The double bind of ecological attunement
From different routes, I have repeatedly emphasised attention’s ontological force. The results of choices of attention have effects in what Whitehead calls the ‘passage of nature’ (Chapter 4). Through emphasising what remains its speculative potential, it has been necessary to detach attention (as concept) from its ordinary contexts. Attention becomes ontological when understood as participant in the ‘concrescence’ of events and occasions whose concrete actuality is prior to the abstractions of Self-I-Subject. Attention is thus an existential mode through which it may be possible to become closer to living reality’s individuations. Deleuze writes ‘it is the I and the Self which are the abstract universals’ (DR: 258). However, this does not mean that undoing this abstraction enables us to find a truer, more primary and concrete self beyond these abstractions. Rather, ‘Beyond the self and the I we find not the impersonal but the individual and its factors, individuation and its fields, individuality and its pre-individual singularities’ (DR: 258).
Can we cultivate capacities of attention to approach individual intensities operative beneath ordinary forms of convention and intelligibility? If it is true that this potential is most pregnant in an intensification of sensibility’s encounter with feeling or tertiary qualities prior to conceptual representation, such that feeling and tertiary qualities become indicative of more than simply ‘subjective’ taste, it is also the case that feeling or the tertiary quality do not automatically manifest in this way (Chapter 3). Understanding feeling, affect and their expressions in tertiary qualities as ontologically active does not automatically translate from their ordinary apprehension in emotions.1
Finally, as we have seen (Chapters 4 and 5), attention’s events do not develop or occur in a neutral or ‘pure’ experiential field. Rather, attention’s ontological potentials are threaded through powerful procedures of control manifest in the way a logic of equivalence constrains processes of psychic ecology. Such logic diminishes rather than intensifies the stakes of attention, encouraging closure to the potentials of encounter with difference or surprise. Through equivalence, it is always more of the same. Coupled with statistical summary and algorithmic data-mining as these feed into loops of predictive technologies and digital prostheses, the challenges in fostering existential capacities for unleashing creative attention are significant.
These challenges are affective, social, epistemological, axiological and existential. They are affective, insofar as equivalence conflates security with predictability. Opening to attention’s creative potentials is necessarily risky, since it may unsettle perceived stabilities and identities (Chapters 1 and 2). They are social, since the economic and material operations of Integrated World Capitalism are thoroughly suffused with procedures of equivalence. These social challenges result from the conforming pressures of common sense, especially as intensified through the echo chamber phenomena of digitalised social media. To attend differently is to risk incoherence, exclusion or the presumed capture of a polarised social field, where if you are not ‘like us’, you must be ‘one of them’ (always the presumption that reality is finished, determined, and that all phenomena, subjects, objects, fit into a pre-existing rubric of order). They are epistemological, since they require relinquishing the presumption that knowledge is best defined through its certainty (Chapter 1). They are axiological, since creative attention requires openness to the emergence of unexpected values or meanings that can only retroactively be ascertained. Finally, there are the simple yet profound challenges of fatigue and finitude.2 There is always more to be attended to: we can never achieve once and for all a maximal flowering of creative attention that I have christened ecological attunement. But its potential, as ideal or ‘propositional lure’, is always there, beckoning, even as the achievement of any single moment of attention is given its definiteness through gradations of exclusion (Whitehead’s ‘negative prehensions’).
Ecologically, a salient challenge is in spatial-temporal scale since a processual conception of individuation means there is no unique serial order of time, but rather many different durational times. The ‘living present’ differs in relation to perspectives: the mountain, the redwood, the hummingbird, the infant, the elder, the electron live different presents. And yet, this difference is not exclusive, since these differing presents converge in each actual occasion. The differing of perspectives is thus not a function of their absolute separation; rather, it is precisely this differing which makes each of them an ingredient in concrescence as a creative addition. That is, if the presents did not differ, the creative addition would achieve less intensity. And yet, this remains difficult to construe existentially, especially in relation to temporality, since time, as time, is often taken as lacking any quality in-itself. Events occurs in time, and they may be frightening, joyful, and so on, but time remains the pure and empty form running beneath these events. To acknowledge that this view of time is rejected by both Deleuze and Whitehead is not yet to make its existential implications manifest.
Can we make sense existentially of the idea that our actions ripple across multiple scales of space and that different temporal durations intersect in a living event? Ruyer suggests that because ‘the core of the theory of (special) relativity suggests that we cannot be in two locations at once . . . the absolute subjective expanse escapes the theory of relativity’ (2016: 94). But I am suggesting a different strategy, following Whitehead and Deleuze. The absolute subjective expanse, if there is such a thing, is not equivalent to ordinary lived experience. Indeed, such experience is almost entirely mediated by abstractions that in effect hinder or obscure existential encounter and participation in the occasions constituting that experience. The notion that we do not live in a single order of linear time, but in many different times and tempos that need not have a single common metric unifying them (‘being in two or more times at the same place’), is a conceptual call to wake up to the qualitative complexity of the present.3 Attuning to this complexity means opening to a precise singularity that is uniquely situated and then gone. But the quality of this singularity is an expression of encounters that resonate beyond the here-now. Negotiating this means being mindful of differently experienced pasts, differently thickened presents, and differently projected futures conspiring together for each achievement of actual reality. There is no master perspective that can univocally narrate what ‘really happened’ – which is not to say that it is all made up, but rather that events continue to take a long time to happen.
These challenges intersect in an existential complex for which there is not adequate language: pragmatic-spiritual-ethico-aesthetic? Such a problematic complex is real. If one’s image of thought is oriented towards immunisation from the problems of living, the consequences of the view developed here are untenable. Rather than getting rid of the problems, this makes them more palpable! In opening the abstraction of a stable Self to its impersonal individuations, the double bind of an ecological attunement is heightened. It is not that the Self, as is, is redemptively incorporated into a larger harmonious Whole. Quite the contrary, if from one perspective the Self is a ‘fiction’, it is still a living idea to which powerful attractions accumulate and is in this sense quite real. Moreover, attending to the collaborative relationality of emerging actual occasions means accepting one’s lack of power in fully controlling their outcomes while heightening responsibility by altering the stakes of attention from passive receptions of a world already determined and made up in advance to active collaborations that feed forward in partially binding ways for future collaborations. Less control, more responsibility! Who wants that?
Such constraints ensure that ecological attunement cannot result in a definitive normative prescription in the form of static categorical judgements. There are no merely neutral attendings in the ontological sense, but there is also not one right or ‘correct’ way to attend or create. What would this even mean? But giving up static categorical judgement is more easily done at the level of theory, in living practices one still has to choose and act. The risk for an abstract conception of ecological attunement in resisting definitive normative prescriptions is the failure of viability in inspiring the work of transforming attention. How does a concept of ecological attunement negotiate such mutual constraints: the necessity of choice and action with the rejection of universal categorical prescriptions for action?
Attending to tertiary qualities heightens attunement to relationality beyond identity boundaries when we understand those qualities to exceed the merely subjective. But this means we have to foster a sensibility that is always alert to its own tendencies to reduce its encounter with the real by presuming a neatness of fit with its pre-existent categories. This aspirational conception of the potential for such sensibility is a clear point of resonance between Whitehead and Deleuze. But this appeal to an ontological conception of feeling/affect, expressed as I have in the language of tertiary qualities, has significant risks as well. Such risks must be lived; that is, any attempt to deny them is already to use thought to shut down the ‘plane of immanence’. (This is another way of saying that the risks are metaphysically real, not simply the result of errors following human limitation.) But conceptual work in more precisely articulating some of their contours can help this living negotiation be more aware of its blind spots or pitfalls.
