Subject: MP: On Approaching the Text - Part THE LAST:) [VIII]
Date: Sun, 20 Mar 1994 11:00:25 -0600 (CST)
From: "Michael J. Current" <mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net>



     Because of the difficulties which I have repeatedly alluded to,  _A
Thousand Plateaus_ is a book that is often picked up and put down just as
quickly.  My goal in these posts has been to try to provide you with some
incentive and some help to stick with it long enough to see what it may
hold for you. As such, these posts have been of the nature of an
invitation.  But it seems appropriate to close this series with an
acknowledgement that _Mille Plateaux_ is also, for all its virtues, in
some ways a problematic text, one that we must approach not only openly
and visceraly, as I and Massumi and Deleuze have urged, but also
critically.  The final quote I will offer serves to remind us of this.

     Dana Polan is the translator of Deleuze and Guattari's book _Kafka_,
in which many of the concepts we will examine here found their first
articulation.  The following passage is from her "Translator's Preface"
to that volume.  As someone who approaches the text out of a desire to
find new spaces for thoughtful political intervention, I believe these
words to be of great import (even though I may not be in complete
agreement with the assertions that relate to the concept of
_devenir-femme_).

     Not that one should applaud any use of _Kafka_ whatsoever.  Already,
     some of the American critical adulation of other Deleuze-Guattari
     texts. . .suggests how quickly a politics of the rhizomatic can
     assuage the unhappy guilty conscience of the depoliticized
     intellectual by offering him or her the alibi of a process in which
     everything one does can be something that one can pretend is
     politically engaged.  The notion of the rhizome as an endless
     pattern in which everything is linked to everything else can lead to
     a slide from a notion like the Leninist one of struggle as a
     calulated engagement with the _weakest_ link in the chain to a kind
     of anarcho-voluntarist fantasy that every link is, in every time
     and place, equally weak, equally appropriate as a point of
     application for one's critical energies.  Dangerously, despite all
     the efforts of Deleuze and Guattari to deconstruct hierachies,
     American literary criticism may treat them the way it has generally
     treated Mikhail Baktin (in many ways a very similar sort of thinker)
     - not as a theorist of the ties of collective enunciation and minor
     literature but as aesthetes of a high-culture avant-garde closed in
     on its own fetish of interiority.  Deleuze and Guattari themselves
     admit that there is a fine line between territorializing and
     deterritorializing processes, and it is easy for their work to be
     appropriated to the most divergent and even contradictory of ends.
     One hopes that a translation of _Kafka_ will be something that
     readers will question, as well as use.
          It is necessary to keep watch over the ways in which what
     Deleuze and Guattari present as progressive deterritorializations
     may necessitate simultaneous reterritorializations in other sites of
     the rhizome.  Most especially, as Alice Jardine has pointed out, the
     lines of escape tend to be especially open to privileged male
     figures: for all their talk about a _devenir-femme_, a becoming
     woman, Deleuze and Guattari tend to abstract this process away from
     any tie to the historically specific situation and struggle of
     women.  Men get the chance to take flight from their entrappment,
     but women get no chance at all except to be perfectly invisible in
     the flow of the discourse.  A picking up of Deleuze and Guattari,
     then, would have to examine not only what they enable but also what
     they disenable, what they close off. [1]

[1]  Poulan, Dana.  "Translator's Introduction."  In _Kafka: Towards a
Minor Literature_, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.  [Trans. of
_Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure_.  Paris: Minuit, 1975].
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.  P. xxvi.  [Reference
omitted.]

- - - - -

So. . . .

What is a rhizome?
What does it do?
What do we do with it?

Michael
-- 
---------------------------Michael J. Current----------------------------
 mcurrent-AT-picard.infonet.net -or- -AT-ins.infonet.net -or- -AT-nyx.cs.du.edu
Specializing in Philosophy, Queer Studies, Depression, & Unemployment :)
 737 - 18th Street, #9 * Des Moines, IA * 50314-1031 *** (515) 283-2142
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AND IT EFFECTIVELY STOPS PEOPLE FROM THINKING." - GILLES DELEUZE
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