Students, the University, Social Contestation, and the ’60s; Nomad Thought, Global Capital and The War Machine in Deleuze and Guattari

The final two lectures in the series:

A talk looking at the meaning of the ’60s in terms of social contestation, students, and the university, and the proximities and distances between thenand now.

Chamsy El-Ojeili
(Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Cultural Studies, MA (Hons) PhD (Massey))
Wednesday 21 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

A talk discussing the assemblage Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari label the war machine, which they establish in opposition to the apparatus of state power, in other words a war of becoming over being.

Robert Deuchars
(Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (City U London), PhD (VUW))
Thursday 22 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5.30pm

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE PROVIDED!

And here is an interview with Robert Deuchars, courtesy of Salient:

Who are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari?

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was one of France’s most influential 20th Century Philosopher’s.  Influence primarily by Spinoza and Nietsche he wrote a number of important works in philosophy, including books on Hume, Foucault, Nietzsche and Spinoza. He is most famous though for his collaborations with Felix Guattari (1930-1992), the radical psychotherapist and political activist.  They co-authored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, which were both best-sellers in France.  Their final collaboration was in  a book called What is Philosophy?  Deleuze is considered a leading figure, along with Michel Foucault in continental philosophy in the post-structualist movement, although some critics place him in the postmodern camp, which is a basic mis-reading of his work. His engagement with the hard sciences and with complexity theory has meant that his ideas cut across many disciplines from cultural studies to political theory.

What do Deleuze and Guattari mean by ‘body without organs’, ‘war machine’ and ‘lines of flight’?

This would take pages to answer so here are some shorthand definitions.  The Body without organs means many things but in its simplest form it is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “plane of consistency”.  In that sense the earth itself is a body without organs upon which all experience is expressed. The body without organs is also a limit to the desiring function of all other “bodies”, whether they be humans all the way to rocks and trees.  Deleuze and Guatarri do not consider the world the be comprised of stable entities, rather the world is made up of a series of flows, travelling at differential rates of speed and intensities. In a general sense then, the body without organs is a substratum of flows.

In a thousand plateaus the war machine is established by two inter-related axioms.  The first is that  ‘The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus’ and, secondly, that ‘The war machine is the invention of the nomads (insofar as it is exterior to the State apparatus and distinct from the military institution)’  and establish it in opposition to the apparatus of state power.  However the war machine has very little to do with war proper and is better understood as a radical type of thought that forms a central aspect of the Deleuzean politico-philosophical project.  In other words it is a war of becoming over being.  The war machine potentially involves everyone as it provides a radically different ontology for both the globalizing tendencies of capitalist power and the various forms of resistance to that mechanism of power.  The war machine is not however something instrinsically good and Deleuze and Guattari point out that it can take malign forms. What is important in Deleuze and Guattari’s identification of many types of war machine is that they are all irreducibly social in nature. It is the social base of all war machines that enables the conceptual tension of the term ‘war machine’ itself to be appreciated.  It is not only nomads that can form a war machine, but eventually the State itself can become something altogether different; a war machine formed by social formations that proceed to ‘take over’ the state apparatus itself, Nazi Germany for example.

‘Line of flight’ is a concept used by Deleuze to explain rhizomatic thinking and the creation of paths or journeys of escape from the apparatus of capture found in the state formation.  The apparatus of the sate is primarily concerned with coding and inscribing all bodies.  Lines of flight are attempts at  deterritorialization or to escape the striated space of the state and move into smooth space.  Striated space is confined space, but very loosely smooth space are spaces of freedom, without instrinsic properties and without pre-defined direction.  To take an everyday example think of young people who skateboard on the road or people who ride bikes over walls and street stairs.  In these simple examples they are deterritorializing the striated space established by the apparatus of capture, appropriating it for creative ends and ‘becoming something altogether different’.  In other words they creating the conditions for smooth space whereby free action has the potential to occur.

In terms of the question of students and the university, how do you think the body without organs, the war machine, and the creation of lines of flight are helpful?

