Breaking Up with Deleuze
In this article, Eve Tuck grapples with Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of desire, finding it simultaneously generative and unsatisfying. Recognizing that Deleuze will not ‘say’ what Tuck wants him to say about desire – that it is smart, and constitutes expertise – Tuck reasons that there is only one thing she can do: break up with Deleuze. The article is organized into several break-up rituals, and in each of the rituals, the author works to understand, interrogate, expand, and extend conceptualizations of desire. In these ways, an articulation of what it means to value the irreconcilable is presented.
Tuck, Eve. Breaking up with Deleuze: desire and valuing the Irreconcilable In International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23:5, 635-650, 2010.
Additional:
Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh https://vimeo.com/423729554
Deleuze for the Desperate #3 Haecceity “Third in the series, this one discusses the haecceity. The term has been used to describe close working relationships, but it has wider applications. The discussion also helps to begin to grasp terms like ‘event’, ‘assemblage’, ‘singularity’ and ‘rhizome’. Transcript available on: www.arasite.org/deltranscript3haecc.html” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77CMNYJEb4I
READING NOTES
- inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s assertions of desire as ‘involution’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003), I have been theorizing desire and desire based inquiry as counter to damage-centered research (Tuck 2008a, 2009; Tuck et al. 2008).
- forgoing Oedipal configurations of regression and repression (illustrated as the false choice between an authoritative father and devoted mother – her shape and his hand [Williams 1991; Gordon 1996]) for a configuration that constituted the multiple, the dimensional, and the kaleido directional.
- Deleuze’s work is a fractal. He is insistent that philosophy operates and resonates while scaling up and scaling down.
- open-handed hold that I use in my reading of poems (Tuck 2008a). my words were anemic, their words were ‘language at its most distilled and most powerful’,
- there is no correspondence between the conceptual rhizome and the botanical rhizome (Colombat 1991, 15).
- ‘All we have to do is prove that you are damaged, and then we can get you what you need’.
- The theory of change is flawed because it assumes that it is outsiders, not communities, who hold the power to make changes.
- Are the long-term costs of these damage narratives worth the benefits (Tuck 2009)?
- Desire-based research frameworks appreciate that all of us possess a: ‘complex and oftentimes contradictory humanity and subjectivity that is never adequately glimpsed by viewing [one another] as victims or, on the other hand, as superhuman agents’ (Gordon 1996, 4; Tuck 2009).
- desire […] ‘becomes applicable in any context or relation: it is a spontaneous emergence that generates relationship though a synthesis of multiplicities’ (Goodchild 1996, 4).
- Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing of desire and the politics of desire is culturally specific, wholly situated within democratic capitalism, even at the same time that they are working to confront and expose the fallacies of this system (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 44; Goodchild 1996, 71).
- It is desire’s nature of being unresolved and self-incompatible that makes desire productive.
- Desiring-machines work by cannibalizing desire, past desire, desire-in-formation, so that the distinctions between them are blurred beyond recognition. There is no new, pristine desire; there is no old, preserved desire; there is only desire that is becoming.
- Deleuze is adamant that desire is revolutionary. ‘This doesn’t mean that it wants revolution’, he writes. ‘It’s even better. Desire is revolutionary by nature because it builds desiring-machines which, when they are inserted into the social field, are capa ble of derailing something, displacing the social fabric’ (Deleuze 2004, 233).
- Foucault, Reich, Deleuze, Guattari, all of us, are concerned with how people can continue to participate in their own domination and exploitation.
- In the notes, Deleuze addresses Foucault’s dissatisfaction with desire, along with MF’s petition for ‘pleasure’: “Evidently it is again something other than a question of words. Since as for myself I can hardly bear the word ‘pleasure’. But why? For me, desire does not comprise any lack; neither is it a natural given; it is but one with an assemblage of heterogenous elements which function; it is process, in contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as opposed to feeling; it is ‘haecceity’ (individuality of a day, a season, a life), as opposed to subjec tivity; it is event, as opposed to thing or person. (quoted in Ewald 1994)”
- desire is both the part of us that hankers for the desired and at the same time the part that learns to desire (Tuck 2009).
- Desire is about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future; it is integral to our humanness (Tuck 2009).
- participatory action research and Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies (Tuck 2008b). It is crafted to be particularly attuned to insynchronicity: to observe contradictions within institutions and the ways those contradictions play out in lived lives. A methodology of repatriation views insynchro nicity – the gaps between what institutions, people, and governments say they do and what they actually do – as revealing units of analysis
- Deleuze gives too much up when he says that desire is perfectly meaningless.
- out of character that Deleuze, so relentlessly scale-ular, would maintain that society strategizes territorializations and deterritorializations because of the haecceity of public desire, but does not afford desire at the level of personhood the same providence.
- [Tuck] believe desire constitutes our expertise.
