In Sustaining Affirmation, Stephen White distills the ontological orientations that inform several political theories, including mine. In doing so, he plays up the importance of language to ethics, identity, and politics. In the novel White Noise, Don DeLillo portrays both the contingency of many events and the noise that precedes, permeates, and limits them. (1) He thinks, among other things, about the pertinence and insufficiency of language to being. My aspiration is to place these two shades of white into communication.

In reading White, I became aware of a strategy of response I commonly adopt. First, I now see, I announce where the critic misrepresents my work. Then I correct the misrepresentation while slipping in a couple of points, hoping the latter hold until I skip out of town. On the way out, I may even glimpse how misrepresentation occasionally contains a compliment. It can point obliquely to something in your work that worries the critic. But White refuses me the honor of misrepresentation. I start, then, by reviewing a few ideas that he and I either concur upon or that he finds worthy of tolerance.

First, we agree that the affective and the ideational are mixed together on several layers of being. Each layer is marked by affect-imbued ideas moving at a distinctive speed and level of refinement; each communicates with the others across these differences of complexity and speed; and the whole complex enters into multiple relays and feedback loops with the larger cultural matrix. We participate in a body / brain / culture network that confounds or challenges the reductionism of sociobiology; the eliminative materialism of physicalists; the stark dualism of Cartesians; the explanatory hubris of classical empiricism; the flatness of rational choice theory; and, perhaps, the quest for deep, authoritative interpretation in some versions of phenomenology. The complexity of this network points to the recurrence of surprising events in political life, the non-coincidence of thinking with itself, and (to use White's term) the "stickiness" of identity as a series of passive syntheses formed below reflective attention that become consolidated into habits and dispositions. Because there is stickiness in identity, arts of cultivation are needed to craft a decent ethical sensibility, and micropolitics forms a critical component in the activation, success, and depression of political constituencies. These points show why "voluntarist" readings of Nietzschean and "neo-Nietzschean" thought are so far off the mark, as they project consequences and dangers into it that reflect their own anxieties. But there I go again, looking for misrepresentation ...

Second, White and I agree, I think, that the terms "ontology," "creed," "theology," and "metaphysic" slide toward each other as you challenge the separation between theology and philosophy supported by Kant and neo-Kantians and sanctified by the disciplinary boundaries of the contemporary academy. As you breathe, eat, love, worry, chant, and compete while growing up, and also endure a host of admonitions, caresses, hits, commands, and compliments during dinner, play, school, church, and tenure evaluations, a preliminary onto-political faith, often replete with ambivalence, becomes consolidated. Under such conditions, it is a laugh to purport to be post-metaphysical. Of course, it is possible, as Derrida does, to try your best to avoid sinking deeply into a single metaphysical stance, even as you admit that you never entirely succeed in that task. But that is not my agenda, and it does not seem to be White's either. Rather, I concur that the ontology-faith I embrace is incompletely articulated, in that white noise circulates through and around it. Nonetheless, I try to articulate it as best I can and to fold that articulation into my reflections on nature, identity, language, thinking, ethics, and politics. And the relation goes the other way around, too. As I proceed, I try to come to terms with the comparative contestability of the faith-ontology that inspires me. That is, I try to acknowledge, through comparisons with other orientations, where faith enters into and inflects mine. It is possible, even likely, that new comparisons will emerge to shed new light on my own orientation, as happened to me once when Foucault and Nietzsche threw a wrench into my Left-Hegelian/Taylorite/Habermasian disposition and then, later, when Spinoza and Deleuze tossed a couple of new curve balls.

Third, we may concur that it is pertinent but insufficient to political theory to advance a positive ontology, even as you concede its comparative contestability. For between an ontology and an ethico-political stance reside at least two other constituents. There are the distinctive circumstances in need of interpretation, some of which may pose challenges to the plausibility of one's ontology, and there is also the sensibility infused into your ontology. I focus here on the second point. A sensibility mixes into a political ontology until a distinctive complex emerges. We are not entirely in charge of the sensibilities that inhabit and move us. And a sensibility is not separable from other dimensions as one part is from others in a car. Rather, a sensibility bathes the entire complex, as it finds expression through specific sensual tonalities, vocabularies of articulation, and predispositions to action. If, to put it coarsely, a devotee of immanent naturalism comes to admire the image of the cosmos as open, he or she may often respond to the exigencies of being with presumptive generosity; if, however, one hates or resents the very condition he or she identifies, a disposition to authoritarianism or violent stifling of diversity might be activated. Pretend for a moment that Gilles Deleuze and Carl Schmitt share an ontological creed, and, say, that William James and Leo Strauss do so as well. The second figure in each pair would still differ from the first on the political register. Such a difference flows in part from the difference in sensibility suffusing the creed they share. Moreover, Deleuze and James--each identifying a certain plurality in the universe while differing on the questions of God and immanence--are apt to enter into agonistically inflected alliances in political life. That is because a generous sensibility is folded into the proclivities and texts of each.

