Date:         Fri, 01 Sep 95 16:14:28 EDT
From: CJ Stivale <CSTIVAL-AT-CMS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>
Subject:      Refrain/Affect/Hecceites



Greg characterizes what I'm undertaking in the Cajun dance/music
project much too generously... but I'll take it!! :

"[Not to forget one has a body] is precisely what you have done with
those additional pages (the prologue and intro) of your essay; they
make all the difference in the world.  Here are the bodies, your
body: they're the real color of the essay's soul. My response after
reading them was: well, why didn't you say so in the first place?
These pages clear up a lot of my questions."

Because "in the first place," I tried to intervene rapidly but at
great length into the "Affect/Refrain" discussion by a quick
infusion of something already written under (then) current revision,
long excerpt from the Cajun dance/music essay for
Kellner/Cvetkovich. It was already long enough that the List
administrators did not post it *to* the List, but archived it, w/ a
notification of its location there. I had excised a 5 page excursus
on 'Cajun Origins', i.e. recounting the forced migration from Acadie
in 1755-56, then a quick evolution of Cajun dance/music forms. So to
lengthen it further, well, it was not feasible... Hence, the bright
idea to include it where most appropriate, in response to your
pertinent suggestion that the D&G stuff be situated more
substantially.

Says Greg further:
"These pages also correct an imbalance that I thought the essay--in
its prior form--had: namely, that cajun music & dance seemed more an
occasion for explaining (and putting into use) Deleuze and
Guattari's theory/concepts (which, frankly, is a worthy enough task
in and of itself) but, when added up, the cajun scene didn't get as
much back in return as it gave.  . . .  But the balance seems right
now."

This is a struggle for me in the entire project, because frankly, I
don't really want to write a book that uses the Cajuns music/dance
forms to 'explain' D&G. But I find their concepts so useful at
times for understanding 'events' that it's hard not to employ them.
In any case, the long piece that has generated this discussion
concentrates a lot of material that I intend to spread out more
widely in the ms. Once I get that far, that is.

I excised a passage in what I've just cited:
"These pages clear up a lot of my questions.  (I could, of course,
cry 'foul' that your response is arranged so that my most pointed
questions follow your now-included sensuous descriptions of cajun
music and dance.  But I'll accept your acknowledgement of a certain
'bassackward'ness in your post's conclusion.)"

In putting Greg's most pointed questions last, I had no strategy in
mind other than not to elide them completely. In fact, Greg's
questioning of the place/space distinction has kept my mind
churning. Not only have I consulted one marvelous text that has
helped me with this distinction -- Doreen Massey's _Space, Place,
and Gender_ (U Minn 1994) --, I've also decided that I've got a bit
too fast on the question of affect as well (the chapter entitled
"Theorizing Affect: Twentieth-Century Mass Culture Criticism" in Ann
Cvetkovich's _Mixed Feelings_ <Rutgers 1992> suggests how much more
work I need to do).
So what I hope to work on sometime soon (let's try to forget the
fact that course preps are upon us... thank god I don't have to
switch offices, like Greg has had to) is a revised intro chapter (of
which I've sent the first section). However, I don't know how much
D&G will be involved in those kinds of introductory
"putting-theoretical-positions-into-place", so they might not be
appropriate for this list.

Says Greg:

"One additional thing in this regard: these 'new' prefatory pages
also bring, to your essay, a better sense of 'home.' That is, they
give the essay a greater sense of [personal] place (never mind our
place/space debate for the moment ... I suspect that, when we've
reached some agreement about the 'ease' and/or 'struggle' of
becomings, we'll also have gone some distance toward resolving what
is involved in the affective production of space)."

On the question of "home," well, that's something I need to work
on further, since I have notes from the "Refrain" chapter of ATP
precisely on that topic, and I want to try to bring it in. Greg
reminds us:

"while I know that a house is not a home [following the child's song
of _ATP_, D&G say "Now we are at home.  But home does not preexist
..." (311)] and that by invoking "home" one cannot help but call up
the way in which it has been histor-ically and differentially
gendered (Meaghan Morris, for one, talks about this somewhere ...
"Henry Parkes Motel" maybe?), "home"--in some necessarily
reconfigured sense--is what you carry with you.  Nomads aren't
forever leaving home; they're carrying their home on their backs
(those of us with children--like Karen H and myself--occasionally
carry 'home' a bit more to the side and slightly off one hip)."

In a similar vein, I've latched on a phrase by Edouard Glissant,
"l'errance enracine'e", roughly translated as "rooted wandering", as
a way to describe the Cajuns: settled into and associated with a
region, they are nonetheless everywhere, displaced to various metro
areas for economic reasons, in which Cajun "clusters", affinity
groups spring up (e.g. Atlanta, Chicago, L.A., Minneapolis).

Thanks for the textual/musical riffs, Greg... Not that I'm familiar
with the artists, but I might have some new incentive to listen
elsewhere and otherwise.

CJ Stivale

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