On AmEx cosmopolitanism, part I

Posted on | February 16, 2005 | 11 Comments

Things are getting a little out of hand over at “For Amanda, especially”, so I’m going to take up some questions here in a new post. Something Glen writes has clarified a major part of my interest in Deleuz/ians/ists/ism:

I have not yet [sic] 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.

Glen seems to be describing a relationship between philosophy and autodidacticism, an implicit solitude in discovering the joy of a thinker’s work. That this learning by yourself is apparently the case ‘for most other people’ encountering Deleuze is something I find incredibly sad and frustrating because, to a ridiculos extent, I’m desperate to always learn, share and debate ideas with others. I think this is part of what I am here to do, whether in a professional capacity teaching students, or with friends, family and other people quite distant from academia. To be so isolated while reading Deleuze seems to contradict the pedagogic and writing experiments of the guy himself. Yet I suspect there is also a degree of heroic pleasure gained from many Deleuzians’ will to solitude. Besides, when don’t you need to be alone to absorb new thoughts? It’s pretty hard to learn in the space+time constraints of today’s classroom.

Glen mentions that I was taught by a leading Deleuze scholar as an undergrad, which certainly sheds some light on how long I’ve been thinking about these issues. There was one lecture on D&G in our 2nd and 3rd year Critical Theory course, which we weren’t tested on. In true English department fashion, the new blood was wheeled in for a guest lecture to make sure the course stayed a little bit hip. I used Essays Critical and Clinical in a couple of undergraduate essays and my Honours thesis. I found it pretty useful and interesting, probably because it was an easy way to ‘apply’ a theoretical model (symptomatology) to a writer’s style and be rewarded for it. Unfortunately for myself and for them, I now supervise students and tell them not to do this very thing that may have won me prizes but didn’t make me particularly proud of my work. It took me a long time to recover from being taught that achievement could be measured by coming first.

What I didn’t go in for at all was the sense of ownership of Deleuze that seemed to come with the territory when studying him. I think that’s why I avoided the well known books, Anti-Oedipus and 1000 Plateaus. I thought that they must have been seriously sophisticated and provocative to make someone so committed and defensive about them. I think I steered away from them so I wouldn’t be influenced in the same way. When I do read these books and others now, what I find is that I understand most of them, but still can’t figure out what triggers the preciousness – the debates about appropriate performance and the tiresome tiffs about Deleuze’s legacy. I really don’t think it’s about Deleuze at all, or that it’s the intention or fault of the particular individuals. Instead I think it’s the sound of an old form of gentlemanly practice struggling against its own redundancy, one manifestation of the way academia may well have been, but no longer needs to be. While I really like Deleuze’s writing, Deleuzism is a form of scholarship I write against at every opportunity, with all the capacity that’s been waiting to be harnessed for eight years.

Category: Research

Comments

11 Responses to “On AmEx cosmopolitanism, part I”

  1. danny
    February 16th, 2005 @ 5:14 pm

    Hey Mel – can you give examples of “the debates about appropriate perfromance and the tiresome tiffs about Deleuze’s legacy”? Do you mean the ones in the comments on your blog or others, or both?

    I wonder if there is more to it than a form of gentlemanly academia. I was struck by Christian’s post in For Amanda Especially (great title for a blog post on deleuze by the way) as “the only philosophy I’ve read which can describe my way of being-in-the-world”. I associate Deleuze with a kind of romantic subject-construction of the type that fuels music fandom. But while girls may be more interested in the rock/theory stars and what generates their mojo (clothes, liaisons, etc.); boys tend to hold the object itself (theory/sound) to be deeply imbued with utopian transformative potential. (A Thousand Neologisms contribute to that sense of potential). So I think you’re right to draw a distinction between using Deleuze and Deleuzism, and to suggest that this is a gendered distinction, but I think we can productively look beyond academia… I know people who carry a certain habitus of the intensely abstracted romantic

    and think: if you were an academic you’d be a deleuzian.

    I’d also say at the sociological level that I think there is something about urbanism/modernity to talk about here. I like your identification of the “alone-ness” of Deleuzism as it very simply explains the cultural limitations of such work, and the unfortunate legacy of Euro-modernity in valorising the “individual”, and of course the bulk of the theoretical work of recent times has been to try and address these exclusions! I’m learning a lot from this discussion.

  2. Glen
    February 16th, 2005 @ 6:26 pm

    It is very sad. A couple of minor points.

    Although as a postgrad I think there is a different mode of scholarly production/practice (ingrained in the set of expectations which p/g’s accept) than compared to the delicious beast we call the ‘academic,’ hmmm? I mean I need to produce the goods, derived from a single project, as if my life depended on it, which, to a certain extent, it does. I circle my project like a deranged dog that has found some interesting dead thing and chant in secret, obscure languages to bring it (back) to life. I am just hoping it is alive enough to convince my markers, Weekend at Bernie’s style. I would be good to be so convincing that they want to dance with the carcass or, better, they become seduced by the pretty dead thing. I want all my markers to be necrophiliacs.

