A Bloody Conversation by risa
By Heather Neville, Neil Balan, Christian Allan Bertelsen.
This is a culmination and an accumulation. Mostly, it is a conversation, a shared attempt at agreement and consent. It serves as a map, but it also serves as a mark for the terminal event of a collaborative generation and production. It is a text and we have written on it, and as a text, it has written on us. This emerged far before we arranged its compilation, before we orchestrated it. We induced it, yet it induced itself because, in our conversation, something was always slipping and escaping. We knew we would have to follow the route of writing and encounter its constituents: imitating, mediating, absorbing, reforming. It took longer than we had initially thought, and in its duration, we learned about momentum, about energy loaded in an endeavour, in the promise of inertia. Once it’s moving, keep your feet going…
So we clambered up plateaus, across gaps and through spaces, tangled with ideas, and settled on a fashioning, a this here, and in choosing a shape, gave it some momentum to take flight. Lift is essential. Then: one line, one pathway, one arc away from this assembly we have made, taking the advice of some of the more wild mediators who have connected lines and made maps. These assembled bundles of intensities are compelling, and in my induction—in the predetermined circumstance of these self-enforced collaborations—I am repeatedly struck by my repetitive recourse to writing. Shocked, even. Generating pages of text, scribbles, hypergraphia and writing always writing, folding inward the bundles of these substantial thinkings and doings and knowings and transcribing my fragmented little events of encounter to letters, transfiguring and perhaps transducing them. I have made these thoughts and concepts matter in that I deem them deserving of script, of being written to become something for me, for me to become with them. Yet, I have literally made them matter, made them a text and a substance, borrowed the recourse to writing that these others I have encountered have also done, these others who I am inclined toward and responsible to. This responsibility is an ability to generate a timely response that is both appropriate and just. The writing, my writing, our re-writing, is a technology that binds us to expectations about what one does with this kind of thing, while allowing for a fiddling manipulation by making words into matter and plugging into these thoughts and intensities. This writing, for me, is a music, an anti-memory, that makes things visible to me, allowing me to cut ties and re-tie, to choose what sutures I will staple through my thinking and doing skins. In making matter, I make a map. “Don’t plot points, always make a map.”i So, with writing a map and reading it, a flow is continued and the circuit stays open.
Open, hopefully to such an extent that in this moment of collaboration, in this confluence of thought, writing and speaking, we can share some of the thoughts and concepts that have either in one way or another made something work for us or perhaps affected us; that is, to have opened new sensations or perceptions for us in the body. From another perspective, this experience that we have shared has of course not only exposed us to new thoughts and concepts, but it has also made us encounter new questions; new questions from which we have undoubtedly begotten many of our own. Questions have a way of concatenating with one another and creating productive flows. “It is the question that drives us.”ii Right on. Very much in the same way, weekly readings have provided us with a recrudescence of thought, thinking and questioning, you might say that our impetus has been maintained by a succession of perpetually regenerative second-winds. Of course, we have not sought to master these texts, knowing that this would be a foolish endeavour to begin with, instead we have taken a capriciously concentrated approach to these works, we sought to deterritorialize them and reterritorialize them elsewhere. And this is indeed what we are trying to do here. Part of my interest in our collaboration, is motivated by a Bruno Latour piece that I recently read in Harper’s Magazine. He
questioned if it was possible for critique to explode anew rather than implode upon itself, that is, if people like
ourselves could generate “more ideas than we have received.”iii I believe that at present we stand before a particularly exciting conjunction of time, space and intellectual surroundings. You have mentioned the desire for openness—to keep these circuits open. With the online journal known by the same name and principle, we can see that there is a shared structure of feeling. Contingent conjunctions such as these are exciting for just that reason: the aleatory nature of their coming together. The American ragmatist John Dewey spoke of liberty and said that it “is that secure release and fulfillment of personal potentialities which take place only in rich and manifold association with others.”iv This is how I’d like to think of our collaboration.
