Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 15:24:58
From: Luba Slabyj <romanframe-AT-v-wave.com>
Subject: Re: Beyond bashing


Charles:

Thanks for taking an interest and even more so for bringing this discussion
into closer alignment with D-G (my knowledge/grasp of the latter is weak to
non-existent, but I hope to keep learning). Indeed, it's gracious of you to
re-frame the debate in the terms below, which I am still digesting. Would
you care to say more about Readings' book and just how compelling you find
its argument? Inasmuch as I understand your summary of Readings' argument
about "peripheral singularities" vs a "paradise-lost" conception (for lack
of a better phrase), I too wonder about its implications for a concept of
academic community. However, no matter how the concept comes together, I
can't but think that the gap between theory and actuality isn't easily
bridged without the aid of memory, for one thing. Especially memory that
resists locating ideal communities either in the past or (through
comparison) in the here and now, or even in the future (although that's
where ideals seem to reside most comfortably). Attempting to identify
community as it actually operates these days seems the pressing (daunting?)
task. I'm sorry for being so vague and essentially just re-iterating
Readings' position. I suppose that with that term "memory," I'm trying to
invoke some concept of "conscience" without unduly loading the term.

Luba


At 10:39 AM 6/16/98 -0400, you wrote:
>I've been very intrigued with this exchange, particularly the latter posts
>between Luba and Alexander. It's not a question of assigning good pts/bad
>pts, of course, but I had two thoughts upon rereading these (and two
>without having had coffee this morning is enough of an achievement,
>providing they are at all worth sharing).
>
>Alexander said:
>>  EVERY professor I have ever had has made
>>>it quite clear that their highest expectation for their students, what
>>>they want more than anything, is a fresh perspective, something new,
>>>something not-yet-thought.
>Luba replied:
>>But isn't it true that this something new, something not-yet-thought is
>>nevertheless expected to be formulated within certain prescribed
>>theoretical frameworks? After all, it would be naive to think that all
>>sorts of approaches are equally encouraged, that some aren't decried as
>>passe or otherwise unworthy. And yet it could well be that such approaches
>>may well come into vogue again someday in, as you say, a new and fresh
>>way--depending on exactly who initiates the fashion.But I'm sounding
>>cynical. Don't get me wrong. I love exciting and challenging new theory,
>>but I'm dismayed by the discrepancy between protestations of multiplicity
>>of intellectual perspectives and the academic reality as I've experienced
>>it. 
>Alexander continued:
>> And I have had A LOT of teachers, some
>>>famous, some obscure, all of whom agree on this.  Merely rehashing a
>>>contemporary debate on something is NOT going to get you the high
>>>marks--if you have nothing original or creative to contribute, you're
>>>not going to catch the prof's attention.
>Luba replied:
>>Perhaps not, but timely allegiance to a certain position can do much to
>>score one political points at moments of heated debate. Professors are only
>>human: complete with ideals *and* insecurities.
>
>The thought I had re this question of fresh perspectives and allegiances to
>certain positions relates to D&G, the proliferation of their texts,
>particularly in translation so that the non-francophone community could
>take up their challenges. Being 'into' D&G has not always been the cool
>thing that it seems to have become today. I recall a job interview in Dec
>1980 with a team from the French dept. of Miami U of Ohio, a group of
>predominantly Derrida/Lacan allied scholars. I'd just deposited my
>dissertation that drew heavily from a rather flawed understanding of
>D&G-thought, and so in response to their question, "could you tell us about
>your dissertation?", I launched into a 5 minute spiel that left them
>staring at me like I'd just fallen from the Planet Claire. What's the
>point? I don't want to see Alexander's position dismissed too readily (and
>Luba is not doing so), and I also think that timely, and particularly
>UNtimely, allegiances are not to be dismissed either. I agree with Luba:
>one can and does score points packing a good dose of D&G-thought, and there
>is an oddly satisfying frisson, however petty, derived from having a
>relatively firm grasp on a particular body of knowledge, and especially in
>making connections that others may not yet have seen. I don't claim to have
>done this yet, but it is one of Deleuze's lessons in the "ABC Primer" and
>elsewhere, about having *une pense'e* and thoroughly developing "a concept".
>
>As for the question of "the University," here my other thought is not
>terribly original, and since I don't have the reference text I want -- Bill
>Readings's _The University in Ruins_ -- at my fingertips, I cannot site
>from it completely. However, in discussing the "ruins" of the current
>university system, Readings makes a nice connection with Giorgio Agamben in
>evoking the "singularities" into which we can enter and with which we can
>engage in the pedagogical and intellectual enterprise(s). This relates to
>the dilemma of defining and staking out the specificity of one's field of
>critical engagement without necessarily closing oneself off from other
>influences and modes of thought through this act of defining.
>	I would suggest that this dilemma is precisely what Giorgio Agamben
>describes with the expression "whatever being," "not =91being, it does not
>matter which,=92 but rather =91being such that it always matters" (Coming
>Community, 1993: 1). This "whatever being," says Agamben, "relates to
>singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a
>concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in
>its being such as it is" (1993: 1). In this way, he continues,
>"such-and-such being" no longer must belong to a particular set or class,
>and thereby is reclaimed simply "for its being-such, for belonging itself"
>(1993: 2). Elspeth Probyn has developed this by showing how Agamben=92s
>"whatever singularity" suggests that "the movement between specificity and
>singularity is a process that is at times hard trodden, at others even
>impossible," but also that the very "historical limits imposed by
>=91being-called=92 . . . constitute a condition of possibility for belonging as
