Keeping Up With the... Well, not Joneses

Another blogger wrote about her trip up north and included pics to boot, so I feel kind of obliged to keep the two or three folks who actually read my blog updated with like info. So, here are some pics from Slim Lake in the BWCA:

Solon's 15 inch northern pike. Good eats, if a little bony! It looks like I'm more proud of this accomplishment than Solon, but it may also be his dislike of getting his picture taken.


The calm after the thunderstorm! Perfectly calm, mist on the water and a gorgeous sunset!

My mom took this as we portaged out.

Now, folks might call such experiences with nature, especially in "wilderness" areas sublime. But, like William Cronon, I would have to disagree -- at least, if they are sublime, they are not the kind of sublime Kant would say ultimately gives purpose to reason. It seems "sublime" is often very close to "wonder" in philosophical discourse. Really, at the base of it, doesn't Kant's sublime simply re-inscribe the 'gap' in knowledge Descartes says (like Plato before him) is caused by wonder? Doesn't "wonder" then, also point toward something transcendent? Yet, curiously, it is the emplaced, bodily, sensuous aspect of these experiences -- a heightened affect of being-in-a-(different)-place and living within unfamiliar rhythms -- that is often pointed out as what makes them worthwhile and often connects them to ethics.

It would seem to me that an argument for "wonder" as something that points toward transcendence of gaps or fissures in knowledge, even ethical knowledge, can only happen in a mind-body duality. But, given the writing on critical potentials of outdoor activity from recreation and leisure studies and ecopedagogy, wouldn't it make more sense to follow other critical theorists in a rejection of Cartesianism and thereby arrive at a sense of wonder that is immanent as opposed to transcendent? Wouldn't this seem to be more ethically consistent in terms of its ontology? Wouldn't this radically alter philosophy?

The Future of Invention

WARNING: This is NOT a review... yet!

I just picked up my copy of John Muckelbauer's book, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. Sadly, it's only available in hardcover and e-book. I had trouble getting it in e-book, so I had to get the print version. It seems that Publisher's Row, the e-distributor of choice for SUNY Press, requires an Adobe Acrobat plug-in that doesn't work very well with Macs. When I questioned them about why I couldn't open the file I downloaded, they suggested I use Outlook Express as my browser. Great! Make me use an outdated Microsoft product. Anyway, they were kind enough to refund my $20 with no questions asked... but still.... aaargh!

OK, the first chapter of the book is available online and I've read that. Muckelbauer does a great job outlining Deleuze's stance on difference and repetition. And it stands as a nice critique of the "third-way" approach. If change is something rhetoric strives for, either in an audience or in learning, then how do we enact change that doesn't come back to haunt us by repeating the same mistakes as before. This, I take Deleuze as saying, is ultimately the problem with Hegel. The spirit of history haunts us all. And, if we're not careful, we run away from Hegel's spirit only to find he has already arrived at our destination (kind of like Old Man Willow along the Withywindle).

So, I'm hoping Muckelbauer opens new paths and connections out of the Hegelian Old Forest. I'm also hoping to see how it can act as a companion piece to Byron Hawk's A Counter-History of Composition since that argues for a vitalism Deleuze used to escape the forest (by tunneling under it? a rhizome?). And, as has been my project for a couple years, I hope Muckelbauer points some possible connections for an immanent composition. It may seem obvious to argue, but, like Hegel's spirit -- hell as Hegel's spirit -- transcendence still haunts composition. The critical potential is often cast in transcendent terms and leads us toward certain pieties we should be loath to embrace.

"The Written Word is a Lie"

Tom Snyder's interview with John Lydon has to be one of the most sublime moments in all of television. The only was to save rock 'n roll was to kill it.



Snyder's insistence that Lydon defines himself and PIL simply demonstrates his inability to grasp what punk was all about and that Lydon and Levine intuited the postmodern condition. "There should be no difference between who's onstage and who's in the audience" (4:40).

This is an aesthetics consonant with much of deleuze's thinking. PIL, in Lydon's description is pure difference.



Snyder's query about "What do you like?" could easily be "what are you for?" as opposed to what are you against; be positive Snyder demands, but Lydon doesn't give up. He only against, only a rebel without a cause and endlessly at that. With so many having gotten the Sex Pistols wrong, there is more to the end of rock 'n roll. and PIL's endeavor is to expose that pure difference by melding with it. It is anti-stardom and Lydon is a consummate writer of anti-stardom.