“Matter”. We have made and are making these thoughts, ideas and intensities into matter – a physical form – and, in addition, we always ask ourselves ‘how does this matter?’ or in the appropriated phrasing of another, “how does it work for you?”v when we encounter the matter that has become from another. When we ask questions of this sort, what are we asking? We want to find the points of connection, the moments at which our subjectivity meets with the matter, the body, of another’s text as it becomes a part of our own and moves us forward, up and across. My text comes from me and yet holds me within it, just as your text comes from and encases you, even if only for a moment. Just as we fear the boundaries of our bodies, our physical selves and meet their transgression with abject, so too we fear the boundaries of our textual matter. We assert our limits and say, ‘this is the body of my text’. It is a body, it has a form and it has a subjectivity, the one which effected its becoming and upon whose becoming it has also had an impact. But what of its flesh? Can it have flesh? Can it be without? Caputo says that flesh is the body stripped of being and sense, distinct from the body, it exists in a space that is prior or external to cognition, prior to any potential act of writing which necessarily involves “being and sense”vi. The reduction of the body to mere flesh requires recourse to pure affect. In the space
of feeling without cognition, affect without reason, here alone do we escape our subjectivity. But the text is always subjective, we have already shown this to be so, and this is how we can say that it is a body, it has being, it has sense, it speaks of intentionality. Is it then, necessarily a body without flesh? While the body may be stripped away, reduced to flesh via torture, sleep or sex, the flesh can never be fully stripped from the body. The body always brings with it the knowledge of its fleshy-ness and this flesh becomes embedded in the text, even if it is hidden from our view.
The pragmatics of material bodies, of words and flesh, is the plateau we’re grappling with in order to move across it. In the little immanent micro-events of reading and writing, there is a grappling with the sutures fixed by custodial values to the connections made, some learned as sensationally performed (‘Oh, that Butler’), some demanding a careful mental dredging (‘What should I understand with this Massumi piece?’) that is the extension of a difficult and extended encounter with a machine that does something. “Does it work and how does it work? How does it work for you?”vii The point is getting tangled up with this, getting entangled to rely on a power-geometryviii of thinking that doesn’t undervalue the formations of living bodies materialized and contained by power but appropriately maps our virtual interaction and co-ordination with a capitalized and programmatic tradition
(Theory). Anne Norton writes of the bloodrite of the post-structuralistsix as a challenge to the Law, the Word, the Text, and the privilege of closure afforded to those in a position or location of power (codification of politicized speech, naturalized, and subsequently depoliticized, becoming hegemonic), those who can speak Truth to legitimize and make knowledge scientific in an ordering and operational function. Our assemblage here is an exercise in power, its practice implicit in writing and thinking and generating, but buttressed by the institutional sponsorship and the brand-name logo (Theory), a Logos, stamped and affixed to an endeavour. And yet, I still follow Norton and her bloody mess of writing and thinking, with the refusal to close the body from its bleeding as a powerful thing, leaving a body of words open to maintain and glow with an intensity or tone that defies capture, or at least squirms and bulges uncomfortably on the shelf of an archive or in the pages of a catalogue. So, as I write I make amends with what I offer and muster, a guilty apology because I am confessing, wondering and probably not doing perhaps what I should be doing, swept up in the thinking but hoping ridiculously that my inclinations are good enough. If that which bleeds and leaks is open, why am I declaring my openness, the self-held legitimate form of doing in this perpetual Event that we write? What is—or becomes—‘correct’? The correct is blocked like a scene played out in a performance, blocked by the assignment of blockages. The blockages create corrective pathways and establish a prevention, preventing the ‘can’ of something to go any way, and precluding the possibility of refusing the correct ‘knowing for sure’. I have learned this, allowed this to fester and function. But how do I feel my method is becoming, as something that refuses organization, that defies the coherence of an organism, that is perhaps the messy flesh of Norton (and Longhurst and Caputo and Grosz) and the body without organs that Artaud realized? This is the paradox: we are organized, but there is a shred of trying, our trying to defy and fly, to take molecular flight from this organized way without giving up the handling of pens and keys and words and reading, an attempt at allowing openness with an autonomy to stand on its own. Openness is disorienting, but it invites an encounter without a being, a becoming becoming. Maybe this could be “…intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret.”x Maybe this is the way to have a conversation: to attempt to become open so as to get things moving, to let it bleed a bit.
