Theory
As Party-Starter:
When
Deleuze Becomes Antisocial
Draft chapter for
Deleuzian Trajectories:
Mappings for a Contemporary Social Ethics
Submitted by
Dr Melissa Gregg
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland
Bohemian Like You[i]: Theory as
Party Starter
“So what’s your research on?”
“I work with Deleuze.”
“Oh. [Pause] But he’s dead, isn’t he?”
—Overheard
conversation,
international cultural studies conference
So far my experience of academia has been inordinately
populated with Deleuzians. There are tell-tale signs: conference papers
featuring a predominance of neologisms or geological terms; ‘entertaining’
anecdotes about meeting Deleuze and/or his contemporaries; passionate opinions
as to the proper inheritor of Deleuze’s legacy (must be French-speaking); a
party confession—delivered somewhere between a political statement and a
pick-up line—that one’s thesis is ‘on Deleuze’. The only condition of the
Deleuzian’s admission is that ambivalence can’t be tolerated. The inherent
radicalism and usefulness of Deleuze’s philosophy is unquestionable in these
encounters. Their cumulative effect has led me to ponder the performative
nature of such revelations, and as Eve Sedgwick lately asks, how best one might move among their
causes and effects.
[ii] For a number
of years I have harboured secret suspicions that Deleuze’s renowned ‘style’ permits a degree of anti-social
behaviour amongst his adherents; that his celebration of the productive nature
of desire and becoming is often a convenient way to justify uncollegial
encounters between fellow academics in the present. At the very least, the popularity
of this author seems to have enabled a certain blinkeredness on the part of
institutionally-positioned critics professing their engagement in the ‘relay’
between theory and practice.
[iii]
Any discussion of the ethics
discernible in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze must acknowledge the context in
which it is overwhelmingly encountered, the academic workplace.
[iv]
While many writers maintain the most fitting response to Deleuze is to extend
his thought in new and experimental ways, such exercises will always be limited
to the extent that the institutional position from which they emanate and the
forms of privilege upon which they rely are insufficiently acknowledged.
Dialogues between scholars, students, art schools and scholarly presses may
well promote an admirable regime of ethics for an urban-based, highly educated
group. But this is at the expense of much attempt to break with the very
limited networks of reading, reception and dissemination that decide how
knowledge is valued.
[v]
The need for such a break
can be seen in Deleuze’s own attempts to write philosophy differently. His idiosyncratic readings of precedents, his
collaborative writing with Félix Guattari and especially his affective voice
all trouble a history of scholarly endeavour premised on authorial intention,
theoretical mastery and rationality. In this way, Deleuze’s writing is a challenge
to the very conventions of the academy. It invites readers to consider the way
that their own performances contribute to existing hierarchies, I think
implying that selflessness and risk are intrinsic to the philosophical
endeavour.
Yet to the extent that even his strongest admirers now
acknowledge Deleuze’s thought is ‘effectively the ideology of the newly
emerging ruling class’
[vi]
it is worth considering the peculiar line of flight this philosophical system
has taken, especially if its effects are ever to extend beyond ‘a thousand PhD
theses’.
[vii]
There are questions to be raised
about a philosophy that offers a seductive dissertation topic but fails to
influence the ethical horizon of its most vocal advocates. So while my
endorsement of his example will be evident, my concern in this chapter is
not to provide
another heavily prefaced reading of Deleuze. It is instead to ask
whether an insistently vitalist, apparently radical philosophy is always the
best way to hear the voices of those at the level of our everyday
encounters—the beginning point for any ethics. It is also to suggest that
fixating on the right way to read one writer is rarely the best way to gain
skills in listening, reciprocity and engagement with others which involves
social graces as much as a familiarity with books we might ourselves prefer
reading. A commitment to theory involves ‘taking our own and others’ theories
seriously enough to seek to act and live by them, letting what is learned in
the living also test and develop the theories’.
[viii]
Adequate concepts on their own cannot measure the plausibility or future
revolutionary potential of an individual theorist’s project. It is also to be
measured in the reverberations of that project—whether it is deemed powerful
enough to be worth risking our own surest beliefs, including the intrinsic
merit of Deleuze.