    On the other hand, the ‘academic’ has the torturous luxury of doing all the wonderful things that ‘intellectuals’ are supposed to do. They can. It is a ‘job.’ Or what?

    I am not describing a situation that could have existed even 4 years ago. The necessary conditions of expectation had not been installed until the first crop of 3 year phd students. I don’t treat my PhD like a ‘job’ or even a career but my life. I allow myself to commit a specific violence of social self-isolation — a ‘will to solitude,’ away from ‘friends, family and other people quite distant from academia’ — that is separate from the philosophical isolation that you are discussing. As more people begin 3 year PhDs I think the line will become very blurred. The biopolitical production of intellectuals. When can I switch off? I think it is an important distinction.

    An example. Pretty much the only non-cultural studies/philosophy person I discuss deleuze with is a mate about to submit his PhD in material science (this week). He enjoys reading Delanda and he is one of those maths genius dudes who luckily didn’t take too many drugs as an undergrad. I enjoy hanging out with him because he is acutely aware of the pressures of doing a PhD and yet he, like me, attempts to remain ‘open’ to things happening around them, but struggles.

    Secondly, I have participated in online groups and email lists discussing Deleuze’s work. There are two problems with online groups and email lists.

    They eventually become infected by schizo-poets who either do not have English as their first language, which is cool, or they write as if English is not their first language. Maybe I am being too harsh, but people seem to confuse using deleuze’s thought as a synthesising stepping stone to think in creative ways with expressing some alleged creativity in ‘creative’ and non-sensical modes of discourse. I have never read something from Deleuze that was more nonsense than sense, that is, more absurd than it is truth, so I am not sure why such people decide that it is an appropriate mode and forum for _discussing_ deleuze’s work.

    The other problem with online discussion groups is that the difficult nature of Deleuze’s work means that those who could very easily help others through engaging in discussions or whatever are normally either too ‘busy’ (ie superstar Profs, what Dick Pels called the ‘privileged nomads’) or there is such a tragically huge gap in understandings that quite intellgient people speak past each other.

    The case in point here is the Spoon’s D&G list. Check the archives for who used to post there, Delanda, Hardt, Wise, Shapiro, Stivale, and so on. The schizo poets invaded and fucked it. The poor nobodies (like me!) who are left to pick up the pieces are really struggling.

    Second lastly, in defence of academic elitism. Deleuze’s stuff is very difficult. Yeah, it does require a heroic effort to understand, or at least it has for me to get to where I am, and I certainly am not a bloody expert. Attacking academic elitism as a function of power-hungry desire is great, but attacking the elitism of something (and elitism is probably the wrong word) that is extraordinarily difficult is a bit wrong-headed. It really is a ‘secret style conspiracy’ (to use another Christian-ism;), but that is not necessarily because those on the ‘inner’ want anyone to be on the ‘outer.’

    Lastly, the closing down of one’s self I was describing was not meant in a molar sense. I was making a really mundane point. People can still speak with others and help the world go round and all that stuff. I meant it in a (here we go!) deleuzian sense on a molecular level, where being ‘open’ is an awareness of the slippages and experiements across the thresholds of subjectivity of the subject positions that we invariably occupy. I did not mean it as being able to negotiate — learn, communicate, etc — with others in different subject positions (although problems may emerge here as second order ‘harmonics’).

    BTW, that [sic] was sick. ;) I feel like I am back doing journalism, getting quoted and stuff.

  3. mc gregg
    February 16th, 2005 @ 7:07 pm

    Does anyone else read this blog?

  4. mc gregg
    February 16th, 2005 @ 7:17 pm

    Seriously, Glen – one day I would like to see one of your major points!

    Danny, I am not talking about blogs at all. I am talking about people I have met, talked about Deleuze with, and sat through classes and conference papers of. As well as a lot of the Deleuzian scholarship that has been circulating for the past 5-10 years addressing in the main French and American intellectual publics. Here is one particularly virulent example from a book I read today:

    ‘The vultures already have the scent. Over the last two or three years the academic industry has suddenly “discovered” Deleuze, and paraphrases, commentaries, and critical analyses are now coming out at an alarming rate. Whoever said, Better dead than read? They’re dead and they’re being read to death. Not that it changes anyone’s life, or “the world as it is” in any way. It just makes sure that after Genealogy as Critique, something like “Critique on a Plateau” will be dumped on your plate. It came from Duke University Press in Spring 2000, a much needed “metacommentary” on Deleuze [Referring to Ian Buchanan's book] Don’t miss it. Everything Deleuze hated most and spent his life fighting – dialectics, utopia, social critique – is there. 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.” What they meant by that wasn’t a philosophy calling for a separate “praxis,” or “use value,” but on the contrary for a kind of experimentation directly engaged in reality and responding in the present, without any preconceived idea, to the singularity of the situation’ (from ‘Doing Theory’ in Sylvere Lotringer and Sande Cohen’s French Theory in America, Routledge New York and London, 2001. Thanks sandy).

    Get the picture?

  5. mc gregg
    February 16th, 2005 @ 7:30 pm

    PS. Don’t even know where to begin with the comment about girls being ‘more interested in rock/theory stars and what generates their mojo’.