An existential faith, then, is a creed or philosophy with a distinctive sensibility infused into it. Such a faith--subject to direct intellectual engagement on some registers, to tactics of modest intervention on others, and perhaps immune to further work in some respects--forms a qualitative assemblage in which the partially fused elements enter into regular communication. That suggests, or so I think, that cultivation of an ethical sensibility is important to political thinking and theory, to the micropolitics of everyday life, and to the macropolitics of an entire state.

Fourth, we agree--though White himself may not embrace such an existential faith as his own--that the contestable ontology of immanent naturalism has something positive to offer political theory. An immanent naturalist does not ground morality in the commands of a god, or the "apodictic recognition" that morality takes the form of law projected by Kant, or the idea of a fictive contract. Immanent naturalists such as, variously, Epicurus, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze ground ethics in the first instance in an attachment to the world or a gratitude for being that includes and exceeds the identities infused into them. We do not ask, in the first instance, why we should be moral. We ask, in the first instance, how to enliven and cultivate care for an abundance of life over identity that already infuses us to some degree. Such care, if you are lucky, is simmering to some degree, available for further work. Ours is an ethic of inspiration, attraction, and cultivation rather than a morality of command. We further conclude, perhaps to the dismay of some analytic philosophers, that argument is relevant to philosophy and ethics but insufficient to them. For political argument always has a porous structure, and it is inflected this way or that according to the sensibility infused into it by those who present it and those who receive it.

We share something with theo-teleological perspectives in these respects. They, too, criticize the sufficiency of argument and the crudeness of moralities of command. One place where we differ with the teleological tradition, however, is in the image of time we embrace. We are immanent naturalists because we think the whole is open to some degree, that we participate in a world of becoming set on multiple tiers of time, that each tier periodically collides or coalesces with modes of becoming on other tiers, and that these collisions and collusions sometimes propel new and unpredictable events and entities into natural and cultural history. One reason that thinking is not entirely coincident with itself is that time itself is "out of joint," as Bergson, James, Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Arendt say in different ways, with the protraction of the present dividing into a past that is being preserved and a future that looms.

We admit ours to be a contestable image of time. Our goal is to foster relations of agonistic respect with those who embrace other images, thinking that to acknowledge moments of comparative contestability in our own doctrine is to provide a potential starting point from which a relation of agonistic respect between orientations can evolve. A robust micropolitics in support of the solidification of relations of respect across deep differences is important to the larger ethos of pluralism. So it is pertinent to pursue such relations in academic life, simulating there the ethos commended to political life writ large. The complication is that occasions do arise when you must fight militantly even to secure a place on the register of legitimate perspectives.

Fifth, as White sees so clearly, I seek to maintain torsion between, on the one side, presumptive respect for established modes of being, habit, identity, responsibility, and justice and, on the other, attention to the politics of becoming by which new events and identities periodically surge from a place of subsistence below the threshold of positive being onto its register. A successful movement of becoming changes as it negotiates this tricky transition, and it also shakes up established habits and norms of justice if and as it crosses the threshold. A civic virtue appropriate to the politics of becoming is what I call "critical responsiveness." It seeks to be alert to recurrent situations when something in the established criteria of judgment, and the passive syntheses that help to sustain it, is disturbed or challenged by a new event or movement. To act with presumptive care under these political circumstances is also to place something in your own identity at risk. To respond collectively to the new movement is to work upon some conceits collectively infused into an entire constituency on the receiving end. A public morality that does not highlight how ethico-political life itself poses periodic risks to comforts and demands that have become sedimented into the underbrush of the contemporary "person" underestimates the challenges of politics, ethics, and identity alike. Something in the essence of ethico-political life is touched when you are pressed to ask whether something in the established habits of personhood, justice, or legitimacy is adequate to the new issue at hand or requires more radical reflection and tactical work.