Mastering the
Terrain: The Agony of Deleuzian Agon
You
can’t just tell someone what they’re saying is pointless. So you tell them it’s
wrong. But what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn’t that some things
are wrong, but that they’re stupid and irrelevant. That they’ve already been
said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of
something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth.
—Gilles
Deleuze, Negotiations
The limited circulation of Deleuze’s thought is only
understandable given the manner in which French Theory in general
[ix]
came to the attention of English readers:
The idea was to make
“theory” less formidable, something that could be read like “how to” books, how
to think with your own mind, philosophy for the boudoir, short in words but
intensely focused; how to eroticize thinking, make it a pleasure of the senses.
People would read them with one hand standing in the subway among all the din
and disruption; or they would take them around in “downtown” clubs in New York
just for their look, quickly leafing through for the hot passages. These books
extended theory beyond itself as only theory could.
[x]
Sylvère Lotringer describes the
Semiotexte approach to publishing which helped build an appetite
for the writings of French thinkers in the United States but at the same time
seems clearly invested in the subcultural taxonomies of urban bohemia. From an
Australian perspective, Meaghan Morris notes the similar tendency amongst
Deleuze readers who sought after the polemical parts of a philosophy which was
‘more heard about than read, or read selectively and at a single speed (very
hastily).’
[xi] While
this apparently superficial engagement might be put down to the pressure on
academics to publish regularly, the massive interest in French Theory met the
career ambitions of a new generation of radical intellectuals entering tenured
employment over the past couple of decades. The axiomatic mastery of a
theorist’s
oeuvre fed the growing
demand for explanatory texts and courses in Critical Theory. It also offered
something of a passport to an international conference network debating an
established agenda of theoretical priorities against a changing backdrop of
world cities and world events.
[xii]
This is what Kevin Robins and Frank Webster have termed the ‘American Express’
cosmopolitanism typical of the contemporary university, which rests on ‘being
able to fit into the global enterprise culture at any of its (metropolitan)
locations around the world—about the possession of dereferentialized and
abstract skill (travelling skills).’
[xiii]
For Deleuzians in particular, international conferences and invitation-only
symposia offered so many chances to continue the friend-rival relationship at
the heart of philosophical debate, the gentlemanly ‘athleticism of the agon’
Deleuze and Guattari describe in
What is
Philosophy.
[xiv] When
they weren’t flagrantly attacking each other, the caustic footnotes, in-house asides
and carefully composed acknowledgement pages in Deleuzians’ competing
publications worked as so many missives in an ongoing war over territory.
[xv]
Ian Buchanan saw the irony:
Who benefits from this rigid policing? It would appear that
by some strange twist of events Deleuze and Guattari have been transformed into
figureheads of exactly the kind of politics they explicitly and caustically
castigate—namely, conservatism.
[xvi]
Whatever conceptual lucidity the Deleuzians’ agon helped
establish, it brought new significance to the idea of a writer’s legacy in that
the victor threatened to tarnish the ‘true’ Deleuze for all to follow.
In a critical climate of post-structuralism, coupled with
Deleuze’s own dismissive thoughts regarding authorial intention,
[xvii]
these have been strange developments. At the same time however, such
internecine, hyper-masculine, quasi-religious debates among Deleuzians were
matched by efforts to avoid the negativity of critique, to put theory to a
practical use in line with Deleuze’s own clear statements.
[xviii]
Zizek’s
Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze
and Consequences stands as representative of these approaches when he
writes: ‘one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of
remaining faithful to the core of his thought.’
[xix]
But as Elie During argues, endorsing Deleuze’s utilitarianism itself became the
basis for a suite of books and articles seeking absolution for the
metacommentary nonetheless engaged in (this article being no exception). An
‘exhortation to construct and connect, to trace further lines and move along’
came close to ‘a mere rhetoric of pragmatism’:
It is all very well to
“resist the desire to fetishize” Deleuze… but in the same turn one should be
ready to actively dismantle Deleuze’s own machine, instead of relying on the
sleights of hand of criticism and on the kind of conventional play of concepts
that can repeatedly be turned over.