The glib answer is resistance.  However, that would depend on how the student body is constituted and what forms of expression it takes.  As far as I am aware the student body here is highly coded, captured and individualised.  However the appearance of spaces in between the codification of the student body (nothing is ever completely captured) create the conditions or potentialities for war machines to emerge, and for lines of flight to be created.  This does not suggest however advocating confrontation with the primary mechanisms of control ie , law, institutions and contracts, but the active and affective expression of creative thinking and actions.  Confrontation is situational so it would depend on the particularities of situations that may appear as unfair, oppressive, dominating and so on.

In relation to Roger Douglas’s Voluntary Student Membership bill, this lecture series might be involved in something of a war machine to VUWSA’s (Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association) state apparatus: a student body becoming rather than being. Your thoughts?

Given that I don’t know anything about this bill, I don’t feel qualified to answer this question.  I do not pay any attention to domestic formal politics.

Any ideas on how this process can be extended?

That I imagine has to be done by experimentation, trial and error.  Those seeking a plan, an alternative a manifesto should be disappointed, or confused by the antagonism between the line and the point. The point of the line of flight is,  is to follow the line; not to have a point; that’s the point of not having a point.  Consider escape along lines of flight as journeys; journeys’ where one does not know the destination but where ‘other world’s are (already) possible’.  There is an emancipatory aspect to this line of thinking.

How do we make ourselves a student body without organs?

Given that I don’t know who “we” are this question is not one that can be answered as it presupposes a “we” that is known, that is active and that “others” are aware of its movements and intentions.  I think the question is potentially misleading as it conflates the student body (or student body politic) with  the body without organs, which as noted about is a plane of consistency, limit or a plane of immanence.  However the student body in this reading is more analagous to the body politic found in mainstream political theory ie it constitutes a thing.  The body without organs on the other hand is a substratum of fluidity and desire.  A very simple answer to the question though is to stop thinking in terms of “things” ie stable and fixed entities with all of their properties established and known and start to think of processes, unstable and shifting identities and subjectivites, always in the process of becoming.  There is an aesthetic appeal here to this line of thinking that is analagous to nomad thought ie what defines the nomad is as that it operates according to different principles, which Deleuze describes as the   ‘fundamental indiscipline of the warrior, a questioning of hierarchy, perpetual blackmail by abandonment, or betrayal, and a very volatile sense of honor, all of which, once again impedes the formation of the State’ (or in the case of your analogy here equating nomads (some students) against the VUWSA.

Are there any questions which you think would be useful which you could add and respond to?

Very briefly, what is nomadism?

Deleuze sees in Nietzsche a type of experimental ‘nomadism’, a form of non-philosophy that escapes the confines of the philosophical discourse of his time. This discourse is firmly rooted in the outside or exterior to the philosophy of State or of sovereignty. It implies movement, speed, and unexpected irruptions and sets itself in opposition (although not binary) to the tired and worn effects of dialectics; in other words the affirmation of chance, creation and most of all in the eternal return.  The dicethrow in Nietzsche confirms ‘affirmation of the many.  But all the parts, all the fragments are cast in one throw; all of chance, all at once’. This in short is the defining feature of the eternal return.  In other words what returns is not the same but returning itself.  Pure difference.

However, although Deleuze and Guattari argue that although the war machine originated with nomads, there is nothing especially important about them. At one level of thought nomads, say in the form of the early artisans or metallurgists draw ‘a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth place of displacement’.   This is a war machine but of consequence only insofar as it demonstrates groups’ abilities to carve out space for themselves, rather than occupy the space created by a higher or pre-given ordering principle or process. This war machine forms the part of the Deleuzean critique of hylomorphism.  In short Deleuze states that ‘The primary determination of nomads is to occupy and hold smooth space; it is this aspect that determines them as nomad (essence)’.

This is one form of the war machine but not taking a revolutionary form, merely action to avoid the overcoding of the State apparatus.  In this sense many social formations have the potential to constitute a war machine, but one of relatively little importance when it comes to the consideration of active and effective resistance to the globalizing tendencies of contemporary capitalism.

“The Groundings with my Brothers”: Knowledge Production Outside of the Academy in the Academy

The second lecture in Victoria Student Media’s ‘How Do We Make Ourselves a Student Body Without Organs?’ series:

“The Groundings with my Brothers”: Knowledge Production Outside of the Academy in the Academy

A talk drawing on prominent Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney’s work.

