DELEUZE & DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Further thoughts on Dreyfus and Kelly’s reading of « This is Water »

Dreyfus and Kelly, in « All Things Shining », give several examples of  an ethical problem: What is the appropriate response to the surging up of a pulse of physis such as a great moment in a football match, a speech by Martin Luther King, a Hitler rally. They envisage two types of response: let yourself be swept away OR walk away. Determining which response is appropriate in any given situation is the object of a meta-skill that they call meta-poiesis. This meta-skill  is their response to the « burden of choice » that assails us in our post-modern secular world:

« it resists nihilism by reappropriating the sacred phenomenon of physis, but cultivates the skill to resist physis in its abhorrent, fanatical form. » (ATS, 212)

Physis is an ambivalent phenomenon leading us into a sacred affirmation of life or into its fanatical negation. We must learn when to « leap in » and when to « walk away ».

Wallace in « This is Water » gives another type of example the mood of rage and frustration that whooshes up in a traffic jam or in an overcrowded supermarket. What is the ethical response that our meta-poiesis can permit in this situation? Wallace is closer to Dreyfus and Kelly than they seem to think as he proposesa sort of paradigm-change, a transformation in our perception. Faced with this whooshing up of negativity, do you give in to your « natural hard-wired default setting », your certainty that everybody else is just in your way, that only you matter, that everyone else is rude and obnoxious and repulsive? Or can you rework this natural default setting, change your paradigm, cultivate a different form of affectivity, perceive people differently and be affected by them differently?

(I am reminded here of Levi’s notion

http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/deleuzes-transcendental-aesthetics-and-empiricism/

of how our freedom is greater than that of « wasps, trees and rocks » because we « are more able to form new multiplicities or transcendental forms of sensibility » and more free to vary the entailments of these forms of sensibility. This is freedom as the meta-skill to develop new forms of sensibility and to vary their entailments).

Dreyfus and Kelly don’t see the meta-poietic aspect in DFW’s speech. He is not talking about a new improved first-level skill in handling people or navigating traffic jams. He is talking about a meta-skill for resisting being swept away by the whooshing up of negative affects. You can’t just « walk away » from the overcrowded supermarket or the interminable traffic jam. « Walking away » is not always possible nor even desirable, and it is an ambiguous solution at best. DFW proposes a number of  what can only be called « spiritual exercises » to allow you to experience the stressful or enervating situation differently. He suggests imagining another explanation for the behaviour of those we find obnoxious or infuriating. He is not advocating some sort of counter-factual ratiocination to alleviate the stress of the supermarket, he doesn’t ask us to imagine that the repulsive lady screaming at her kids is really a giant squid disguised by a « perception-filer » (DR WHO oblige), but just that she may have been staying up every night with her husband dying of bone cancer. The aim is not to impose an arbitrary meaning by sheer force of will. The aim is to make us aware that

1)meanings are already  being imposed on the situation, preventing us from seeing it as it is

2)these meannings can be subsumed under a single paradigm, our hard-wired default setting of « fear and anger and frustration and worship of the self »

3)other meanings are possible if we open our selves to the multiple field of gods to be worshipped

4)these other meanings can be subsumed under a different paradigm, one not centered  around the ego but based on de-centered attention and caring for others.

DFW wants to free us from our excessive ratiocination, our overintellectualisation, get us out of our hypnotic state of immersion in and servitude to our internal monologue.  He wants to get us out of our nihilistic understanding of being where we as autonomous individuals each feel we are the center of the world, and everyone else is a help or a hindrance.

The meta-poiesis that DFW describes subtends a different understanding of being where attention can dissolve the stereotypes of the nihilist versions of reality and open usto the multiple forms of the non-nihilistic sacred: « be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles ». These are the many gods we can worship and that give us meaning and life: « pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive ». So DFW is all for « luring back the gods » to populate « the now egotistical sky », as Dreyfus & Kelly, citing Melville, describe their project.