[xx]
Here I want to suggest that such developments are
reflective of a degree of anxiety held by an historically privileged group of
accredited readers not entirely comfortable with a widening circle of
participants in philosophical debate. It is these larger issues I’m
particularly interested in, for as Nick Couldry has urged, ‘we should be
sceptical rather than reverential’ assessing the merits of any individual
thinker given ‘how much, institutionally, is invested in the “mastery” of these
theoretical terrains.’
[xxi]
As much as Deleuzian commentaries have helped
explicate Deleuze’s writing, I wonder whether they have also worked
as
placatory measures establishing
his thought within the scriptural economy of an essentially bourgeois
institution, which as Michel de Certeau has shown relies for its power on the
belief that language is of ‘a disorderly nature’ requiring cultivation. The
bourgeois power ‘of making history and fabricating languages’ assures the
authority of philosophy as part of the academic institution, for it ‘defines
the code governing socio-economic promotion and dominates, regulates, or
selects according to its norms all those who do not possess this mastery of
language.’
[xxii]
Instead of leaving Deleuze’s work to play out its utilitarian fate, critique
and commentary impose institutional authority and disciplinary rites of
initiation on the otherwise anarchic use of language fashioned by Deleuze. The
exciting flow of words, intensities and affects we find in his work are tamed
to fit the conventional agonistic style of academic philosophy. Voices that can
present themselves as competent in the dominant discourse are sanctioned while
others are dismissed for the ‘lack of mastery’ betrayed in their speech.
The Substance
of Style
This process helps to explain why critical attention has
tended to focus on Deleuze’s conceptual innovation over and above his writerly
style, to the point where the latter is often dismissed as a distraction from
the system otherwise evident in his writing.
[xxiii]
But the
way Deleuze writes is a
crucial element to
what it is that he
wrote, and in saying as much I am not seeking to endorse more of the tiresome
geological papers and abstract neologisms often generated in a Deleuzian
manner. As During argues, this is to confuse ‘
style with
mannerism,’
engaging in a form of mimicry which would canonize rhizomatics as a procedure
(akin to the destiny meted deconstruction).
[xxiv]
Deleuze’s style might instead be read as a strategic choice, a voice formulated
to fit the message he seeks to deliver. Tom Conley notes that Deleuze always
maintained an artist’s style of composition
conveys a tactic and a way of dealing with the world, hence
a habitus, understood in a general fashion, that determines both being and
action. Authors in this mold, in which are also cast the writings of Deleuze,
seek to create “styles of thinking” consequential enough to supersede their content.
However utopian they may seem, they compel us to believe that to aestheticize
is to politicize.
[xxv]
The performative manifestation of Deleuze’s philosophy is
the essence of Deleuze’s challenge to the academic conventions of philosophy:
its irreverent and varied tone (‘the gaiety with which it launches into
adventures of reading, writing, and thinking’),
[xxvi]
its commitment to collaboration, its playful and shameless appropriation of an
array of thinkers. The range of affects and innovations Deleuze brings to bear
on the business of thinking makes it an attractive prospect for people other
than those traditionally consecrated to partake in it.
Philosophy itself is asked to change as a result of
Deleuze’s intervention. Attacking the most precious markers of his own
subjectivity as a writer is the principal measure that ensures Deleuze’s
reluctant participation in the history of philosophy. This is how we can
appreciate the following appeal:
We must be bilingual even in
a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we
must create a minor use of our own language. Multilingualism is not merely the
property of several systems each of which would be homogeneous in itself: it is
primarily the line of flight or of variation which affects each system by
stopping it from being homogeneous.
[xxvii]
As one part of a much wider system, philosophy must begin
with its own dearest principles—the language that grants its authority—to begin
the radical process of becoming-minor. Deleuze suggests philosophers must be
prepared to take risks, not merely to speak in a language other than one’s own:
‘not pretending, not playing or imitating the child, the madman, the woman, the
animal, the stammerer or the foreigner, but becoming all these, in order to invent
new forces or new weapons.’
[xxviii]
Resisting the subjectivities most familiar initiates the process of
becoming-minor.
