All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, Free Press, 256 pp., $26.00 (C$29.99)
***
Part 1 (Monday, 21 February 2011).
Part 2 (Wednesday, 24 February 2011).
***
I left you last Wednesday with a sketch-summary of Dreyfus and Kelly’s narration of the West’s odyssey from the divinely-fingerprinted world of Helen of Troy, to a world that we see as essentially banal and inert, organized around the often unconscious, self-eviscerating pursuit of an abstract, unattainable, and depressingly content-less ideal of the perfect distraction.
The next question seems fairly obvious: Recognizing that the Greeks had a receptiveness to the immediate world that we’ve largely, but not entirely (remember Wesley Autrey), lost, can we get this receptiveness back? What, aside from almost three thousands years of intellectual history, stands in our way?
***
As the authors see it, one of the main forces driving us away from the world is our technology. In the following passage, they describe the consequences of adopting a GPS system as a navigational tool:
For those of us who are directionally challenged (and both authors count ourselves among this group) the GPS seems to offer a great technological advance.
But notice the hidden cost to this advance. When the GPS is navigating for you, your understanding of the environment is about as minimal as it can possibly be. It consists of knowing things like “I should turn right now.” In the best case — and we want to take the best case here — this method of navigating gets you to your destination quickly and easily. But it completely trivializes the noble art of navigation, which was the province of great cultures from the sea-faring Phoenicians to the navigators of the Age of Discovery. To navigate by GPS requires no sense of where you are, no sense of where you’re going , and no sense whatsoever for how to get there. Indeed, the whole point of the GPS is to spare you the trouble of navigating.
But to lose the sense of struggle is to lose the sensitivities — to landmarks, street signs, wind direction, the height of the sun, the stars — all meaningful distinctions that navigational skill reveals. To navigate by GPS is to endure a series of meaningless pauses at the end of which you do precisely what you’re told. There is something deeply dehumanizing about this: it’s like being the central figure in a Beckett play without the jokes. Indeed, in an important sense this experience turns you into an automated device the GPS can use to arrive at its destination..
This gives you some sense of why DFW’s “perfect distraction” is of such interest to them. Imagine the utility of the GPS universalized such that one’s responsibilities for navigating through life were completely alleviated by technology. Do we not catch a glimmer of what it would be like to be perfectly distracted? Think of Wall-E, the 2008 Pixar masterpiece in which humanity is so blissfully distracted that the only place where life and romance can exist is among the robots built to service it.
The beauty, though, is that the world is still there — as the humans in Wall-E’s world are delighted to recognize when they’re jarred from their absorption in the distraction machine. Technology may turn our eyes from the inspirations the world offers, but as long as the world still exists, the potential for it to inspire us does too.
As proof, the authors point to a number of instances in which powerful flashes of such inspiration do break through the haze and register with us. Autrey’s experience is one example: The extreme situation he was confronted with gave him the opportunity to realize his courage, and his receptiveness to this extreme situation meant that he allowed himself to be pulled into action. But although we were able to see the flash of his heroism, it’s hard for us to decipher its actual shape — hence our incredulity at the inspired (and not deliberative) character of his action.
And then there’s sports. The authors describe a number of athletes expressing heroism both in their sport (Bill Bradley; Roger Federer via DFW), and because of what their sport allowed them to do — the story of Lou Gehrig’s riveting farewell to baseball in Yankee Stadium opens the book’s final chapter. These athletes’ performances create the opportunity for an entire community to “rise as one in joy to sing the praises of the Hail Mary pass, the Immaculate Reception, the Angels, the Saints, the Friars, or the Demon Deacons”; for all of them (hero included) to know, if only for a moment, “exactly what they [are] about.”
More practicably, the world’s inspiration can reach us through our own active cultivation of our receptiveness to it (what they call poiesis, meaning the skill to make, which’ll make more sense in a minute). The athletic hero’s vision of the world of his sport is focused through the lens of her or his cultivated skill as a player of that sport. Similarly, they describe how the master wheelwright sees through the lens of his craft, quoting George Sturt:
Under the plane (it is little used now) or under the axe (it is all but obsolete) timber discloses qualities hardly to be found otherwise. My own eyes know because my own hands have felt, but I cannot teach an outside, the difference between ash that is “tough as whipcord,” and ash that is “frow as a carrot,” or “doaty,” or “biscuity.” In oak, in beech, these differences are equally plain, yet only to those who have been initiated by practical work.