but it huurrrtss…
Any direction, any opening, embrace the mess. As with “rhizome”, “wave”, “map”, again we pillage the discourse of others. We must maintain the open wound and let the matter of foreign words get in. “Flesh” and “blood” we say, but surely flesh and blood do not belong to paper and ink? To biology, to ‘nature’, to horror even. We lurk in the shadows and seize the words that we want. We take flesh, we take blood, we take them from the scientist’s lab, or mother nature’s womb or from splatter film gore. We give new meaning, make new pathways and in so doing we find that they have fit, somehow these words have been accepted and find place here though they were stolen from somewhere else. And we must not hide behind the other words that we have learned that make it easier for us to accept and place these words, we cannot simply cry “metaphor!” and run from the implications. It is not that we have found a word that covers a hole
satisfactorily, the words themselves have been transformed by their contact with our conversation and it becomes. This is not easy and requires militant defense. This process of finding and thieving is not taken lightly by those from whom we steal. When we find new words and use them to open wounds and let them bleed, we open wounds elsewhere too – in the discourses of science, say and they may find that they are also unable to heal. But perhaps they do not share in our discursive masochism, they do not want their boundaries broken, their blood spilled. Because it hurts.
But still we have not answered the question. How can flesh and blood work for us in communication, in writing, in reading? Verbal communication, fine. Body language and gesture, surely. But the written word? Clearly flesh and blood do not belong here, they are not the Right Words, and yet…We cannot see how these stolen words can belong because we continue to believe that we are always thinking first with our minds, with our ‘selves’, even with our hearts – with these things that live inside our bodies – within the boundaries. But it is the skin that knows first. This is not metaphor. “Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin.”xi When we touch skin it is transformed, autonomic reactions kick in – here we have physical intensity. But intensity functions “differentially in relation” to languagexii too and as a text is transformed by its reader as its flesh is revealed, it too transforms and the flesh of the reader herself manifests this affect as it is reminded of its own fleshy-ness, of its own trouble maintaining boundaries.
And it is this recognition of language—not all language but certain kinds of language—that is,
particular compositions of words, carefully crafted phrases, and eloquently expressed thoughts have the ability to elicit those autonomic responses, to affect the reader. If it makes you shiver, it is working. Perhaps part of what we are interested in here is bridging—in the moments when it is possible—the disjuncture between qualities and intensities, because of course “there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity.”xiii With that said, I guess with this brigandage, and with all these incisions and sutures, we are interested in addressing the flesh—breaching the boundaries that keep it out of reach—affecting it and perhaps even stimulating synesthetic responses. Sure this is lofty, but it is something of import nevertheless. One of the things that we all share is our affiliation to writing. And returning to what was said, there are of course certain expectations placed on those who write. Again this is further laden by the institutional support which, in our case, is inextricably linked to this theoretical endeavour. Of course, this little project of ours is expressly predicated upon opening up the body, keeping it open, letting it bleed, and letting that bleeding be productive, but part of what we are also beholden to do, is first “be loving in our recklessness,”xiv and second be lovely in the way that we do it; to write in a such way as to elicit and not just express. I broach this because we mustn’t—as so many of the custodians of knowledge coming before us have—forget that “matter-of-factness dampens intensity.”xv This is not to say that bodies of knowledge—ours, or those stolen from our victims—need to be made transparent, no, the struggle is part of the fun. Rumination leads to nourishment. Because of course, in the words of a particularly astute servant of thought, we are “obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.”xvi (‘Oh, that Butler.’). Nevertheless, throughout these philosophically minded pursuits we should not leave intensity or affective writing by the wayside. Though we can certainly create bodies without organs, let us not obfuscate the flesh of our bodies. Writing, in fact, is not dissimilar to the open body that we are assembling or the process of its becoming. This openness we seek, and that we perpetuate with every cut, slash and tear of the body is not so different from how we learn to write—how we are always learning to write. Learning to write is much like a continual flight. A movement that follows a multitude of lines and vectors, some of which produce more drag than others. And each trajectory that is followed leaves us with something that we did not possess before. Knowledge, words, phrases, and feelings have this way of accruing, sometimes accumulating so discreetly as to elude our notice… that is until the moment of recognition. A moment that matters; a moment that has a way of once again fashioning more matter and creating something to be plugged into.