Lydon's writing, of course, is preceded by Artaud and followed by Cobain. And Sirc has traced out how Cobain's writing is important as a heuristic. We might go so far as to follow Cobain back to Artaud through Lydon and apply the same description to them as Sirc does to Cobain: Orpheus, all of them, gazing from below and exposing the world of the dead.

Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you
Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you

Subdivision/ Line of Flight/ In-be-tween

Dissonance at the water park -- I am becoming-tween, repeating naive sexuality and desire balong the waves of music coming over the loudspeakers

Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth


An adult transported here, only even that was not it, but a repetition, different from 1982. Both it and me have traveled along different lines even though we are conjoined twins within Rush's music.

Subdivisions, conformity, escape; segmentations, molar bodies, lines of flight. There is desire and delirium at the water park. Seeing and desiring flesh like at a carnival, which is always also seeing and desiring a different flesh for the self. A desiring drawn from a delusion of one's own self-image, that seizure necessary from which we draw our name.

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Nothing is quite so tween to me than Rush. Not the standard pop/ country of my youth, nor the alternative music of my teens, but the "intelligent," vaguely escapist rock of Neil Peart. A cumming-to-social-consciousness be-tween two segments in life. But this in-be-tween hasn't passed. The spirit hasn't marched on or how would the song evoke that affect, virtually replicate the feelings from over twenty years ago? It is this in-be-tween-ness that has defined this moment and already foretold of its coming. How else do you explain my family, my career, my location in a small town in Iowa where everyone prides themselves on keeping this town "safe"?

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights...

Narrative and the Ghost of Deleuze

Two things, really in this post. First: my horoscope for this week as it appears in full (click on the icon to go to the most current horoscope):

Leo Horoscope for week of November 15, 2007

Stories interest me more than beliefs. I'd rather hear you regale me with tales of your travels than listen to you recite your dogmas. Filmmaker Ken Burns agrees with me. He's worried about the increasing number of people who love theories more than stories. "We are experiencing the death of narrative," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We are all so opinionated that we don't actually submit to narrative anymore. That's the essence of YouTube: Abbreviate everything into a digestible capsule that then becomes the conventional wisdom, which belies the experience of art." Your assignment, Leo, is to help reverse this soul-damaging trend. Spout fewer opinions and tell more stories. Encourage others to do the same.

Are we over-theorizing? Certainly in academe, theory is the name of the game. But to what extent does narrative intersect with theory? As one of my professors asked me (on more than one occasion), "Do students need a theory in order to write?" Maybe I see this question in a new light (I never said I was quick on the uptake). Could it be that students don't have a theory, but a narrative -- what Marilyn Cooper called the "solitary author" narrative -- about writing, and this narrative sometimes functions as theory, but isn't really? And is Burns-Brezny right in claiming that as a society we are so good at speaking about explanations of narratives that we have lost the stories themselves? If so, aren't we then loosing multiplicity or, at least, the habits of living with multiplicity and contingency?

I struggle with this as I revise my dissertation because all through its writing and now during its revision, I feel the current of narrative pulling at its theoretical aspirations. The kind of empirical research I conducted lends itself to narrative quite well, if only in the positivist/ structuralist tradition of anthropology. However, where I arrived was anything *but* positivist or structuralist and, as I increasingly find out fits more and more with Deleuze -- one could say (cry, even over the fact) that while I did not cite Deleuze even once, his thinking haunts the entire work like a ghost shambling around an attic. If Deleuze posits being (becoming) as creativity (Hallward 2006), then we may turn toward a poststructuralist re-creation studies (Rojek 1995). Further, if Zizek is right in characterizing Deleuze's becoming "within those magic moments of illusory freedom (which, in a way, were not precisely illusory)" (xii), then there is a politico-educational turn to this that doesn't settle neatly within humanism, logocentrism, or any other -ism. It simply doesn't settle.

So, maybe, following Deleuze, Zizek and Burns-Brezny, we might stop "doing theory" for a bit. Isn't this why Deleuze detested Hegel? An avoidance of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, of "debate" over meanings, of explaining in endless dialogue? Wouldn't a story tell us just as much, if not more, about our worlds? Doesn't narrative carry those multiple and contingent meanings so that the story itself ceaselessly becomes something other? Could this be a better way to talk about transcendental empiricism?

And, to stir the waters one more time, is transcendental empiricism and the virtualities of Deleuze like the Greek chora?