Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement

Russell Duvernoy's new book Affect and Attention After Deleuze and Whitehead: Ecological Attunement can be seen as a further contribution to the growing body of work that articulates some of the central ideas and authors in continental philosophy with key concepts and thinkers from the process tradition. Published in the New Perspectives in Ontology series with Edinburgh University Press, what is distinctive about Duvernoy's book is that it attempts to explore the existential implications raised by the new speculative metaphysics and process ontologies emerging out of the conjunction of Deleuze and Whitehead. Duvernoy emphasizes that he is less interested in an exhaustive study of the detailed convergences and divergences between Deleuze and Whitehead, and more interested in developing a “speculative proposal” (7) from their work that engages the affective and attentional dimensions of lived subjectivity and how such dimensions might be re-oriented, and ecologically attuned, for the crises already upon us and those to come (environmental, political, economic, etc.) The book develops this project in two parts. Approximately two thirds of the book—or the first four chapters—constitute part one. The final third—or the last two chapters—make up the second part. One can think of the first part as the theoretical and conceptual heart of the book and the second part as the application of those concepts.For ecological attunements of the kind Duvernoy is after, which resonate with Deleuze and Whitehead, we need new abstractions that enable the reconfiguration of the plane of experience in ways that avoid the bifurcation of nature (Whitehead) or transcendence (Deleuze). One such abstraction that might fit the bill here as the basis for a new speculative plane or image of thought is William James's famous notion of pure experience. Following Deleuze and Whitehead, pure experience is both metaphysical (not just psychological) and determinable (not determinate) in structure. In other words, reality is experiential (mind and matter, human and non-human) and it is open and relational. The question then becomes: how does this mobile open structure become more or less individuated or stabilized into the macroscopic world of things, objects, and lived subjectivities? The focus on the latter is important for Duvernoy because the philosophical task at hand goes beyond mere description to include an account of its lived reality at the intersection between metaphysics and psychology where affects and modes of attention are constituting (and being constituted in) habits of subjectivity. To construct this field, several philosophical moves are required that Duvernoy sets up as separate theses: first, detaching individuation from identity since conflating the individual and self-identity tends to cover over processes of individuation; second, reworking the universal/particular relation to include new types of singularization and abstraction as well as new immanent activities of potentiality and virtuality; third, conceiving these types of individuation and actualization as occurring in disparate fields of reality that communicate, such that individuals/societies emerge at different scales and levels as temporary resolutions of differential fields. Equally important here is the rethinking of modern philosophy's primary/ secondary/tertiary qualities distinction, turning it on its head as it were, with tertiary qualities becoming the most real (because connected to the forces of the Outside) even as they remain in excess of representational thought. The speculative image of nature that emerges is one of mutual reciprocity and co-implication between mind and matter, space and time, the human and the non-human along a continuum of events of differing levels and scales overlapping and extending over each other by degree.Although some of the sections and chapters in part one may prove hard going for some readers unfamiliar with either Deleuze or Whitehead, as an introduction to many of the key ideas motivating the Deleuze-Whitehead conjunction, Duvernoy's study is to be welcomed. Those new to these authors will find many of the central philosophical staging points laid out with as much clarity as these ideas allow, and Duvernoy brings in a supporting cast of other important authors—Quentin Meillassoux, Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert Simondon, Isabelle Stengers—to supplement or critically deepen the lines of argument he pursues. For example, in a fine section on Meillassoux and his claim that Deleuze is a “correlationist” because his vitalism ascribes life to matter, Duvernoy shows how from a process point of view such ascriptions can be easily turned around (88). Rather than ascribing life to matter Deleuze (in Difference and Repetition) redefines all ontological activity as habits, contemplations, and contractions that constitute the living elements and parts of organisms but which also cross the threshold defining non-organic modes of existence. This is not any simple vitalism since life is not required for habits. Nor is it simply panpsychism, which both Deleuze and Whitehead are accused of, since minds (as typically understood) are not required for habits; or, we can say that mind is redefined as a species of habit. In any case, the metaphysical habit of constantly and often unconsciously reverting to oppositional structures (mind/matter, life/non-life) must be made visible and challenged by a more capacious thinking-feeling.This more capacious thinking in its metaphysical generality operates across organic