Presumably, we could begin to rediscover the world by putting away our band saws (their example; Tom notes that band saws actually do require quite a bit of skill to operate) and GPS devices and picking the old, skill-requiring technologies back up, reapplying them directly to whatever part of the world we wish would disclose itself to us. Later in the chapter, they describe how one can cultivate one’s skill as a discriminating coffee lover to rediscover the Dionysian inspirations that coffee can disclose to us.
In all of this, though, they fail to recognize something critical; something that even in the quotes they draw from him (though in parts of them they don’t analyze), DFW evidently did; something that gets at the core of why we moved away from the craftsman’s plane and axe in the first place.
***
“The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options…” –David Foster Wallace, in a passage quoted by the authors from an interview he gave to Salon.
The authors quote the above passage early in the book, but only to make the broad point that Wallace wanted to “unpack the world as it really is.” What they don’t address is that in this passage he is actually describing the world as it really is. It’s not just that we’re tempted on a case-by-case basis by distractions from the world in the form of our handy band saws (Tom again objects) and GPS devices, but that the world in its totality has come to be set up to reinforce our distractability. “The texture of the world” is a fish-scaled one across which we slip effortlessly away from the immediate and particular, but which grips us and resists us if we try to slide back towards it.
How did the world become like this?
The authors’ insight that Aphrodite, Ares, Dionysus and the gang are still out there (manifestly, if not literally) and able to inspire us is hardly one they’re alone in coming to. Every successful salesman has drawn the same conclusion and operationalized it to strategically “inspire” people to buy their shit. The authors largely ignore this, with a couple of exceptions. Notably, they preemptively Godwin the discussion of their argument by explicitly recognizing that Hitler harnessed worldly inspiration in this way to serve his own pursuit of power. They say, rather lamely, that we have to position ourselves so that we can condemn such barbarity, which they seem to think that they show us how to do — though I have to say that I was left scratching my head.
What they fail to recognize is that this isn’t just a case of the gods being captured to serve as the instrument of one man’s pursuit of power, but that it is indicative of a capturability that has been exploited systematically by — to tie this back to the GPS — our technology, steering us indiscriminately towards the ends we’ve forgotten we programmed into it.
We live in a world organized and structured by a simple invention: value as a generalized abstraction — that number (whose unit’s principal quality — whether Dollar, Pound, Euro, or Yen — is its intangibility) that is arguably the most important characteristic defining how something is treated within our political economy. In our world, everything can be valued in simple terms that allow us to say exactly how it compares with everything else, even, apparently, the whole of itself. (My question is how exactly would we arrange to sell it?)
This is a technology that has a goal built into it: since more is greater than less, more. And this goal changes things. Rather than work one’s craft to trade for those tangibly particular things one knows one needs to live as one who practices one’s craft in the particular way required by the context one lives in, one works directly for a definite but completely abstract number to be added to one’s bank balance, and only indirectly for what one would spend that number on. And this number on one’s balance sheet can be compared to the number on other people’s balance sheets, and to the number assigned to strange objects that one might never before have thought of wanting to trade for. And if one trades for them, then they are brought into one’s life, and one is no longer just a wheelwright any more, but a wheelwright with a car. But not just any car. A five-year-old Hyundai Sonata, which breaks down all the time, but is a practical family car, which suggests to people (and to you) that you’re not just a wheelwright with a car, but a practical, family wheelwright, who drives a practical, family car. With expensive insurance (not compared to other cars, but car insurance is expensive). Which is why one maybe can’t afford to spend the man hours to cut and work wood by hand, but a chainsaw would amortize in like three months! And then one could cut eight times the wood in half the time, making enough money to buy an industrial lathe, and a band saw, and to send Suzie to a private college so that she doesn’t have to be a wheelwright too if she doesn’t want to be, YAY! But no one’s really buying wooden wheels any more, so maybe she wouldn’t have HAD to be a wheelwright anyway. What are people buying wood for? The frames for suburban houses! And so one becomes the owner of Wheelwright Lumber, Inc., a business whose plan is to supply lumber beams to local developers, and which has an awesome logo with one of those old-timey wooden wheels on it that one, like one’s father, used to make. But Wheelwright Lumber Inc. promptly fails because it can’t compete with the industrial mill in the next town which has just fired all of its workers because it decided to invest in some awesome manufacturing robots from Japan. (Five years later, despite its awesome robots from Japan, it fails too because it can’t compete against this Africa-based Chinese-Congolese milling corporation whose local