Attunement and affect: vitality before world
Ecological attunement is a manner of attention that follows from a processual metaphysics. Disambiguating a philosophical concept of ecology from its scientific function meant incorporating psychic, social and material processes into its purview and hence brought us to Guattari’s ‘existential territory’ (Chapter 5). This concept can seem primarily phenomenological, merely a new phraseology for the life-world (Husserl’s lebenswelt or Heidegger’s Dasein (there-Being)). This appears even more plausible given the use of ‘attunement’, a term whose most famous deployment in philosophy is certainly Heidegger’s.4
While fully working out the differentiation with the complex phenomenological tradition is a matter for another book, there are several important ways in which ‘attuning’ here functions differently than Die Stimmung or mood (in Heidegger primarily). Articulating these differences, while not intended as an exhaustive engagement with Heidegger or existential phenomenology, is nevertheless helpful for moving the speculative proposal I am developing. Most notably, mood or attunement (die stimmung) is a primary concept Heidegger uses to distinguish between Dasein’s being in a ‘world’ and what he calls the nonhuman animal’s ‘poverty of world’.5 Mood or attunement is not ‘one existing property that appears amongst others’ (Heidegger 1995: 65); rather, attunement is linked to the very being of Dasein (there-Being). In Being and Time, Heidegger declares mood prior to representative cognition as a ‘fundamental existentiale’ that offers a ‘primordial disclosure . . . in which Dasein is brought before its Being as “there”’ (2008: 134). He contrasts the ontic or everyday sense of having a mood (today I feel happy, depressed, and so on) with its ontological condition. While we may, ‘factically’ seek to control or modify our ontic mood, this does not deny that, ontologically, attunement or mood is prior to conceptual control. Mood thus ‘discloses Dasein in its thrownness’ (2008: 175/136). Mood is like the primary filter or sieve through which everything that shows up is mediated or tinted, like an effect on a lens.
As a fundamental existentiale, attunement is always linked to world for Heidegger. Indeed, it is through attunement that Dasein opens up world. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, this opening is in contrast to the nonhuman animal. The nonhuman animal does not attune, it is rather captured by a limited number of viable ‘signs’ that correspond to its drives and instincts. Heidegger characterises the condition of the animal as ‘captivation’: ‘the animal can only behave insofar as it is essentially captivated’ (Heidegger 1995: 239). Because animal behaviour is captivated according to its drives, it does not open a world: ‘the behavior of the animal is not a doing and acting . . . but a driven performing’ (1995: 237). This is why Heidegger declares that ‘the animal behaves within an environment but never within a world’ (1995: 239). For world, a being must have the capacity to ‘apprehend something as something, something as a being’ (1995: 264).
In this sense, Heidegger’s attunement remains firmly in the tradition of humanism. Even as he offers a novel distinction between human and non-human that does not rely on rationality or language, he is still committed to their fundamental ontological difference. By contrast, ecological attunement, which in its strictest terminology is always ecological attuning, shifts the locus from Being to events and occasions. This has important consequences. Attuning keeps the musical connotation of Die Stimmung, but expands the players, if you will. Ecological attuning is thus ontologically prior to the constitution of a ‘world’. Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the territorialising operation of the refrain, which is an ontological discussion, makes this clear.
Deleuze and Guattari link the refrain’s territorialising to what they call the ‘becoming-expressive of rhythm and melody’ with a capacious and cross-modal understanding of rhythm to include ‘the emergence of proper qualities (color, odor, sound, silhouette)’ (ATP: 316). This becoming-expressive involves a musical collaboration in which a territory is constructed on the basis of ‘expressive qualities’. In contrast to a fundamental attunement which hovers like an affective sieve across the reception of all qualities, attuning to expressive qualities can never be characterised through one fundamental affect. Or, if it is characterised by one fundamental predominating affect, this is an indication of a diminishing refrain, a society tending towards death, as Whitehead would say. World, if we insist on that term, is always commencing, because it is always in relational contact with more-than-world, with outside-world, with other-world, and so on. For Deleuze and Guattari, who use ‘territory’ rather than world, the becoming or emergence of proper qualities (what I have referred to as tertiary qualities) can be called ‘Art’: ‘the territory [is] a result of art’ (ATP: 316). Moreover, a territory is neither finished nor possessed: ‘the expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being’ (ATP: 316).
When Deleuze and Guattari say that these expressive qualities are ‘necessarily appropriative’, they immediately insist that this is ‘not in the sense [of] belonging to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject’ (ATP: 316, emphasis added). These qualities are ‘signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode’ (ATP: 316). This is to say that one does not project identifying qualities (like a primordial mood) in front of them like a cloud of possession, rather, the qualities come first, and in the activity of attuning a domain is created in relation and dialogue through these expressive qualities. This is why, for example, ‘expressive qualities . . . enter shifting relations with one another that “express” the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances’ (ATP: 317, emphasis added). Ecological attuning is thus a manner of attending to the edges between territories and milieus. The expressive qualities (what I have called tertiary qualities) function as ‘signs’ that cross milieus and are thus the best access we have to the ontological constitution of the occasion in its creative sense. This is why they represent a ‘having more profound than being’ – it is a having in the sense of a constitutive experience that has (creates) one, rather than that is. Having is dynamic, being is static.
This expressive interplay of refrains and qualities (‘expressive qualities entertain variable or constant relations with one another’ (ATP: 318)) is inherently ecological in undercutting the primacy of any single relation and opening to a dynamism of multiple relations with various degrees of stability. Rather than constituted subjects and objects, ‘we no longer have the simple situation of a rhythm associated with a character, subject, or impulse’; instead, ‘the rhythm is the character’ (ATP: 318). Ecological attuning expresses a manner of attending to these rhythms (tertiary qualities) as primary ontological modes. This entails a gestalt shift or inversion of foreground and background. Sounds, colours, affects, shapes, tones, smells are no longer the accidental or contingent, they are what the landscape or ecology does: ‘the melodic landscape is no longer a melody associated with a landscape, the melody itself is a sonorous landscape’ that is ‘in counterpoint to a virtual landscape’ (ATP: 318). Always, it is a question of counterpoint, of changing relations, of the way in which an expression ripples through in series of occasions and events, which set forth further series and occasions. The constants are not the objects and subjects, they are the tonal affects, which function like potentials that actualise according to different intensities:
We can say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing. None of these formulations carry the slightest risk of anthropomorphism . . . It is instead a kind of geomorphism. The relation to joy and sadness, the sun, danger, perfection, is given in the motif and counterpoint, even if the term of each of these relations is not given. In the motif and the counterpoint, the sun, joy or sadness, danger, become sonorous, rhythmic, or melodic. (ATP: 318–19)
Ecological attuning understands its own attendings as participant in this counterpoint. One’s affective and material affordances are of course constrained – there is no maximal bandwidth that somehow envelops the whole, at least for the human being. But such bandwidths can make more or less conscious music, and this making is, in some partial but never fully determinate sense, a function of attending – the ‘to-what’ one is attuning. The aspirational goal, in the ecological sense, is to understand this attuning as ultimately linked to the ‘forces of air and water, bird and fish’ such that one becomes an expressing modality of the ‘forces of the earth’ (ATP: 321). This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘becoming-imperceptible’.
If ‘becoming-imperceptible’ presents a lure for living, can we articulate more concretely how this might affect living habits? Or, alternatively, is there a way of drawing out what a notion of attuning to an ecology of expressive qualities could mean in other domains of theory or thought?
Cynthia Willett draws on a non-Heideggerian conception of attunement to conceive of forms of communication across species boundaries that she describes as ‘proto-conversation’ (2014: 82). If attuning is less a primordial orientation and more a relational modality between the expressive qualities of juxtaposed moments, then it is also potentially operative across boundaries between different forms of life. Note that this possibility becomes even more cogent under a process metaphysics, since the forms of life are not discrete and separate entities, but rather routes of historical inheritance (societies) defined, in a sense, through their reception and transformation of previous occasions. This is not just to affirm nonhu-man animals as expressing their own modes of meaning-making, play and intersubjectivity, but to raise the possibility that such modes might be collaborative with an ultimate interest in exploring an ethics based on a ‘biosocial eros’ (Willett 2014: 82).6
Ecological attunement cannot follow Willett’s emphasis on the ethical as yet. While this is a noble goal with which I am in much sympathy, I do not find an unequivocal ethical implication at the level of theory to follow from ecological attuning.7 That said, Willett’s project, and especially her use of Daniel Stern’s work studying ‘affect attunement’ between human infants and adult caregivers, offer interesting examples of how an ecology of expressive qualities and corresponding processes of subjectification as refrains in counterpoint may illuminate more empirical work.
