The joy of intuition, the joy of concepts
Posted on | March 16, 2005 |
Elizabeth Grosz gave a wonderful lecture this afternoon at UQ. It made me feel a lot better about having spent the last two months wrestling my Deleuzian demons, and couldn’t have come at a better time - two days before my chapter deadline. Like Anne, I need to believe in the kind of thinking Deleuze shows us to be possible, even though I remain almost hysterically sceptical of the way his ideas are often deployed. But now I realise my hysteria is partly due to an ongoing bewilderment with the world of academe in general, which is something I am facing more and more lately, and given my few guides, will take a much longer timeframe to understand.
After so much reading, writing and thinking, I’ve decided I can only really manage to deal with the most concrete of examples when trying to see the value in theory. Which is why I found the concluding gesture to Elizabeth’s talk so fitting. When she received her final applause, she promptly handed over the paper she’d just given to her hosts. The slight shrug of her shoulders seemed to say, “I’m done with this. It was an event intended just once, for you. It’s now open for anyone to use the way they want to. I’m setting it free.”
Check the CHED website over the next little while and see if it works for you.
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11 Responses to “The joy of intuition, the joy of concepts”
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March 17th, 2005 @ 12:45 pm
hey, I just got my copy of Delanda’s _Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy_ yesterday, and so far I am very impressed. The initial exposition of Deleuze’s ontology is the most straightforward I have come across. When or if I ever teach some of this stuff, this book is going on the reading list.
The maths stuff is in there too. Maths looks like being the new (philosophical) black.
March 17th, 2005 @ 12:48 pm
Yeah, just when I was starting to get over my first big hurdle, philosophy, they want me to enjoy maths too? Ain’t gonna happen.
March 17th, 2005 @ 1:08 pm
Deleuze archive. There isn’t much good stuff on the new archive…
New:
http://lists.driftline.org/listinfo.cgi/deleuze-guattari-driftline.org
Old:
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~spoons/
March 17th, 2005 @ 1:09 pm
Oh, but it has already moved. So the old archive is at the new list home.
March 17th, 2005 @ 6:16 pm
“I need to believe in the kind of thinking Deleuze shows us to be possible, even though I remain almost hysterically sceptical of the way his ideas are often deployed.”
Nice phrase and a healthy approach
- are you sure, though, that this is just about you coming to terms with academia? I mean, there does seem to be a particular feeling to the way that Deleuze’s work is taken up by people that is, if not unique, then distinctive. I’m not sure what that distinctiveness is, though I would have liked to hear Grosz’s talk.
Along with two others, I did heavy math at school and Glen I’m afraid I’m yet to see its philosophical appeal
March 17th, 2005 @ 6:33 pm
Hi Danny, no it’s not just that, which is why I said ‘partly’ and why after much hesitation I still decided to follow through with writing the paper. Nearly there…
March 17th, 2005 @ 8:24 pm
Danny, I’m not sure it’s that distinctive, although I think you speak more from the privileged position of actually understanding Deleuzianese (by which, mel, I don’t mean ’stuff Deleuze wrote’, but stuff that Deleuzians do) before critiquing it. Instead, I’m going to resort to the only available stock of high cultural capital I have to draw an analogy. For me, it’s only distinctive in the way that, say, Schoenberg is distinct from Stockhausen…the music (as ‘activated’ in use) and fans of both inhabit very similar spaces in the social-cultural-economic matrix.
For the record, I did hardcore maths too, and I like the kind with more letters and fewer numbers (algebra and calculus) and could not comprehend the kind with graphy things.
March 17th, 2005 @ 10:58 pm
Looking forward to the paper Melissa! Jean, I know a little bit of Stockhausen and Schoenberg, but I’m not sure I get that analogy :). Except that I’ve known a few stockhausen fans that do like Deleuze. But you’re right, I think I understand Deleuzianese (or Deleuzism as I think Mel put it initially) quite well, as I’ve lived it, much better than I understand Deleuze’s writing - and this throws up some challenges for what I think mc gregg has written about previously on academic ethics, of trying to read things in context and inside out. I find it very difficult to do that with deleuze as my reading is overdetermined by the way it has been taken up within specific communities I have been associated with. In idealistic moments that worries me, but practically I just see it as unwanted waste product from the “read what the people you admire read” strategy, the way I tend to find out about stuff socially rather than disciplinarily, and whatever the bad parts of that are, it’s good to know that some people are doing the work properly that I’m too lazy to do, and so I think Spivak, Braidotti, and Gregg will be enough Deleuze for me this year. Hopefully enough to gain some hints on the kind of thinking Deleuze shows us to be possible, which I don’t remember from my last encounter with him “in person”.
March 18th, 2005 @ 12:12 am
Ah, my point is so much simpler than that: I meant Stockhausenists and Schoenbergites occupy much the same space as one another, in sociological terms (avant-garde, high cultural, etc etc) in relation to the classical music world and the musicsphere beyond that, as Deleuze(ians) and Theorist X/Y/Z do in academia (and the world of ideas-as-words beyond that), despite the minutiae of differences between them that insiders can talk about until the proverbial ruminants come home.
March 18th, 2005 @ 1:32 pm
Hmmm, so the correct answer to my question to my Grade 10 maths teacher (”Sir, why do we have to do quadratic equations/”) should have been “Well, one day, young lad, you may be interested in French philosophy” instead of “Shut up, Bahnisch”?
Speaking of philosophy, Antonio Negri’s copping some flak from the Culture Warriors:
http://larvatusprodeo.redrag.net/2005/03/18/tutorials-of-terror-conferences-of-communism-quads-of-quiddity/
March 19th, 2005 @ 11:37 pm
Mark, that is not flak, that is conversation participation: where people feel like they have to say something about an issue when they probably shouldn’t, because, in fact, they say nothing anyway. Whoever said it, I think Foucault, was right… there _is_ not enough silence in the world.
I am still struggling through Time for Revolution and I still don’t really know what the hell Negri means when he says the proletariat is defined by its mobility. Sandy said it was probably a social factory thing, I dunno. Certainly doesn’t belong to any of the mobility paradigms with which I am familiar. I wish Negri had come because I would’ve asked him a bloody question about it.
Now it looks like I don’t have the chance because of spineless Australian academics. I hope I never get into a situation in my life where I have little choice but to kowtow to reactionary cockheads. I would be telling them to fuck off as I resign from my job.
Ha, I could go back to working in a servo. Or, better yet, I could open my own speedshop.