Congolese workers are very poorly treated and barely paid at all, but who’s got a heck of a sales team and massive economies of scale on its side, and who will actually be thinking of getting some fancy robots of their own, which, because it would mean firing all the local Congolese unskilled laborers, would mean that they could stop treating them badly, improving their workers’ rights track record, a true thorn in their sales-team’s side, considerably.) And so one finds oneself at the unemployment agency with all of the fired workers from the mill just looking for any fucking job that will get you the money to pay Suzie’s tuition bill, because who are you if not a supportive, providing father? And who’s Suzie? She has no idea, but thank gawd she’s not pregnant or anything. She wants to be something cool, you know? What’s “something cool,” you ask? Whaddaya mean “what’s coo??” And suddenly the show you were watching together goes to commercial, and this ad comes on that was made by this totally smart dude with a Master’s degree who you don’t know but who just kinda knows both you and Suzie, if not by name, then by demographic (which basically covers it, frankly). The ad tells you exactly what cool is: It’s erotic, and it’s clever, and it’s revelrous, and it’s brave, and it’s colorful but most of all it’s a number. But never mind, it’s erotic and it’s clever and it’s revelrous and it’s brave and it’s colorful and it’s all these other things that seem like things that have moved you before. Or maybe it’s not even a commercial, but the State of the Union, and Wesley Autrey, that awesome subway hero guy, is there, cheering the President on as he tells you that what’s cool is America and Freedom and Troops and God, all of which are being hurt by taxes and teachers and climate scientists — LOOK! It’s Dikembe Mutumbo! And he’s, it’s suggested by his presence, telling us the same basic thing. But at root there’s still a number attached to that vision of what’s cool. One that’s a hell of a lot greater than the one on your balance sheet. But you’ll be damned if you’re going to let that stop you from getting it for your little girl, if it kills you. And by the way, it’s not 2011 any more. It’s the ‘Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.’
Depend Adult Undergarments bring you heroic music conducting action that shines!
But I just got a little carried away right there. Give me a second to figure out what I was getting at. Hmm… Well… I guess my point is that it’s easy enough to, say, turn off one’s GPS and make one’s own decisions about one’s route to the dentist’s. But not all technologies have such a weak hold on us. Abstract value supplies the organizing logic for modernity’s most powerful social technology — its economy — and its effect on the individual is manifestly the same as that of the GPS: Economic decisions are, by-and-large, not “decided” by us in terms of any particular criteria of our own. The correct answer is more-or-less clearly supplied by the logic that more is better than less. And when we are given the space to make real decisions about what makes sense for us, there are 250 voices chiming in every day, using the most powerful gods as ventriloquist dummies quacking inspirationally at us to forget about thinking and just go out there and buy what they want us to buy which will allow the ventriloquists to get more, which is better than less.
We’re not dumb. We see this happening. We participate in its happening. And it makes us look suspiciously at any god that calls out to us at all. We’re suspicious that they’re not addressing us for their own sake as qualitatively rich worldly phenomena, but for the sake of an abstract person’s abstract score in an abstract social power game with seven billion players and counting. And even if we resist the pressure to follow the logic of this game — instead, maybe trying to forget money, and pursue rich, qualitative experience of the world — we have to fight and scrape and flail in a way that can wreck a person. See Ryan Larkin, who just wanted to cultivate an understanding of movement through his craft as an animator.
Wallace understood and felt this. But Dreyfus and Kelly don’t seem to. Why? Well, since they fail to take up economics in their book (or, as far as I’ve been able to tell, elsewhere, but I could very well and would love to be wrong about that), one can only guess. And, what the hell, I’m gonna guess…
***
Dreyfus and Kelly are totally right to point to professional sports as a font of poietic epiphanies. Last year’s Olympic gold medal hockey game was a revelation for my whole country. We forgot ourselves as individuals with lives and discovered ourselves as a collective energy flowing in thrall with the game (even collectively peeing between periods), and I can only imagine what it was like for the players. (Parenthetically, watching any high-level sports event, one has more than 250 ads in one’s field of vision in a given moment, let alone in a given day). But it was a distinctly bounded infinity, its magic only effective within the context of an institutionally bounded hockey-world that has very little practical bearing on any part of the rest of our lives. (Although the ad makers would all like us to think that their ads have a practical bearing on the rest of our lives, and –who are we kidding? — they do). For the players, though, a much larger portion of their world is hockey-world, and I would imagine that it’s not difficult to forget this world, which they’re able to see in such rich particularity through the lens of their cultivated skill, isn’t really even their whole world at all. It’s easy, after all, to mistake the infinite number of points along the line between zero and one for real, unbounded infinity.