Stern articulates ‘affect attunement’ to express how affect patterns transfer without being threaded through the conscious intentionality of a subject (since the newborn infant does not yet developmentally have a sense of self). His later work draws more extensively on cognitive science and expands the concept to include attunement to what he calls ‘vitality forms’. Three features of Stern’s account are important for ecological attuning. The first is that attunement is cross-modal in that it can occur across different perceptive modalities, transferring for example between sound and sight (Stern 1985: 154–7, 2010: 26–8).8 The second is that attunement is distinct from empathy, mimicry or mimesis. Though affect attunement ‘starts with an emotional resonance’, it ‘does something different with it . . . [it] takes the experience of emotional resonance and recasts that experience into another form . . . that need not proceed towards empathic knowledge or response’ (Stern 1985: 145). This distinction is one of the places where Stern’s concept is better enabled by a process metaphysics rather than a more traditional substance approach. With the latter, empathy presumes a sharing of predicates between stable subjects: you feel angry, and now I feel angry. The emphasis is on the identification of two shared emotional states that function as the same predicate. With attunement, however, the emphasis is on a manner that passes through both but does not presume an equivalent affective identification. Attunement as a mode of transfer thus allows for shared experiences to constitute different subjects that emerge as altered through their relation.9 Rather than identification, ‘attunement is a distinct form of affective transaction in its own right’ (Stern 1985: 145).
An affective transaction which does not presume a logic of identity is attractive for ecological attuning, but also emphasises its normative challenges.10 Attunement does not function as a means of consolidating meaning that is the same across difference, but as a way of connecting or bringing into relation. But the meaning of such relations is not necessarily shared or agreed upon.11 This brings us to the third important point, which is that affect attunement is not necessarily intentional or conscious. Stern writes: ‘evidence indicates that attunements occur largely out of awareness and almost automatically’ (1985: 145, 152–61). For the argument of this book, which is exploring the way in which a different metaphysical understanding might shift habits of attention, the ‘almost’ in this sense is important. If attunement was simply and always automatic, then there would be no point in developing a concept of ecological attuning. That said, it is clear that attuning is not primarily an activity of the conscious will. For the gambit of this text, it requires shifting one’s habits of attention and being more open to differences and gaps where one does not know, but one endeavours to feel or encounter, expressive qualities without automatically enlisting them into one’s prevailing narratives.
Stern’s disambiguating between emotions and ‘vitality forms’ is important for more speculative applications of attuning like Willett’s since it involves opening to relations across differences where ordinary concepts of emotion do not apply. The object of attunement is not a discrete emotional state, but rather a style of expression actualised through rhythm, timing and intensity. In his earlier work, Stern distinguished between ‘discrete categorical affects’ and ‘vitality affects’, later to be renamed ‘vitality forms’. Discrete categorical affects refer to experiential states commonly understood as emotion: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, interest, and so on, and it is these that would be relevant for concepts of empathy and mimesis.12 Vitality affects however are qualitative forms: surging, fading away, crescendo, bursting, etc. (1985: 54–5, 2010: 23–8). A vitality form is a dynamic pattern that expresses shifts without predetermining the emotional content of these shifts. While this is not an exclusive distinction (‘vitality affects occur both in the presence of and in the absence of categorical affects’ (1985: 55)), attunement functions at the level of vitality affects, not categorical affects. Stern’s later work explores this point in greater depth, studying how ‘vitality forms’ inform a wide range of experience. Stern insists on the distinction from emotion: ‘vitality forms are different from emotions in their nature, feel, non-specificity, omnipresence and neurobiology’ (Stern 2010: 28).
Willett is interested in ‘vitality affects’ or ‘vitality forms’ in providing a way of thinking relational encounter not mediated through a shared ‘world’ in the phenomenological sense. Vitality forms are not equivalent to emotional content. Stern tends to discuss them in terms of manners of intensity, timing and rhythm. These forms need not be states of a presumed subject; but attuning to them brings one into greater contact with the world around them. The maple tree’s surging burst into autumn red becomes felt in a visceral way. This is not a projection of one’s emotional state but a receptivity to an expressive quality. Furthermore, combined with a processual metaphysics, such attuning might be one way of gaining greater awareness, if not control, of the creative effects of attention – as one becomes more conscious of the feedbacks of attention – how one’s choice to attend, or not attend, to expressive qualities influence subsequent attuning and the created quality of existential territory.
Understanding vitality forms in such a metaphysics complicates the Kantian-Uexküll transcendental pluralisms in which each species, agent or subject only perceives the forms available to it.13 If vitality forms partially characterise transfers from occasion to occasion they are prior to the distinctions between organisms even as that eventual distinction emerges out of these transfers. Finally, and most speculatively, vitality forms give a way of thinking attuning that is prior to ‘world’ and as such open one to encounters beyond the preconceived. Such a capacity may be all the more important in periods of duress and destabilisation, since they enable one to attune to what is vital in a situation even as its ordinary markers are dissolving or changing. However, and this is the promise and peril of vitality forms, because attunement is not always intentional, there is an inherent risk for manipulation and capture, as we see in the charisma of fascist leaders for example. So, ecological attuning must explore its normative complexity in more detail, even if the outcome is not a categorical judgement.
Tertiary qualities and Self/Other
Can ecological attuning, combined with a speculative notion of vitality forms or asubjective tertiary qualities, make sense of Guattari’s call for individuals to become both more united and increasingly different? How can we understand such a call without presuming a falsely harmonious holism? As Whitehead reminds us, ‘a characteristic of every living society is that it requires food . . . [this requires] interplay with their environment . . . [that] takes the form of robbery’ (PR: 105). Is there a way of conceptualising encounters with difference without recoiling into antagonism while remaining cognisant of ‘robbery’?
Ecological attuning disrupts homogenising habits of attention captured by equivalence. In the context of a processual concept of subjectivity, the stakes of this disruption are ontological. In attuning, we do or do not develop capacities and affordances that become both enabling and constraining for manners of attention going forward. However, if there is a degree of creation in each occasion, this degree is often heavily constrained. Moreover, such creation is not necessarily aligned with our perceived interests, whether personal or social. Citing Whitehead’s claim that ‘God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities’, Stengers observes that this means that ‘God is indifferent to what counts for most of us: preservation’ (2011: 317).
Such evocation of intensities is in tandem with the dissolution of a certain concept of subjectivity, as explored in the first part of this text. Subjectivity has been redescribed as a manner of consistency exhibited in patterns of relational feeling – such that it is not that we ‘have’ feelings, but rather that feelings have us. But how does this conception manifest in more ordinary modes of speaking, thinking and being in relation to others? It is one thing to understand the speculative posit of the actual occasion as related to all other actual occasions in gradations of relevance, but what does this mean for the person currently struggling to understand their interlocutor?
Deleuze’s brief development of what he calls the a priori Other structure expresses the extent to which a processual conception of subjectivity departs from entrenched scripts while also raising potential problems. Of most significance is how his characterisation follows from an affirmative, rather than negating, conception of difference. At its best, as Rosi Braidotti observes, this offers a thinking of subjectivity in a manner alternative to the Hegelian influence in critical thought, which underwrites a theorising of the relation between subject and other through a logic of negation: you are who you are because you are not that other. Not that, not that, not that – not them, not them, not them. By contrast, a process conception of subjectivity resonates with what Braidotti calls a ‘nomadic subject’ that ‘disengage[s] the emergence of the subject from the logic of negation’ (Braidotti 2011: 323). At its worst, however, Deleuze’s way of describing the a priori other structure may reinforce the risk of a solipsistic self-referential affect, since it appears to inscribe the other as primarily a structure of possibility for the Self.14
In Difference and Repetition and an appendix to Logic of Sense, Deleuze articulates the a priori Other structure as a ‘structure of the possible’ (LS: 307).15 This structure is a transcendental condition of the development of the psychic system commonly called self, precisely because ‘the self is the development and the explication of what is possible’ (LS: 307). It is because the Other structurally expresses the different that it is a necessary condition for the development of the psychic system of Self. Without such difference, there is no disruption to the Self’s perceived world and thus no differentiation: ‘the Other is initially a structure of the perceptual field, without which the entire field could not structure as it does’ (LS: 307).
