For Amanda, especially

18 Responses to “For Amanda, especially”

1. danny
   February 10th, 2005 @ 10:18 pm

   Nice quote Mel, and reminiscent of Ghassan Hage’s comments at Dialogues Across Cultures in Melbourne. But the question that springs to mind for me is - how does one draw the articulation between “facts” and “movement”, and what strategies do we have to promote the “movement” possible through engaging with “facts”? Because iit seems to me that to state “facts” is in many ways to “fix” something and try and constrain its movement. Not always, maybe. But a lot of the time I feel that the political dimensions of the mediascape have a very tangential relation to facts, and they’re actively resisted. Not just by “the Right”, but by everyday people who, at the end of the day, find the facts to not be that useful for their own movements. Not sure if that makes sense, but I don’t see how Deleuze specifically wants to be able to connect “movement” to “facts” (I haven’t read the book and as you know have Deleuzophobia, but I’d be interested if you or your faithful readers can shed some light on this!)

2. mc gregg
   February 11th, 2005 @ 11:30 am

   Well, you can’t move/change anything that isn’t recognised or acknowledged to exist…

   One of the examples GD uses leading up to this digression is Palestinian rights. The fact that there are Palestinians has to be recognised first in order to change how the ‘question’ is posed and addressed.

   Danny, what is Deleuzophobia? In a neat paragraph too would be nice. I’m in the middle of writing an article on Deleuzism and I’m soliciting soundbytes on what people mean when they talk about him. That goes for all of you!

3. Glen
   February 11th, 2005 @ 12:05 pm

   A key distinction Deleuze is making is between ‘winning arguments’ and ‘being open about things’ is problematic. One is to attempt to herd people through a door and the other is to let people know the door is open for them. To me, this is the most ‘undeleuzian’ thing I have read of deleuze. It reads like some sort of Platonic ’simile of the cave’ scenario. From Plato’s Republic:

   “I want you to go on to picture the enlightenment or ignorance of our human condition somewhat as follows. Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. [And so on.]”

   But perhaps the aim is not enlightenment, but to get the Right to ‘talk in a different way’ by throwing down facts/problems. The current state of affairs in Aus Fed politics is about ‘winning arguments’. Kim was such a poor selection for the Left because he attempts to win arguments against the current master of argument winning, Howard. Howard doesn’t argue as much as determine the necessary discursive conditions under which arguments are contested. Even though Latham had his flaws, he attempted to ‘talk in a different way’ about the same state of affairs.

   Witness the ongoing furore over the Cornelia Rau incident. To state the facts of the case is to get the Right to speak in a different way about refugee detention centres and the mental health services in QLD. Therefore they must address some of the problems that certainly can be found with the detention centres and may exist with the mental health service. However, notice how they are attempting to focus on the QLD mental health service as the location of ‘the’ problem… The incident is a probelm for the Right because it forces the otherwise apathetic mass public or enthusiastic right-wing nationalistic sections of society to recognise that the problems with the refugee centres. It is not a question of ’shedding light’ on a state of affairs that people didn’t know already existed (the Right ‘are not stupid’, they know what happens), but of denoting the same state of affairs while forcing the Right (through exposure to the facts) to express a different sense - to ‘talk in a different way.’

   ‘Talking in a different way’ does not necessarily mean the Right modifies its discourse, it can also mean that the public exposured to the ‘facts’ listen in a different way to the same talk. This is the role Deleuze is getting at in this section of Negotiations on ‘Mediators’. Howard and Bush are masters of discursively framing argument - ‘black armband history’, ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘freedom’, etc. I don’t think Deleuze is necessarily indicating something that most people with an intellectual bent don’t already know.

   ‘Movement’ always comes from Bergson in Deleuzian discourse. Massumi has a brief and concise exposition in the early pages of Parables for the Virtual. He raises the example of Zeno’s Paradox of the arrow and the target. Arresting movement and/or forming points in the arrow’s flight path retroactively from movement’s end is the discursiving framing of processes that have a nondecomposable continuity of movement.

   Rather than absolute movement or absolute cessation, I am not sure if Deleuze intended like that, I don’t think he would, it is the political mediation between at least two processual series, because movement is always relative. If we follow Foucault who suggests that discourse is already always a mediation between two series (from Arch. of Know.), then it is about challenging forth the ‘facts’ so it forces a shift in the relation of these series. Deleuze argues that the Right has a tendency to arrest movement, but this is not always the case (if movement is always relative). Literally, therefore, it is about the creative invention of discourse and the dissemination of such a discourse amongst the public that accounts for the ‘facts’ (singularities) of an event that escape the ‘Right-eous’ discursive framing of the event.