From Salient:

‘Defending the language of politics’

http://www.salient.org.nz/features/defending-the-language-of-politics

Robbie Shilliam is a senior lecturer at Victoria in the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations. He will be presenting a lecture as part of Victoria Student Media’s lecture series ‘How do we make ourselves a student body without organs?’ VBC 88.3FM’s Jonathan King asks Robbie about his ideas on the subject.

With the title of the lecture series being ‘How do we make ourselves a student body without organs?’, what would your response to this question be?

It could mean many things, but I am guessing in this context it refers to how political agency might be retained in the absence of fixed organisational structuring principles.

Who is Walter Rodney, and how has his work influenced your views on academia and the role of intellectuals?

Walter Rodney was a Guyanese academic, an historian of Africa and the Caribbean who taught in both places. He was a seminal voice in the Black Power era, writing the very influential book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. But he was a critic, especially, of what he called the “Black Bourgeoisie”, including members of the Caribbean political elite, many of which were university educated. He became involved in the Guyanese Working People’s Alliance, an opposition group, and was assassinated by the Burnham government in 1980. For the last part of the question, see below.

What is meant by “The groundings with my brothers” and how does this phrase relate to today’s situation?

This refers to Rodney’s several meetings, while at the University of West Indies, with Rasta in Kingston. To ground is to discuss and reason with Rasta. It is called grounding because you sit on the ground. That might sound silly, but it has a profound meaning. Rodney, the educated, privileged academic—the legitimate producer of knowledge of society—sat down on the ground with Rasta and treated them as equally legitimate producers of knowledge of society. In terms of the hierarchies of knowledge production, and of who can speak authoritatively, this was a revolutionary action: it meant that those who are so often talked about in academia—the poor, the destitute, the abjected, the suffering, the ‘masses’—themselves talked about those who took upon themselves the right to study them. In my opinion, that is true critical dialogue. Student Unions have often sought to provide a bridge between the world of academia and the world academia (and especially the social sciences and humanities) interrogates: just think about anti-Apartheid movements, here, in Aotearoa and at this very Whare Wananga. So that is the importance of talking about Rodney in the context of these present debates.

What problems do you think exist within the current university model?

Within the university, or amongst students? Not everything can be blamed on the university model. But in general, the problem is that the changes happening—and this is a thing that is sweeping the entire ‘western’ world, and not just universities here—is that the core purpose of the university, especially with regards to its faculties of humanities and social sciences (that is, to be a critical conscience on society), is being dismantled. No policies ever state this directly (how could they?!), and most of the policymakers involved don’t think they are doing this, but this is what is being done. The focus on outputs for output’s sake; the turning of the student into a consumer; the focus on efficient maximising of throughputs—all of these means have become the ends. I note that in many ‘third world’ countries, most of their universities have to focus on very practical contributions to society. It used to be the privilege of ‘first world’ universities that each had a focus on more long-term visions and critiques of what the good life for all meant. I wonder where our universities are now situated.

What role do you think academics, students and the university should ideally play within the university and society at large?

The purpose of university is to constantly debate that very point. Hence, the provocation of my talk is that to debate a student body without organs cannot be narcissistic. It is neither about the students, or the university, but the ethical and political relationship that students and universities hold to the ‘objects’ of their inquiry. Rodney would have spat on that word, ‘object’!!

Some people have argued that we would do well to do away with the university and the student, with the other half of the title of your talk being ‘knowledge prodution outside of the academy in the academy’, what is your view on this?

Quite simply that our society is based on hierarchies of power, those hierarchies reproduce themselves in elite forums and institutions. The social glue of these forums and institutions is knowledge production. Now, these institutions can be formal (e.g. a university) or they can be informal (e.g. the living room where the family is emptied out and the men and their student-sons talk to each other). So the question is: which forum/institution do you think is more healthy? Let’s not delude ourselves with puerile thoughts. Getting rid of public institutions doesn’t get rid of privilege and hierarchy.

With large cutbacks in funding of university education occurring around the world, accompanied by rising resistance from students, what advice would you give to the student body?