My supposition is that Dreyfus and Kelly are caught in a similar trap with regards to the bounded world of philosophy as it’s practiced in North America. Not to say that they’re as narrowly bounded as their Analytic colleagues (essentially hyper-specialized technicians of logic and language), but like their Analytic colleagues, they leave considerations of even the phenomenology of broader sociological, political and economic systems to other departments whose competency in phenomenology is probably not so hot. The bounded world of their phenomenological inquiry (the literary history of the West) is plenty rich, and I can only imagine how rich it must be to such cultivated interpreters as they are of it. Why worry about these broader concerns? There’s plenty to contemplate in Helen’s flaunting her infidelity without venturing into the charged territory of her flaunting her catalyst role in genocide.
Further, while both hockey-world and academic-literary-phenomenology-world are institutionally bounded, they’re also institutionally preserved; protected from the capriciousness of the wider world by the bulwarks of tradition, the way hockey is commodified (it would be hard to commodify Calvinball), and in the case of Dreyfus and Kelly, tenure and the fact that DFW, Nietzsche, et alii are all dead now, and so even if they did at one point have the “freedom to choose [their] commitments, [and] unchoose them again, when that is what [they] choose to do,” they don’t have that freedom any more.
Within these enclosed universes, one can cultivate ones poietic vision without being crushed, so long as one is careful not to step too far out of it (especially before one has tenure). But what’s keeping all these neatly walled-off fragment of lifeworld from drifting further away from each other? And once we’ve drifted apart, does it not become more and more difficult to make sense of each other? And yet we are still materially tied together as codependents on a global economy, which forces not only economic interaction, but social and political interaction too. Or maybe a better word is conflict. Mutual unintelligibility and conflict. Sound at all familiar, or am I just waving my sword at windmills?
The world DFW spent his life cultivating his skills to interpret was the wider and greater, unbounded one; the one that so thoroughly dominates the lives of those unlucky enough not to be insulated from it that they don’t even have the time or space to reflect on it. So where are we left? Was DFW ultimately right? I promised you that he wasn’t entirely right, right? I promised you a possible solution, right? Well, just get ready, because I will give you one… Friday! Monday! (I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. I just need to go to bed if I’m going to get up for work tomorrow).
***
UPDATE: I thought of a pithier distillation of the point of my little narrative above: We can’t trust the gods in a capitalist world. In this world, the headhunters’ mark on any god’s back is somewhere between geometrically and exponentially proportional to the degree to which that god demonstrates an ability to inspire people to action. We can’t help but see that (see the mark ourselves which abstracts us from the encounter), and so many of us shut our eyes. But it doesn’t change anything. It just makes us suckers.
How epically put was that? *Smiles in self-satisfaction looking off into the distance nodding*
UPDATE II: For all the latest DFW News (it still trickles in…), check out the Howling Fantods DFW blog.
(Gruesome Soviet workplace safety posters via)
***
UPDATE (Monday): So I failed at writing part 4 this weekend. It’s still coming, just…. later. Here’s something to watch in the mean time:
***
Surfed in on the “Tampon Friends” wave, but stuck around after some pleasant nostalgia-enducing Calvinball until I realized that INDEED “Brutish&Short” comes from Hobbes (but not the imaginary tiger). Actually, the authors of the recent Sex at Dawn spend a lot of verbiage explaining why that particular Hobbesism as a characterization of human prior to the Enlightenment is pretty much bunkum, and I tend to agree with them.
But with regard to this specific article (series of articles)– I’m definitely going to have to read up on my Dreyfus, particularly if he’s gotten the Matt Groening nod.
A particular moment that has stayed with me since I’ve been following this review? article? is when metaphor of infinity which we imagine to exist between the boundaries of the real numbers 1 and 0. Beautiful. BUT I would definitely argue that we ought not fault a person or a culture for imagining such infinities. The analytical logical method of arriving at an “understanding” of the Infinite (as you so elegantly described takes place in mathematics and so on all the time. And I believe that this way of seeing the world is deeply flawed. But to use the limitations of logic to justify nihilism– and throw out the notion of Infinity altogether– is a grave mistake indeed. Which is why I’m no nihilist.
Then again, I’m no materialist either (and perhaps I’m setting up a false analogy here between nihilism and materialism, but I really like the direction you begin going when you bring economics into the European literary/cultural framework set up by Dreyfus). When I wear my poet hat, I imagine that the ethic that drives the poiesis I engage in as much more intuitively derived, but simultaneously affirmative of the glut of intoxicatingly entertaining stuff that I am surrounded by and bombarded with constantly AND AT THE SAME affirmative of the possibility that there is literally nothing and that the notion of value that is the kernel of motivation is an absurd one.