A key component of Deleuze’s ethics is to break open
philosophy’s narrow trajectories and make it a practice open to all:
The real philosophical
problem, therefore, is not the determination of who can or should speak (a
matter best left to the police, Deleuze says), but rather the fabrication of a
set of conditions that would enable everyone to speak. “So how can we manage to
speak without giving orders, without claiming to represent something or
someone, how can we get people without the right to speak, to speak?” The short
answer is, through philosophy.
[xxix]
Buchanan’s short answer is insufficient, however, if
philosophers aren’t prepared to value a variety of voices as equally entitled
to participate in the discipline’s traditionally restricted conversations.
Philosophy has to be open to radical renovation, a minor politics that welcomes
a situation ‘in which languages of power begin to stutter and falter, to
metamorphose.’
[xxx] This is
the basis of all revolutionary acts: ‘to hate all languages of masters.’
[xxxi]
The very language we employ in academic work is a statement
of intention about audience. If a Deleuzian ethics can be defined as ‘the sphere
of judgments regarding the possibilities and actuality of connections,
arrangements, lineages, machines,’
[xxxii]
the manner in which we write says a lot about the connections we desire. A
reluctance to recognise the merits of a performative dimension to writing means
that Deleuze’s affective voice has often been viewed as the quirky or
entertaining add-on to the otherwise serious business of philosophy.
[xxxiii]
But downplaying the lively parts of his prose limits the kind of writing
appropriate for philosophical discourse. It reproduces outdated expectations
about the kinds of listeners presumed to be interested in Deleuze’s thought in
particular and scholarly debates more broadly. Welcoming a range of voices in
academic writing is an important way to change the economy of scarcity
determining the subjects of university study in the past. It is also to begin
to develop an ethics of reciprocity in scholarship that guides our everyday
encounters as academics.
Doing Theory
Differently
Even when the conceptual value of a theorist’s work is
undisputed, how we do theory is
intricately related to its wider dissemination. As Katrina Schlunke has argued,
this distinction is the basis for ongoing tensions between those relying on the
privileges of an older form of academic privilege to talk about radical philosophical ideas and those for whom the same
theories inform a more personal, applied political project. Reflecting on the
‘post political white boys’ so much a part of her own academic training,
Schlunke writes:
We wanted them to stop
dessicating ideas that might be able to shift us and start living them, perhaps
embodying them, for their dessication carried with it through the secular
rational tradition the power of both mastery and correction.
For Schlunke, it is no coincidence that there have been few
Butlerians or Groszians: ‘the feminist maxim that the personal is political
would have meant recognising that competing intellectual and political lines
shared the same emotional landscape.’
[xxxiv]
Schlunke urges sensitivity and mutual respect in navigating our diverse
political preferences. Moreover, she shows that participating in the heights of
theoretical debate—while certainly the source of great hope and optimism—is a
luxury
[xxxv]
for many academics today:
Women? Men? Theory?
Antitheory? Who cares? What about my vision for workloads? Why is it your turn
for study leave? Who left the photocopier jammed? Where the hell
is the library? Give me a good old
fashioned feminist, give me an idiot chauvinist who has retained a genuine love
of his subject, give me a complete dickhead who will at least support me in my
final stand that the library must subscribe to journals and we have another,
related politics. In the politics and theory of the workaday academy we have
another example of a tribalised politics. We constantly rub in and out of each
others’ lives and in doing so we make the theories and politics of becoming.
And we still do theory.
[xxxvi]
Schlunke’s humour in no way detracts from her point that
the theories informing our worldview must and can be related to the immediate
contexts of our everyday lives. The competing political priorities which
characterise the contemporary academic workplace cannot simply be willed away
as part of an attempt to summon a preferable ‘people to come.’
[xxxvii]
The more difficult task is to veer away from the comfortable trajectories of
our everyday and learn from the unsettling facts of lives other than our
own—experiences that may even contextualise the significance of Deleuze’s
philosophy. This is the great promise of the current university environment.