>well as the conditions for calling into question the inscription of
>difference" (Outside Belongings, 1996: 24-25).
> 	I raise this dilemma in this debate as a form of the "in-between," of
>what Larry Grossberg has called  a "science of singularity," of tracing
>lines of circulation "constitut[ing] a =91structured mobility=92 that defines
>the spaces and places of everyday life" (Bringing It All Back Home, 1997:
>324). While his reference is to de Certeau=92s The Practice of Everyday Life,
>one cannot help but link the term "singularity" to Agamben and Deleuze and
>Guattari as a matter of "bordering." I cite Agamben: "[Whatever
>singularity] is determined only through its relation to an idea, that is,
>to the totality of possibilities. Through this relation, as Kant said,
>singularity borders all possibility and thus receives its omnimoda
>determinatio . . . only by means of this bordering" (1993: 67). In a
>similar vein, Bill Readings argues that subjective enunciation now proceeds
>from "peripheral singularities rather than from traditional
>citizen-subjects" (1996:115). Says Readings, "the advantage of speaking in
>terms of singularities is that it offers us a way of discussing the
>contradictory and multiple ways in which relations of desire (for
>commodities and other things), power, and knowledge flow among individuals,
>without having to presume that there is stable, natural, or logical order
>of such relations that we have lost and to which we should return" (1996:
>116).
>	As may be quite evident, I am still working through these complex issues,
>not just those of definition/non-definition as they relate to disciplinary
>fields and, for me, to national literatures. I am also working through the
>question of "community" as well. The turn to "singularity" might be one
>means to maintain the "structured mobility" of our critical approaches, but
>I wonder what might be the implications of "peripheral singularities" for
>the concept of "community." The mobile fluxes into (or onto) which such
>singular agents are inscribed reminds me of the "packs" and "alliances" to
>which Deleuze and Guattari refer in terms of the flows of "involution" and
>"becomings." Concering alliance rather than filiation, say Deleuze and
>Guattari, these becomings "form a block that runs its own line 'between'
>the terms in play and beneath assignable relations" (ATP 238-239, MP 292).
>Always involving "a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a
>multiplicity" (ATP 239, MP 292), becoming produces an "affect," as "the
>effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and
>makes it reel," an "involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings" (ATP
>240, MP 293-294), toward "contagion" and "unnatural participations" as the
>means of establishing these assemblages (ATP 240-241, MP 294).
>	Again, what might such conceptions of "singularities" and "becomings" mean
>for "community"? To put it more bluntly, what are we doing here on this
>list? What draws us together, what senses of "community"? I have understood
>our exchanges on this list as a means of engaging in some forms of
>"community"-building, of assemblage-constructing, of pack and alliance
>formation, of creating transversal relations between "peripheral
>singularities." But of what sorts? These remain open questions, but they
>relate to the need that Luba seems to address:
>>
>>All this is eminently reasonable and just, but I do think there's room for
>>an argument concerning certain trends evident throughout university
>>networks (if only because the academic's life is so often a nomadic one?).
>
>Larry Grossberg has suggested that Cultural Studies needs to remain "a
>flexible and radically contextual intellectual and political practice"
>(1998: 68; 1997: 5), and I think that such mobility =96 of critical practice
>and "community" alliance -- is our best hope for avoiding, to the extent
>possible, the unwitting but effective conscription in a border patrol that
>would arrest this fluid movement "in-between." I also think that this
>mobility, and a pedagogy based on it, could help allay *some* of the
>tensions to which Luba refers, that students experience:
>
>> Which reminds me of your point in your last posting
>>about not making students feel bad about themselves. I agree. I just want
>>to emphasize that there's much *within* the system to make students feel
>>bad about themselves; it's not just the ridicule of the ignorant/envious
>>outsider, which, I think, tends to reinforce more than actively create such
>>bad feeling. One of the biggest of these problems is the weakness for caste
>>systems, which makes sorting the "promising" from the "rest" so much less
>>time-consuming but which can also function as self-fulfilling prophecy.
>I guess I wonder here how one goes about distinguishing a caste system from
>a community, and particularly how one as a teacher proceeds to develop the
>latter and to defuse to the extent possible the pernicious effects of the
>former.
>
>Alexander concludes:
>>>
>>>Perhaps all we can do is to keep on reminding each other of our own
>>>abstractions, as well as of our own more "concrete" experiences...
>>
>I think these -- abstractions and "concrete" experiences -- need to be
>allied constantly in an active (vs. reactive) pedagogy, one not limited to
>the classroom, and one that undermines the exclusionary demarcations that,
>unfortunately, seem all to prevalent in institutions (educational and many
>others).
>
>In his follow-up, Alexander excused himself, unnecessarily IMHO, for
>seeming naive and/or romantic in believing that "if you find
>yourself arguing for something that few or none of your peers really
>accept, and you nevertheless strongly and passionately *believe* in
>it, well, that's probably the *best* possible place to be. ... If you truly
>*believe* in the value of what you have to say, you will not ever tire of
>saying it, no matter how few people want to listen." It takes courage not
>only to say this, but truly to act upon it. I don't know that I have
>measured up to this standard, but to attempt to do so is certainly a choice
>one can make.
>
>Sincerely,
>CJ Stivale
>Charles J. Stivale, Chair, Professor of French
>Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
>Wayne State University
>Detroit, MI 48202
>Office: 313-577-3002 / Fax: 313-577-6243
>Dept. Web site: www.langlab.wayne.edu/romance/romance.html
>D&G site: http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/romance/FreDeleuze.html
>