Differences & Repetitions

Looks great…

4th Biennial Philosophy and Literature Conference at Purdue University
April 9-10, 2010
Purdue University, West Lafayette

Deadline for Paper Submission:
January 15, 2010

The philosopher Michel Serres once described Gilles Deleuze as “an excellent example of the dynamic movement of free and inventive thinking.” Without a doubt, Deleuze was one of the most singular and prolific philosophers of the 20th century. It is no surprise then, that the impact of Deleuze’s thought continues to reverberate throughout a host of diverse disciplines including Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Law, Visual Arts, Film Studies, and Education. With recognition of Deleuze’s influence in these various fields, and in the spirit of Serres’ assessment, this conference seeks to motivate an exploration of Deleuze’s inventive thinking in the particular areas of politics and ethics.

Thus, this conference will serve as a platform, bringing together graduate students and faculty interested in engaging, developing, or critically examining the political and ethical dimensions of Deleuze’s work. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: immanent vs. transcendent criteria in ethics, political theory, law and jurisprudence; the role of the State in relation to capitalism; the possibility of social forms of organization radically exterior to the State forms; the positive or productive function of desire as a creative force directly invested in the social field; the problem of micro-fascism with respect to individual and collective processes of subjectivation; the forms of resistance enabled by minor literature and other processes of becoming-minor; the conception of cartography as a critical and transformative social analytic of power relations. This two-day conference will consist of four panels, each with three to four accepted graduate students presenting, three keynote addresses, and a wine and cheese reception.

Keynote Speakers
We will host three preeminent Deleuze scholars as keynote speakers: Daniel Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky, from Purdue University, and Eugene Holland, from Ohio State University. Dr. Smith is known for national and international projects including translations of Deleuze and Klossowski and several works on Deleuze leading up to the forthcoming publication of his book on Deleuze’s philosophical system. Dr. Holland specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. He has published widely including a 1999 volume on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and a forthcoming book on Nomad Citizenship. Dr. Plotnitsky has contributed numerous publications on Deleuze and on the topics of science, literature, and philosophy. He is currently working on a book entitled Space-Time-Matter-Thought: Non-Euclideanism from Riemann and Deleuze, and Beyond.

Conference Eligibility and Submission Process
We welcome submissions from graduate students of any discipline working on the political or ethical facets of Deleuze’s philosophy. Submissions will be accepted via email at phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2010. Authors should attach both the paper and an abstract (500 word limit) as a Word document. The author’s name and affiliation should be omitted from the body of the paper. In addition, the author should include the text of the abstract in the body of the message. Be sure to include the following information in the email: full name, departmental affiliation, degree program, and the title of your paper. Accepted authors will receive notification no later than February 15, 2010.

Contact Information
For updates, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/idis/phil-lit/conference/. All additional questions can be directed to Erin Kealey or Rocky Clancy via email at: phil-lit-conference@purdue.edu.

D&R readers absolutely must watch this video! It’s modeled after the political “attack ads” that appear frequently on U.S. television around election time. Here, though, politicians aren’t dueling, philosophers are, and Immanuel Kant is on the receiving end of the smear campaign. It’s truly hilarious, if, ultimately, rather apt.

Thanks to my colleague John Lucaites for passing along the link. Share and enjoy!

Differences and Repetitions began in many respects as a blog about the individual and collaborative writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It’s always been about more than that, of course, but many of my earliest readers/interlocutors were fellow admirers of their work. I’m writing now to propose an experiment involving those of you with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari, and those of you who might be intrigued to participate for other reasons.

I’ve just completed a draft of a short paper on Deleuze and Guattari, which I’m scheduled to present at the US National Communication Association convention next week in Chicago, Illinois. It’s part of a panel organized by my friend and colleague, Mehdi Semati, on the theme, “Against Communication: On the Deleuzoguattarian Ethics of Refusal (to Communicate).” Here’s the deal: each of the panelists has chosen a short passage from the duo’s work that says something about communication. My selection, which comes from What Is Philosophy? is this: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (108; emphasis in original). Our task is to explicate and complicate our respective passages, in the strong sense in which Deleuze uses those terms. “To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate,” he writes in Proust and Signs. “But this ‘explication’ is identified with the development of the sign itself” (2000: 17).

