Deleuze, Femininity and the Specter of Poststructuralist Politics: Variations on the Materiality of Rhetoric

Deleuze, Femininity and the Specter of Poststructuralist Politics: Variations on the Materiality of Rhetoric

Matthew S. May

Language: English

Pages: 126

ISBN: 2:00145589

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this thesis I rethink the materiality of rhetoric in a minor key. I review
poststructural and psychoanalytic endeavors to position rhetoric from within the
postmodern and poststructural critique of the subject. I move beyond the logic of
influence (dependent on a flawed conception of object) and hermeneutics (the
correspondingly flawed methodology). In thisendeavor, I primarily enlist Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) for a conceptual apparatus that enlivens the “thinness” of rhetoric’s
(neo)Aristotelian conceptual design (cf. Gaonkar, 1997a, 1997b). I offer Monster(2003)
as a case study, analyzing the discursive expression of nondiscursive abstract machines to
draw out the reterritorializations of the latter. Recognizing the impossibility of complete
reterritorialization I map one artifact that reinvests difference in itself, Dancer in the
Dark(2000). Finally, in the epilogue I provide a brief recapitulation of minor politics,
and offer a summarization of the utility of rhetoric.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Though dominant within the discipline, this expression of faith in a traditional understanding of rhetoric, is even used to articulate this conservative ideology, based on nostalgic longing, as the perspective of the oppressed: “I know this kind of hope is theoretically incorrect, but in the wake of Foucault, Lyotard, and the fragments of liberal humanism—here we are, still, together. What now?” (Eberly, p. 46). Momentarily bracketing my concern over the ideological implications of this statement

action…the capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole” (pp. 10-11). This quote highlights our departure from the former rhetorical and social science literature I have reviewed, which attempts to demonstrate that an increased capacity for the subject to perform fluid identities through narrative is the condition of possibility for an increased sense of agency; whereas Badiou and Deleuze and Guattari are

narrative identity (the scape-goat narrative) suited to the interests of the mode of production. As stated, this portion of the essay describes and analyzes selections from the recent and popular film Monster (2003). Following from the previous section, I take as my point of departure this guiding question: how do narratives, ostensibly suggestive of a humanistic discourse forming the identity of an asignifying minor force, reify the existing axioms of postindustrial capitalism? I argue that,

behaviors that take them to market and back—is determined by the ‘cash nexus,’ by quantitative relations embodies ultimately in the abstract, universal equivalent of money. Capitalism undermines or ‘decodes’ all established meanings and beliefs, replacing them with sets of axioms that govern the conjunction of decoded flows—of money, labor-capacity, raw materials, skills and technologies, consumer tastes, and so forth—in pursuit of surplus value. (p. 148) And of the relation between capitalist

perspectives, as exemplified in Bergson and Nietzsche (pp. 89-96). This perspective, by way of the shock of the irreconcilable, the shock to thought, to paraphrase Massumi (2002), anticipates one pragmatic political application of Deleuze (1983) as outlined in the preface to Anti-Oedipus by Foucault (1983): “develop action, thought, and 70 desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization” (p. xii), and “what is needed is to

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