merit, are likely to produce a mismatch over time with the reality they purport to describe.

Constructively focused attention is naturally drawn to the unfamiliar, or to the familiar viewed from fresh perspectives. Fixation on the other hand is all too predictable and basically repetitive, although it attempts to allay its own repetitive character by feeding on new input. In that sense it is forever hungry for the new, but only as grist to the mill of the old. The mill remains unchanged no matter how much novel material is fed into it, because the principal purpose of a fixation is to confirm its own rightness and maintain its own stable existence.

While the content of a fixation is situated very much to the fore of a person’s consciousness, its form lies hidden in the psychic shadows. By “form” here I mean the mechanisms of its action, the modalities by which it shapes perception. Actually it’s the exclusive focus on content that helps to keep the form of the fixation concealed. And yet it’s quite simple to turn our attention onto the form by asking ourselves a few straightforward questions. For example, “why am I always looping back onto this subject? What is the nature of the compulsion that keeps me doing so? What do I gain by obeying the compulsion, and what do I lose by it?”

There is a strong analogy in this regard between our inner psychic workings and how the mass media operate. For they are always giving us content, content and more content, while concealing the form, the shaping agenda, which moulds the content into a consumable product. This means that for as long as we react to the content in its own limited terms, either for or against, the fixation game goes on.

Some fixated people turn into loners, nursing in solitude their idée fixe. But the more common pattern is for like to attract like, so that fixations turn into a bonding mechanism, a social currency, and can even become an organising principle, shaping agendas and taking hold of institutions. DEI, for example, can be seen as a kind of fixation that is having predictably negative consequences in media, business, academia and politics. Likewise every ideology that has lost its initial creative impetus - assuming it ever had any - soon turns into an ossified set of weary obsessions.

But really we can fixate about anything, whether in public or private life. Celebrities are a frequent object of the reflex, and politicians also, these days usually in a negative way, given their generally low standing in public esteem. Speaking of which, at just over a week from the US presidential election we are witnessing the Trump fixation being juiced up to a new crescendo. Here is an interesting case of a pattern that seems to thrive indiscriminately on the energy fed into it, regardless of whether one is for or against the man in question.

Certainly where Trump is concerned it would seem that the biggest obsessives are to be found among those who loathe him, often with an almost frantic intensity. Trump Derangement Syndrome has become a common mock-psychiatric diagnosis for such cases. Hence the paradox, when viewed again in energetic terms, that the two sides of this particular fixation are united by what divides them. They are united by the prominent place occupied by Donald Trump in their preoccupations, however much they may be divided by their positive or negative views regarding him.

Unfortunately being united around a fixation does not in any way conduce to the broader harmony of society. It only means that the extensive chaos of atomised individuals engaged in a struggle of all against all gets turned into an intensive collective enmity between two or more defined camps. That’s hardly a great outcome, and yet most people instinctively find it preferable to the experience of helpless atomisation in a meaningless and uncaring world. Compared to that, being with “your own kind” may well feel like a step in the right direction, even if it means being viscerally opposed to some other type of person, thereby promoting even greater social fracture and dislocation.

In summary, we have three factors which contribute in a powerful yet generally obscure way to the theme of this post. These are a) fixation as a remedy for the chaos of diminished attention span; b) fixation as a surrogate for meaning in a meaningless world, and c) shared fixation as a form of connection with others that assuages the pain of atomised existence.

The ills which provide fertile ground for fixation are all real enough in themselves. Who doesn’t suffer from a splintering of attention in our manically stimulated environments? Who doesn’t experience the creeping senselessness of life as the old meanings that bound us together crumble and collapse? And who doesn’t long for the human warmth and common purpose that can arise out of shared meanings and a unifying sense of direction?

The fixation reflex is not however the answer to these keenly felt needs. After all, it’s a mechanism that’s unhelpful even when expressed through purely personal hang-ups, so it will likely be much more dysfunctional when raised to the collective level. And this is without even touching on the major issue of how fixations are promoted, not to say engineered, by systematised propaganda. Given the 24/7 nature of what today goes by the name of news coverage, the “two minutes’ hate” of Orwell’s 1984 can become hate round the clock directed at whatever target may come into the crosshairs of the propaganda machine.

Every fixation, whether assuming a political guise or a personal one, whether hooked into the culture wars or the public health arena or whatever else, is really at bottom a form of addiction. Maybe it’s not pure coincidence that there’s a fix in fixation. And like all addictions it delivers rewards - a release of enthusiasm here, a splurge of vituperation there, a feeling of belonging, a sense of having some kind of bearings in the broader scheme of things. But also it comes at a price, one that may be not so obvious on the surface yet which insists on being paid, usually in the psychic equivalent of direct debit, so that you don’t notice the outlay even as it builds up inexorably over time.

One way out of this bind might be to look at fixations, one’s own as well as others’, in their aspect of form rather than content, as touched on above. Consider in this respect those who love Trump and those who loathe him. In terms of content their views are diametrically opposed, yet the shape or form of the fixation, the way it works on the psyche and lends pattern to perception, is not so dissimilar in the two cases. Yet that kind of disinterested standpoint can only become available to us when we are willing to step outside of our own fixations, if not completely, at least sufficiently to see them in the round. Only by finding out how they work and by understanding the mechanism that keeps us locked into them can we begin to slip their hold.

The more one is able to do this, the more a degree of tolerance can arise as much for one’s own foibles as for the weakness and blindness of others. When we can see an ideological adversary not so much as a bigoted and malevolent ogre but as the plaything of fixation, we create some space for them to come out of their trenches. We may even become aware in doing so that we have dug into a few trenches ourselves. Fear in either instance is likely to have been the digger - fear that flips in a moment to anger that turns to hatred. For what is hatred but repetitive anger directed at a fixed object until it congeals into the shape of that fixity, into the contours of that fixation?

This doesn’t mean for a moment that all opinions are equally valid in terms of content. Far from it: a great many of those held commonly today are skewed and propagandised, and in not a few cases are indeed quite deranged. But still we must come back to the fact that only when we ourselves are positioned outside of the fixations driving this current madness can we evaluate anything reliably.

It’s not always an easy place to get to, for it requires dispassion and forbearance, making it seem like a tall order especially given current circumstances. Yet the alternative taking shape is a dark one, and should provide sufficient motivation for the task in hand.