4. mc gregg
   February 11th, 2005 @ 12:18 pm

   Thanks Glen. You know the other thing I find interesting about Howard’s government is that not only do they dictate the discursive terrain but they are also highly aware of the importance of providing facts too. It’s precisely what’s happening in the last few days as we hear details of the campaign to expose ‘politically motivated’ research showing the psychological effects of mandatory detention. At every point when professional representatives (small ‘l’ liberals) have attempted to enter public debate in this country, to provide a ’specific’ intellectual role in the sense Foucault described, the Liberals match them - shout them down - with their own state intellectuals. Keith Windschuttle, anyone?

5. Glen
   February 11th, 2005 @ 1:21 pm

   Although, Mel, I think there is a difference between intellectuals and mediators. I certainly agree that Windschuttle seems to be very good at reflecting upon debates in such a way that ‘mirrors’ the conservative position (ala Deleuze’s first section in his ‘Mediators’ essay), but by ‘facts’ I understand Deleuze to mean something else. Winschuttle seems to argue through a different modality of the same discourse.

   I just thought of an example of the sort of mediator for which Deleuze is arguing the case. Steve Cannane on Triple J’s weekday ‘Hack’ program. He allows the ‘facts of the matter’ to challenges forth. Listen to this program: http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/mod_windows/mon.asx (it goes away soon!!).

   To record it on to your computer as you listen you can use this program: http://sourceforge.net/projects/asfrecorder/

   Extracts (fuck, I am so in transcription mode at the moment, haha…) from about the 7 minute mark:

   “One of the questions we are left with in the case of Cornelia Rau is why didn’t the staff at the Baxter Detention Centre realise she was mentally ill? Particularly when she was doing things like eating dirt and speaking incoherently. Or maybe her behaviour didn’t stand out from the crowd?

   “I once went to Villawood Detention Centre to see what it was like. I had to pretend to be the friend of an asylum seeker to actually get in, given that they don’t allow members of the media in to detention centres. I can tell you that it’s the most depressing place I have ever been to.”

   Why I am so anxious about all this stuff is that I am to appear on a panel on the 21st to address the discussion points released by Carl Scully last year about the p-plater issue. I know my role must be to not subsume myself to the arguments and discursive terrain of those I shall be undoubtedly arguing with (probably the media!). I shall appear as some sort of hoon/intellectual composite and not a mediator, yet I shall have ‘force the issue’ in such a way that it makes people ‘face the facts’. The intersection of Deleuze, hoons and the Australian media should at least be good for a giggle…

6. danny
   February 11th, 2005 @ 2:30 pm

   Glen, I knew I could rely on you for some clarification! Those points are very helpful…

   Melissa - well, Deleuze is the high concept film. I find his work to be produced in a way that always manifests internal coherence through high production values while it offers an ostensible “open-ness” in its level of abstraction and appearing not to mean anything too particular. After reading Rosi Braidotti’s nuanced take ( http://www.philosophy.ru/library/pdf/113455.pdf ) I’m a bit clearer on the value of his way of working for the things I’m interested in, but I think this requires the proviso that his strategies only make sense within the belly of Euro-Imperialism, e.g. it grows as one approaches the subjectivity of a famous white french philosopher that Deleuze inhabits. What I’m more interested in is the limits of subjectivity in Deleuzian discourse and how they tend to be routinely glossed over by Deleuze himself (and the virulence of his anti-Freudianism I think can be usefully contrasted to the value of the psychoanalytic subject-in-process that feminist film theory found so valuable). As Braidotti very presciently put in in 1995 ( http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/Braidotti/ ),

   “Foucault is androcentric and I think Deleuze if fundamentally a romantic when it comes to sexual difference, a high-tech romantic. I am sure that this will have disastrous consequences when he is applied in a cyber- punk mode: new internet cowboys who are riding the wave of the next technological revolution. Why bring gender out of the picture? In the name of “poli-sexuality” and multiplicities. That is going to be a very big problem….”

   My beef with Deleuze is the same one Spivak rasied very succinctly in Can the Subaltern Speak (and was more succinctly put by Ben Attias in his eading notes on this essay ( http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/grad/gcs.html ): what’s missing from Deleuze’s critique of presence is “an awareness of the itinerary of presence in one’s own critique”. The blurring of the two forms of “representation” described there (Vertreten and Darstellung) is particularly problematic (thus that conversation I had with you about all these Deleuzians talking about “post-representational politics”, WTF!). I think a problematic effect of this (and perhaps there is also something affective here) is that Deleuzians tend to shrug off questions of gender, race, and subject formation as part of the well-established critique of Vertreten/speaking-for, when in fact a different logic of representation should be considered in these questions. (Yes I’m generalising here, but I’m sure you’ve seen this particular politics of the subject in action at conferences etc.)

