Always Becoming: (De-) (Re-)territorializing A Social Studies Autoethnography as ‘Minor Literature’ Wordingsprocessen, een (De-) (Re-)reterritorialisering Een Social Studies Autoetnografie als ‘Literatuur Minor’ Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op woensdag 5 november 2014 des middags te 2.30 uur door Johanna Boudina Maria de Jong 27 november 1969 te Elst (Gelderland) 1 Promotoren: Prof.dr. D.M. Hosking Prof.dr. H. Letiche Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................................. 7 MULTIPLE CONNECTIONS, AND ASSEMBLAGES [INTRODUCTION] ................................ 9 My Journey .................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Recording Experiences .......................................................................................................................................................... 11 Prequel ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 12 PLATEAU 1 GOING INTO THE FUTURE ................................................................................ 19 People to Come ......................................................................................................................................................................... 19 Within the Global South ........................................................................................................................................................ 22 PLATEAU 2 AT THE BEHEST OF THE UNIVERSITY ............................................................ 31 A Desert Sinkhole .................................................................................................................................................................... 31 Maaike, Becoming Bounded, Becoming a Slave, Enslaving Myself… ..................................................................... 32 ‘All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here’............................................................................................................................ 37 PLATEAU 1987 AMIDST DELEUZE ......................................................................................... 41 On the Bridge [Slave Infidel] ................................................................................................................................................ 41 Finding my own Voice ............................................................................................................................................................ 44 Becoming-Animal .................................................................................................................................................................... 46 How Does it Feel to Become Deterritorialized? ............................................................................................................ 48 What a Body can do ................................................................................................................................................................. 56 3 PLATEAU 2014 SELF, AFFECT AND TEXT .............................................................................. 59 Reflexions on what Others have done with Self, Affect and Text ............................................................................ 59 Reflexions on what I do with Self, Affect and Text ....................................................................................................... 65 Engaging in a Process of Writing ........................................................................................................................................ 68 PLATEAU 5 GOING OUT THERE ............................................................................................. 75 Voicing the Shopping Mall [A Reterritorialization into the Shopping Mall] ...................................................... 75 Inside the Pearl Exhibition .................................................................................................................................................. 79 PLATEAU 6 TOWARDS FRIENDLY ASSOCIATION ............................................................... 83 Malika “Every Year I Change my Car” ............................................................................................................................... 83 Being with Irma ........................................................................................................................................................................ 87 Xavier and Liesel ...................................................................................................................................................................... 92 A Dog Becoming ....................................................................................................................................................................... 95 ONTO THE SEVENTH PLATEAU [CONCLUSION] .............................................................. 103 Deleuzian-Guattarian ‘Philosophical Map’ ...................................................................................................................105 Leaving the Elevator .............................................................................................................................................................115 Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka at the Back Door .........................................................................................................118 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................................... 121 Sources of Inspiration for “Voicing the Shopping Mall” ...........................................................................................129 SAMENVATTING IN HET NEDERLANDS (ABSTRACT IN DUTCH) .................................. 131 For Alexander & Myrthe 5 Acknowledgement “Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd” – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987, p.3) Pursuing a PhD project and writing a book has been a long-standing wish on my path of éducation permanente. In my feeble scholarship of the early days I had the chance to meet great scholars, such as David M. Boje, Jack Cohen, Alphonso Lingus, Rosi Braidotti, Corolyn Ellis and Art Bochner, Martin Fuglsang, Bent Meier Sørensen, Jean Luc Moriceau, Stephen Linstead, Simon Lilley, Steve Brown, Peter Pelzer, Geoff Lightfoot, Robert van Boeschoten and Peter Case, all of whom were brought to the table by the organizational and inspirational skills of Hugo Letiche. He, together with Dian Marie Hosking, became my PhD supervisors. I got to know Hugo as a tremendously erudite person and the right person to guide me through (organizational) complexity, Deleuze, and ‘the affective turn’ in ethnography. Dian Marie I admire for her amazing intellectual wit and ability to shape a community that felt like ‘home’. During the writing of my book, I went through several transformations, and started - in theory and practice - to reflect on ‘what it is to be a person’ (Hosking, n.d.) through qualitative inquiry. Words cannot express my appreciation for both Hugo and Dian Marie, for giving a place of scholarship, sharing knowledge, support, discipline, and trust. I cannot express enough thanks to Thomas Bianchi, Joop Bos, Martin Groters, Falco de Klerk Wolters, Paul Lynch, Ann Mannen, Wil Munster, Albert Postma and Paul Verweel for their support and encouragement. Some of my PhD fellows who I would like to mention are: Ben Berndt, Martin Loeve, Jose Middendorp, Veronica Millan, Soheil Torkan, Kim Tsai, Lizet Donkersgoed, Hilda Ham, Pim van Heijst, Vincent Pieterse, Cees Grol, Joshiko Suzuki and Elvin Zoet. For editing I am particularly indebted to Val Turner and Anna Johnson. A major part of my life and joy is interaction; interaction with students of all kinds, and