While on the one hand it continues to foster the dubious perks of an American
Express style cosmopolitanism, it also provides the opportunity for
a cosmopolitanism, or let us
say a cosmopolitan potential, that derives from globalization ‘from below’.
This form of cosmopolitanism derives from new global forms of the migrations of
peoples, ideas, and institutions. It is a more complex vision, and raises more
difficult, but also more significant and interesting, questions. It is
concerned with how people might live together with differences—how peoples who
have different histories and cultures might construct new kinds of
relationships with each other. It is a cosmopolitanism that is concerned with
the new forms of encounter that globalization brings about.
[xxxviii]
As Robins and Webster maintain, ‘it is this latter form of
cosmopolitanism that is now crucial for rethinking the role of the university,’
for ‘universities now have the possibility of reinventing themselves as places
of encounter for cultures and knowledges from across the world.’
[xxxix]
In this challenging work we need more than one philosophy to help us. It
requires a ‘greater openness towards a
variety
of theoretical legacies’
[xl]
and involves a willingness to listen to the different perspectives of others as
part of a wider experiment in the ‘kind of rhizomatic connections we can draw
among ourselves, here and now, in the act of doing philosophy.’
[xli]
Conclusion
I
think it’s important to have a small number of authors with whom one thinks,
with whom one works, but on whom one doesn’t write. Perhaps someday I’ll write
about them, but at that point they will no longer be instruments of thought for
me. Finally, for me there are three categories of philosophers: those I don’t
know; those I know and discuss; and those I know and don’t discuss.
—Michel
Foucault
In the chic networks of the grad student party and the
international conference mixer theoretical nous
is a useful way to affirm allegiances and compatible lifestyles. This form of
theoretical exchange amounts to an exquisite ability to cite from, emulate or
even supercede Deleuze but it is perhaps less prepared to accept that his
politics may not be the most appropriate in every scenario. The risk of
Deleuz(ian)ism is that one writer responding to a specific conjuncture becomes
the most obvious way to begin thinking about problems generated in very
different cultural circumstances. It is also to risk losing the subtle forms of
interpersonal communication which would allow us to participate and be invested
in the struggles of those around us.
Without some frank acknowledgement of the way Deleuze’s
work has been framed the likelihood that it remains the currency of ever
smaller networks of readers is increased. As During writes: ‘All the fuss about
theory being like a toolbox is really a joke or a clause of style if one does
not realize that a tool is something that must be used, and that something that
is used sometimes
does not work.’
[xlii]
Deleuze’s empowering gift was to show the benefits to be gained from a healthy
skepticism to the established hierarchies of intellectual practice, encouraging
confidence in his readers that they might generate their own theories and
concepts. Left only to academic philosophy, this creative project would stay a
precious commodity to be protected instead of one example of productive
thinking that is intended to encourage many more. Breaking free of the language
of privilege means exposing our own vulnerabilities as we convey what is at
stake for all of us in the dissemination of new ideas. Doing this, we add to
‘the creation of new terrains, different lines of thought and extraneous
wanderings that are not at home in the philosophical terrain.’
[xliii]
Once we are prepared to lose control over the trajectories of thought, we
expose ourselves to unexpected consequences, free from the petty desires that
institutionalised modes of engagement would have us pursue. We grant the
conditions that welcome all comers to a much more interesting and protracted
party—one to which you, too, are invited.
[i] I would
like to thank Shane McGrath, Glen Fuller, Danny Butt, Jean Burgess and Joshua
Green for various kinds of help writing this chapter.
[ii] Eve Sedgwick, Touching Feeling,
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 124.
[iii] Michel Foucault with Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in D.
Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press): 205-217.
[iv] As Justin
Clements notes, in his stinging attack on Deleuzian fashion: ‘the enthusiasm
for [Deleuze and Guattari] remains an almost purely academic affair, and, as
such, the participants in this ménage-á-multiple
are those with enough cultural capital to get into the place in the first
place.’ “A Thousand Stupidities: Why I Hate Deleuze (and Guattari),” Antithesis, vol. 8, no. 2 (1997): 195.
