Deleuzians

I try to read sympathetically. I try to be open-minded with philosophy books. I also try to read books that are outside my usual field, because I hang onto an old-fashioned idea that philosophers ought to be engaged in philosophy rather than scholarship, and this calls on me to read outside my narrow academic field. So, I read some deconstruction, I read some critical theory, I read some contemporary philosophy based on the rejection of phenomenology. I have never been able to go anywhere with anything coming out of Gilles Deleuze, and what I'm reading now gives me some clues as to why.

Let me say, though, that as far as I understand it, the basic ideas in Deleuze's thought are attractive: we shouldn't be tied down to reified concepts and ossified theories; flux, change, and surface are more interesting than philosophy has traditionally held; notions like "the transcendental subject" are sometimes dangerous fictions. But I am not sure who, beyond a number of brick-intellected academic hacks, sincerely, resolutely, and constantly commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness this critique implies. I have always taken it that when Husserl, for example, writes about the transcendental Ego, he's writing an account of consciousness, and not writing something that is literally the final word explaining the basic metaphysical being in the world. (I read Husserl this way for the simple reason that he tells you to.)

I would like, in 63% seriousness, to write a paper called "Deleuzians Should Shut The Fuck Up."

Erin Manning goes head first into Deleuze in Always More Than One. For this perspective, transcendental Being as “depth”=totalitarianism=fascism; this position is ascribed to no one in particular, except that, by omission, it appears to be anyone holding a position that does not follow the surface=transcendental field=a life (always italicized). This a life is not a particular life, but the immanence in any event, that is purely surface, does not have relation, is not human, and has no meaning. It is ineffable, an always-more-than that itself has no characteristics, and as soon as it is treated as inaugurating anything — a stable being, a stable meaning, the human, history, memory — it has lost it’s surface-ness. Meaning, the human, and particularization are all forms of fascistic thinking, it appears. What thought can do is to skate on this surface, but as soon as thought becomes transitive, as soon as it is intentional, as soon as it has some direction (some sens—pardon my French), it’s no longer thought but the metaphysics of Being, i.e., fascism.

This is precisely why Deleuzians should shut the fuck up. Thought that skates on the surface can’t say anything about the surface without gouging it. The ineffable is ineffable, so stop effing it!

ugh

I woke up at around four AM. I'm not really sure why. Between my Loveliest and I, lately, there's someone up at nearly every hour of the day at our place.

I spent the first twenty minutes of my morning lying in bed with random thoughts swirling around in my head. One recurring thought was about the likelihood of trouble in transit this week. So I got up and checked the east coast weather.

The problem isn't the weather per se, but the backlog of flights now that 9000 flights have been canceled, today through tomorrow. The Philadelphia airport is closed today. All flights are canceled by every US airline in and out of Newark, New York, DC, Baltimore...

And again, we're not going any of those places. We're going to Rochester, up on the Lake Ontario coast, where Hurricane Sandy will provide about 48 hours of constant rain. Given what's happened to Atlantic City already today, I'm hoping there's still enough Rochester above water to fly to.

But the main problem isn't in Rochester, it's in the airports. I'm not a good air traveler, I loathe and feel dehumanized by the non-place of an airport, the non-people of crew members, and the non-service they work so diligently to provide.* Perhaps we'll get lucky, and the airline employees and travelers will have gotten the mean spirit of Sandy's aftermath out of their systems. Perhaps flight schedules will have returned to normal by Wednesday afternoon when we're supposed to transfer at O'Hare.

I might be on east coast time before then. We do have to leave here a little after four AM Wednesday.

--

* I take these terms from George Ritzer's The Globalization of Nothing. "Nothing" is Ritzer's term for the placeless, featureless, ubiquitous crapola that global capitalism produces and sells so much of. RItzer's other concept, of "McDonaldization," helps explain how, where, and by whom "nothing" is produced and consumed. "Non-people" is a modification of Goffman's idea of a non-person, and the rest should be pretty simple to tease out.

My favorite bit is his account of the scripted interactions of non-persons during commercial exchange (i.e., overwhelmingly most of our daily, commodified interactions). It's one of the things about air travel that most offends me. Maybe I'm wrong, but when flight attendants start to run through the safety card information, their dead eyes unfocused on anything in particular, never making eye contact, I experience a sense of their icy hatred of every person in the plane. I believe we all know that the safety information is not for our safety, but that of the airline, specifically, from liability. (Remember when Southwest used to have "joke" safety information? That was just as offensive, because it was that gutless mild kind of writing that isn't actually humorous -- I'm sure they hired a writer from a sitcom on ABC Family Channel.)