White and I both suspect, moreover, that Charles Taylor overplays his hand in suggesting, if he does, that a philosophy of immanent naturalism runs a more severe risk than philosophies of transcendence of courting violence. The issue depends on the sensibility cultivated, and the ethos negotiated, within each onto-political stance. It is pertinent whether nontheists cultivate gratitude for the immanence of being, rather than resenting this very condition. It is equally pertinent whether attunement to the loving, generous side of their tradition by monotheists takes precedence over its commanding, vengeful, or nationalistic side. For, again, the connection between an ontological faith and a political orientation is mediated by the types of sensibility infused into it.

Let me note a final concurrence between White and myself. We agree that every onto-political faith articulated so far in Western history encounters sore spots and aporias, where the reach it seeks exceeds its persuasiveness in the eyes of others. One noble pursuit under these conditions is to acknowledge such points in an invitational way, to the extent you can identify them, while simultaneously pointing out corollary sites of uncertainty, incompleteness, or aporia in contending orientations. To both acknowledge and invite modesty at key junctures is to open a window to the negotiation of agonistic respect between interdependent parties.

Even amid these agreements, affinities, and tolerances, White is brazen enough to pose some critical questions. Here is what he says:

First, how does Connolly draw us to a special preference for, and attention to, human presencing over any other dimensions of presencing or being? In short, why support a gay and lesbian rally in a local park, rather than its suppression, something one might prefer on the basis of enjoying the unobstructed greening of the vegetation.... My point here is not to tar Connolly with the brush of Heideggerian politics, but to call attention to a place in his argument from which others could plausibly proceed from similar ontological figures in directions he would deeply oppose. (128)

The second issue concerns the problem of drawing distinctions between different modes of human presencing; more particularly between those that injure human equality and dignity and those that affirm or embody them. An ontology the heart of which resides in the sense of an inexhaustible abundance of being does not by itself offer an adequate prefiguration of this crucial ethical distinction. (128)

The response White commends to reduce the gap in each case is to come to terms with the distinctive linguistic capacity of human beings. He proposes a capacious ethos of justice in which listening and responding to the claims of others calls into being distinctive obligations we owe to them. Here is White's formulation:

One does justice (to other humans), first by recognizing the capacity of the other to participate distinctively in being through the disclosure of meaning; and second by appreciating the necessity of giving space to this disclosure of meaning, in the sense of allowing the possible novelty in the emergent symbolic complex to take shape.... It is such a capacity for disclosure and articulation that best construes what human dignity amounts to, and thus that to which we owe justice. (131)

I embrace what White says as a way to reduce the second gap. A focus on our linguistic capacities is critical. Humans share the rudiments of language with some other animals, but we possess distinctive linguistic capacities to appreciate the wonder of being, to ponder reflexively some of our own states, to make claims upon others with a capacity to respond, and to help usher new experiences into being as we deploy language inventively. I merely add, as I do in Neuropolitics, that it is important to attend not only to the expressive, designative, performative, and inventive dimensions of language, but also to the compositional or self-organizational dimension interwoven with them. (2) The latter dimension works in conjunction with image, rhythm, posture, gesture, and touch to compose the passive syntheses that constitute the preliminary stickiness of a self and the initial bearings of a constituency. Being given a name and called by it repeatedly as you are disciplined and caressed is merely the tip of the iceberg. The painful memories called up by media images of 9/11 in conjunction with public articulations of its import express the same interplay in collective life. The compositional and disclosive-inventive dimensions of language exist in a relation of interdependence and tension, making the virtue of critical responsiveness both more important and less certain of itself.