Indeed, plugging into, or literally, actually feeling the intensity or the heat or force-field or micro-environment around a body, off someone else’s, some other’s body. What we want is in parts haptic: that is, perceptual, visual, but close enough to touch, to handle. We want an image of thought on a plane that consistently reassures us we are accomplishing something, something more than hiding behind contrived words and prefacing statements with the goodness of our intentions to deprive the custodians of our words the petty pleasures of control and regulation, by becoming irreverent and unruly, by being reckless vultures. We want that Deleuze breathing air through Spinoza and the immanence of things, a thing that, in changing an ‘a’ to an ‘i’ (immanent), intensifies, amplifies, and multiplies with added proximity, always near-by. Yet, I detect uncertainty, anxiety, uneasiness with the prospects of hiding behind pretty words and mixing metaphors, despite our best intentions, despite the sensorial and aesthetic revelry ongoing in the space of affect that is the recurring whatness we suppose, which we feel ourselves. I detect, recognize, interpret (no no no) a necessity, a need to be affective, to have an effect, to matter, to touch, to really touch, but to have to tackle the layers or distances or times across the multiple proximities that we struggle to keep close, to try and fix so the effort is easy, the labour much less. I detect some kind of feeling, some inability, some driving motivation or obligation to release, to move this elsewhere, to be idealistic enough to really think that this thinking can continue to change, can continue to touch flesh, to really touch life, to be “infinitely responsible”xvii, to be ethical in the sense of becoming open to others, recognizing the needs of others and sympathizing and being compassionate enough to step out from behind the carapace of words thrown together. Inclination. Inclined.
Obligation. As Michael Payne reminds us, Sartre knew that in literature, in both the writing and the reading, we are “condemned to be free.”xviii And now as we thieve and murder (all writing is theft, all reading is murder) we are free too take what we wish, say what we like, we have the power to take meaning, to change meaning, to make meaning. But with this comes responsibility – if it has flesh and a body, then it must also have a face and as Levinas tells us the face commands that we be responsible for another prior to that other’s address. As the text is unfettered and let loose from the bounds of traditional discipline, as we explore and revel in the excess, we must also know that as long as the text keeps going (which it can, into infinity) so too must our responsibility. We must know our place. We must know that the text will not stop. We cannot call this an ethical problem because we cannot know the text’s bounds for it has none, none that will hold in any case, and to talk ethics we need something to build that talk around, something with edges and straight lines and corners, not the permeable, fluid, leaking, squelching, squirming flesh that lives between the real and the imagined and transforms them both. As Caputo says,
Obligation…is a kind of skandalon for ethics, which makes ethics blush, which ethics must reject or expel in order to maintain its good name, for ethics is “philosophy,” a certain episteme. Ethics contains obligation, but that is its undoing (deconstruction).xix
When we see the face, contact the flesh of the other, we are faced with the topography of our obligation. So too it is with the text as it is other, as it bleeds and leaks and is fleshy even as it refuses to abandon its body, its being and sense, we know that we are obliged. We cannot ignore its screams, its tortured pleas. Though it bleeds and suffers and calls to us for help, it too may heal and nourish us, soothing our cries, tending our wounds. Its flesh meeting with ours we identify with the blood and mess, we understand that we are not alone, that our flesh may unite and comfort us. The flesh reminds us that we will die and while we may mourn ourselves, we must also celebrate the one thing that we all share. For it is in the space of this sharing that the marginalized meets the oppressor and neither one can deny their sameness, the mutual experience of the flesh.
