File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Feb.96, message 98


Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 22:31:04 -0500 (EST)
From: "Bryan A. Alexander" <bnalexan-AT-umich.edu>
Subject: Re: nomad (kinda long)


More than 2 cents' worth, in this exchange economy!

Bryan Alexander					Department of English
email: bnalexan-AT-umich.edu			University of Michigan
phone: (313) 764-0418				Ann Arbor, MI  USA    48103
fax: (313) 763-3128				http://www.umich.edu/~bnalexan

On Mon, 26 Feb 1996, Judith L. Poxon wrote:

> 
> Some thoughts on the responses to my comments (and Bryan's):
> 
> Dominic wrote, in part:
> 
> > But have you ever listened closely when philosophers
> > start talking about possible worlds?  They act like they have
> > never been there, but will tell you every fucking detail about
> > the places.  The truth is those worlds are just down the
> > street-- if one has a geological map--lodged in the
> > undergraduate bars and public mental-health wards, but shrouded
> > in a historicized OTHERNESS.   So look:  the question is not
> > "how can we be nomadic in academia?", but rather, "WHAT VENUES
> > ARE WE WILLING TO ADMIT INTO OUR LITTLE ACADEMIC WORLD?"
> 
> I think this is an important rephrasing of the question: it seems clear 
> to me that the academy needs to be opened up to new ways of 
> thinking/doing/becoming that have previously been left to the "real 
> world." I'm not offering practical tips for how to accomplish this, 
> though. Any thoughts, Dominic?

Good rephrasing, and allows in all sorts of subversion.  Even the 
possibility of damage.
> 
> Then Bryan wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps I have too much of an unreconstructed Marxist within. 
> > I fear  these structures all too much, and am suspicious of
> > nomads who can all  too easily be recuperated by transnational
> > capital.  I am indeed thinking  more about May '68 and a
> > massive monkey wrench tossed into the workings  of state and
> > capital.  This seems highly unlikely to occur without  special
> > circumstances within traditional academia (luck; an
> > ill-displined  institution; cunning manipulation), but might be
> > easier from the gypsy  position, which introduces more desires and 
> > flows into the machine...
> 
> And the possibility of being recuperated by transnational capitalism seems,
> on dandg's analysis, to be built into the structure of desiring-machines 
> and their relation to social-machines. So that, as they claim in AO, 
> "there does not exist a pure nomad who can be afforded the satisfaction 
> of drifting with the flows and singing direct filiation, but always a 
> socius waiting to bear down, already deducting and detaching" (p. 149). 
> And it seems to me that the possibility of being a nomad to ANY extent 
> within the academy is linked with the recognition of this fact, and the 
> will to continue to open up nomadic lines of flight within the socius 
> that is the University.

of course.  But there's possibility and possibility, variable 
intensities.  What I see happening all too easily is a brief flavor of 
D+G, the slight lapse into nomadism followed by a hurtling back into the 
warm concentric rings - and that's a fate for D+G in the academy.  I'm 
interested in breaking away from state capital, for developing oblique 
intensities.

> > And Ed wrote, in part: > 
> > [...] we ought
> > to take the intensity-extensity distinction seriously and think about
> > what D meant when he said "I don't like to move around too much, it inter-
> > feres with becomings."  The nomadic experience perhps is more like what
> > happens when you get done with a four hour stint reading something in the 
> > library and you walk out into broad daylight and everything seems a little
> > wierd, cause you've spent all that time displacing your modes of thought,
> > allowing them to interact with other one's in the book, etc.  Perhaps it
> > doesn't matter one bit whether you write an essay, a dialogue, or nothing
> > at all about it?  Just a thought.
> 
> I agree completely with what Ed is saying here about staying with the 
> extensive/intensive distinction that I pointed out in my earlier post. 
> What troubles me a little, though, is this apparent emphasis on the 
> "nomadic _experience_"--as contrasted with, say, nomadic 
> _effects_--because it seems to suggest that what's most important to 
> becoming-nomad is that one _feels_ nomadic, rather than that one produces 
> nomadic effects (or allows them to be produced, or something like that). 
> And I would take it that the force behind Bryan's original question, and 
> Dominic's elaboration on it, is a concern with the revolutionary effects 
> produced (or not) by one's thinking/doing/becoming.

That's about right.  I can imagine someon feeling nomadic as they spiral 
into obscurity and death - which is alright; but I'm more interested in 
the truly chaotic productions of the nomad (interesting how chaos has 
become a synonym for control!).

> 
> Just my two cents' worth....
> 
> Judith
> 
> Judith Poxon
> Syracuse University, Dept. of Religion
> jlpoxon-AT-mailbox.syr.edu
> 
> 
> 

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