We have to start at experience, because “there is only a ‘knowing’ from a perspective” (Nietzsche, Genealogy 86).
The Self cannot experience its own crystallization, because experience depends on there being a perspective. Totalities are always invisible precisely because they are all encompassing.
The Self can, however, experience its own dissolution to the extent that it is not a total dissolution. This is the postmodern Self: the Self that sees itself in the process of permeation, disintegration, and evaporation.
To speak of the dissolution of the Self is therefore to assume that a Self existed in the first place. Here, we are talking about two very different phenomena: the Self as a crystal has nothing to do with the Self as a solute.
Permeation is the extension of lines into the interior of the Self, a piercing and poignantly painful process that is experienced as uncanny violence.
Disintegration is the beginning of movement within the Self, as webs of identities disassociate and begin to recombine with new perspectives, which bring with them new identities and webs of identities.
Evaporation is the ultimate erasure of the bounded Self, as webs of identities are more powerfully associated with the Other, a boundless form defined by its dissimilarity with the previously whole Self.
So when we speak of the dissolution of the self, of the rearrangement of the particular knotworks (Engeström 2000, “Activity theory…work”) that constitute the oozing lattice of the crystallized Self, we are not speaking of a body without organs (visible, but light on its feet), but rather of a rearrangement of flows that are experienced as violent permeation, destabilizing disintegration, and ultimately (if all goes well) final evaporation. What is experienced from within as deterritorialization is experienced from without as territorialization (D&G, 1000 Plateaus).
Where do we look for permeating flows? They can be experienced from within as well as without. Either way, there is an inversion of the senses, a view of the web of identities from within rather than from without. When we begin paying attention to the gaps and hidden assemblages that structure experience, we begin getting at the Self. By turning our vision inwards, permeating flows gain access to knotworks of identity. The very experience of the Self becomes the channel through which the solvent of the Self comes into contact with the solute of the Other.
To locate permeating flows, we have to look for the places where our vision is turned inwards.
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