The Other does not function as an Object or a competing Subject, but rather as an expression of a ‘possible world’ that is characterised affectively through tertiary qualities. Deleuze gives the example of an encounter with a terrified face when the perceiver does not experience the cause of terror: ‘the face expresses a possible world: the terrifying world’ (DR: 260). This expressive potentiality gets explicated or unfolded through the encounter as a mode of individuating the self: ‘the terrified face does not resemble what terrifies it, it envelops a state of the terrifying world’ (DR: 260). The Other is not simply transmitting an external condition for the unfolding Self to see on their own, rather, the a priori Other structure is defined through its manner of concretising difference. This difference is both in terms of the encounter between Self and Other and in the expression of Other to the world: ‘The terrified countenance bears no resemblance to the terrifying thing. It implicates it, it envelops it as something else, in a kind of torsion which situates what is expressed in the expressing’ (LS: 307).
If we read Deleuze presuming the Self exists independently prior to this encounter, then his description is open to a criticism whereby the Other is simply the means by which a Self achieves autonomy. Alice Jardine presents a strong criticism along these lines from a feminist perspective, also considering how ‘becoming-woman’ in A Thousand Plateaus similarly perpetuates a masculinist logic where the route to an authentic individuation proceeds through the Woman.16 Such worries are important, but this is not the only way to read the a priori Other structure in the context of a speculative metaphysics where the autonomy of Self is an illusion if taken as metaphysically complete. Here it is important to maintain a distinction between an individuating and the psychic system that becomes characterised and identified as Self. The former is metaphysically primary and not equivalent to the later.
With this distinction in mind, what is primary in the encounter expressed in the a priori Other structure is the tertiary quality – not the Self or the Other. As Deleuze says, ‘Concretely, it is the so-called tertiary qualities whose mode of existence is in the first instance enveloped by the other’ (DR: 260). Otherness is not given or located at the level of persons, but rather as expressions of differing values: ‘the a priori Other is defined in each system by its expressive value – in other words, its implicit and enveloping value’ (DR: 260). While it is true that the Self often operates with a falsely reified sense of this constituting system, Deleuze is interested in the extent to which the system includes a necessary disruption to autonomy through the encounter with Other such that both Self and Other are expressions of implicating values and intensities. What is really Other is not the person, so much as the tertiary quality. This otherness disrupts the stability of both sides of the encounter: Self and Other.
What is ontologically prior are the tertiary qualities as mode of encounter between: ‘Fear’, ‘Terror’, ‘Joy’, ‘Curiousity’ are actualisations of differing intensities around which the self/other structure gets explicated:
The I and the Self, by contrast, are immediately characterized by functions of development or explication . . . they tend to explicate or develop the world expressed by the other, either in order to participate in it or to deny it. (DR: 260)
Jardine’s worry however remains, precisely because these metaphysics push on ordinary lived conceptions of subjectivity to such an extent. Deleuze indeed recognises this when he acknowledges that the I and the Self either ‘participate or deny’ the ‘world’ of the Other. Deleuze’s account can only escape these worries if it is understood to function at the level of events, not the level of ordinarily lived subjectivities. Deleuze however says as much: ‘In order to grasp the other as such, we [have to] insist upon special conditions of experience . . . the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no existence apart from that which expresses it: the Other as the expression of a possible world’ (DR: 261). The a priori other structure offers a clue (a sign) for other (different) ways to affirm the event’s excess to any single perspective on it. In this way, the encounter with the Other may function as a ‘dark precursor’ or ‘quasi-cause’ (Chapter 2) in triggering a threshold and as such changing the trajectory of the ‘I-Self’ system. The other as such is expression of a quality, not the world, and not the person. This is why Deleuze says that ‘In the psychic system of the I-Self, the Other functions as a centre of enwinding, envelopment or implication. It is the representative of the individuating factors’ (DR: 261). These individuating factors express in experience as tertiary qualities or asubjective forms of vitality prior to their capture in consolidated identities. When we experience the encounter with an otherness of feeling, the structure disrupts the Self’s homogeneity and (potentially) pushes it to unfold more intense or differing values and ‘grow’ or change. Without this encounter with alternative possible worlds, the world becomes static, inert and equivalent to one’s interiority: ‘The Other assures the margins and transitions in the world’ (LS: 305).
This does not mean that such an encounter is necessarily harmonious nor always ‘positive’. Nor is such an encounter easily assimilable into norms of understanding or transparency. What Deleuze is interested in is the extent to which such an a priori Other structure challenges the idea that the encounter results in a shared consensus or explication as to its meaning. This is why he warns against over-explication, both with regard to Self and Other (DR: 261).17 Because it functions at the level of the extensive and constituted forms of representation, explication has a tendency to ‘cancel’ the differences of intensity that are its condition of possibility: ‘The hard law of explication is that what is explicated is explicated once and for all’ (DR: 244). Explicating the other strips their power to produce difference. It does the same to the self. Always something must be ‘kept in reserve’ (DR: 244). Indeed, Deleuze characterises this as an ‘ethics’: ‘affirm even the lowest, [and] do not explicate oneself [too much]’ (DR: 244).
Such affirmation can seem a wilful obscurantism if one does not keep in mind the metaphysics in which it arrives. Explication is a mode of separating, whereas for Deleuze the question is always how to construct greater (more intense) modes of resonant connection. The operation of such connection is through sensibility, not intelligibility. The question for an ecological attuning then is whether or not we can see the a priori Other structure as operative in a wider field than just our immediate acquaintances and species.
But there is a second, and perhaps more important, temporal implication that follows this characterisation of the a priori Other structure. Indeed, because of the risks of encounter, because we cannot presume a level playing field, and because, as Whitehead notes, we both eat and are eaten, the normative question cannot be jettisoned. Even as we affirm the encounter and the a priori Other structure as emphasising lived importance of the tertiary quality as a sign of individuating factors, we also live these encounters in a dangerous world. The Other expresses a possible world that can kill, eat or otherwise injure you. Moreover, while from a metaphysical perspective we live on the edge of these encounters, they are also continuously being incorporated into the molar lines of subjectivity’s ordinary representations. What can this mean for ecological attuning? While both Self and Other must resist complete determination, representation or understanding, they are nevertheless also always subject to relative determinations, relative representations and degrees of understanding. But such relative determinations, representations and understanding manifest retroactively, when the occasion is past. As Deleuze puts it: ‘If the Other is a possible world, I am a past world’ (LS: 310). If descriptively this follows a processual account, it appears to strand the would-be attender in a place of passivity: where they can never know how the encounters in which they are immersed will turn out even as they must choose what to affirm in them.
Janus-faced time: selection and orientation in ecological attunement
Ecological attunement alters the stakes of habits of attention. Instead of passive reception of a world determined in advance, attention is implicated in active collaborations that feed forward in partially binding ways for future collaborations. However, while there are no merely neutral attendings, there are also no general prescriptions to be extracted as static universal principles. In some sense, the occasion itself engenders its own value. What can this mean in a practical sense? Life requires choices and actions, many of them fraught with uncertainty. How does a concept of ecological attunement navigate this double bind: the necessity of choice coupled with the impossibility of universal categorical principles?