This is the point, perhaps, where faith in a benevolent god provides consolation to those imbued with it. To be tortured in isolation, to subsist in a Gulag such as Guantanamo Bay, carries cosmic weight if witnessed by a god. Whether the idea of transcendent witnessing may simmer somewhere in the criteria of prefiguration that White invokes, I am unsure. Those of us, however, who do not feel such a faith in their bones do not have recourse to a cosmic witness. That absence might inspire us to invest all the more in our commitment to this world. The invocation of nontheistic gratitude, moreover, is linked to a worry about the periodic tendency of factions in all three religions of the Book to join human uniqueness in the eyes of God to the judgment that many humans, such as believers in the other two Books, atheists, heretics, homosexuals, Amerindians, pagans, Roma, and Africans fall so far below this standard as to deserve authoritative correction, punishment, exclusion, or worse. (3) Our conceit is that a positive ethos of monotheism of any sort shines most brightly when its devotees acknowledge a degree of accountability to nontheists. Christianity, in particular, needs us, though not all of its practitioners appreciate this need sufficiently. Its orientation to atheism at each historical juncture provides a pretty good index of its own nobility. At the moment, however, 58% of Americans say it is impossible for atheists to be moral, expressing in this way the sort of self-conceit that limits the possibility of outreach to others. (4) For corollary reasons, I would not want to live in a society publicly defined to be atheistic, even though that is not a very big worry at the moment.

I have been responding to White's reflections about the justice we owe, in a large sense of that term, to other human beings. On his first point--concerning the "special preference for ... human presencing over any other dimensions of presencing or being"--however, I become more uncertain. It is not that I doubt that people do in fact give priority to humans over everything else in nature. Nor that I seek to eliminate that priority altogether. But I wonder whether White implicitly solicits here a prefiguration that includes and exceeds the turn to language. We humans do prize ourselves in part because of our linguistic capacity. But to justify human precedence by recourse to that capacity sounds to me like one party to the case unilaterally assuming the right to be the authoritative judge of it. Do we deserve priority because we speak? Or is something closer to species self-assertion involved here? If the importance of language is joined to a god who bestows the gift of language upon us, then the case for strong human priority sounds more plausible. But the profound contestability of that very faith and special dispensation soon enters the picture. And if the significance of language is not connected to another claim about transcendence, it is not clear to me how much cosmic weight to give it. A case could be made that just because we speak we should adopt an expansive orientation to nonhuman nature; we should be shepherds of being, more than masters of the rest of nature.

White raises a difficult issue, and I do not have a satisfactory response to it even after hearing his proposal. I am inclined, however, to rephrase the issue, to assert that Western philosophy and theology have historically teamed up to bestow too much privilege on human beings over nonhuman nature, anchoring that privilege in a unique relation to God, human agency, consciousness, moral autonomy, reason, self-evident rights, language as the power to disclose, or some combination thereof. Thus Immanuel Kant, the hero of the moderate Enlightenment, gives full-Monty priority to humans over nature:

There is a judgment that even the commonest understanding cannot escape when it meditates upon the existence of things in the world and of the world itself. It is the judgment that all these diverse creatures would exist for nothing if they did not include human beings (or some kind of rational beings) no matter how artfully devised these creatures may be, and how diversely, coherently and purposely interrelated. In other words, it is the judgment that without man all of creation would be a mere wasteland, gratuitous and without a final purpose. (5)

I invoke here resources offered by the radical and immanent side of the Enlightenment, even while acknowledging that Spinoza, who inspired much in that movement, did not himself pursue the issue in the way I commend. (6) If you come to terms, first, with the deep interdependence between human animals and the rest of nature; second, with the complexity and unpredictability of numerous forces and entities in nonhuman nature; third, with the wonder of evolution from which we have emerged; and, finally, with the resulting affinities between us and other components of living and nonliving nature, it seems wise to be modest about the degree of human uniqueness and the extent of priority we should assert. (7)

Our very thinking is set in electro-chemical charges that also operate elsewhere in nature; we share a capacity for sentience, affect, and pain with other animals and maybe some plants; our place in biological evolution reveals how some of our visceral capacities and essential brain regions are shared with snakes and monkeys; the way we form habits indispensable to so much in life, including thinking, speaking, action, and judgment, is comparable to the habit-forming propensities of other species; our sexual pleasures are approximated or surpassed by other species; and we depend upon the integrity of the environment to breathe, eat, act, judge, sleep, fornicate, and worship. Even our most distinctive disclosive and inventive powers are prodded and enabled by various forces in nonhuman nature. If the lava flows from which unique meshwork patterns of granite are formed were to disappear from the earth, our ability to articulate the meshwork complexity of cities and thinking itself might be diminished. If rhizomatic plants and grasses disappeared, and only oak trees were left, the ability to challenge arboreal models of cultural life with more rhizomatic ideals of pluralism would decline. Even with the availability of such references, several theorists of the nation--captivated by trees and ignoring how broad and strong rhizomatic connections can be--reduce theories of expansive pluralism to differences without connections, that is, to atomism. At any rate, if such depletions of nature were to occur in several domains, the richness of human language and thinking itself would decline.