The very space within which to debate and consider the relationship between power and knowledge production is under threat. The history of universities, in the main, has been predominantly one of people paid by elites and armed with weapons rushing in and violently stopping meetings and talking. That is the main history of it. However, those people with weapons have usually had practice, first, upon the ‘objects’ that we in the social sciences and humanities study in university. It is about you and your education, but you and your education in relation to hierarchies of power in which you yourself are situated favourably, and thus about your thoughts on how that hierarchy can or cannot invest itself in a good life for all. It is, then, about defending the very language of politics itself. So those are the stakes at play.

‘Learning to think’

Tony Schirato, an Associate Professor in the School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria, talks to Salient Editor Sarah Robson about his upcoming lecture entitled ‘Foucault, Ethics and Fearless Speech’.

http://www.salient.org.nz/features/learning-to-think

What are you going to be talking about at the lecture on Tuesday?

It’s tied up with two books I’m doing. One is a book that Anita Brady and I are doing on the American gender theorist Judith Butler. The other is a complete rewrite of a book with some other people on Foucault. The departure point is a group of lectures Foucault gave—a lot of Foucault’s lectures have now come out as books in the last ten years or so. They’re really interesting things, because they talk about a whole lot of stuff about questions of ethics, about questions of political action and that kind of thing…

Butler uses a lot of Foucault and one of the books is a really interesting book called Fearless Speech, which is about a Greek concept called parrhesia. It’s about fearless speech, or what it translates to, free speech. It’s about two things, one is that one should speak, or be in a position where one speaks, fairly fearlessly about the situation. At the same time it’s a kind of an ethic. There is an ethos here, there’s the ethical imperative—one is pretty much required to speak the truth about things. It’s really an interesting topic for me because we’re living in a time where a whole lot of things are happening in the contemporary public sphere—and I’m using that in the wide sense of the West, and in New Zealand too.

[It] is clearly dominated by the media, where I think there is very little possibility of truth telling. More specifically there are a whole series of events: Afghanistan, Iraq, the war on terror, post-September 11—this is the stuff that Butler writes about, Butler is increasingly devoting her books to how the frig do you talk about these things in an honest way, when in fact there are all sorts of serious [consequences] if you do. It strikes me that this is a question for our time, a very serious, serious question for our time.

Of what relevance is this to students at Vic?

[It is of] very, very significant relevance. In a sense students have been seriously misserved by the media as public sphere…Students should know what’s going on around them, they should be able to make informed decisions about what’s going on around them. They should be knowledgeable and should be able to contribute. That sort of thing doesn’t happen. I think the opposite’s happening, whether it’s from the media, or the way they’re treated as students by the wider kind of institutional frame, I think in a sense they are being treated in a way that is not to their advantage.

Things have happened to them, you only need to mention huge student debt—that clearly constitutes a form of violence in all sorts of ways. There are different forms of violence: invading Afghanistan or Iraq and killing 500,000 people, or basically saddling people with enough debt so they can never jump over it. These both constitute forms of violence and it’s important if students are going to—if anybody’s going to—do something about it and challenge these different forms of violence, then it’s important that students be literate about what’s happening and be knowledgeable and be able to do something about it. Even understanding the situation and understanding how it came about is really important.

Do you think student media can play a better role informing students?

You’re a student, and you identify with other students. You’re a community, you’re part of a community and you’d like these people to be treated in a way that you’d like yourself to be treated. I think being part of student media sort of helps do that. Lots of things are happening, [but] student media can’t actually have an effect. If only students knew they could actually influence things, if they got pissed off about certain things they wouldn’t happen, or rather if they articulated and manifested their pissed-offedness, the university wouldn’t do them. If you are more than self-interested, then yeah, I think you can make a difference, and that’s kind of useful.

What do you think is the role of academics and the university in wider society?

Theoretically the university is meant to take on a number of roles. One is a critical role, it’s meant to be the voice that asks questions, that queries why we are doing this, says “is this really a good thing to do? Are we thinking about this? Is this really what we want to do? Are we doing bad things here?”

Also it takes on a role to inform and to help people learn to think. Learning to think—I’m talking about the wider community—and teaching ourselves to think… Thinking is something that as a task is a remarkably difficult thing to do, most people simply cannot think, most people haven’t been trained to think. You can’t simply say go and play squash and pick up a racket and a ball and you hit yourself on the head. It won’t work, you have to be trained to do it.