If a ‘Self’ is an abstraction from relational patterns exemplified in tertiary qualities, then attending to such qualities becomes a way to ‘know thy-self’ and connect this knowing to larger ecological contexts. Tertiary qualities are by definition relational. Formally, Locke’s characterisation tends towards the two term or dyadic (meltable/melt-causing), but this cannot hold in a strict sense. In a process context, even tertiary qualities are better understood as manners of qualifying events. They thus name a relational pattern that repeats but can be realised in different intensities. This realising is constitutive of the occasion and functions at the intersection of the axiological and the aesthetic. The explosive tension of a fraught encounter, pervasive throughout the room, is a form through which disparate series constituting the event of the room connect. Feeling is shared, but how the feeling manifests is not.
The boundaries of this shared activity of feeling do not map the boundaries of the organisms. Moreover, within a Whiteheadean framework, the subject/object pivot is no longer correlative to the Self/Other, but rather is incorporated into the structure of actual occasions and the grain of experience. Explosiveness is an inheritance of the occasion, and as the occasion exemplifies this quality, along with others, it is its own subject. In its completion, the occasion becomes objective for further occasions to inherit. Each actual occasion is shaped by the relations it inherits, and this inheritance is both informed by, and the result of, the tertiary qualities mediating between occasions. The feeling is not an add-on to an occasion that happens, but rather a mode of actualising the occasion’s unification. For this reason, the more capacious a range of feeling is, the more complex and intense the occasion can be, because it operates by achieving a moment of unification across a greater range of differences that produces a qualitatively more complex intensity.
Are such moments always ‘good’? This is not a well-formulated question since it supposes the possibility of a monolithic judgement. Temporal heterogeneity (good when and at what register or scale?) and dynamism (good going in what direction?) problematise such a single-register question. However, in attempting to articulate practical dimensions of an ecological attunement, there is still some vestige of existential meaning. From this vantage, even while admitting the reduction induced by asking the question, the answer is clear. The relational structure of moments out of which a life is knit means there is no conclusive way to immunise from conflicts and discords. In short, no, such moments are not ‘always good’, harmonious or constructive.
The question is poorly formulated from a metaphysical perspective because it presumes the possibility of isolating a dominant stable perspective as ground from which to judge. But given the heterogeneity of scales involved in processes of individuation, such an isolation will be a reduction. What is one to do? And the paradox gets more intense, precisely because the achievement of a genuine perspective is in some sense the goal of ecological attuning. Everything depends on what is meant by genuine. That is, a perspective can simply conform its inheritance and follow the path of least resistance in being assimilated into trends of equivalence, in which case the opportunity for the universe to express itself more capaciously is diminished, or, it can understand its own processes of attention as forms by which the universe is singularised. How does one include as much as possible without disintegrating? And how do we understand inclusion, in a singular moment of individuation, while also keeping in mind the multi-scalar complexity of ecology?
The most pertinent lived dimension of this complexity is temporal. For this reason, ecological attuning requires dual modalities, selection and orientation situated along two different temporal axes – that is, one looks backwards and one looks forward.18 It is true that attuning as activity is always enacted in the ‘living present’ that Deleuze refers to as the first synthesis of time (DR: 70). The living present is constituted by the passive synthesis of habit. Importantly, the ‘subjects’ of these habits are not constituted selves but rather ‘the primary habits that we are; the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed’ (DR: 74). Deleuze calls these passive syntheses, which in many respects are akin to Whitehead’s actual occasions, as ‘larval subjects’ or ‘little selves’: ‘Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject’ (DR: 75). In insisting on the ontological dimensions of attention, attuning is made up of the corresponding micro-contemplations of these passive habits. However, insofar as we seek to alter their enactment in the present, we must insist on a possibility of learning how to alter or transform their activity. This cannot be an act of direct conscious will. But it may be possible, through reflection, to influence these constituting habits. Indeed, when Deleuze observes that ‘it is simultaneously through contraction that we are habits, but through contemplation that we contract’ (DR: 74), it is this possibility that activity of contemplation can influence contractive habits that is opened.
And yet, this does not mean that this influence is direct or unequivocal. Everywhere there is uncertainty and ambiguity. We are creatures of contractive habits that form without our realising it. It is not just a matter of changing habits but of knowing what habits to change, and at the level of the ‘little selves’ it cannot be assumed that these contractions and contemplations mirror intentional normative valuation. The fundamental issue is in terms of the tendency of a habit – does it move towards an intensify-ing or diminishing of contemplation’s awareness? Intensifying awareness must be taken as a good, even if the objects of awareness are not always harmonious. To be more aware is to be more alive is to be more potentially responsive and creative. But how is contemplation intensified or diminished by choices of attention? Can we learn to notice the ‘feeling’ of such intensification or diminishment?
Ecological attunement, as concept, requires a reflective looping that, it is hoped, can over time infiltrate the passive syntheses of the living present. Consciously, this involves observing the effects and outcomes of habits of attention and learning to better discern their influencing manner on the quality of one’s present. This discernment must also remain a process, given the varying temporal feedback loops in question. This temporal complexity admits of two main modalities: a retroactive selection and a futural orientation.
Consider how the distinction between Chronos and Aion inflects Deleuze’s discussion of an existential attitude in relation to the event. Deleuze adapts this terminology from his discussion of Stoic ontology where ‘time’ functions as one of the four ‘incorporeals’ (void, place, time, sayable) contrasted with bodies or states of affairs (LS: 7–23).19 For the Stoics, the latter are a complex, even cosmic, whole. Differentiations between different bodies can be made, but they require the intervention of ‘incorporeals’. (This is why ‘void’ and ‘place’ are ‘incorporeals’ – because conceptually they require a place outside of bodies or states of affairs from which to locate or differentiate these states of affairs.) In bodies themselves, there is only the cosmic whole.20 The ‘incorporeals’ thus are the means by which Stoics explain the thinkability of this whole from the limited vantage of the finite human. With regard to time, this entails a further distinction: Chronos refers to the ‘always limited present, which measures the action of bodies as causes and the state of their mixtures in depth’, whereas Aion refers to an ideal instant or ‘empty present’ that is infinitely divisible (LS: 61–5). This distinction can feel counter-intuitive. If the former is in one sense privileged as the ‘physical’ reality of a moving present (‘only the present exists in time . . . [and] the present is in some manner corporeal’ (LS: 162)), the latter allows for experience of change and meaning, precisely because Aion is limited to an ideal instant. That is, from the perspective of Chronos, what is, is in a forever moving present. But Aion reverses the order of priority such that it is the future and past that become the domain of meaning. That is, it is only future or past which matter, with the present being emptied into an ‘instant without thickness and without extension’: ‘instead of a present which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once’ (LS: 164).
This distinction between Chronos and Aion is crucial for cultivating an ecological attunement. The former incorporates the living present in which the becomings of actual occasions (Whitehead) or the passive syntheses of ‘little selves’ (Deleuze) simply are reality. But this living present is insufficient for understanding the experience(s) of purposive meaning. The eternal present of Chronos is not accessible to the limited vantage of the subject in motion, even if it can serve as an ideal reminder of cultivating equanimity. Moreover, if Chronos names the reality of a living present constituted by becomings, it also, in a certain sense, denies the viability of becomings in its very institution of an eternal present. Deleuze observes, for example, that
whereas Chronos expressed the action of bodies and the creation of corporeal qualities, Aion is the locus of incorporeal events and of attributes which are distinct from qualities. Whereas Chronos was inseparable from the bodies which filled it out entirely as causes and matter, Aion is populated by effects which haunt it without ever filling it up. (LS: 165)
Aion thus becomes the crucial condition for the possibility of meaning even as this meaning is no longer ‘given’, but rather always an effect of one’s orientation within events.
This point is both challenging and indispensable for an existential ecological attunement. We might say that selection/orientation are actions by which one fills out the emptiness of Aion in the hopes that one’s attuning finds the most pregnant intensities in Chronos. Selection names the activity of meeting the event with an attitude that best allows us to ‘become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event’ (LS: 149). But does this mean simply passively accepting what happens to us? On the contrary, when Deleuze says that ‘willing the event is, primarily, to release its eternal truth’ he invites us to understand the activity of selection as a positive creation of meaning. On the one hand, there is an acceptance insofar as events necessarily exceed our control, on the other hand, Aion is the time of meeting these events in a manner that best accommodates the greatest intensity of experience without becoming mired in resentments. This is not a bland or hopeless resignation or a facile positivity. It’s not ‘all good’. The selection involves understanding one’s own role as a conductor between past and future, rather than solely as an outcome. This involves choice and creation, implicit in the activity of attention. Deleuze writes, ‘we are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation’ (LS: 149). The volition involves learning to ‘will . . . not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs’ (LS: 149).