Each species would probably prefer itself to others if it were possible to consult it, though I have met cats and cat lovers who challenge this generalization from both sides. The point, perhaps, is to explore considerations that attenuate our tendency to species self-assertion without erasing it. I might on occasion support preserving a wetland even if it created some economic hardship. Part of the reason would be to support clean air for us, but another would be to protect the diversity of life on the planet, even if it has no immediate effect on our interests narrowly conceived. And there are instances in which the balance would go the other way. I am unable to say when the one should prevail over the other in the absence of a close specification of circumstances, listening to a variety of voices, and communing more sensitively than I have heretofore with lines of affinity and interdependence between humans and other domains of nature. So the question returns: how much priority should be given to humanity over other dimensions of nature? How much help is provided on this question by invoking language?

Immanent naturalists seek to tap in ourselves and others a preliminary attachment to the abundance of being over identity, paying special attention to a series of selective affinities we have with other dimensions of nature as we do so. We then strive to cultivate that orientation further, drawing upon the energies so mobilized to pursue relations of agonistic respect with those who draw sustenance from different onto-political faiths. We prize the significance of language, while bestowing importance upon the interinvolvements between language, affect, faith, and sensibility. We also attend to the fragility of ethical life in a world where the need for a positive ethos is not always matched by the capacity of a public to mobilize it. Previous projections by some liberals and radicals that religious impulses will wither as reason, evidence, and science progress, no longer make sense to us. We discern that we, too, are inhabited by a faith-infused doctrine that can be supported by argument but that has not been definitively established--the faith / philosophy of immanent naturalism. We seek to pluralize more broadly and deeply than heretofore religious impulses, philosophical orientations, and experiences of faith. And as we cultivate the bifocal orientation to public culture appropriate to deep pluralism, we also fix a third eye on those inside and outside our onto-camp who cannot be content unless they occupy the religio-national center around which everyone else is compelled to revolve.

William E. Connolly is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His book The Terms of Political Discourse (1983) was awarded the Lippincott Award for a "book of exceptional quality still considered significant after a time span of at least 15 years." His most recent books are Why I Am Not A Secularist (1999); Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002); and Pluralism (2005).

(1) Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1985).

(2) See William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) 70-78.

(3) For a recent history of how the consolidation of Christianity in the West was joined to various intolerances, see Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2003).

(4) Reported in Nicholas Kristoff, (17 August 2003).

(5) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 331, #86.

(6) For a compelling history of the radical Enlightenment in relation to both the moderate Enlightenment and established clerical-state authority, see Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Israel's book, focusing on the importance of Spinoza to the radical Enlightenment and the impressive movement he spawned throughout Europe to challenge the moderate Enlightenment and the dominant regime alike, shows how exaggerated it is to say that recent and contemporary thinkers such as Bergson, James, Foucault, and Deleuze are anti-Enlightenment. They, rather, pursue themes initiated by the radical Enlightenment.

(7) For two studies that pursue this thesis, see Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Manuel De Landa, Two Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone, 2000).

Citation Details

Title: White Noise.(Book Review) Author: William E. Connolly Publication: The Hedgehog Review (Magazine/Journal) Date: June 22, 2005 Publisher: Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture Volume: 7 Issue: 2 Page: 26(9)

Keywords: Deleuze, Pluralism, immanentnaturalism, StephenWhite, WilliamConnolly, DeLillo, Spinoza, Foucault

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Re: White Noise - a book review by William E. Connolly

by Debashish on Sun 09 Aug 2009 02:27 PM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

Sri Aurobindo integrates in his darshan a transcendental Being and an immanent Becoming. Under the ontology of the modern, this makes the transcendental aspect of his teaching vulnerable to appropriation as metaphysics. Given its integral scope, this runs the danger of a totalism of unprecedented scale if an ideological construction takes priority over a praxis based on immanent becoming. An ethics of practice as affirmed by Connolly, in which access to transcendental Being is strictly mediated by phenomenological processes of Becoming needs to become part of the social habitus of Integral Yoga, if it is to avoid its contemporay slippage into the internally policed domain of an integral theology (or worse).