This is where you come in. I’ve set up a page on wikidot.com, which, like Wikipedia, allows users to view, comment on, and edit the document I’ve drafted. You can access the paper by clicking here. You don’t need to do anything special to edit it; no registration or login is required. All you need to do is click the “edit” box near the bottom of the page, and the rest is more or less self-explanatory. If you’d rather not actively edit, you’re always welcome to read the paper and email comments/ responses to me: striphas@indiana.edu. Alternatively, you can leave your comments here on D&R.

I’m interested in soliciting your input and collaboration for several reasons. For starters, I’d love some advance feedback on the piece before presenting it. But beyond that, having read Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, and related materials, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the creative possibilities of distributed peer production. Wikis and other such technologies seem to me commensurate, at least in principle, with Deleuze and Guattari’s injunction from A Thousand Plateaus: “Write, form a rhizome…” (1987: 10). I thought it might be intriguing to try something like dissolving the speaking (or writing) subject in a piece ostensibly about “communication.”

Anyone who contributes will, of course, get appropriately credited on the piece. I thank you in advance for your input and look forward to seeing how the essay shapes up.

Though it’s always been more than this, Differences & Repetitions began in many respects as a Deleuze blog. At the time I was teaching a graduate seminar, “The Problem of the Media in Deleuze and Guattari,” and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy was very much on my mind in the fall of 2005. In a way it often continues to be, though sometimes other issues and intellectual concerns need to take priority both in life and here on this blog. As this semester winds down, though, I find myself with just a little more time to think and write than when we’re in full-swing. And here, in anticipation of composing an essay on the concept of critique, I’ve found myself more fully engaged once again with Deleuzo-Guattarian (mostly Deleuzian) philosophy.

The odd thing is, inasmuch as I’m gripped by the individual and collaborative writings of D&G, and while many in my department poke fun at my “Deleuzianism” (I bring this on myself, as I have a poster of Deleuze on my office wall), my work rarely comes across as Deleuzo-Guattarian in any clear or direct way–and readers who know my writing are welcome to correct me if you think I’m wrong. Granted, I at times refer directly to the work of D&G, and I occasionally–and I really mean occasionally–pilfer ideas and vocabulary from them. Still, I don’t believe that my research reads as particularly Deleuze/Guattari-inspired, at least in the same way as that of many scholars who claim an interest in D&G. I interact intensively with Deleuze and Guattari, in other words, especially in preparation for writing, but in the end I have a tendency to leave them behind.

My question is, why? And it’s this question that leads me back to Charles Stivale’s brilliant question from his Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: how can one be Deleuzian? I suppose, for me, “being” Deleuzian (or, really, Deleuzo-Guattarian, for as someone with an alphabetically late-occurring last name, I can appreciate the travails of second authorship) means thinking with or alongside Deleuze and Guattari but doing so in the background, more than, say, employing a whole host of their concepts explicitly. So, for example, my book manuscript explores an emergent set of consumer practices that might well be describe in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms as “becoming actual.” And yet, I don’t use that language until the final chapter, and only then do I use it in passing. In a more general sense, my commitment to cultural studies, and thus to the idea of articulation, in many respects disposes me to think and analyze “rhizomatically.” Nevertheless, I cannot really recall a time when I used that specific language in a published essay.

I’m not trying to set out here a normative prescription by which one ought to “be” (or become) Deleuzo-Guattarian. Indeed, I think of some of the most intriguing work coming out of Deleuzo-Guattarian cultural studies, much of which refers more explicitly (and successfully, I think) to Deleuzo-Guattarian language than does my published research. Here I’m thinking of the work of Greg Seigworth, Jennifer Daryl Slack, Steve Wiley, Greg Wise, and others. Still, I wonder if, in the end, the question “How can one be Deleuzo-Guattarian?” is best answered by trying to start from their work, with the intention then of trying to move away from it. That’s what’s seemed to work best for me, at any rate.

P.S. This might well be my last post of 2006, and if so, let me wish all of my readers the happiest of winter holidays and good cheer for 2007. Peace.

Tonight I had the good fortune of seeing Donna Haraway deliver a lecture here at Indiana University. Her talk, “We Have Never Been Human: When Species Meet,” was the keynote address at IU’s first-ever Kindred Spirits conference, which is taking place here today, tomorrow, and throughout the weekend. It promises to be a remarkable event interrogating the relationship between human and non-human animals. The lineup even includes (among other notables) Carole Adams, whose The Sexual Politics of Meat is a remarkable, thought-provoking book about vegetarianism.