7. Jean
   February 12th, 2005 @ 10:34 am

   I’m finally going to out myself as the Person Most Puzzled about Deleuze in cultural studies anywhere.

   I couldn’t be as virtuosic as Danny even with several more lifetimes of theory, but i think I agree with him in regard to identity and difference - sexuality, gender and race - and at least i learnt a new german word or two. I think there is altogether too much speaking *for* in Deleuze - and at this level of “high-concept” abstraction, how could it be otherwise? To paraphrase something i once heard, I think I mostly like the politics, but I don’t think the poetics get us very far in intervening wherever we might like to intervene.

   And I’m constantly struck by the enormous weight of theoretical fashion, how powerful it is, how strong your own impulse to follow its shifts is. (heh, unfashionable Foucault might have something to say about that).

   So, my heretical deleuzophobia comes from the same place that my equally heretical obsession with specificity, context, grounded theory, and (worst of all) utility come from.

   Plus, as I can hear the crowd of smug, black skivvy wearing theoreticians in my subconscious say, I *know* I just really don’t understand a bloody word of it, at least not in any way that could be useful to my academic work. (Maybe it’s because I’m way, way too left-brain?)

   But aesthetically, it’s very seductive. So I read it like I read poetry: its utility for me is the opening up of possibilities - awareness of the ways in which things could be/are otherwise.

8. Jean
   February 12th, 2005 @ 10:35 am

   p.s. by “your own impulse” I meant “one’s own impulse” - but how wanky would that look?

9. Glen
   February 12th, 2005 @ 2:05 pm

   Jean, I agree, Deleuze is perfectly useless for ‘cultstuds’, at least, the cultstuds that I learnt as an undergrad, discuss with students now, and most of what I am doing for my thesis. It is cool for experimenting with hypostatised concepts. If I’d had someone like Ian Buchanan as an undergrad lecturer/tutor I probably would’ve turned out deleuzifried. ‘Speaking for deleuze’ is not necessarily accurate if you are talking about what I have written. I attempt to resuscitate particular qualities in Deleuze’s thought in an entirely reactionary manner in the context of particular constraints of the blogosphere and in response to particular questions.

   The uselessness of Deleuze was driven home for me when in Sweden when the sorts of questions I was asking were not the sort of question being asked by others. Historically, the major trajectories in cultstuds, theoretical and practical, are enabling for certain things, we all know this. Deleuze’s stuff is also enabling to do certain things. The two have an overlap, but they are not the same set of elements. That is what I was trying to get at with my post in response to Danny.

   For example, I think Braidotti is asking a specifically ‘undeleuzian’ question of his corpus of work, going by her article, she also knows this. It enables her to experiment in certain ways. Cool. And it certainly is not a question of asking the right questions preprogrammed by the deleuze hegomochine, it is about bending it to your own devices. The case of Braidotti’s question in interesting, because D&G explicitly argue against the sorts of positions within their own work that asks such questions (here I am thinking of the n-sex and the nonhuman-sex from AO, which I use in my thesis to ask questions about car-human-system of automobility sexuality). Spivak is asking questions of Deleuze that do not necessarily enable a line of thought, that is, beyond the purely critical. What is the point of that? Is she arguing against Deleuze or academic fashion? What is the specific problem she is attempting to isolate?

   Claire Colebrook has also engaged with Deleuze from a feminist angle. One of her essays (from (1998)”Haunted Flesh” Signs, 24(1): 25-67) opens with a quote from AO:

   “We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack, The Women’s Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked.” AO, 61.

   If deleuzisms are another mode of oedipalisation (kind of like the way Deleuze talks about the history of philosophy as another oedipalisation), and it doesn’t work for your project, then tell it to get fucked. I love writing things where I exclaim to people, thoughts, and/or movements to get fucked - it’s part of who I am!

   And, Danny, Colebrook picks up on some of your questions regarding embodiment in that essay, through her discussion of eating disorders. As yet, I don’t understand why so many feminists influenced by Deleuze focus on eating disorders/food!?!?