    Um, major difference between talking about the changing conventions of an historically privileged profession and what chicks might like.

  6. danny
    February 16th, 2005 @ 10:14 pm

    Oh, I get the people you’re talking about. The “true school revolutionaries”. Well, that’s how I started to read Deleuze as well in the autodidactical way that brings such communion (1992 I think, I’ll need to check my RE/Search subscriptions). But I’d discovered feminists and feminism by then and there were other ways to different forms of living being opened up. I think there’s something about one’s first language that’s really important, the work that really moves your sense of what’s possible for the first time. Which makes teaching undergrads very important! In the bad and blunt stardom analogy I was not (or should not – thanks :7) have been talking about “chicks” and what they like, but the relationships between male romances in various subcultures (music, theory, politics, etc.) to which chicks are the counterpoint. Lotringer is the apotheosis of that phenomenon, and I think his audience is a very good example of how this type of romance is transferable across domains of practice (music/theory/politics). I think I sounded like Alan McKee at the end of that last sentence, I hope he reads this blog.

  7. Glen
    February 17th, 2005 @ 12:05 am

    Why? whats wrong with me and Danny? I reckon we make for pretty entertaining bloggophisists :P Emphasis on the pretty, yeah.

    The next wave will be ‘born again’ badiouists, and like the opening of that Vietnam War tv show — Platoon — they want it painted black.

    I am going to stick with Deleuze. Badiou is just a shockingly bad deleuzian anyway…

  8. mc gregg
    February 17th, 2005 @ 9:50 am

    ha ha, glen, yr such a kidder

  9. sandy
    February 18th, 2005 @ 10:47 am

    Oh Glen, I thought Badiou’s book on Deleuze was beautiful!

    I think a large part of the historical acuity of debates on Deleuzianism (or whatev) have to do with his position in the anglo academy, and cultural studies, through the eighties and most of the nineties. Of course, this is pretty much history as I can reconstruct it, but it seems that for a lot of that time the import-theorists who held intellectual hegemony were widely received as apolitical or depoliticising – especially Baudrillard, but also Derrida, and even Foucault. (The point isn’t that these writers aren’t political, but that the bulk of the work carried out in their names was effectively depoliticising in that it pursued a break with structuralist and other marxisms.) Like in that Lotringer essay, he quotes some artist who organised an anti-Baudrillard show and called Deleuze a tremendous political inspiration, etc. Australian academia (and para-academia) was probably an exception to this, with journals like Working Papers etc. But it’s clear that such projects were controversial, even here – and the controversy was over whether such “esoteric” forms of theory were or could be political (or whether politics consisted in a return to class, race, etc.)

    So maybe what I think is that there was a conjuncture where the proper name “Deleuze” could map a way to try and avoid a pincer movement between a depoliticising theoretical aestheticism and an anti-intellectual demand for authenticity-effects. A line of flight, if you want, but as D&G like to emphasise not all lines of flight end up well. And this one probably carried at least the seed of the kinds of ressentiment I think Mel is, at least partly, talking about.

  10. Glen
    February 18th, 2005 @ 11:58 am

    Hmmm, what do you mean by ‘authenticity-effects’? Like “keeping it real” sort of thing? And ‘depoliticising theoretical aestheticism’ do you mean those that take theory as the ‘problem’ which they try to ‘solve’ rather than a version of something closer to the ‘keeping it real’?

    If so, example of depoliticising trajectory, David Muggleton’s “Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style.”

    To connect with you initial point, there was a debate I was attempting to quash on troppo armadillo over the critical literacy furore. People were somehow trying to link critical literacy to some abstracted, hypostatised and po-mo ‘loss of referentiality’ methodology, here:

    http://troppoarmadillo.ubersportingpundit.com/archives/008500.html

    [I wasn't trying to quash it out of a fascist desire or whatever, but because it was stupid. My efforts did not make an impact, haha]

    And in terms of the nouveau Badiouists (and neo-Zizekians) I was referring to, check out the K-Punk blog, then have a look at his (totally deleuzian) thesis, which is also online. Oh, it is tragic. Theory seems to be that person’s problem, plus the state of the capitalist world or something.

  11. The casualised working bee
    February 19th, 2005 @ 10:32 am

    oh man, methinks deleuze would suggest chilling out. i think it is o.k. to read deleuze and not get it, like i don’t get much of this argument and the way deleuze-speak litters the conversation. but i am the working class you cultural studiers r going to save. geez … ungrateful pleb huh? don’t have to speak or write like him, do we? pleeeeeease say no!

    from what i am reading there is no revolution emanating from deleuze’s arse (bergson, nietzche and spinoza are all up there i have heard), but a couple of interesting ideas that once read can mess with the way we move, perceive, and make ‘sense’ of our antics as we go about everyday things. i try to just bend over and let his concepts do something, AND that is the challenge i reckon, trying to relax when you know it is going to hurt. don’t worry about using theory, applying theory, spreading theory, or keeping it real – just let Deleuze ass fuck you and c what happens – try to reeeelaxxxx. now where did i put my hammer and sickle.

    buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz