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According to these authors the world was formerly a world full of intensity and meaning, "a world
of sacred, shining things" (cf. the preamble ), which elicited moods of wonder and reverence and
gratitude and openness. This is the explanation of the book's title. However the shining things are
now long gone, and life has become permeated with moods of sadness and lostness, a purely
personal affair to be managed by the plans and choices of the closed-off "autonomous" ego. The
solution proposed is a reappropriation of Homer's polytheism, now understood to be a polytheism of
moods, such as we can see the outlines of in MOBY DICK. An important part of this response is the
necessity to cultivate a specific skill that can help us discern when we can or should let ourself be
taken up in the moods we encounter (example: a nonviolent freedom march) and when we should
resist and walk away (example: a Nazi rally): this skill they call "meta-poiesis".
There is something very attractive about the ideas in this book: the pluralism of understandings of
being, the polytheism of moods , meta-poiesis, a subjectivity of openness to the world and wonder
at its shining things. But there are ambiguities that make one wonder (in the other sense of wonder)
whether the book avoids the trap of romantic nostalgia. Its vocabulary is often nostalgic: "lure back"
the gods, "uncover" the wonder, "reveal" the world. Also there is the danger of proposing merely a
new postmodern theology, however philosophically distilled and sublimated. Here we can cite the
suggestive slippage from "the shining things", index of a world charged with intensity and meaning,
to the more theological sounding "sacred things", as if that were the same thing. But surely a life
based on intensities, on moods and on meaning without any reference to the sacred is worth living.
A last worry is that with their constant evocation of moods that attune a subject and reveal a world
the authors seem to be stuck in what Quentin Meillassoux calls the "correlationist circle", unable to
talk about the world outside its correlation with subjectivity and with a particular understanding of
the world.
It seems that Dreyfus and Kelly are aware of this problem and try to undercut their grand narrative
of a succession of incommensurable understandings of being with a different model based on
Heidegger's notion of a thing thinging. One example that Dreyfus gives in his lectures is that of the
feast in the film BABETTE'S FEAST, a focal event that assembles or gathers together elements in a
way that makes them shine, that brings them out at their best. The polytheism of moods would then
be reinforced by a pluralism of things thinging, but this is left undeveloped in the book. Another
trace of this attempt to maintain the grand narrative and to make room for other ways is the concept
of marginal practices and the things that embody them. One dominant understanding of being is
only a hegemonic rather than a totalitarian paradigm, and each epoch contains many other things,
events, practices as marginal phenomena. This model has the further advantage of making change
conceivable.
The other concept that merits developing is the notion of meta-poiesis which allows us to navigate
between different moods and different understandings, tracing out our own individual path. As such,
it would seem to be the pluralist virtue par excellence. Once again I would put this notion of
metapoiesis in relation with the ability to engage in marginal practices and assemblings, being able
to take things out of their stereotyped uses and set them thinging, thus producing change, and
allowing communication between incommensurable understandings. Dreyfus and Kelly seem to
have realised that they were in danger of expounding an epochal solipsism, and gave indications for
a way of communicating across the barrier of incommensurability. Once again we see, as both
Deleuze and Feyerabend have emphasised, that openness must precede (logically) closedness or we
will never be able to get outside our framework. Finally, for a book whose message is pluralist its
bibliography is surprisingly monist. There is no mention of such pluralist philosophers as Paul
Feyerabend, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly, or Alain Badiou.
As regards Nietzsche, Dreyfus and Kelly seem content to repeat uncritically Heidegger's vision
according to which for Nietzsche once the consequences of the death of God were drawn "the lone
source of meaning in human existence would be the strong individual's force of will" (46). On this
point I think that the fellow-pluralist William Connolly said it all in an article on Nietzsche
(“Nietzsche, Democracy, and Time”). Connolly associates Nietzsche with an ethic of cultivation
(meta-poiesis!), non-theistic gratitude, multidimensional pluralism, “nobility as multiple nobilities”
(and not the Nazi deformation of Nietzsche’s thought as promoting a warrior ethic, strong will etc.),
and even “modesty as strength”.
