The basic intuition of change is that we move from one state to another. To visualize a change, be it exceptional or mundane, it seems necessary to posit the possibility that, absent the change, this state, whatever that is in the context, will continue. The status quo seems to, for free, receive through its inertia, or just the mere weight of its present presence, the additional commendation of ‘stability’. The intuitiveness of this intuition, its evidence, is apparent not only in the way we daily handle objects, but also in the persistence in which philosophy keeps talking about substances and their attributes. Nowadays, we acknowledge just as willingly and intuitively that this shorthand or heuristic de-emphasises how every state is held together by dynamic elements, perhaps hanging in tension. While we can’t help but operate with stable substances, as otherwise everything would simply melt into air, it seems that stability itself has become somehow suspect, an uneasy atavism from a world that, at some point, still made sense.
To somehow get ahold of this uneasy state of contradiction – let alone master it – we acknowledge that the status quo is far from heavy and inert; that its rigidity does not emerge from a stable solidity, but precisely violent and dynamic tensions that pull all of the elements into its configuration, willing or not. The introduction of power into the equation, once a grand provocation against the well-founded nature of the divine order, has become a commonplace, the silent acknowledgement of the principle that might makes right. But we need to carry this over to the end and avoid the trap of fetishizing power as some ‘substance of all substances’: it can’t be the case that change is a transition between states, stable or metastable, because the states themselves contain the possibility of all kinds of schisms internal to themselves. These, then, are not imposed from the outside, by some gargantuan ‘will’, but are the effects of the configuration itself. In fact, such schisms, juxtapositions, and shifting fault lines may be necessary to explain the apparent stability that emerges, as the state pushes itself through time while it conceals its tumultuous engines that propel it forward by being off-kilter – the turbines that it has itself assembled.
The question of change is not undoing or opposing a stable substance, but neither merely writing it as Change, as a metaphysics of becoming – and neither of dialectically reconciling the two. If the ‘substance’ invents the vectors of its own undoing, just like change produces its own impasses and points of exhaustion, neither can be understood as merely the effect of the other. It’s a change of perspective where the secret of the effect lies not in its hidden cause, but in its efficiency as an effect. Both a suspension of the principle of power, as the cause of all causes, and of the principle of finality, as the end of all causes, to create room for that which wants nothing but itself: play.