   Anyway, I write and cars and car stuff, FFS! I need to post the funny French newspaper report about the first drag race in France in the 1970s. Classic. It gives an indication of how warped all this sort of ‘high concept’ thought is going to be ‘modified’.

10. Christian McCrea
    February 12th, 2005 @ 8:24 pm

    Just some notes.

    I’ve been seduced by Deleuze in the last two years, like a lot of people I suppose, the poetricks found a way past my cynicism for philosophy (still at the time a hairy quasi-activista for whom actions spoke prouder than words.)

    Jean, you are absolutely right about the theoretical fashion, Deleuze was very much in last year which means he has to be radically out, out damn spot this year. I’m sure Negri and Hardt will soon tumble out the windows. (prediction: mid-year, just *before* the Politics of Being conference). The philosophy squad at unimelb have already held me in low esteem for my Deleuzianism, but no grudges. Your heresy won’t be so for long!

    The writing in Deleuze has been the only philosophy I’ve read which can describe my way of being-in-the-world, adrift in energetic flows and whatnot (I’ll stay away from the aphorisms here), but I’ll be the first to say its usefulness for intervention, political or otherwise, hasn’t yet found me. It just seems right to a point. I often find myself defending anti-oepidus with the line that just because its popular now doesn’t mean it hasn’t been superseded. (Spivak, especially.)

    Deleuzians should be well aware of their own politics of presence, but as Danny points out, that’s not always the case: “Deleuzians tend to shrug off questions of gender, race, and subject formation as part of the well-established critique of Vertreten/speaking-for, when in fact a different logic of representation should be considered in these questions”.

    This is a problem… and I think one of the reasons this is would be there’s a *lot* of Deleuzians. So a) some of them haven’t got it all worked out yet (like me) and more importantly b) philosophy trends are annoying. Deleuzianism can have some very limiting discourses, but to be honest, last time I was in a room full of cultural studies people, I left in tears. I think bad theory can happen anywhere, and the usefulness of reading is really up our ability to hammering past discourses to present events. I still feel a twinge of nationalistic pride in the fact this country’s innate urge to keep things real permeates intellectual discourse.

    Its like Vice magazine. What’s worse - Vice magazine being racist, sexist and puerile - or being one of the thousands who dismiss it without understanding why it used to serve an interesting function (for a street press mag.)

    I’m interested in the way energy and play bounce off structure, so Deleuzianisms are more useful to me than they used to be. Mediations especially, is an essay I could go back to, but probably for different reasons. The person who introduced me to Deleuze said that to work usefully with his/their work, you need to *not* be a great theorist, and probably a bit lazy. I think it works.

11. Rowan
    February 14th, 2005 @ 11:19 am

    For an example of someone not afraid to speak against the grain (as Roland Barthes might say), check out Justin Clemens’s “A Thousand Little Stupidities: Why I hate Deleuze (and Guattari)”, Antithesis 8.2 (1997).

12. sandy
    February 15th, 2005 @ 12:34 pm

    This is slightly off-topic, but I would like to say something in defence of academic fashion. First of all, there is a long history to the dismissal of various forms of intellectual production as fads and fashions, which are tied to the comparably long history of the identification of fashion with women in terms of superficiality. The most significant recent iteration of this history was in defence of ‘traditional’ modes of ostensibly oppositional theory against the ‘merely cultural’ interests of minorities - queer theory, critical race studies, feminisms, etc. If nothing else, there is something suspiciously defensive about identifying other people’s theoretical interests with fashion, as against the implicit timelessness of your own.

13. mc gregg
    February 15th, 2005 @ 3:01 pm

    Thanks Sandy. Really agree with you. And Christian, a bit worried about how you’re calling the fashion seasons! This is kind of relevant tho. Writing this article I’m also interested in parochialism and assumed knowledge - the differences that exist in the dissemination of ideas between different cities, subcultures, and networks, ie. could you make the same diagnosis that Deleuze was ‘in’ last year if you weren’t in Melbourne? Are you only talking about Melbourne Uni, or your mates, or what? (BTW Rowan, find it really great that Antithesis - a Melbourne Uni journal - published that article, which I had heard about and am busy finding). Since I moved to Brisbane it seems hard to find a Deleuzian grad student compared with Sydney and Melbourne, for instance. Why is that? To partly address Jean’s point, this is how I want to introuduce some groundedness and context to my discussion.

    Debating about whether or not Deleuze is politically sound or philosophically acute is pretty far from my concerns in asking what Deleuzophobia is. I’m trying to talk about the effects and impressions generated by this thinker, what Deleuze summons as a signifier (despite his hatred of signifiers) - and especially the elitist behaviour that his writing is employed to sanction, which I’m sure we’d all agree Glen’s work stridently avoids.