- how do I attribute Deleuze’s notions of rhizomatic interconnected ness, a notion at the very center of his philosophies, when for hundreds and thousands of years, interconnectedness has been the mainstay in many Indigenous frameworks, both tribal and diasporic?
- It’s an issue of false inventions and giving credit where credit is due, and again an issue of describing and engaging in contentious, complex ideas.
- The notion of fluidity has never worked to the advantage of Indigenous peoples. Federal agencies have invoked that language of fluid or unstable identities as the rationale for dismantling the structures of tribal life. Whitestream America has seized upon the message of relativism to declare open season on Indians. (Grande 2004, 112)
- valuing the irreconcilable […] Patricia Carini’s work on valuing the immeasurable.
- To describe is to value, Carini tells us ‘Describing I pause, and pausing, attend. Describing requires that I stand back and consider … Describing makes room for something to be fully present. Describing is slow, particular work. I have to set aside familiar categories for classifying or generalizing. I have to stay with the subject of my attention. I have to give it time to speak, to show itself. I have to trust that what I am attending to makes sense; that it isn’t a merely accidental or chance event. To discover the subject’s coherence and how it persists in the words, I have deliberately to shift my own perspective in relation to it. (2001, 163)”
- ‘experience as always inseparable from language – from self-subject, from others, from discourse, from difference, from love’ (2009, 615). (Stacy Holman-Jones)
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Tuck, E., in conversation with M. Fine. 2007. Inner angles: A range of ethical responses to/ with Indigenous and decolonizing theories. In Ethical futures in qualitative research: Decolonizing the politics of knowledge, ed. N. Denzin and M. Giardina, 145–68. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Tuck, E. 2009. Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3: 409–27.
Gordon, A. 1996. Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Holman-Jones, S. 2009. Crimes against experience. Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies 9, no. 5: 608–18.
POST-READ
Interesting in thinking about own research and speculative presents, especially drawn to thinking about questioning damage-narratives, “desire-based research frameworks,” and valuing the immeasurable.
Reading Art as Confrontation
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Reading Art as Confrontation In e-flux journal, May-August 2015.
Reading Notes
- What sort of compositions could retain the postcolonial concern with representation, aiming beyond the limits of postcolonial critique and its particular rendering of modern grammar? If it aims to go beyond denouncing, if it moves to dismantle and/or counteract the effects of epistemic violence, what would anticolonial artwork accomplish through the form of presentation?
- “[…] A process of rethinking visual representation unleashed, considering how to make these images “visible” without making them public, and questioning the iconography of the Palestinian refugee created through images mainly produced by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).” (description from “Together,” Eid-Sabbagh)
- The time and situation in which the performance takes place […] does something that is beyond and that cannot be comprehended by the conceptual tools and analytical moves associated with the “postcolonial” as a scholarly practice
- […] by violating the presupposition of universality that gives ethical support to representation (juridical, symbolic, economic). […] without some assumption of a universal (in terms of equality and/or transcendence), it is inconceivable that free (self-determined) persons or collectives would accept being represented by somebody or something other than themselves.
- […] the postcolonial academic does not have to worry about the “public” when she performs her critique. Nor does she, as noted above, worry about the “making public,” because what becomes “visible” in the text is mediated by pages and pages of conceptual and methodological declarations that make evident that what becomes visible is made so only under these conditions of emergence.
- none of that distancing is available to the postcolonial performance artist.
- […] because of the in/difference between the stage and the museum as exhibition sites. Both offer precisely that which Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh’s performance refused (its corruptive move), which is the “ethical closure” effected by a reassurance of difference, namely, of a given distance between “I” (spectator/colonizer/Human Rights enforcer) and the “Other” (exhibit/colonized/victim). For that is precisely what has justified (as explanation, cause, or meaning) the violence done in the first place.
Module
Notes
- Sarah Ahmed
- in the critical undoing of hegenomy there are productive assembleges that matter and that in mattering there is forming
- disruption, confrontation and refusal are not simplistic methods that result in ruin, what emerges? transformations…
Cont. w/ Eve Tuck - “research that is not damage centred”
- delueze – do more than critique, but augment
- breakup as necessary and productive
- analyitic lense of experiece and self determination as method for self determination
- thinking with desire, counter to damage centered research
- haecceity: properties of a particular thing and not an individual, not about personhood (about fields that move the matter within space)
- freud – desire = lack,
- indigenous knowledge systems accumulate knowledges over generations
- stress selfdetermination, desire has expertise via desire and memory
- why desire should be smart? is smart a way of saying intentional, purposeful?
- what does it matter that deleuze does not say desire is not smart?
- immeasurable is about refusable to classify for purpose of unquestioned heirarchy
- irreconciable – difference is inevitable
- deleuze and guttari undersanding of desire is productive because they argue for necessary caution “art of dosages” opening body to connections that presuppose entire assemblage, circuts… passages and assemblages of intensity … gentle. lines of flight are not always predictable.