[v] Deleuze
scholars have been keen to identify the significance of online communication in
breaking down access to philosophical debates, particularly the role of the
Deleuze and Guattari discussion list immediately following Deleuze’s suicide
(now hosted at
<http://www.driftline.org/cgi-bin/archive/archive.cgi?list=spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive>).
As Charles Stivale writes, ‘the scholar’s isolation in the cubicle or “ivory
tower” diminishes increasingly in proportion to interlocutors’ connections to
daily and global conversations on computer lists and synchronous discussion
sites.’ The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze
and Guattari: Intersections and Animations (New York: The Guilford Press,
1998): xiii. However this chapter will reflect my own scepticism as to whether
these developments necessarily cause a shift in the existing trajectories for
scholarly work or actually provide another avenue for existing hierarchies of
academic practice to be played out.
[vi] Slavoj
Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze
and Consequences, (New York: Routledge, 2004): 193.
[viii] Richard
Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram and Estella Tincknell, The Practice of Cultural Studies,
(London: Sage, 2004): 92.
[ix] Sylvère Lotringer points out that French Theory is an American
invention stretching back hundreds of years: ‘The French themselves never
conceived it as such, although French philosophers obviously had something to
do with it. In France, French theory was considered philosophy, or
psychoanalysis, or semiotics, or anthropology, in short any manner of
“thinking” (pensée) but never
referred to as theory’. “Doing Theory” in Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen, eds., French Theory in America, (New York:
Routledge, 2001): 125. In the same collection, Jacques Derrida describes the
effects of the ‘French Theory in America’ construct: ‘This inexhaustible
subject has exhausted even us. It is becoming more than a topos or a common place: it is becoming a genre. It has its rites,
its theatre, its unavoidable characters, its laws, its law of genre.’
“Deconstructions: The Im-possible,”
in Lotringer and Cohen, p. 13.
[xi] “Crazy
Talk Is Not Enough,” Guest
Editorial, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, vol. 14, (1996): 384.
[xii] Morris’s
work has often drawn attention to ethical problems of this ‘grandiloquent’ form
of debate in cultural theory: ‘in which massive,
world-historical problems are debated on such a level of generality that they
cannot possibly be solved, and posed in ways which do not, will not and cannot
ever connect to agencies by which actual social futures may be given a
“definite shape.”’ “‘On the Beach,’” in Cultural
Studies, L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. A. Treichler, eds., (New York:
Routledge): 466. I share Morris’s concern that ‘One consequence of the mundane
globalization immediately affecting intellectuals is the indignant parochialism
of assuming that you always already know the
political import of this or that product or practice’—in this case, the
political importance of Deleuze in every context. “Future fear,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global
Change, B. Curtis, J. Bird, T. Putnam, G. Robertson & L. Tickner, eds.,
(London: Routledge): 42.
[xiii] Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, “Afterword: What Will Be
the Global Identity of the University?” in their The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets, and Management, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press): 322.
[xiv] Gilles
Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill, (London: Verso, 1994): 4.
[xv] As Stivale
reflects, writing his own acknowledgements: ‘The construction of such lists…has
fallen into a strategy of marking territory, with exclusions and inclusions,
that runs counter to both the letter and spirit of the work I pursue here.’
Stivale, p. xvii. Lotringer’s is probably the nastiest attack I’ve come across
in the body of a published article (p. 155 in particular).
[xvi] Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000): 47. Setting up
his own reading of Deleuze so defensively, Buchanan nonetheless enters the same
polemical terrain by describing those who insist on a concept of gender as
‘soft at heart’ for not giving up ‘their cherished views.’ Buchanan, p. 195.
[xvii] Alain
Badiou describes as a conscious strategy Deleuze’s ‘constant use of the free
indirect style, or the deliberate and undecidability of “who is speaking?”’ Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise
Burchill, Theory Out of Bounds, vol.
16, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000): 14. In Negotiations, Deleuze describes the
difficulty his critics have in accepting the status of a jointly authored text:
‘I’ve wondered whether one general reason for some of the hostility toward the
book is simply the fact that there are two writers, because people want you to
disagree about things, and take different positions. So they try to disentangle
inseparable elements and identify who did what. But since each of us, like
anyone else, is already various people, it gets rather crowded.’ Negotiations
1972-1990, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995): 7.