So, as you can imagine, I make some pretty bad poetry!
I’ll finish up by saying that DF Wallace is a figure that I admire tremendously, not least for his prolific brilliance. And that I suppose I’m comfortable with Wallace being the terminus of a line Dreyfus starts drawing at The Iliad. I might add that this post modern “condition” that the dead Wallace represents for Dreyfus might also be exemplified in the writing of folks like Don DeLillo (Omega Point– his latest is an excellent meditation on the many of the topics covered in your article here, from entertainment to Infinity to nihilism). I’d be interested to see if you could elaborate on any of these areas through reviews of other new writing.
In any case, thanks for some moist reading.
Thanks so much for your very thoughtful comment. I will go buy Omega Point some time today. All I’ve read of DeLillo so far is White Noise (which I actually didn’t read, but listened to on Audible… he’s not really a writer whose style lends itself to the audiobook format so I had a hard time with it), which is all by way of saying that I’m on board to give him a serious go. Thanks again.
And if you’re interested, all of Dreyfus’ podcasted courses are available here.
Yeah. White Noise is the only DeLillo novel other than Omega Point that I’ve read, and I really really enjoyed it, but I can see how it might lend itself more quieter read. The sort of deadpan delivery that certain gems such as “Department of Hitler Studies” require, might be difficult for your average voice actor to achieve. Actually, come to think of it, I read that one as part of an American Satire class that could’ve easily included DF Wallace had it been longer than a summer course. Actually we “read” tons of The Simpsons for that course as well, which, happily brings everything full-circle to Dreyfus and our six degrees of Matt Groening.
Thanks for the audio link! I’ll be interested to read what you think about Omega Point.
enjoyed this..part 4 any time soon??
Thanks so much John. Yes! Re: part 4. I have a developed outline, but this month’s just turned out crazy and its going to take I think a full weekend or so to midwife it out of myself. If things go well, I’ll get to it this weekend. If not, next.
to start off, i do hope that part 4 of this comes out soon.
second, your broad reaction to this book by Dreyfus and Kelly echoes what would be my broad criticism of most (post-)Heideggerians like Dreyfus (or Hannah Arendt), the aspect of Heidegger which they seem to unknowingly appropriate and which I would argue is one of the most dangerous aspects of Heidegger: his conservatism. To his credit, he does occasionally (come close to) break(ing) out of this conservatism (AFAIK mainly in his book Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) as it has been translated into English–which, while in my view of course worth reading, is, as a warning, significantly more difficult to make sense of than Being and Time), which broadly entails the view that “the Greeks were right, we should be more like them,” i.e., conservatism in the sense of the ideology of the “return to roots.” Symptomatically, it seems (since i have not read this Dreyfus/Kelly book), their appropriation of this view of the Greeks in relation to us is tied up with silence on what is truly New [/Zizek] about our times, which, as you point out, is the abstract world of the valuations of political economy.
i also want to take a moment here to rant about my feelings, as a philosopher (for clarification i have only just recently completed my undergraduate work on the subject, and have yet to pursue it further), on Dreyfus. while i can fully commend the personality of his scholarship as you do in the first part of this series, at the end of the day i have serious problems with his reading of Being and Time, which, as a reflection of my prior standpoint as staunch Heideggerian, still elicits some… negative emotions in me, let’s say. in short: Dreyfus (in Being in the World primarily but also in various journal articles of his I’ve read, and, based on articles by others, also in his (relatively) more recent book about the second half of B&T) argues that the first and second halves of B&T just straight up contradict each other, which, to me, is just infuriatingly lazy… even more so since Dreyfus is one of the earliest to present Heidegger as an academically legitimate topic of philosophical study in the USA, and so his misreadings have been spread here for literally decades. thankfully, based on more recent journal things i’ve read on the subject, Heidegger scholars are distancing themselves from him–though of course they still bear the signs of people who are just too into Heidegger: while I have yet to see anyone outright proclaim, in full Heideggerian mode, that politics is an ontic concern beneath the purview of their ontological considerations, I do get the feeling that this idea is unconsciously promoted among Heidegger scholars here, especially in light of the overwhelming political apathy that exists in the USA today…. (I apologize for this rant)
No apologies necessary. I really appreciate the rant, and am curious to hear more about these critical voices from within N.American Heidegger scholarship.
I really do want to get back and write part 4. I do. Hopefully I will shortly. Going up for a week up north and I want to use the time to tie up the loose ends that have been holding up moving on to new substantial projects. To give you a teaser in the meantime, it’s going to have a lot to do with Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man.” Easy enough to find online.
Thanks so much for reading!