Connolly's White Noise - an Aurobindian Interlocution

by Debashish on Wed 12 Aug 2009 12:45 AM PDT | Profile | Permanent Link

[W]e agree that the affective and the ideational are mixed together on several layers of being. Each layer is marked by affect-imbued ideas moving at a distinctive speed and level of refinement; each communicates with the others across these differences of complexity and speed; and the whole complex enters into multiple relays and feedback loops with the larger cultural matrix. We participate in a body / brain / culture network that confounds or challenges the reductionism of sociobiology; the eliminative materialism of physicalists; the stark dualism of Cartesians; the explanatory hubris of classical empiricism; the flatness of rational choice theory; and, perhaps, the quest for deep, authoritative interpretation in some versions of phenomenology.

Connolly’s acknowledgment of the mixture of the affective and ideational on several layers of being is a psychological insight which is critical to his revisionary view of modern knowledge, the post-Kantian ideological dispersion of specialized understanding, which misses out on the amalgamated action of different modalities of consciousness, their implication in each other as also in the possibility for their integrated subservience to a higher or deeper principle. Connolly here draws on Spinoza and a postmodern lineage which can be constellated with him. According to Spinoza, body, life and mind are part of a cosmic substantial ontology, a single Being as Substance which manifests in different forms in all of these.

This can be fruitfully compared with Sri Aurobindo’s idea of body, life,and mind as different modalities of consciousness, but involved in each other in a mixed working, but it being possible to align them to an integrative principle. In Sri Aurobindo’s case, this principle, in its immanence is soul or psychic being and in its transcendence, supermind. Connolly does not name any integrative principle but his faith in an immanent naturalism and his alignment with Spinoza implies as single principle, delight of creative energy in matter, latent chit in sat expressing intelligently due to latency of supermind in and as matter. Translating into Vedantic terms, Matter itself then, in its spiritual truth, can be seen as the unitary principle, with the immanence of satchidananda-vijnana in it of which body, emotions, thoughts are modalities intermixed in each other, but possible through discipline to align to the invisible integrative principle.

Connolly sees that the acknowledgment of this inter-conscient involvement is critical to the revision of the epistemology of modernity which has established the radical cleavages recognized by T.S. Eliot as “the dissociation of sensibility” and which is one of the main sources of the deep alienation symptomatic of modernity. He refers to the various epistemological cleavages which dominate modern understanding such as “the reductionism of sociobiology; the eliminative materialism of physicalists; the stark dualism of Cartesians; the explanatory hubris of classical empiricism; the flatness of rational choice theory; and, perhaps, the quest for deep, authoritative interpretation in some versions of phenomenology.” It is in this sense also that he also writes: Second, White and I agree, I think, that the terms "ontology," "creed," "theology," and "metaphysic" slide toward each other as you challenge the separation between theology and philosophy supported by Kant and neo-Kantians and sanctified by the disciplinary boundaries of the contemporary academy.

An aspect of the inter-conscient which Connolly recognizes and which is critical to his political philosophy is the enmeshment of the mind-body complex with culture. It is this imbrication which mediates between psychology and socio-politics, revealing it for what it is, bio-politics.

Connoly’s insight into cultural psychology informs his understanding of identity politics. Identity politics, in the modern sense, is associated with ideologies, but for Connolly, identity formations go down to pre-rational consolidations. This makes it impossible to wish-away the field of identity politics, or to promote its rejection in black-and-white terms, just as with Metaphysics, Theology or Nationalism. Identity has its animal or perhaps even mineral basis and worse, the ideational immixture in the pre-rational psychology makes identity vulnerable to sub-rational behavioral conditioning, a political lesson all fundamentalist and totalitarian ideologies know only too well. This is why it becomes imperative to develop a critical and ethical sensibility and practice a micropolitics of everyday existential and tentative choices. Connolly, borrowing from White, refers to this as the “stickiness” of identity:

The complexity of this network points to the recurrence of surprising events in political life, the non-coincidence of thinking with itself, and (to use White's term) the "stickiness" of identity as a series of passive syntheses formed below reflective attention that become consolidated into habits and dispositions. Because there is stickiness in identity, arts of cultivation are needed to craft a decent ethical sensibility, and micropolitics forms a critical component in the activation, success, and depression of political constituencies.

…………………………………………………..