Then there's the "in-flight service," a non-service in every way Ritzer talks about. It seems as though the typical non-service amounts to one 8-ounce plastic cup filled with off-tasting ice and a soft drink filled to the rim, per two hours of flight time. On flights over four hours, they sometimes provide a plastic bag containing 2 ounces of mini pretzels (approximately eight), and the smart airlines are now providing free stupefaction pacifiers television. As the plane lands and taxis, when they say "welcome to __" and "your final destination," and tell us to have a good day, I can tell they really mean "get the hell out of the plane so I can wash the dreck of your repulsive presence off of me," or, you know, words to that effect.

publication provision: revision

Last time I heard back from a journal about a submitted paper, it was the Journal of Academic Ethics asking me to revise and resubmit my paper on the decline of the professional status of college faculty and the lack of opportunity or authority to follow our professional ethics. The blind reviewer earned this name in a way he or she probably didn't mean to, by clearly not reading the paper for its actual argument. Instead, the revise and resubmit letter said I should basically write an entirely different paper on a topic that this reviewer would find more agreeable: how university administrations constantly seek meaningless public image advancements.

(I emailed the JAE editor back and said I would not be resubmitting to a journal so obviously lacking ethical commitment to the principle of peer review.)

Just last week, while we were down in LA, I finally received word back from the journal of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology, Studia Phaenomenologica, saying that my paper had been accepted pending revisions. The revisions listed by their reviewer seem to miss the basic ironic stance in my paper, and the reviewer seems unfamiliar with the pursuit of phenomenology of the body in French existential phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty, Henry, and Marion (and more recently Barbaras), despite my having quoted Ricoeur freaking explaining it in precisely the same terms.

So I've added voluminous footnotes citing dozens of sources to show that, indeed, there is a pretty constant and still ongoing phenomenology of the body. My criticism of this is, briefly, that this fetishizes the body in a way that does two things phenomenology shouldn't do: (1) presupposing that there is a theoretical level of analysis that we must go to in order to explain experience, and (2) relating phenomenological description to a specific metaphysical problem - the mind/body problem Descartes gave us - despite the avowed intent of phenomenologists from Husserl onward to dispense with that metaphysics.

There are some quite valid and difficult criticisms. I write very elliptically at times, and this does not help. I blame Merleau-Ponty. (Obviously, I can't get away with it, because he's Merleau-Ponty, and I'm not.) Plus, the version of the paper I sent to them was edited down to 5000 words from a 8000 word screed I wrote last summer, which I ended up calling "the goofy paper," to express my total disgust with Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. Minus some of the screedy elements, the argument is not very explicit (whereas, with the screedy elements, the language would have been all too explicit for a family journal like Studia Phaenomenologica).

(I curse at my food when I cook, and I curse at my books when I read. Mostly in good fun. I am far more forgiving of disobedient foodstuffs than disappointing philosophers, so some of the cursing at books is a little less joyous and collegial.)

I'm having a very hard time keeping the gumption up for this task - hence this post. I have until 15 July.

fun and frolic in contingent academic employment

I subscribe to an email list for contingent academics. Someone on the list half-jokingly suggested that there should be an Exploitation Of The Week archive. It might be warranted, following the last week.

On Thursday, Inside Higher Ed published the story of San Antonio College administators requiring part-time faculty working full-time to sign a waiver indicating they are still part-time and won't be paid for additional work, or receive health benefits. The contingent academic email list went nuts. The comments section on the Inside Higher Ed story went nuts.

Almost immediately, San Antonio college officials said they'd restore wages and benefits, and that the whole policy would come to an end. It turns out, according to one dean, that nobody ever told the administration that it was wrong not to pay people for working. Some people need practical advice.

This morning brings the news that a long-time faculty member at Central New Mexico Community College has been summarily separated from employment, with apparently no notice, after hosting a Bastille Day event commemorating folkie/activist Utah Phillips.

(Neither college has a unionized faculty. I don't think that's a coincidence.)

What will tomorrow bring? It's almost as exciting as watching the finance industry collapse!