Selection/orientation are two sides of ecological attuning as existential ideal. Selecting is the activity of becoming participant in the creation of meaning even as events exceed conscious control. What happens is one thing, it is question of selecting from the event its most intensely vital quality even in the midst of misfortune or suffering: ‘my misfortune is present in all events, but also a splendor and brightness which dry up misfortune and which bring about that the event, once willed, is actualized on its most contracted point, on the cutting edge of an operation’ (LS: 149). It is a matter of finding the cutting edge as an intensification rather than deadening of attention. This is a transmutation of equivalence. The forces of equivalence by contrast seek to dull the cutting edge through the churning operations of the Sameness machine. Without such selection, the path is already groomed by predictability. To select is thus to will that one not simply accepts the event insofar as its meaning is determined by a general or ready-made consensus and categorisation, but rather to enter into its ‘communicating singularities effectively liberated from the limits of individuals and persons’ (LS: 150). In this way, selection is a form of actualising the event’s potential beyond prior identities or former categories; it is, as Deleuze will write later, ‘a question of freeing life wherever it is imprisoned, or of tempting it into uncertain combat’ (WIP: 171).
If selection is a manner of becoming worthy of what happens, orientation marks the manner or tone in which one incorporates this selection in anticipation. Selection/orientation are thus mutually implicated in all activities of attention. To attend is, whether consciously or not, to select and limit excess in order to achieve a coherent perspective. But, in the context of forces of equivalence and an increasingly loud media ever ready to supply pre-existing narratives for every event, then selection/orientation become both intensely important and increasingly imperilled. How do we select out of the noise to find that which is important or relevant? Even more provocatively, how do we create importance rather than simply follow the lines of what is created for us? Paradoxically, this creation of importance, this singularising of perspective, involves not a repetition of already consolidated narratives, but rather an openness to the possibility of these narratives being interrupted. Indeed, when Deleuze talks about learning to ‘will’ the event, he is inviting us to take up the reality of one’s inextricability from events that exceed single ascriptions of their meanings even as they are the condition for the reality of subjectivity and its potential for authentic differentiation. Deleuze thus refers to a ‘neutral splendor’ that is ‘impersonal and preindividual, beyond the general and particular, the collective and the private’ (LS: 148). This ‘neutral splendor’ is crucial for an ecological attunement. Its neutrality is not a gesture towards a positivistic void, but rather an ecological expression of the interdependence between singularity and an ever-differentiating whole that does not stand still. This splendour exceeds any single fixed perspective on it, and yet it can be qualitatively impacted by any form of hegemony that levels difference. This is important especially insofar as so much of what is presented in the media as important may actually encourage a lack of attention or blindness to the qualitative specificity and singularity that is our unfolding ecology. Selection is thus also always a manner of anticipating what is to come. Can we learn to select with an orientation towards the creation of a future that does not repeat the abuses of the past while allowing for differences to proliferate?
Formally, Deleuze is consistently wary of how such selection is assimilated into a logic of negation. Ecological attunement requires an existential selection that does not insist on negating alternatives, but rather choosing which differences to affirm. An affirmation of differences involves developing or pushing their implications into a more intense state of actuality. In this sense, the selection is not simply a choice about how to best represent what really happened (though it is that as well), but rather is partially constitutive of actual occasions that emerge going forward. In moments of great intensity, this process appears automatic. But if differentiation and individuation are not only more complex than negation, but also prior to it, then even such intense moments of encounter are always full of possibilities that do not reduce to discrete oppositions. This is why Deleuze thinks of difference as affirmation, not negation: ‘difference is the object of affirmation or affirmation itself . . . affirmation is itself difference’ (DR: 52). Difference as affirmation requires the selection of which difference to affirm. To fail to do so is to be selected for and follow the given path of representation.
It is worth noting that Whitehead frames the question of selection in terms of evil, accepting evil as a necessary consequence of a fundamental temporal double bind:
the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a ‘perpetual perishing.’ Objectification involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy . . . In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction . . . The nature of evil is that the characters of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. (PR: 340, emphases added)
This selection is a double-edged sword. It is ‘at once the measure of evil, and the process of its evasion’ (PR: 340). Whitehead orients a principle of selection that would develop sheer incompatibility into a patterned contrast and in so doing achieve a novel intensity. In this sense, the reaction to ‘evil’ is not a negation, but, similar to Deleuze, an affirmation of difference.
This insistence on affirmation rather than negation informs the second modality of an ecological attunement: its futural orientation. Importantly, such orientation is not teleological in a standard sense and cannot fixate on a prescribed outcome insofar as this will hinder the potential for the unexpected and prefigure or diminish attention. But how these possibilities are encountered and how the occasion is achieved depend to some extent on a basic affective attunement that orients towards the future. The tension is between a too-static generality and a too-restricted particularity. If an ecological attunement restricts general teleological prescriptions, it also is wary of restricting the orientation towards the future to conclusions or predictions attached to single perspectives. It therefore strives for a balanced openness and a willingness to be surprised. I have suggested that the conduction of past to the future through an ecological attunement is primarily mediated through affect and feeling. If our orientation of attention contributes to the unfolding of ecologies from which we are inextricable even as they exceed any singular perspective, then the best access we have to qualitatively influencing this unfolding is through the way we conduct affects and feelings. What are we attuned to notice? What feeling-tones do we collaboratively construct, create and pass on in our noticings?
This suggestion might appear to lead to a kind of facile optimism or neoliberal project in positive psychology in encouraging us to cultivate only ‘positive’ feelings. Worse, it might function to dampen or otherwise complicate the affective charges (anger, most predominantly, but also fear) correlative with critique of power or speaking out against injustice. Rosi Braidotti describes this as the ‘relationship between creation and critique’ constitutive of a central difficulty facing Deleuze-inspired political theory: ‘how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness that such a stance necessarily entails?’ (2011: 267). Everything depends on complicating superficial characterisations of the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’.21
It is true that emphasis on creative becoming and affirmation of difference is often enlisted in rhetorics that emphasise the ‘positive’. Braidotti herself for example describes the time of Aion as the ‘time of becoming’ in which ‘spontaneous’, ‘creative’, and ‘joyful acts of transformation’ invent new possibilities for the future (2011: 269). Whitehead also consistently emphasises the virtue of an attitudinal wonder rather than scepticism, suspicion or resentment. (‘Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains’ (MT: 168).) Given the reality of risks, dangers and discords, we should take care to understand ‘wonder’ as normatively neutral and affectively heterogeneous. There is no guarantee that any occasion will only reveal ‘positive’ or joyful affects, nor that every encounter is respectful or reciprocal. This is a particularly important point in the context of the present, where harbingers of dire futures are increasingly the fabric of the everyday.
However, it is also because of this precipitous present that care must be taken in attuning to ways to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies. Undoubtedly this remains a delicate, ever delicate, issue. Indeed, in such a context, Deleuze’s notion of the ‘counter-actualization’ by which one becomes the ‘actor of one’s own events’ is crucial (LS: 150). Here, he again partakes of the Stoic ontological distinction between a realm of a cosmic physical whole and the ‘incorporeals’. This is, in Whitehead’s language, a distinction between God’s consequent nature as the inclusive and incomplete present and the process of individuation of the singular occasion. The actor is the one who acts. In this sense, we are all, potentially, actors, but the question has to do with a capacity to be the agent of our actions and act in accordance with constitutive processes of individuation that are ontologically excessive to our ego identity. This is not about satisfying egoistic desires. It is, rather, attuning to the ‘impersonal and preindividual’: ‘the actor strains his entire personality in a moment which is always further divisible to open himself up to the impersonal and preindividual’ (LS: 150). In this way, the actor ‘actualizes the event, but in a way which is entirely different from the actualization of the event in the depth of things . . . [because] the actor redoubles this cosmic, or physical actualization, in his own way’ (LS: 150). This counter-actualisation is a manner of creating a meaning in relation to events. These events can be extreme, destabilising, even destructive. How do you counter-actualise them?