[xviii] ‘What matters is whether it works, and how it works, and
who it works for. It’s a machine too. It’s not a matter of reading it over and
over again, you have to do something else with it.’ Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 22.
[xix] Zizek, p.
13. This is the tenet forming the
basis for Buchanan’s distinction between Deleuzists and mere Deleuzians, and
his own self-consciousness about being unDeleuzian by trying to systematise
Deleuze’s work. In doing so Buchanan anticipates Lotringer’s critique: ‘Like
fugitives blowing up bridges behind them, Deleuze and Guattari made a great
effort not to leave behind them any “model” that could be simply applied, even
discouraging all too eager disciples to follow their paths instead of finding
their own. “Applying theory”: this kind of hands-on, hand-to-mouth attitude, of
course, has little to do with what they themselves advocated as “pragmatic
philosophy.”’ Lotringer, pp. 155-6.
[xx] Elie During, “Blackboxing in Theory: Deleuze versus
Deleuze,” in Lotringer and Cohen, pp.171-2.
[xxi] Inside
Culture: Reimagining the Method of Cultural Studies, (London: Sage, 2000): 14; 19.
[xxii] The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984):
138-9.
[xxiii] As the leading proponent of this approach, Buchanan calls
Deleuze’s terminology ‘indubitably sexy’ and claims that his rhetorical devices
are the ‘sexier double’ we must put to one side to get to the heart of
Deleuze’s philosophical system. Buchanan, pp. 47, 56.
[xxv] “From
Multiplicities to Folds: On Style and Form in Deleuze,” in ‘A Deleuzian
Century?’ South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.
96, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 630.
[xxvi] Morris, Crazy Talk,
p. 385.
[xxvii] Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, (London : Continuum, 2002): 4.
[xxix] Ian
Buchanan, Introduction to ‘A Deleuzian Century?’ p. 385.
[xxx] Jane
Jacobs, “Speaking Always
as Geographers,” Guest Editorial, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 14, (1996): p. 381.
[xxxi] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 30, (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986): 26.
[xxxii] Elizabeth
Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,” Constantin V. Boundas
and Dorothea Olkowski, eds., Gilles
Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, (New York: Routledge, 1994): 197.
[xxxiii] It also ignores the changing conditions of an academic
workplace where charisma and affect are increasingly viewed as key dimensions
to scholarly practice. See Melissa Gregg, Voices
of Intervention in Cultural Studies: Politics, Affect and The Academy
(Palgrave, forthcoming). As Tania Lewis has argued, this is ‘a move away from
traditional models of academia to a more embodied, performative mode of both
teaching and scholarship.’ “Embodied
Experts: Robert Hughes, Cultural Studies and the Celebrity Intellectual,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural
Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, (2001): 245.
[xxxiv] “Performing Theory and the Post-Political White Boy,”
Unpublished Conference Paper, ‘What’s Left of Theory?’ The Cultural Studies
Association of Australasia Annual Conference, University of Tasmania, (2001):
4.
[xxxv]
Observations of a similar nature have also characterised the eulogies of
Jacques Derrida in recent times, and inflect Clements’ remarks when he writes:
‘DaG remain in many ways perfect for the current pedagogical climate, insofar
as they liberate students of the burden of looking at anything resembling
empirical data, making any remarks that could be coherently translated into
bureaucratese or any other idiom with at least minimal political effectivity,
and do a great job of keeping a possibly volatile youth population off the
streets and unemployment registers.’ Clements, pp. 196-7.
[xxxvii] Buchanan concludes his metacommentary on Deleuze claiming:
‘There is much to be said about the fact Deleuze admired only those writers who
wrote for a people yet to come, who nourished deep within themselves a new race
of beings and did not hesitate to condemn humans as they are.’
[xli] Rosi
Braidotti, “Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics
and Metabolism,” in Boundas and Olkowski, p. 167.
[xliii] Claire
Colebrook, Introduction to Deleuze and
Feminist Theory, Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds., (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000): 10.
DoxDoxDox
terça-feira, 16 de outubro de 2012