As you breathe, eat, love, worry, chant, and compete while growing up, and also endure a host of admonitions, caresses, hits, commands, and compliments during dinner, play, school, church, and tenure evaluations, a preliminary onto-political faith, often replete with ambivalence, becomes consolidated. Under such conditions, it is a laugh to purport to be post-metaphysical.

But this is where Connolly makes it clear where he draws the line in terms of faith and identity and where his text reveals its indebtedness to its title. An existential faith in immanent naturalism is not practically too distant from a psychic aspiration which makes no claims of omniscience and is open to the unpredictable contingency of natural circumstance as of transcendental intervention. What both of these are very distant from is ontotheology, where a transcendental Being is inscribed with the name of God and assimilated into ideology and teleology to discipline time into structural omniscience and personality into fundamentalism. This leaves the future open, knowledge an evolving intuition and experience and plurality a comparative field for self-introspection, growth and varied syntheses:

I concur that the ontology-faith I embrace is incompletely articulated, in that white noise circulates through and around it. Nonetheless, I try to articulate it as best I can and to fold that articulation into my reflections on nature, identity, language, thinking, ethics, and politics. And the relation goes the other way around, too. As I proceed, I try to come to terms with the comparative contestability of the faith-ontology that inspires me. That is, I try to acknowledge, through comparisons with other orientations, where faith enters into and inflects mine. It is possible, even likely, that new comparisons will emerge to shed new light on my own orientation, as happened to me once when Foucault and Nietzsche threw a wrench into my Left-Hegelian/Taylorite/Habermasian disposition and then, later, when Spinoza and Deleuze tossed a couple of new curve balls.

…………………………………………………

Generous sensibility, existential faith and immanent naturalism go together for Connolly, as the faith in creative Becoming immanent in the cosmos acknowledges an abundance which far exceeds the ideological and infuses life with inspiration and gratitude. This grounds ethics not in mental prescription or social prevention but in an intuition of the auspicious within Becoming and a dynamic surrender which is not a “voluntarism” but a cleaving to the integrity of a cosmic aspiration. How far is this from an openness to the psychic ?

This is far from the accidents of immanence of the amoral brutality of immanence, it is rather the theology of immanence, which in its developing self-revelation cannot but take its follower to the “cosmo-political,” as its subliminal experiences interweave rationality with the unnameable and transhuman dimension of language, with its starting point in wonder and meaning and its evolution an ongoing dynamic participation in the micropolitics of cosmic Becoming:

Connolly also does not tire of reiterating the extension of consciousness beyond the human. Here is where identity politics for him goes not merely below the rational but beyond any ideological or specifically theological privileging as also beyond biological privileging. In this he affiliates with a thinker like Latour, who distances himself from post-Enlightenment humanism which makes mastery over nature its ideal an calls instead for an extension of the boundaries of human identity to embrace the cosmos. This indeed, is where the micropolitical becomes the cosmopolitical:

The invocation of nontheistic gratitude, moreover, is linked to a worry about the periodic tendency of factions in all three religions of the Book to join human uniqueness in the eyes of God to the judgment that many humans, such as believers in the other two Books, atheists, heretics, homosexuals, Amerindians, pagans, Roma, and Africans fall so far below this standard as to deserve authoritative correction, punishment, exclusion, or worse. (3) Our conceit is that a positive ethos of monotheism of any sort shines most brightly when its devotees acknowledge a degree of accountability to nontheists. Christianity, in particular, needs us, though not all of its practitioners appreciate this need sufficiently. Its orientation to atheism at each historical juncture provides a pretty good index of its own nobility. At the moment, however, 58% of Americans say it is impossible for atheists to be moral, expressing in this way the sort of self-conceit that limits the possibility of outreach to others. (4) For corollary reasons, I would not want to live in a society publicly defined to be atheistic, even though that is not a very big worry at the moment.

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Connolly invokes here the rhizomatic potency of dynamic existential processes which he borrows from Deleuze and hints at the contrast with predictably structured trees, the top-down model for ontotheology. Rather than the seeking for the Tree of Life using the inadequate instrument of mind and abusing nature in the process, using the roots or the downward hanging leaves (in the image of the Gita’s upside-down tree) through a process of psychic intuition in becoming, is more akin to the expanding affiliations of the rhizome – no ideological identity to differentiate space but a faith in amplifications towards integrity:

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