Further, not all depression is a dead-end, yet Dreyfus and Kelly stick to the bright Olympian gods
and do not talk about Saturn and scholarly melancholia. In THIS IS WATER Wallace tries to open
us to others as having their own lives outside their roles as inconveniences or obstacles to our
desires, and all that Dreyfus and Kelly can see is an appeal to will-power. Dreyfus and Kelly have
trouble seeing depression and boredom as intensities, and so associate them with the ego and the
desire to transcend human life and the frustration that this is impossible. The post-Jungian analyst
James Hillman is not so simplistic, and has described the importance of depression and boredom for
deepening our psychic life (cf. REVISIONING PSYCHOLOGY, passim).
Another problem with ALL THINGS SHINING is its appeal almost exclusively to extreme
examples. Meta-poiesis exists in their book when we refuse to give into the hate at a Nazi rally, but
they accuse Wallace of hubristic will when he discusses how not to give in to the anger and
frustration one can feel on a queue at the supermarket. Dreyfus and Kelly, despite their anti-
metaphysical intentions, would seem to be guilty of a metaphysical split manifest in the very type of
extraordinary examples they give. Stanley Cavell’s Emersonian emphasis on a return to the ordinary
is a useful corrective to their obsession with mastery. The coffee-drinking example (p216-219) with
its distinction between ritual and routine is a step in the right direction, and they talk about the
“experimentation” to discover how to bring things out at their best, and thus to respect both the
singularities of the materials and acts comprising the ritual and one’s own singularity.
They contrast the “generic” way of doing where things are treated as exchangeable and meaningful
distinctions are obscured, to a “particular” approach where we “rise up out of the generic and banal
and into the particular and skilfully engaged” (217). So we individuate an activity or domain while
individuating ourselves at the same time. Yet Dreyfus and Kelly, while describing this struggle with
the reign of the stereotype, use a language of uncovering and discovering, and so imply that
meaning is pre-existent rather than emergent.
Further, despite their pluralism and immanence and polytheism of moods, Dreyfus and Kelly have a
one-sided view of intensities or what they call “shining”, a view that excludes the “pathological”
intensities. All this talk of “shining” (really as pluralists they should be saying “shinings”) is
potentially élitist. It most often limited to human excellence as expressed in best case scenarios,
despite their phenomenological orientation. Shining is supposed to be a a descriptive, and not a
normative, notion. One could compare this with Deleuze and Guattari’s cry in ANTI-OEDIPUS:
“Everything must be interpreted in intensity” (p173)
For D&G this is already what Nietzsche and Artaud were doing. And I would add that David Foster
Wallace is engaged in this project of redemption from nihilism, and not, as Dreyfus and Kelly
claim, of its culmination.
If we take this point of view of intensity then we may avoid what threatens to be a form of
hermeneutic nostalgia over the supposed superior inventiveness of the Greeks and of mourning for
the loss of the Greek event. For pluralists like Feyerabend, Deleuze, and Lyotard, our contemporary
time is characterized not by the nihilist condition of the loss of meaning and intensity, but by an
increase of novelty and inventiveness, a surplus of abundance. They refuse to endorse the narrative
of decline that we see at work in ALL THINGS SHINING. To convince us of the contrary we need
only be attentive to the multiplication of invention in the domains the sciences, the arts, politics,
religion, and personal relations. The proper mood is not nostalgia and regret, but openness and
affirmation. The goal is not to “bring back” the shining things, but to be attentive to the shinings
that are already present or being produced.
Mood and concept are closely linked. To dispel one we often have to deconstruct the other. “The
Greeks” is a false unity, a concept that belongs to the dogmatic image of thought. The idea of the
“Greek miracle” cuts them off geographically and chronologically from the multiplicity of sources,
influences, encounters, exchanges, and rivalries. This creates an image of their inventiveness as
stemming from some absolute break and absolute beginning, such that the Greeks become
incommensurable with what went on before and elsewhere. This poses the novelty and
inventiveness of the Greeks as some impossible to attain norm. There seems to be no way that we
can ever make such a leap again, so we are reduced to just adding footnotes to Plato.
