A one night stand with Deleuze, then brunch with King and Tuck

I was a philosophy student in undergraduate school where we spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about thinking. I loved it because it made me feel smart. I was in classes mostly with men who were delighted by my intelligence and that made me feel plucky-- like I was proving something.

Then, in my last semester of school, I had my first women’s studies class.It was like the scene from the Matrix where Neo takes the red pill and wakes up realizing he’s been living in a false reality created by a machine.

I immediately “broke up” (thank you Eve Tuck for the break up metaphor) with philosophy and never went back. I stayed in school an extra year to take more Women’s Studies classes. What use did I have for abstract, theoretical mind games and academic-only jargon, when my life and the lives of others were in danger and needed action now? When I still didn’t have equal pay or equal rights and women of color, less so? And when my gay friends were dying every eight minutes?

Reading Humans involved: Lurking in the lines of posthumanist flight by Tiffany King was like having an unpleasant visit with an ex, where they make all the annoying noises and aggravating habits that remind you why you wanted to break up in the first place.

I found myself constantly turning to Wikipedia to learn about the concepts and scholars she mentions. Posthumanism. Transcending the subject. Transcending the human. Deleuze. Poststructuralism. Rhizomatics. I wasn’t up-to-speed on this movement in the philosophical world and I felt like King says "they can have that."

But paradoxically when I read Eve Tuck’s Breaking up with Deleuze: Desire and valuing the irreconcilable, in the story of her love and breakup with Deleuze I found a gentler and more curious side that could see some value in his thinking while being completely inspired by the writing-style and concepts outlined by Tuck as she enacts her break up with him.

I have, late in life, become a painter and owned my love of the creative, the generative. Most of my favorite painters and paintings contain a messy, dark beauty; chaotic assemblages that are somehow lush. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to the image of an epistemological rhizome. I, like King, am not comfortable with the concept of identity as “post” anything or the imagining of identity as a rhizome with many disparate locations and no centralized root system. As if identity is a decentralized but connected system of narratives where there is not center. As Tiffany King so adeptly points out—when it comes to real life and not theory and elegant metaphor, there most assuredly is a center—and it is dominated by the narratives and needs of white people. It is called white supremacy.

However, I must confess, I have a new crush on the some Deluezian ideas: what Tuck describes as “an exponentially growing assemblage” rhizome that accounts for humanity’s history and knowledge; his idea that art, science and philosophy are all equally valid endeavors for discovering meaning and reality; also, the concept of “machines of desire” that produce unintended consequences and create products they were not intended to create. Perhaps I love these Deleuzian concepts solely because of the strong visual imagery they invoke. I can see the painting now- a dusty and hulking machine, part mechanical and part fleshy globules, that moves across the landscape belching rain, stink and fire.

I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Is this a one night stand? I feel like Tuck introduced me to this sexy man and then the next morning I had brunch with my girlfriends, King and Tuck who told me he was absolute pig. It’s really Tuck’s ideas about desire that I’d like to have an affair with now. Her work, was accessible, readable, and spoke to lived experience without resorting to abstract and impossible sentences. Tuck’s discussion of the trend toward “damage-centered research” resonated deeply with my experience working in non-profits. A week doesn’t go by when I am not asked to write a story or find a quote that demonstrates how broken a youth was before our program came along and fixed them. These stories, together with “measurable” outcomes are deemed necessary to “establish the grounds to …petition for gains” a.k.a. funds to pay for the program. Tuck’s inspiring research “framework of desire” is open to telling stories of loss and oppression, but also stories of survival, hope, and wisdom. It challenges the “outsider as rescuer” narrative for a narrative of survival that comes from within oppressed communities. Tuck has issued a challenge to me both as a researcher and a non-profit manager. I must work to find ways to measure the immeasurable. Description that takes time, can embrace contradictions—one that requires presence, artistry, and transgression.