File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-10-27.132, message 20


Date: Fri, 11 Oct 1996 13:49:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Educational Practice & Nomad Philosophy


On Fri, 11 Oct 1996, Mr Christopher McMahon wrote:

> Dear Tom, 
> Not Tony, sorry.
> Thanks for the email clarifying your position on toughtaction.

But is it really a position?

 I found the
> egs of nurses etc. especially helpful. 

In what way? One has to bear in mind that thoughtaction as I'm 
understanding it here has that example operating at the infinite limit of 
philosophy.

I'll have to meditate on  this some
> more. Clearly you are not using the idea of violence as I am familiar with
> it. For one ting, I have always been suspicious of the hard barrier
> between thought and action - but I think thoughtaction only makes sense in
> certain rather peculiar fields (eg: Teaching Literature where violence,
> it stikes me, actually is, or can be, differance).

Can you explain this more? Teaching literature (e.g. 18th cent. lit.) or 
literature concerning teaching (pedagogy)? How do you have violence *as* 
differance? Isn't it possible that the deference/deferral/difference of 
differance is precisely the "opposite" (so to speak) of violence in that 
it *understands itself* and marks itself out in that spacing in such a 
way that it avoids the immediacy that marks violence?

 I suppose, at bottom,
> I'm not really confident that I could or would want to do away with
> violence, 

Am I suggesting "doing away" with violence? But just out of curiousity, 
what sort of violence do you want to "keep"? In any event, isn't it a 
nonviolence that maintains the worry you have here, i.e., you fear a 
violence to something, if not simply to violence, then to a way of life? 

or reach the sort of plane of awareness that would let me know
> when I am being violent.

Perhaps what is at issue here is that nonviolence in its *already 
existing state*, as, roughly, somewhat alienated, tends, when it "goes 
after" violence, to get too positional, and when it exploses hidden 
commitments, etc., tends to attack, and to lose itself as nonviolence? 
I.e., Nietzsche exposures of Christianity certainly that operate out of a 
certain nonviolence, and the identification of a "violence" to "health", 
to a certain "decency" (eg. "how evangelical!"), but do so violently *in 
that they too freely ascribe a violent intention" too totally. Perhaps 
the exposure or "plane" (which is a positionality you are positing, and 
precisely a positionality nonviolent thoughtaction would be vigilant 
against, since the *plane* as such is constituted not only by the 
singular position, but, worse, the temporal maintenence of a divisional 
positionality) you speak of is *accomplished precisely by granting and 
affirming precisely the reservations you have articulated (somewhat) here.

 For one thing, the perception of violence seems
> fairly positional. 

The perception? I don't know about that. But to get what nonviolence 
means in tersm of such perception, what its logics are, etc., requires 
some passage into/through "deep nonviolence" or whatever one might call 
it. It is possible that it only begins to accomplish itself when the 
sensibility *grounding* the perception you have in mind is itself 
activated, problematized. I sense that you're basically 
anticipating/fearing a "stern moral gaze", varius varieties of 
prescription, injunction, legitization, etc., all of which I think would 
be things to be vigilant against.


> 
> So what sort of classroom practices stem from this philosophy anyway? What
> do you actually do, what do they do?

I don't do any actual practices right now. That's partly why I'm writing 
these posts and inviting dialogue. I've done some projects in a much more 
limited setting, such as setting up a school for refugees, which used a 
lot of the narrower thinking. I teach piano, refinish furniture and 
various odd stuff, and think and what not.

What the practices -- a highly positional word -- would be, I'm not 
exactly sure right now. They wouldn't be so much *practices* as 
*thoughtpractices*, that is to say, *thoughtaction*. Getting that is part 
of it, I think, I mean, really grasping it, going right into the 
*presumed/assumed* sense of "practice", and grasping that the 
*problematization of the theory/practice distinction* is not so much 
simply an occasionly question or even outcry on an email list, and not 
the "hot", driving, capitalized and domesticated "radicality" for one's 
theses or writing in a tenured position (be it the tenure of the 
professor or of the graduate or undergraduate student), but a radical 
rifting elision, waxing/waning plunging resonance, emergent 
accomplishment/arrival, etc. So the question you ask can be answered in 
the inner and irreducible progression, as relentless and intractable or 
irreducible as "deconstruction" in the Derridean sense, and in many ways, 
I am guessing, indistinguishable from it. 

My strong *position* here is this: That this is in fact what is 
*required* to do justice to the question of something really different 
and something responsive to the educational issues being raised. This 
position, you see, is much more restricted and much closer to specific 
issues we are dealing with. I'm not putting this well enough, but I 
wonder if you see what I mean. It's a *minimal* positionality, and, I 
would be likely to maintain, *precisely the kind of positionality you 
yourself are likely to take for granted*, and I'm saying that I'm 
granting your reservations *everything* (within limits) and am in fact 
going beyond precisely that. I'm saying that when you get sick of staying 
in the space you are working to preserve, but which to continue to 
recognize its issue and *positions* (heh), this, *or something like this* 
is where you go.

Tom B.


> 
> - Chris
> 
> 

__________________________________________________________________________

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