“Incommensurability”, however, is not the final word. Beneath the hermeneutic closures and
incommensurabilities lie the pragmatic encounters and exchanges. “The philosphers have always
been something else, they were born of something else”, claim Deleuze and Parnet (DIALOGUES
II, page 74). Michel Onfray develops the same idea for the Greeks: “Protagoras the docker, Socrates
the sculptor, Diogenes the assistant banker, Pyrrho the painter, Aristippus the teacher … are not
professionals of the profession in the postmodern fashion”. This “something else” is not just another
profession, but also another site, the outside with its freedom from the semantic police and the
hermeneutic priesthood. The forum and the agora allowed philosphers to address and discuss with
anyone, as does the blogosphere today (potentially!).
Hermeneutic novelty is often the illusory construct of the retrospective projection of striated
structures onto the past. Pragmatic novelty is far more ambiguous and fluid, tied to the intensive
encounter rather than the regulated exchange. This is why Lyotard too sees no difference between
the ancient Greeks and us, in terms of the withdrawal of Being and the loss of inventiveness:
“Nothing has withdrawn, we have not “forgotten” anything; the ancient Greeks, Heraclitus the in-
between of faith and knowledge, are no more originary than Janis Joplin.”
The comparison with Deleuze (and Guattari) is interesting as I often think of Deleuze and Parnet’s
DIALOGUES II in relation to ALL THINGS SHINING, and of Deleuze’s oft expressed desire to
construct a pop-philosophy – which I think expresses part of Dreyfus and Kelly’s ambition for ALL
THINGS SHINING. Pop-philosophy does not mean a demagogical anti-intellectual hostility to
theory or concepts or erudition, it is philosophy that has an immediate appeal to readers who find
something useful for their lives (and thinking is essential to the human form of life); but it must also
have enough conceptual backbone to make it really a contribution to philosophy and not just
opinionating or free-associating on a theme.
I have been frequenting the two sets of thinkers (Deleuze and Guattari, Dreyfus and Kelly) for some
time now, and the question arises for me of the relation between them, between their respective
philosophical understandings. The relation is clear in terms of my overall project of a diachronic
ontology, of “pluralism and individuation in a world of becoming”: both sets of thinkers are
pluralist; they decenter the subject, its sovereignty and its agency; they give great importance to
affects or moods; they reject the domination of technological rationality; they situate themselves
firmly after the death of God; they seek to go beyond any nihilism that this may be thought to
entail. The points of convergence are many and varied.
ALL THINGS SHINING is quite Heideggerian in orientation and talks in terms of physis, poiesis,
technology, and meta-poiesis. The level of physis involves the "whooshing up" of moods that are
transindividual and that draw people to perceive and to act in certain ways. Poiesis is an affair of
skills that allow us to perceive important distinctions in a material and act on it to bring it out at its
best. Deleuze and Guattari and talk in terms of affects, assemblages, and autopoiesis. The tone is
quite different, being more open and diverse in their bibliographical references and in their
sensitivity to social and political dimensions. The notion of assemblage is used powerfully to
decenter the notion of human agency and distribute it throughout the superordinate groupings or
assemblages of humans and things that “whoosh up”, if you will, perdure and vanish. This is physis
in a deleuzian sense; and I have always found the ALL THINGS SHINING sense too limited, as it
seems to be restricted to the upsurge, perdurance, and vanishment of publicly shared moods and
their associated perceptions and actions. But objects and agents and events are important parts of
the assemblages we confront or belong to.
There seems to me to be a complementarity between the two sets of thinkers that I can bring out in
terms of what I think is a hesitation in Deleuze and Guattari over the meaning of the word “affect”,
which sometimes is closer to physis and sometimes is closer to poiesis. Physis-affect characterises a
plateau of affective tonality, a haecceity, that can last a moment or an afternoon, or several years.
Poiesis-affect characters the powers of being affected (of perceiving differences that matter) and of
affecting (of provoking and revealing differences). The whole notion of skills and crafts that ALL
THINGS SHINING finds so important signals the necessity of a cultivation of affects, of the
discipline of working on our affects to favorise more affirmative, more creative perceptions and
actions. This is a process of individuation, the poietic path of developping one's skills, an
apprenticeship for which, according to Deleuze, “there is no method but only a long preparation”.