Does touch constitute contact? You can direct and address a touch, but words address by themselves, ghostly, escaping, decaying, but still stubbornly resonant. The echo of words bleed and leak (The words that come out are shit, eh, these silly organs of mine?); the edifice of writing as the locus of hegemony and power, the violent fixing of naming, always leaks. The skin feels first. What do we know, though, afterward? How do we feel the word and the touch it brings? Arrange it on an idexical register, where this touch means that, easily? Do we think about it, make it an object refined? Paradoxical problem and solution: we cannot stop thinking, but we shouldn’t stop thinking either. What is the function of this feeling and can we afford to pat ourselves on the back for exploding this thing, for still fulfilling the demands of a programmatic pathway we knew would culminate with this kind of encounter, this modified collaboration? This bulges, is not streamlined, and this thisness is a release—for us, at least—of the energy inherent of the encounters and co-ordinations and emergences, caught up in percepts, in affects
Percepts aren’t perceptions, they’re packets of sensations and relations that live on independently of whomever experiences them….Affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else…xx
And yet, what have I opened? Have I created the threat of perpetual emergency? I calculate the risk, my object, the risk that comes in stating or speaking or feeling, still swayed by the feedback of value and the arbitrary end. Being selfishly open to myself, to my colleagues, to the mediators I value and hold in high standing? Letting my nomadic little machine mind run wild while compiling stroking assemblies, thinking all the while that the fluidity of my massing of words can defy? Can perform magic, can transform and do things? Massumi argues that boundaries are less solid physical things than they are filters, permeable membranes that do not exclude (negative) but prioritize and productively induce certain emergencesxxi. My point is simply that the only prioritized matter, the flesh that leaks into this, is ours, is elegantly ours. And despite some of the treasured advice I have received, the guilt still kicks in, a blockage that produces sedimentation rather than encouraging movement. I feel the pull of accomplishment, of necessity, of a task to be finished, yet intellectually realize the need for the autonomy of affects, to engage and differentiate with the sensing and doing of thought, and the application of its knowledge seized. And yet to bring what I have come to know, after thinking, to attempt to hold it and concretize it comes with the subsequent knowledge that it slips underneath or through without a scrutineering touch or feel or glance or smell. Sometimes it escapes my own response. But still I am left with the fact that knowing, the science of harnessing the affects, reeks. It does stink. It sneaks, invisible, without a relay, like hydrogen sulfide gas, industrial disease extraordinaire, beyond smell, which is only visible by the dropping of people in its fallout zone, its viral quality visible too late. I fear I can’t smell the reek, yet the words continue to do their little things.