with those academic fellows that I meet in those pockets of intense scholarship, such as the (Deleuzian) summer camps and conferences. Ian Buchanan started organizing the ‘Deleuze Summer Camps,’ which was focussed on the work of Gilles Deleuze, with instruction provided by many scholars such as Ian: May the force be with you! Through these intense networks of Deleuzian scholarship I also got to know Gregg Lambert, Jan Jagodzinski, Patricia Pisters, Peter Wolvendale, Ronald Bogue, Claire Colebrook, Piotrek 7 Świątkowski, Jeff Bell, Joshua Ramey, Rick Dolphijn, Petr Kouba, Daniel W. Smith and James Williams. Meanwhile, my work bought me to the Middle East. In my book, there are many vivid accounts of ‘what it meant to be there’. The author George Orwell once wrote, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand” (1946). I too experienced, that it is not possible to write without demons haunting you down the road, and on such an abstract level I am grateful for the life experiences the Middle East gave me. When I returned back to the Netherlands, it was when I met Armand Gouvernante van Raders, who became my ‘friend-psychoanalyst-philosopher’ as mentioned in my texts. Truly, I would not have known how to proceed in a fruitful, sensible way without him. Our conversations helped me shape my thoughts and texts to a level that have, in my opinion, a scholarly edge and enabled me to decentre. He truly – besides becoming a great intellectual sparring partner and friend – also initiated me once again in the arts- and happiness of life. I smile when writing this, because, wasn’t it his profession after all, driving out the ‘djinns’ of one’s life? And to find one’s, what he calls, ‘Human Mythology Development’: finding one’s ‘Original’? Last but not least I would like to thank my husband Alexander and daughter Myrthe who have always joined me on global adventures and the path of Fernweh/Wanderlust: a desire or longing to travel (“Fernweh, German”). Alexander I also like to thank for his unshakable support in me and in being a soul mate in the many pleasures of mutual intellectual scholarship. My book is made up of “emotional data, dream data, sensual data, memory data and response data – data that was not visible and that disrupted linearity, consciousness, and the mind/body dichotomy” (Adams St. Pierre, 2011, p. 621) and was constituted - like all of those whom are acknowledged – as part of an ever becoming assemblage, of life itself. Amsterdam, 2014 J.B.M. (Maaike) de Jong Multiple Connections, and Assemblages [Introduction] My Journey My project is almost over, and I sit in my Amsterdam apartment listening to the birds. I rewrite my introduction for the last time and feel proud of my work. This project has involved me in a world of wonders, and I still wonder. Since my book consists of text, including this introduction, it is a text. It is my last text, sitting here, overlooking a street in a city where, as DeLanda (2006) puts it, capitalism was born. This early form of capitalism has been drawn into a romanticized tourist asset of ‘Amsterdam’ and includes the warehouses, Rembrandt, old harbours and canals. Capitalism as a force has many faces and continuously creates new faces. In this work, I take you on a trip to explore one such face. This book has been written in the first person singular ‘I’ form, and it is important to keep in mind that this ‘I’ is not intended to be a narcissistic, ego-centric narrator, but, rather, a becoming in which self is always in movement in different relations. This is directly related to the challenge that I take up in this book. I do things that the Deleuze and Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) failed to do in their attempt to move outside of purely ‘conceptual philosophy’. The ‘game’ that they, and Deleuze in particular, played, is to do things with concepts that are so startling that it takes your breath away and makes your jaw drop. It is a very conceptual form of art, and Deleuze does it brilliantly. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make an effort to stop doing purely philosophical conceptual art and attempt to look at the world from the point of view of social studies. Nevertheless, I would argue that Anti-Oedipus ends up as a rather narcissistic text. In a way, what I am trying to do is to return to their challenge, and, in recognition of Deleuze’s cognitive art, to make a move towards affective social studies. Methodologically my book is an effort to move from the conceptual art of Deleuze and Guattari to an exploration of a way of studying social relatedness through a form of autoethnography that is relational and descriptive1. 1 I am very grateful to Hugo Letiche and Dian Marie Hosking for illuminating these aspects further to me at the supervision session in Utrecht in May 2014. 9 Before going to Qatar, I dreamed of going to a society immersed in a certain velocity, of speed, of transformative energies. During my stay in Qatar, I experienced its dynamics and intensities. However, its embodiment for me was rather unplanned and rather unforeseen. Excitement, of the kind I was looking for, intensively unfolded in the interactions between me and my reading of the books by Gilles Deleuze and (sometimes in conjunction with) Felix Guattari; texts that were invented, so to speak, during the mid- 20th-century in France and whose ideas continued to develop throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s; texts about life, energies, process forces, facilitating interrelations, and becoming; becomings which I have powerfully re-lived. I recall sitting in my white Eames James’s chair and ottoman (talk about time pieces!) on the 16th floor of a large apartment building—‘the ZigZag towers,’—reading A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). From here, I overlooked the Arabian Gulf and the enormous building sites just below my window that were reinventing Venice here in Qatar, constructing canals, piazzas and even city palaces that perfectly mimicked the city in Europe. Passages about lines of flight, capitalism and creative becomings, captivated me. I have been inspired and motivated by the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, firstly, to develop my own style as presented in this work; and secondly, to be inspired to the creative production of concepts. In the plateau “1987: Amidst Deleuze,” I work out processes of inspiration. Important and relevant Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts for my project, those that address movement, are: machinic thinking, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. I experienced machines at work, not simply machines found at construction sites, which I saw and heard outside my window; but on an abstract level, different sorts of machines, inspired by the machines of the Deleuzian and Guattarian kind, initially described as: “a system of interruptions or breaks (coupures)” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, p. 38), later on further developed by them as a process of bodies, of actions and passions “reacting to one another” (1987, p. 88). I felt them, the machines, do their work creating, connecting, reconnecting and breaking. These machinic movements deterritorialize and reterritorialize ‘life worlds’. While deterritorializations are movements that disrupt ‘life worlds’, reterritorializations are movements that somehow establish ‘life worlds’. It was this type of breakage that kept me awake at night and sometimes almost drove me to madness. And it was the flow, these intensities of joy from activities like visiting museums, listening to great lectures by people like Thomas Friedman, or buying a jeep from a friend leaving the Gulf, that kept me going. The machines were feeding on the very stuff of which I was constituted; but, nevertheless, also had a life of their own: the