3) ADAM S. MILLER'S CRITIQUE: Attention vs Meaning
In December 2011 Adam S.Miller, the author of SPECULATIVE GRACE: Bruno Latour and
Object-Oriented Theology, published a text criticising Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s ALL
THINGS SHINING for its misunderstanding of David Foster Wallace, whom, as we have seen,
they accuse of nihilism. Miller accuses Dreyfus and Kelly themselves of nihilism for having based
their argument on the “saving power” of meaning as a remedy against the nihilistic loss of meaning
of the modern world. Such meaning, according to Miller, is a distraction from the real task of
redemption:
“Mythologies (macro-scale meaning-maps) are a byproduct of religion in the same way that stories
are a byproduct of life. This is fine. But our stories are not alive and our maps are not the way. It’s a
mistake, I think, to think that religions are in the business of making meaning”.
While I fully agree that Dreyfus and Kelly give a reading of David Foster Wallace's work that is
demonstrably wrong, I think Miller was a little severe in his treatment of their general project in
ALL THINGS SHINING. Despite applying their concepts erroneously in their discussion of
Wallace, they do give great philosophical importance to DFW's essays and novels, and even when
they criticise him they are using his values and ideas (often without even realising it). Their notion
of “meaning” is not one of reference, or even of signification, but is rather like Bruno Latour’s
notion (in REJOICING) of religion as conversion to an attitude of attention to the things that are
near us.
It must be remarked that in Latour’s scheme in AN INQUIRY INTO MODES OF EXISTENCE
myth would seem to correspond to the mode of existence of "beings of metamorphosis", of those
beings (divinities, ghosts, ancestors, emotions, archetypal images) that are formative of the psyche,
whereas religion is a mode that constitutes us as persons. Myths give us meaning and psyche,
religion gives us attention and personhood. Myth, magic, affect and fantasy can transform us,
whereas religion is a matter of love and conversion. I do not fully agree with this schema, but I can
see its motivating force. My own dissenting view is that, while there is surely a difference between
myth and religion, even in the very refined forms that Latour and Dreyfus and Kelly propose to
analyse them, both of these are sub-modes of a more general mode that could be called the mode of
individuation.
Whatever one may think of this last point I was struck in reading the interview with David Foster
Wallace published under the title QUACK THIS WAY, by how all his advice on writing was the
exact opposite of Drefus and Kelly’s interpretation of Wallace. In ALL THINGS SHINING they
claim that Wallace was trapped in the autonomous ego and its masterly will. Yet in QUACK THIS
WAY, as in THIS IS WATER, Wallace is full of advice about how to avoid taking oneself to be the
centre of the universe and how to stop using writing as a narcissistic monologue that reinforces
one's confinement in the ego's illusions of self-sufficiency. The aim of writing for Wallace is
encounter, conversation, exchange and the adventures of dialogue.
The connection between David Foster Wallace and Bruno Latour seems direct in this case. DFW too
wants to provoke a “conversion” away from the ego and towards the world around us, and to that
extent his work is religious in scope.
4) NON-THEISTIC GRATITUDE
ALL THINGS SHINING is a text of pluralist phenomenology and ontology that proposes many
interesting ideas and analyses. However it contains some ambiguous formulations, and needs to be
protected from possible theological co-optation. What is at stake is the occasional importation into
the immanent phenomenological perspective and descriptions of transcendent ontological
assumptions by means of theistic or “believerly” language that has ontotheological rather than
phenomenological import.
This can be illustrated in Dreyfus and Kelly’s analysis of the “event” in Pulp Fiction where Jules
and Vincent are left unscathed after being shot at (p68-72). Surprisingly, Dreyfus and Kelly come
down in favour of Jules’ reaction, despite its being factually false. (He speaks of “divine
intervention” and specifies: “God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets”). The important
issue for them is not factual but phenomenological. They say: “gratitude is the more fitting
response”. I think they should have said “non-theistic gratitude is the more fitting response”.