And, of course, in this discussion of writing, collaboration and bodies that matter, identifying a fall-out zone is no easy task. Any endeavour to investigate the symptoms, signs or traces of our productivity is problematic to say the least. Amid such scrutiny, one must realize that nary a fallen body will be found. And I worry about that. I worry because there are expectations. The expectation that we demonstrate what we have accrued, and in so doing, reveal how this might be applied or made to work. Whatever the case there is the obligation to do, to become, to move or to make things move, moving always moving. Stasis is sterile. From another perspective, I am equally concerned with ensuring that the machine we are constructing or this body of organs that we assembling—or allowing to assemble itself (as words and ideas often do)—cannot be a fleshless body, that is, that it not be something insubstantial, instead, that it becomes something that can get up and move, and not merely be a corpus that collapses upon itself. To this extent, I am also preoccupied with not allowing ourselves to be sheltered by these words and metaphors. I do not want
to merely cry “metaphor!” and flee. That is not in my character. Part of what has facilitated this plane of thought—or thoughts—is the encounters we’ve had and the interactions we’ve shared. Our discussions have given rise to and provided me with concepts or distracted reflections that have really moved me or created things that I can move. That being said, I am truly sorry about the fact that I cannot fully impart or demonstrate all that has been productive about this collaboration. I cannot do so because ideas, concepts and notions are at times incredibly surreptitious… they often need a proxy to signify—or reveal themselves—at all. I do not have a Geiger Counter on hand, but I can assure you—these thoughts are radioactive. They are a form of energy. They afford the possibility of transduction, of opening something, making it work and perhaps remaining open for other use. Openness has been a leitmotif in this project from its very inception. In fact, the reading list was the product of a confluence of three intellectual desires all concerned with poststructuralist thought. Yet at the same time, openness has also been a raison d’être for each of us while grappling with these rhizomes of thought.
During the encounters, our discussions and reflections were always predicated upon a founding principle of
openness—ours was always an ethic of willingness. Not only were we obliged to recognize the face of our
colleague, but we were also—naturally, and of our own accord—interested in both hearing and fleshing out one another’s ideas, questions and critiques. Each utterance and every stammering was welcome. And yet, openness was productive in another sense. Each week consisted not only in the grappling with these custodians’ words, but with fiddling with these theoretical pieces of Lego and seeing how they might fit with the work we were conducting elsewhere. In this way, we were essentially helping one another to open things that may have previously been closed to us. This has carried forth to the editing process as well. This has not been an easy machine to assemble. For reasons previously mentioned, we have struggled between wide horizons, expectations, obligations, and considerations. We have even edited this together. Having altered our own portions of this body, along with each other’s. Thus we have all touched, and touched up, one another’s bodies. It is in this way that these bodies are as much mine as they are yours; hopefully in time they can be someone else’s as well. Returning to my inability to fully express the worth of this project, it can be said that this stems from my having come across a multitude of ideas, concepts and notions through a number of different encounters (all of which are a result of this course) and for that reason I have necessarily left with something more than I originally came with. Some of these insights that I have garnered will only reveal themselves once a proxy makes itself available, once there is an object of inquiry which summons their use, makes them work and thereby renders them visible. As such, it is obvious that some of this will remain completely unknown or intransmissible within the space of this collaboration. Then, one might be inclined to ask: what have we done here? Well, for one thing, this collaboration should not be taken as a confession of our having done something, or of our having been productive, though I won’t deny that we have. Nevertheless, to only see this collaboration along those lines would be to miss the beauty of these encounters. It would overlook the potential of this machine of thought. Though this collaboration ostensibly ends with the conclusion of this text, it has proven to be an encounter which will continue to distend in particular ways for each of us for quite some time. Indeed, any concluding sentence—along with the period that brings it to a full-stop—serves as nothing more than a tenuous lid at most. For when the written word or delivered utterance is released, no one may predict how that thought, energy, or matter gets channeled, shaped or made to matter. More often than not one can rest assured that an end is never necessarily the end…
So, we leave ourselves with ends unfurled; fluids, machines, desiring words and words, with an image of thought that should and ought. We have assembled a territory, a geography. Yet, the only flesh I see is mine and I feel badly. I can afford to perform ‘situational ethics’, can become pragmatic about my own lines of flight to other things, to a serial of tragic submissions, but who cannot? John Schad writes about life after Theory, about life as something theorizing must inevitably answer to, about life as something that emerges in the disinterested, distracted moments of engagement with ideas and thoughts and texts. Jean-François Lyotard has written that the task is to allude to something which can be conceived but cannot be presented (the postmodern sublime), to be aware of the differends that defy recuperation by forces we are at once both complicit with and critical of.xxii Deleuze writes that “non-oedipal love is pretty hard”xxiii, like pure forgiveness without reciprocal gains. Kim Sawchuk has advised us that our interventions massively alter, despite their seemingly small scale, the course of the things and processes and events in a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty way. John Durham Peters offers that the touch of the hand may be the best we can do, the encounter as the comfort of coordination. There is some certainty as to the affective
parameters of the offering we generate here, the subject of the ‘we’ that precludes and makes obvious our selfish, inward turns. But the question remains: whose hands are we touching, and with what scrutiny? What comfort are we providing? With this, then, there is hazy denial along with the suspicious and sneaky contention that there is no blood on our hands.
