If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I’ve read some D(&G) stuff before.
“Infinite” is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they’re not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They’re right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: “flows” mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they’re talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it’s actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze’s stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he’s made in the past. It’s like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it’s almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It’s difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it’s interpreted there’s a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.
Even as a post-modernist, I wouldn’t say I’m impressed with the average post-modern thinker. In other words, I don’t know the answer to your question, and am not confident that it would reflect well on post-modern thought.
I will say that post-modern art theory (as opposed to political theory) is least impressive to me. It always seemed to me like art critics have already said all the interesting things that aren’t post-modern, so post-modern literary criticism is the only way to say something new. And if it isn’t new, it doesn’t get published. But this is an uninformed outsiders impression.
In my rock critic days I found it a useful tool in writing about and understanding pop culture. (’80s British pop music is what you’d get if you tried monetising postmodernism, and I don’t just mean ZTT.) It’s the sort of thing you really want to have a use for before you bother with it more than casually.
(I still think in terms of critical understanding of stuff all the time and read books of criticism for enjoyment, even of artistic fields I know nothing about. I realised a while ago that if I were doing for a job the thing I would be best at, I’d be a professor of critical theory and paid a lot less than I am as a sysadmin.)
I chose postgrads because the counterpoint would be asking, say, statistics postgrads what a moderately arcane piece of stats terminology means in context.
We then have the extra avenue of asking professors. The stats professors should give answers consistent with the postgrads, because stats terminology should be consistent in the public domain; the professors may know more about it, but they don’t have any normative influence as to what the terminology means.
Will the literature professors have answers consistent with, but more knowledgeable than, their postgrad students, or will they be something different altogether?
If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I’ve read some D(&G) stuff before.
“Infinite” is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they’re not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They’re right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: “flows” mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they’re talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it’s actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze’s stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he’s made in the past. It’s like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it’s almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It’s difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it’s interpreted there’s a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.
Even as a post-modernist, I wouldn’t say I’m impressed with the average post-modern thinker. In other words, I don’t know the answer to your question, and am not confident that it would reflect well on post-modern thought.
I will say that post-modern art theory (as opposed to political theory) is least impressive to me. It always seemed to me like art critics have already said all the interesting things that aren’t post-modern, so post-modern literary criticism is the only way to say something new. And if it isn’t new, it doesn’t get published. But this is an uninformed outsiders impression.
In my rock critic days I found it a useful tool in writing about and understanding pop culture. (’80s British pop music is what you’d get if you tried monetising postmodernism, and I don’t just mean ZTT.) It’s the sort of thing you really want to have a use for before you bother with it more than casually.
(I still think in terms of critical understanding of stuff all the time and read books of criticism for enjoyment, even of artistic fields I know nothing about. I realised a while ago that if I were doing for a job the thing I would be best at, I’d be a professor of critical theory and paid a lot less than I am as a sysadmin.)
Should the test be done by asking postgrads or professors? Why one or the other?
I chose postgrads because the counterpoint would be asking, say, statistics postgrads what a moderately arcane piece of stats terminology means in context.
We then have the extra avenue of asking professors. The stats professors should give answers consistent with the postgrads, because stats terminology should be consistent in the public domain; the professors may know more about it, but they don’t have any normative influence as to what the terminology means.
Will the literature professors have answers consistent with, but more knowledgeable than, their postgrad students, or will they be something different altogether?