Otherwise, they seem to be committed to saying that a creationist is right despite his false beliefs
about evolution (and his reactionary politics!), as long as he feels gratitude at the miracle of human
life.
Non-theistic gratitude is a gratitude at the abundance of the world and of its events, an affirmation
of what happens without any idea of providence or other transcendence. It is what Nietzsche names
amor fati, and Dreyfus and Kelly name the “gift without a giver”: “the Greeks felt that excellence in
a life requires highlighting a central fact of existence: wonderful things outside your control are
constantly happening for you (ALL THINGS SHINING, 73).
I must admit that at first I was hostile to this idea of a “gift without a giver”. My argument was that
this was bad phenomenology, that the phenomenon was not being experienced or not being
described in a pure state, because the very notion of the event as “gift” and of the appropriate
response as “gratitude” seemed suspect to me, contaminated by the theistic connotations of these
two words, as implying necessarily a “giver” of the event, whether one consciously intends the
implication or not. I became reconciled to this vocabulary when I came upon the more explicit
formulation “nontheistic gratitude” in the work of William Connolly. In “The Ethos of
Pluralization” Connolly talks about a third possibility outside the theistic and secular belief systems,
which he calls “postsecularism”. In his explication, postsecularists comprise “numerous agents of
resistance to the monotheisms and monosecularisms” who “define themselves—retrospectively, as
it were—as carriers of nontheistic gratitude for the rich diversity of being.” (p190).
What bothers me about Dreyfus and Kelly’s analysis of Jules’ reaction is that they separate
cognitive (or at least ideational) aspects of his experience from some pure affective or emotive core,
and then proceed to endorse the emotive core of the experience, in this case “gratitude”, while
rejecting the cognitive component as just an “attempt at justification”. I don’t think a mood can
exist as a pure emotive state. Rather it includes conceptual, affective, linguistic, and practical
elements.
I still think Dreyfus and Kelly are being unfair to Vincent, as his remark (“this shit happens”) could
be seen as a Lucretian endorsement of physis as against Jules’ theos. In their own descriptions of the
multiple understandings of being they contrast Heidegger’s view on the succession of epochs with
Hegel’s view, declaring that for Heidegger there is no “why”. This sounds to me as if they are
maintaining that Heidegger is like Vincent, and “there is no why” is similar in meaning to “this shit
happens”.
However, to adjudge the victory to Jules or to Vincent is to oppose them inside a commensurable
field, and such a victory is empty. For me the force of ATS lies in its attempt to describe and exhibit
incommensurable understandings of being. Unfortunately, I think that Dreyfus and Kelly pose a
normative overlay to this descriptive task, and so I accuse them of doing “normative
phenomenology”. I do not wish to oppose a Lucretian Vincent to a Heideggerian Jules, and I don’t
think that this distribution of roles and understandings exhausts the conceivable possibilities.
Rather, I think that a third way can be articulated, outside this dualism, one of seeing the event as an
occasion for metapoiesis, so maybe there is no need to presuppose one unique response. A
metapoietic Jules would allow himself to be perfused with gratitude without affirming, or even
feeling, that God stopped the bullets. A metapoietic Vincent could resist one form of the affect of
gratitude as being too entangled with theistic sentiments, without refusing gratitude absolutely.
“This shit happens” could be a Lucretian enunciation of opennes to and gratitude for the abundance
of Nature, the affirmation that the world contains many wondrous combinations.
However, I cannot accept D&K’s solution as it stands. They operate by extracting and
decontextualizing from Jules’ theistic perception of the event the pure affect of gratitude that they
valorize when it occurs in quite other contexts. My feeling is that this gratitude is somehow a cliché
closing Jules off from the encounter with the world, a stereotyped version of the affect. This is why
I embraced Connolly’s notion of nontheistic gratitude. But perhaps by still calling it “gratitude” I
am implicitly accepting the validity of this extraction of affects and their reappropriation in other
contexts. The problem is to determine whether there is a living affect in the cliché or if it is a
caricature all the way down.