Yours, In Theory,
Christian, Heather, and Neil
Hydrogen sulfide is detectable only in low concentrations. It is undetectable in high concentrations by smell, but visible by way of the bodies it inhabits, colonizes, and subsequently kills. The smell goes away as the intensity increases, yet the affect is amplified. I thank Peter van Wyck and his visceral conceptualization of a semiotic relay in this regard. See Van Wyck, “Highway of the Atom”, Topia 7, 2002.
i Deleuze and Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus. B. Massumi (trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1987. 24.
ii Wachowski, Andy & Larry Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Bros, 1999.
iii Latour, Bruno. “The Last Critique.” Harper’s Magazine. April 2004:20.
iv Dewey, John. “The Search of the Great Community [1927].” The Essential Dewey: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy. Ed. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander. Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. 295.
v Deleuze, Gilles. “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Negotiations 1972-1990. Martin Joughin (trans.) New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, 8.
vi Caputo, John D. Against Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. 196.
vii Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” 7.
viii Poached from Doreen Massey, “Power-geometry and a Progressive Politics of Place,” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Jon Bird et. Al (eds.) London: Routledge, 1993, 59-69. Massey refers to place, which I have folded into a Deleuzian place of thinking.
ix Norton, Anne. Bloodrites of the Poststructuralists: Word, Flesh, and Revolution. London: Routledge, 2002. Norton establishes a dialectical and often atonimic relationship between the both themes and actual materials of flesh and blood, and the written word, especially where the word is taken to be representative as codified law and symbolic Law. Norton traces the shifts, specifically in times of revolution, where the body and blood are displaced and brought into order by the rhetorical and physical power of the word in what is a poetic account of the political power .She develops a historical trajectory of the emergence of the word as a violent and privileged form of closure, whereas the body that bleeds is a mark of openness, and as such, the target for disciplinary and regulating discourses. For Norton, the privilege of closure through the word takes on a distinctly patriarchal and phallocentric cultural value, yet this privilege is exploded by post-structuralist developments in cultural and critical theory, where closure itself is openly exposed, revelaed as an immanent and ideological effect of the structure of discourse.
x Deleuze, ‘Letter to a Harsh Critic’, 7.
xi Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect,” Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 25.
xii Massumi. “The Autonomy of Affect,” 25.
xiii Massumi. “The Autonomy of Affect,” 24.
xiv This advice was put forward by professor Peter C. Van Wyck during a meeting held with him on the 28th of January 2004.
xv Massumi. “The Autonomy of Affect,” 25.
xvi Butler, Judith. A quote culled from an article in an unidentified issue of the Montreal Gazette.
xvii Jacques Derrida, quoted in Schad, John. “Epilogue: Coming back to ‘life’: ‘Leavis
spells pianos’,” Life After Theory. J. Schad and M. Payne. New York: Continuum, 2003. 181.
xviii Schad, 183.
xix Caputo, 5.
xx Deleuze, Gilles. “On Philosophy,” Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 137.
xxi Massumi, Brian. “Everywhere You Want To Be: Introduction to Fear,” The Politics of Everyday Fear.
Brian Massumi (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 22.
xxiiLyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Questions: What is Postmodernism,” The Continental Philosophy Reader. Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater (eds.) London: Routledge, 1996. 437.
xxiii Deleuze. “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” 10.
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