With this question in mind, we must insist that positive is not a characterisation of a facile optimism or celebration of ‘happiness’. Far from it, especially insofar as images of happiness are frequently conflated with predictable security. And yet, there is still some conceptual valence to the distinction between the affirmative and the negative. Braidotti for example links this distinction in terms of its relational effects. The reinforcing feedback loop is important. Negative affects both tend to be generated by ‘a blow, a shock, an act of violence, betrayal, trauma, or just intense boredom’ and they tend to produce, inflict or perpetuate themselves through rigidifying the subject’s capacity for relation: ‘Negative passions do not merely destroy the self but also harm the self’s capacity to relate to others’ (Braidotti 2011: 288). By contrast, affects that increase the capacity to connect, relate, affect and be affected are deemed positive. The arbiter is thus relational capacity or affordance. This does not mean that all difficult feelings are negative.
It is always a question of when, how much, how, what manner. Indeed, Braidotti articulates ethical implications as ‘the transformation of negative into positive passions, i.e. moving beyond the pain’ (2011: 290). It is not a matter of ignoring or blocking out pain but of working through it. Such a working through is not necessarily a ‘matter of retaliation or compensation but rather rests on active transformation of the negative’ (Braidotti 2011: 293). This transformation is neither exclusively juridical nor epistemic, but ontological. The criteria is the effects on one’s capacity for relation. The work of cultivating this capacity involves transforming negatively attuned reactionary modalities:
We need to unlink pain from the epistemological obsession that results in the quest for meaning and move beyond, to the next stage . . . let us call it amor fati; we have to be worthy of what happens to us and rework it within an ethics of relation. Of course, repugnant and unbearable events do happen. Ethics consists, however, in reworking these events in the direction of positive relations. (Braidotti 2011: 293)
Rather than a cheap positivity based on denial, this is a deepened ontological capacity to find a way of selecting from the event that creates greater capacity for relation in going forward. It doesn’t need to happen all at once. Grief, pain and sorrow are necessary components of the processing of trauma. But they are oriented towards a renewed capacity for relation, not as ends-in-themselves. In this sense, rather than a retreat into an idealistic false optimism, what Braidotti is expressing is a desire for a more resilient and sustainable critical stance. Indeed, Braidotti believes that emphasis on mourning and vulnerability cannot undo the pathological patterns of advanced capitalism. Equivalence runs on negative affects like fear and loathing. While there are, undoubtedly, many good reasons for the proliferation of such affects, it is a question of counter-actualising untapped vitality so as to create alternatives not pre-captured by equivalence. As Braidotti puts it, ‘the politics of melancholia has become so dominant in our culture that it ends up functioning like a self-fulfilling prophecy’, such that ‘melancholic states and the rhetoric of lament [are] integral to the logic of advanced capitalism’ (Braidotti 2011: 318–20).
It is also important to interrupt the assumption that the ‘positive’ relation is one that involves a certification of one’s preconceived ideas, which, as we know, tends to arrive with a certain positive charge. But the issue is again ontological. Relation can be superficial if it is just a matter of ‘connecting’ through consolidation or agreement. By contrast, taking the full ontological notion of relation as part of the creative differentiation of reality means encountering difference and the unexpected. This is the difference between what Deleuze refers to as the ‘lived states’ of ‘perceptions, affections, and opinions’ and the ontological reality of percepts and affects and concepts unhooked from their consolidation in a representative consciousness (WIP: 170–5). If ‘opinions are functions of lived experience’ (WIP: 174) in its complacent ordinariness, it is a question of inducing the capacity to become other through the encounter with affect or percept prior to consolidation in opinion. In this way, living experience can be opened to potential transformation. By way of contrast, consider how social media networks often reinforce clichéd reactions. All sides of the political spectrum reinforce already constituted views through the sharing, tweeting and retweeting of images or articles that activate a feeling response that is already there: anger, scorn, fear, and so on. From an ontological perspective, the positive connection of this behaviour is superficial because it does not truly open to encounter at relational levels prior to one’s already consolidated opinions.
For Deleuze, this is a manner in which art contributes to ecological attuning. ‘The artist is always adding new varieties to the world’ (WIP: 175) because they are working with affects rather than affections. In this sense, the artist is a creator of actual occasions that differ from the normal in unexpected ways.22 But this differing, in a processual view, must remain to some extent open. Indeed, this is the difference between art and propaganda. Propaganda is directed towards reinforcing a message that is already there, whereas the intentionality of art stops at its affective and perceptive quality (tertiary). Nothing more and nothing less. While representative, thematic and conceptual content play a role, the point is not transmission of a view, but the engendering of an encounter and thus an actual occasion that exceeds the given.
These remarks need not be restricted to the humanly aesthetic. Each actual occasion is an achievement of reality that exceeds the perspectives of an habitual subject. The habitual human subject’s access to this activity is through the modality of tertiary qualities, but such tertiary qualities are not ephemeral predicates of objects and subjects – they are reality! When fear happens, the actual occasion is fearful; fear has been actualised in the universe. When love happens, the actual occasion is loving; love has been manifested in the universe. Moreover, these affects/feelings become crucial to the further integration of the occasions to come. Debaise writes of a fearful animal:
each action is inhabited by a modality of fear. It is the particular manner in which the past is integrated . . . Hence, that which is transferred from one act to another is not only the content of the act but the conditions by which a certain affective tonality ingress into a particular situation. While it always varies, intensifies, or, on the contrary, dissipates, fear is transmitted from act to act, forming the history of this particular route, which is the concern that has appeared in the life of this animal. (2017b: 70–1)
While it would be too simple to adopt any single-register normative assessment of feelings, the question for ecological attuning is again one of selection/orientation. How to select out of the feelings that which orients towards creation and relation? This does not mean pretending that there aren’t real, and well-founded, fears. But it does mean cultivating attention to the manner in which feelings inflect the arrival of occasions and becoming reflective about which inflections increase our capacity to respond and which diminish or hinder this capacity.
In this sense, to speak of the positive or negative is already to risk reduction by encouraging stasis. It is always a question of how, the manner or style. A ‘sad’ affect is not necessarily negative if it induces an occasion of relational understanding. Nor is a ‘joyful’ affect necessarily positive in the broader sense: think of all the pain induced in the world by insistence on superficial happiness. Positive/negative is a simplification and abstraction from the complexity of qualities that resonate together in the achievement of an occasion. This requires careful attending to a distinction between the named content and the qualitative relation. We cannot characterise tertiary qualities as positive or negative before the fact. Positivity or negativity is a manner of what happens going forward, not the naming of a quality as such. It is contextual, relational and, moreover, open to further refinement and understanding as loops of experience unfold. In navigating the complicated webs and flows of material, discursive, ideological and political forces inflecting each occasion, ecological attuning means being open to unexpected convergences or the potential for new patterns of response.
The Janus-faced nature of time is such that no moment can be fixed or possessed. In this sense there is a perpetual processing of loss, as every actual occasion is an occasion of ‘perishing’. There is no possession, it is always slipping through one’s fingers. But, just as there is no secure possession of a fully determinate present, since as soon as the occasion is achieved it slips away into the past, so this past is also never fully eradicated. It lives on, informing the present, and this means both that the present is bound to the past, but also that the past is itself liable to new interpretations and new becomings as present achievements reshape its heritage. To fixate therefore on the loss of ‘what was’ is to miss the arrival of what might be. Correspondingly, to dwell only in the resentments of past tragedies is to risk repeating them in the present. This is not a celebration of ignorance or privileged denial. It is a question of degrees and dosage and an attention to unactualised potentials. Such attention is a response to forces of capture (whether political, ideological, pharmaceutical or economic) that would insist on the future proceeding along the same lines as the present.