and non-organic scales and levels that tend toward space, matter, or the closed at one end and that tend toward time, mind and the open on the other. This metaphysical scaffolding with its poles, degrees, and tendencies can provide a basis for a more focused existential opening up and possible re-attuning of subjectified processes and movements to an enlarged field of feelings, affects, and differences that produce occasions of experience. The motivating question for the second part of Duvernoy's book is, then, how can attention become attuned to such a field in ways that make selective change possible? The existential stakes of this question are key. For instance, to what extent can modes of attention change and transform patterns of subjective habituation processually whilst avoiding the extremes of, on the one hand, a sterile stasis that conforms to and repeats the past by eliminating differences and diversities (Duvernoy's “becoming zombie” 117) and, on the other hand, a highly intense and creative response that remains open to a range of diverse possibilities but ultimately tends toward incoherence and burn out? How is the requisite balancing achieved? From where is such balancing measured and how?In some ways Duvernoy's answers to the questions of attunement (when, how, how much? and the like) might strike some readers as reminiscent of Aristotle's “the right amount, . . . at the right time, for the right cause, and in the right way. . . . ” But there is no golden mean of attention and attunement, only an art of dosages that takes a lifetime to learn. Still, how is it done? Duvernoy comes at this from various perspectives and mobilizes a range of different terminologies that on occasions produce interesting bedfellows. For example, Guattari's notion of an existential territory is introduced with its variable relations between material, social, and psychic registers which are all co-constituting, alongside Pope Francis's integral ecology. Or, Daniel Stern's work on child development is paired with Deleuze and Guattari's affects and refrains and Deleuze's appeal to the “a priori Other structure.” The key, however, is to find ways of orienting to pre-personal modes of attention in the process of constitution that might create feed-forward loops. Such modes may enable greater capacities for richer and more intense ecologies of experience, capable of resisting or disrupting systems of equivalence that reduce all values and qualities to narrow and predictable patterns and habits. Duvernoy emphasizes the importance of the temporal dimension in the struggle over the attuning of habits, particularly in the final sections of the book. The living presents that constitute attunements emerge out of a penumbra or a virtual background that relates them to what they are ceasing to be, or what they are no longer (the past) and what they are in the process of becoming, or what they are not yet (the future). The trick of attunement is that it requires both retroactive selection and futural orientation but without the presumption of simple location.Although we could ask questions here about whether Duvernoy sufficiently contextualizes the concept of attunement which has a long history going back to Plato, he does distinguish his use from the most obvious and relevant rival in this company—Martin Heidegger. Some readers might like examples of attunement. But such examples, indeed the logic of exemplification, could only be retrospective and it is precisely the retrospective illusion that attentive attuning challenges. Another possible point of contention is the role of the “existential,” at least in the form of an appeal to the lived subject. Typically, in discussions of Deleuze and Whitehead the existential is rarely mentioned. In Deleuze, for example, this is sometimes explained in terms of the move to post-structuralism, or the existential is thought to have been displaced by ontology (Deleuze's Bergsonism book would be a good example). However, Duvernoy turns the tension between the ontological and the existential into the problem of metaphysical attunement that he explores in the book's two parts. In other words, a metaphysics has profound implications for how we live our lives.Indeed, one of the most instructive aspects of Duvernoy's book for readers will lie in the importance it attaches to laying out a new metaphysics for thinking and feeling otherwise about our existential present (the Deleuze-Whitehead conjunction), and how we can become better attuned to what happens to us in the light of that metaphysics. As Deleuze says “we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or style of life” (Nietzsche and Philosophy [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 1). Our ways of being or styles of life always already operate within metaphysical frameworks, whether we know it or not, and those frameworks are parsed through systems of equivalence (capitalism, social media, language, etc.,) and translated into existential habits and styles, for good or ill. A metaphysics can make us sick and suffer, just as it can open us to joyful and more intense modes of life. For Whitehead the latter would be something like the achievement of wonder: a turning toward, or a becoming with, immediately perceived qualities (Duvernoy's tertiary qualities) that he describes simply as the art of life. Duvernoy's book is a fine addition to the literature in what we can call continental process philosophy, joining an already growing field of creative process thinking found in books by Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, and James Williams—to name just a few.