Unless you’re trained to think you won’t, and if you can’t think you’re in trouble. The university and academics have a wider critical function, but the other thing is they have a remarkably important function, and that is to teach students and the wider community, to think or help them think. Or maybe teach themselves to think through that process itself… It’s a really important function and students are part of that.

What’s your response to the title of the lecture series?

Basically a student body is something which, I don’t know whether it needs organs, but I think it does need to take itself seriously. It needs to laugh at itself first and it needs to laugh at all sorts of things and then [say], well fuck I’ve laughed at that, now I’m going to take it seriously. The student body needs to take itself seriously. It needs to take itself seriously, first of all as being a very privileged group that’s been put in a position where it’s been taught to think, and there comes a certain responsibility with that. I think it’s a group that learns to think, and it’s a group that learns to take its responsibility seriously.

Tony will be speaking as part of Victoria Student Media’s lecture series ‘How do we make ourselves a student body without organs?’ on Tuesday 23 March at 5pm at the Adam Art Gallery. Refreshments provided!

Foucault, Ethics & Fearless Speech

The first lecture in the ‘How Do We Make Ourselves a Student Body Without Organs’ series, ‘Foucault, Ethics & Fearless Speech’.

A talk based on Foucault’s lectures at the College de France after 1981, on the Greek notion of Parrhesia.

Tony Schirato
(Associate Professor, School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies, MA (Sydney) PhD (Sydney))
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

How Do We Make Ourselves a Student Body Without Organs?

Victoria Student Media presents…

How Do We Make Ourselves a Student Body Without Organs?

A series of lectures, delivered by Victoria University academics, at the Adam Art Gallery.

Foucault, Ethics & Fearless Speech

A talk based on Foucault’s lectures at the College de France after 1981, on the Greek notion of Parrhesia.

Tony Schirato
(Associate Professor, School of English Film Theatre and Media Studies, MA (Sydney) PhD (Sydney))
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

“The Groundings with my Brothers”: Knowledge Production Outside of the Academy in the Academy

A talk drawing on prominent Guyanese scholar-activist Walter Rodney’s work.

Robbie Shilliam
(Senior Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (Sussex) DPhil (Sussex))
Monday 29 March 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

Students, the University, Social Contestation, and the ’60s

A talk looking at the meaning of the ’60s in terms of social contestation, students, and the university, and the proximities and distances between then and now.

Chamsy El-Ojeili
(Senior Lecturer, School of Social and Cultural Studies, MA (Hons) PhD (Massey))
Wednesday 21 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

Nomad Thought, Global Capital and The War Machine in Deleuze and Guattari

A talk discussing the assemblage Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari label the war machine, which they establish in opposition to the apparatus of state power, in other words a war of becoming over being.

Robert Deuchars
(Lecturer, School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations, MA (City U London), PhD (VUW))
Thursday 22 April 2010
Adam Art Gallery
5pm

REFRESHMENTS WILL BE PROVIDED!

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Victoria Student Media is also calling for submissions for a publication based loosely around the question ‘How do we make ourselves a student body without organs?’ (a question based on the chapter ‘How do you make yourself a body without organs?’ from Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Submissions are invited in any form: essays, poetry, photography, painting, etc., and will be compiled and published in May 2010, before parliament attempts to decide how the student body should be organised.

Contact:

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Message

‘Hold on to the Rail’: A discussion with Roger Shepherd

Victoria Student Media presents
‘Hold on to the Rail’
A discussion with Roger Shepherd.
Tuesday March 2nd, 4pm, at the Adam Art Gallery, and broadcast LIVE on The VBC 88.3FM.

“Flying Nun is the very definition of DIY music as far as New Zealand is concerned, spawning or aiding (in one way or another) all your favourite luminaries, from The Clean to Chris Knox to The Mint Chicks. While it may have had a quiet noughties period, any self-respecting music enthusiast has been spewing with joy over the fact that Flying Nun has recently been bought back from Warner (a fucking unheard of occurrence, might I add) by none other than the label’s original founder and owner, Roger Shepherd.

As part of Flying Nun 2.0, he is coming to Victoria University to discuss the rebirth of the iconic label”
-Jame Beavis, Salient