Notes
1. This is the reason for the ‘speculative ban’ (see Hansen 2015a: 88–103 for a summary). Following such a ban, actual occasions are not phenomenologically experienced but rather are speculative constructions that function as heuristics for explaining experience. However, as I argue in Chapter 4, this does not mean there is no connection between lived experience and the speculative actual occasion, or in Deleuze’s terms, intensive individuation processes.
2. Deleuze is interested in the ontological conditions of fatigue, which he locates in the ‘natural contractile range’ of an organism’s ‘contemplative souls’ (DR: 77). This ‘natural contractile range’ correlates with the qualitative intensity of an actual occasion’s positive and negative prehensions. In later texts, Deleuze associates ‘exhaustion’ with a choice to exhaust possibilities through dominance rather than open to new creation. This is the ‘base’ form of becoming that ‘is nothing more than the will-to-dominate in the exhausted becoming of life’ (TI: 141).
3. This formulation is from Fred Moten: ‘. . . you talk about being able to be in two places at the same time, but also to be able to be in two times at the same place . . . [this] is very much bound up with the Jamesian notion of the future in the present’ (Harney and Moten 2013: 131).
4. The German term is ‘die stimmung’. Though Macquarrie and Robinson render this as ‘mood’, the literal German connotation involves tuning a musical instrument. In the English translation of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, it is translated as ‘attunement’. See also Kuperus 2007 for a helpful secondary discussion.
5. I refer to Heidegger’s three theses in the 1929/30 lecture course on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: ‘(i) the stone (material object) is worldless; (ii) the animal is poor in world; (iii) man is world-forming’ (1995: 177). Though some have wondered if Dasein could apply to certain nonhuman animals, Heidegger’s intent appears to be to use Dasein to get at something essential to the human being – ‘We name the being of man being-there, Dasein’ (1995: 63). For discussions on expanding the scope of Dasein to nonhuman animals, see Thomson 2004: 401–3; Thomson draws on Haugeland 1982 in distinguishing in principle Dasein and the human being.
6. Because affect attunement ‘emerges below the level of conscious awareness’ (Willett 2014: 83), it might help describe the way affects move through groups. Willet suggests extending the notion of attunement from micro-organisms up to what is sometimes called a ‘superorganism’. Drawing on recent research (Raison et al. 2010) which details the affective role that micro-organisms in the ‘gut brain’ play, Willet argues that attunement helps understand resonances that do not require a conscious subject: ‘not just microorganisms, but massive superorganisms, as described by various social network theories, can likewise regulate the affect and physical function of nodes – aka people – through a process generally mysterious and yet statistically measurable. It is as though we humans not only have a multiply inhabited gut brain, but belong to a larger one’ (2014: 84).
7. At least, if by ethical theory we presume that the obligation of such theory is to provide determinate decision procedures for ethical action, something I question in Chapter 4.
8. This possibility has a long philosophical history, as Stern notes in introducing it. Most notably, it dates back to Aristotle’s affirmation of a ‘common sensibility’ (koiné aisthésis) in explaining how the sense perceptions unite. (De Anima III.1 425a29; 1987: 187–8).
9. Sylvan Tomkins, an important source for Stern, distinguishes affects from drives. In contrast to affects, drives are object dependent (Sedgwick et al. 1995: 54–5). Tompkins’s example is air: the drive for breathing is only satisfied by air. By contrast, the affect-object relationship is characterised by a high degree of variability and the causal relationship between affects and objects is neither unilateral nor rigidly linear. When an attuning transfer occurs, it does not have to express in the same way. Tompkins’s affect theory thus better fits the phenomenon of subjective variance: ‘Everyman has been puzzled for centuries at the irrationality of affect investment, that this one who has every reason in the world to be happy is miserable, whereas that one, whose lot is unrelieved misery, seems nonetheless to be full of zest for life’ (Sedgwick et al. 1995: 54).
10. Because the logic of affect resists the logic of identity, it has been attractive to Deleuzeinfluenced theorists like Protevi 2009, Manning 2015 and Massumi 2002, all of whom draw on Stern and affect theory.
11. This does not mean that empathy is not an important pedagogical component to the development of an ecological attunement but only that empathy is in many ways a renarration in more conventional categories of a metaphysical relation that is its condition of possibility.
12. There is some debate about the list of categorical affects. Sylvan Tomkins, an important source in affect theory, identified eight basic affective complexes: interest-excitement; enjoyment-joy; surprise-startle; distress-anguish; fear-terror; shame-humiliation; con-tempt-disgust, anger-rage (Sedgwick et al. 1995: 74).
13. This follows the discussion of Uexküll in the Introduction.
14. Alice Jardine reads this as one way in which Deleuze’s theory remains inscribed in a masculinist logic and fails to develop its more radical potentialities. See Jardine 1984.
15. The appendixes of Logic of Sense gather five previously published articles in slightly modified form. The relevant appendix (‘A Theory of the Other’), originally published in Critique in 1967, is structured around a literary analysis of Michel Tournier’s novel Friday and the concept of perversion. As such, its aim is different than the more metaphysical Difference and Repetition. However, the two accounts are consistent and mutually reinforcing.
16. I am convinced by Jardine’s criticism of the terminology of ‘becoming-woman’. Even if, as she acknowledges, the concept is not meant to refer to empirical women, it is likely to be misunderstood and easily read through problematic gender norms. However, for the a priori Other structure presented in the Logic of Sense, Jardine’s criticisms primarily focus on Deleuze’s reading of Tournier and the concept of perversion. I am more interested in the metaphysics of the structure, which need not be read through a psychoanalytic lens or in the context of gender or sexuality per se.
17. Zourabichvili observes that the fundamental logical movement of Deleuze’s philosophy is ‘implication’ not explication. To explicate is to separate or translate an expression of intensity into description in terms of qualities and extension. To implicate, by contrast, is to fold two series or centres of resonance together, while maintaining their difference (2012: 105).
18. Deleuze offers two different descriptions of the metaphysics of time: the tripartite analysis in Difference and Repetition and the Chronos/Aion distinction in The Logic of Sense (this latter distinction returns in the Cinema texts). While there is brief reference to Aion in DR, he does not provide any analysis of how these two descriptions relate to one another. I read them as differing primarily in terms of motivating problem: the three syntheses in DR respond to how a transcendental empiricism accounts for time without recourse to the transcendental ego. The Chronos/Aion discussion in LS is concerned with existential and ethical implications. I focus on the latter above.
19. Deleuze is interested in the Stoic ontology as an early alternative to Platonism (the Ideas are no longer dominant over bodies, but rather in some sense the ‘effects’ of bodies) and because of how these ‘incorporeals’, in particular the ‘sayable’, bring into view the problem of sense. How is sense generated? Deleuze writes, ‘one always returns to this problem, this immaculate conception, being the passage from sterility to genesis’ (LS: 97). The sterility is states of affairs as they are, no more, no less. In themselves, there is no sense. And yet sense is where the bulk of our conscious energy is expended, even as it moves us to act on bodies. For a helpful secondary discussion of Deleuze’s interest in Stoic ontology, see Bowden 2011: 15–47.
20. This leads to the familiar Stoic ethic. Given that, as Alexander writes: ‘all things are bound together, and neither does anything happen in the world such that something else does not unconditionally follow from it or become causally attached to it’ (cited in Bowden 2011: 20), one must develop a capacity for acceptance of this order.
21. It is worth distinguishing between Deleuze and Deleuze-inspired readers. In this context, Andrew Culp’s polemical intervention Dark Deleuze charges Deleuze scholarship with establishing a ‘canon of joy’ that falsely portrays Deleuze’s work as ‘a naively affirmative thinking of connectivity’ (2016: 2, 65).
22. This language is misleading since it makes affects sound like completed things. In English it works better to discuss this in terms of affect-ings as opposed to affections. The affect-ing is asubjective and inherently relational, the affection ‘belongs to’ a subject as a lived state.