    From a different angle, it strikes me as odd that people will often freely admit that they haven’t read Deleuze, or tried to read one or two of his books, but still proceed to offer an opinion on *his work* that is actually about how other people use his work.

    Anyway, Glen, could you talk more about what you mean by having a Deleuzian as an undergrad teacher and what that would do? Deleuzefried? or fied? So many concepts!

14. Jean
    February 15th, 2005 @ 4:46 pm

    Sandy - that’s a great point, hadn’t thought of it that way, and am suitably chastened. Mel - might the lack of deleuzianism in Brisvegas might be somehow connected to the (oft-bemoaned) ‘lack’ of “good theatre”, decent fashion and audiences for contemporary dance?

    i.e. we’re a prosaic backwater…

    I really like your meta-grounded theory idea re investigating this…

    

15. Jean
    February 15th, 2005 @ 4:48 pm

    And to be clear, I don’t feel like theoretical fashion is “mere” and that I am in a position to “dismiss” it: as I said, it feels heavy to me and fills me with anxiety.

    A bit like being the uncool kid at high school…

16. Glen
    February 15th, 2005 @ 6:48 pm

    mel g, yeah, especially when trying to hail a cab. you get fried like a short circuited piece of chicken, but without the 11 herbs and spices, so it is clammy, like it has been microwaved (anyone see the mythbusters last night? awesome). like when you take too many drugs, not bad drugs, but really good ones, and your brain kind of shuts down and your body only responds to obscure tea-based drinks flavoured with roots and imported from Japan. That or deleuze.

    but, seriously, I don’t take good drugs, no, really seriously, I needed a distraction, no, ok, now I am deathly serious, and there is no more evading the question…

    I have not yet anyone who has been ‘taught’ deleuze as an undergrad. I had to learn myself and I think so do most other people. There is a definite learning-your-self process you have to undergo when you first read deleuze. I have a feeling it closes down some people to the outside and forces them back on to themselves. Which is cool, you know, people can do what they dang well please, especially if you they fighting for something that doesn’t need crazy french bullshit to argue it. fried = closed down, over-cooked. I am talking about a process which goes both ways, from the ultra- to the anti-, hence why it is not ‘fied.’

    dunno? what was your expeience with the Aussie master of D.? carn, fess up!

    I had a deleuze/virilio specialist as an honours’ supervisor, but that didn’t really effect things, ‘coz before that I had no idea. I learn so much more teaching myself and asking my own questions.

    The other dismissal besides ‘fashion’ that I have encountered is that it is premised on nihilism. It is a rhetorical trick so conservative critics do not have to engage properly with what you do believe while their beliefs are being a-nihilated. I think it may be a hang-up from the totally whack ‘death of the social’ high-pomo days or something. I am not sure. It is stupid nevertheless…

17. Glen
    February 15th, 2005 @ 7:07 pm

    Two forgotten things

    1) the point about teaching yourself is that there are no conditioning rhetorics of teaching/learning that develop.

    2) And considering you are getting stuck into Badiou’s clamour of being yo might wanna check out this little number (from pli, ie warwick, the deleuze central in the UK):

    http://www.warwick.ac.uk/philosophy/pli_journal/pdfs/laerke_pli_8.pdf

    3) and something else I just remembered

18. home cooked theory » Blog Archive » Feminist cultural studies in Brisbane?
    April 25th, 2006 @ 2:42 pm

    [...] My intellectual isolation in Brisbane has been something I’ve found hard to articulate, because it has taken a while to establish enough of what’s really going on so that I know whether I’m actually imagining it. Initially the differences manifested in comical ways, such as the ‘postgrads don’t read Deleuze here’ notion this blog has documented before. From a cultural theory standpoint, Brisbane is identified with a history of Foucault scholarship, that manifests in a few different places; at UQ, a strong tradition of semiotics-inflected cultural studies (one that I’m not really encouraging to remain, if I can help it); another strand of cultural studies-inflected film and television studies, influenced by the work of (newly promoted, finally) Frances Bonner; a genre of television studies and public-sphere oriented media studies influenced by John Hartley at QUT (and, at a curriculum level now pioneered by the indefatigable Alan McKee); and the policy and industry foci that have become both the specialty, and unhelpfully cliched lot, of the QUT Creative Industries Faculty. Hartley, along with Stuart Cunningham, appear as the public face of this for many. [...]

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