I’m writing, though, to talk about Haraway’s relationship to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Judging by the title of the talk, perhaps it comes as no surprise to hear that one of her objects of interest was Deleuze and Guattari’s chapter from A Thousand Plateaus, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible” (chapter 10). She began by noting that many had suggested to her over the years that her work was Deleuzo-Guattarian in spirit, and so after some time she decided, finally, to read them. She also noted many of Deleuze’s individual writings (most notably one of my favorites, Difference and Repetition), and generally seemed laudatory toward his larger body of work. (I’m not sure how she feels about Guattari, who was the self-avowed environmentalist of the duo.) ATP chapter 10 was another story, however. She described it as something to the effect of, “the 50 pages that deserved to be burned at the inquisition.” Ouch. If I gather correctly, she most objected to their celebrating the wolf pack and denigrating the image of the lone, older woman walking her dog.

From a feminist standpoint, I can certainly understand the objection. I also agree that D&G are wrong to dismiss the significance of the woman-dog scene, which, as Haraway pointed out, is a deeply complex moment of interspecies encounter. As a dog parent (see the photo above-left of my canine companion), I intuitively “get” what she was getting at. What’s intriguing to me, though, is how, in a way, Haraway seems to shoot out the other side in trying to achieve an ethics of interspecies interaction. To me what’s so significant and interesting about D&G’s discussion of the wolf pack is precisely the absence of people in that moment, or their implicit suggestion that philosophy/critical theory need not always return in some moment to the human in order to address broad ontological questions. Haraway, in the end, seems to want to understand the human through the non-human and vice-versa, which I take to be a different kind of project–a new humanism, I think, rather than a Deleuzo-Guattarian ahumanism. And for my part, the latter continues to be a more compelling project, precisely because it doesn’t demand that human beings always dwell within the philosophical proscenium.

I don’t plan on lighting any fires at the inquisition anytime soon, in other words. I should say, though, to be fair, that Haraway’s talk was provocative, engaging, and nothing short of amazing–precisely the kind of work people have come to expect from her. I was lucky to have had a chance to see her in person.

Last week, the review section of The Chronicle of Higher Education contained an intriguing piece by Krin Gabbard entitled, “Cinema and Media Studies: Snapshot of an ‘Emerging’ Discipline.” He just came off a stint as program chair of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), which is the major professional organization representing scholars in those fields. The piece makes a pitch for the Council of Learned Societies’ formally recognizing media studies as a discipline. Even more intriguing to me, however, was his discussion of trends he saw in programming for the upcoming SCMS convention. He had this to say:

The work of [Laura] Mulvey and those who extended her theories on the gender politics of representation is hardly forgotten, but it is no longer front and center. Indeed, Mulvey’s name is nowhere to be seen in the stack of proposals for the 2006 conference. And I found only one mention of Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who was a major influence on Mulvey. . . . Lacan is no longer a central figure. Even Slavoj Zizek, the flamboyant theorist who revived Lacan in the 1990s, is absent from the proposals. The one theorist who pops up repeatedly in the proposals is Gilles Deleuze, another Frenchman, but one with little patience for the old therapeutically based models of psychoanalysis and cultural politics.

I was at once thrilled and saddened to read these words. When I taught my graduate seminar, “The Problem of the Media in Deleuze and Guattari,” last term, I felt like my class and I really were on the cutting-edge of work in media studies. I still think we were. On the other hand, I’m somewhat bothered by the prospect of such cutting-edge work going mainstream. What put me off more than anything in Gabbard’s Chronicle piece was his subsequent explanation of Deleuze’s work, which (a) reduced it merely to the concept of the rhizome, and (b) forgot that Guattari was an integral party involved in advancing that concept.
I worry that, like Lacan before him, Deleuze might be spawning something of an industry. And here I’m reminded of Ken Wark’s prophetic words in his Hacker Manifesto:

D+G [Deleuze and Guattari] describe in somewhat formal, general terms the space of possibility of hacker thought. But their version of escape from history can easily take on an aristocratic form, a celebration of singular works of high modernist art and artifice. These in turn are all too easily captured by the academic and cultural marketplace, as the designer goods of the over-educated. D+G all too easily become the intellectual’s Dolce and Gabbana. (n. 91)

Is a Deleuze industry something to be welcomed or something from which to recoil in horror?