THREE [FIVE] MEANINGS

I think of the notion of Armistice in a number of different ways that are partly complementary and partly disjunctive.   

One way to define Armstice is as, simply put, the inability to see God's blinding light, so that this light is instead refracted and reflected through creations that seem to be the source of the light, although in reality these creations are mere reflections.   Essentially, it is false consciousness.

This picture is itself subdivided into two different kinds of phenomenon - one that is intrinsically 'bad', and one that is more value neutral.  The former involves adaptive, self-defeating patterns of information processing.  In human terms, these would be the neuroses and psychoses: these are stable patterns of delusion and self-inflicted violence that prohibit growth even as they protect the human in question from levels of stimulation that he or she is not able to bear (or from repetition of a trauma that was flooding).  Lets call this a properly Hyperborean Armistice. 

But there is another way of failing to see God that is value neutral - less of a crisis:  this version characterizes any system that is circulating around a single attractor and/or operating at a low level of intensity.   Here, there is no true self-deception, there are no self-inflicted wounds, it is simply that the veil of Maya is totally veiling the absolute.   The product is simply totally covering over the process that made it - but things are running smoothly.  In human terms this version may well be a well-adjusted state of health.  But - this is well-adjustment is adjustment to an ideological apparatus.   Its exemplar could be the smiling conservative Christian in the mid west, creating joy everywhere she goes, faithfully living out her faith - but perhaps insulated from the true absolute (in part by beliefs that are bigoted etc.).  What could this form of armistice be called?  I am tempted to call it Transcendental, but the way I use the term generally is too different from what I'm trying to express (even though it does have some resonances - the person I'm describing here is able to learn and grow).  For now I'll refer to it as the Efraynic Armistice, using my term for the ascetic dimension of transcendence (another way to approach things could be to refer to it as the Ascetic Armistice, and then split the Hyperborean Armistice into two other aspects of Renihilation - the Cathartic Armistice of the obsessional and the Fervent armistice of the hysteric.  And then, why not, the Majestic Armistice of the psychotic). 

Actually, the classification proposed in that last set of parens is far superior to what I was previously suggesting.   Because - now that I think of it - the concept really can be articulated in such a way that it applies to each of the four major attachment patterns (developed by Ainsworth et al).

The final thing I was going to say (what I originally was thinking of as the 'third' kind of armistice, but which is now the fifth):  we then have to talk about the Armistice of the present moment - the Vorizenic Armistice.  This is the one that involves religious fundamentalisms at war with secular multiculturalism and the misappropriation of productive force, together with the ever-encroaching singularity that threatens to completely rend our coordinates for intelligibility and identity.  Here the topic is our armistice, whereas the above refers to something more like a 'general' description.   But our armistice can only be understood in terms of the structure of the other four.