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From Future Collectivities Nexus
Asia Pacific Reader (APR) is an online interactive platform for research, discussion and publication of the academic subjects concerning East Asia. Discover more by visiting the rest of the APR: Home, Library, Journal, Prize, Wiki, Collectivities.
Future Collectivities Nexus
[edit] Virtual Groups
Please click on the link below to go to the group you are interested in:
The Future of East Asian Studies?
Japanese Critical Thinkers: Affect/Subculture
Discussion on Health Industry in Pre-war Japan
[edit] What this site is about
This is a site meant for graduate students or non-professionals. Though we do not exclude the participation of professors or professionals to our discussions, we wanted to provide a forum that was free of the habits in thinking along hierarchical lines that plague our everyday existence within the University. That is, we think hierarchy is something we necessarily inflict on ourselves the moment we begin distinguishing between professor and student (the institution by virtue of its form requires this), and we would like to establish a site where we have the freedom to be(come) different and think differently when we engage in scholarly or non-scholarly debate. The internet seemed to offer some emancipatory possibilities for creating this kind of site. This is why we ask members or anyone participating to refrain from identifying themselves via any kind of designation that might feed into our own weird desires to find our place in a hierarchy unless the mention of the designation is important to the specific conversation engaged.
We are not afraid of criticism and polemical debates. In fact we think they are productive and useful so long as debates do not devolve into an "I am smarter than you, so I am right" form of banality that a lot of us are used to encountering in our days dealing with institutional forms of thinking. Some of us are dialectical, some of us are critical, and a few of us are downright Deleuzional. Consequently, we believe in the productive potential of arguing, criticizing, and polemicizing, and we think all of it IS personal, in the sense that we are more inclined, and honestly just more interested in, arguing about things that matter to us. How else are we to learn unless confronted by the radical alterity, limit, or exterior to our very ability to think those thoughts that are most important to us? Real learning ruptures us where our beliefs are the most deeply entrenched.
We are not afraid of theory. Which is to say, we are invested in the idea that thought possesses emancipatory potential exceeding our very ability to think thought itself. Thought is an action. Thought is active, not always reactive. Thought can be transformative. It can also be dangerous, and destructive. The real danger, however, occurs when dogma or ideology starts to take up more and more space where thought once worked. We want to think, but we also want to know where are thoughts have been, so we can determine where we would like them to go. We believe historicizing, and contextualizing can be useful in wrapping our heads around a theory or a problem. We also believe in the freedom to encounter a theory free of any predetermined notion of its historical relevance. We don't think these two beliefs need to be mutually exclusive.
We believe that one of the major categories threading through most of the contemporary theoretical, and political debates is one of collectivity. Whether it is thought of as multitude, or organized in rhizomes, whether it functions according to a logic of multiplicity informing the ontology of an event, or as an encounter with whatever being, collectivity offers us a means for thinking the world that connects its universal characteristics (if indeed it can be said to have any) with the particularities of how people relate to others and, indeed, to themselves (since even the self can be said to be multiple). This site is not dedicated to uncovering the answer to "What is to be done?" in terms of organizing collectivity, though we do keep our eyes, minds, and bodies open to the impossible future of an as yet un-thought Utopia (or has it already been thought?). This site is much less ambitious in its aims. We simply want to know how our colleagues are dealing with the various possible forms of collectivity out there, so we can, as a collective ourselves, begin to think together the relations that join and rupture these collectivities.
We are interested in thinking the relations between ideas, concepts, philosophies, thinkers, etc. Too much of what we do seems to be organized around the fetish of the name. We call ourselves Derridean, Deleuzian, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Jamesonian, despite the reservations these thinkers themselves had or have with the reduction of thought into the circulation of names. At the same time, we cannot ignore the rigor that is needed in dealing with any thinker. It almost seems impossible to come to an understanding of a Deleuzian, Foucauldian, Derridean text without in some way becoming Deleuze, Foucault or Derrida, if one is to give the text its due. We are not against these forays into thinking thought through a process of becoming. Again, we don't think the above two positions are mutually exclusive. By organizing this site around the idea of collectivities we hope to provide a forum for thinking these thinkers and others in relation. What more glorious encounter could be imagined than a gaggle of Gramscians bashing into a rhizome of Deleuzians and a dollop of Derrideans to see what thoughts emerge? Besides, we are not ones to cling to that old mantra of modern individuality, "Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?” It stinks too much of narcissism, and narcissism is anathema to the thinking of collectivities. We accept that we can all be multiple while also being open to the possibility of being one. We can be Derridean one day, and Hegelian another, or perhaps both at the same time. Which is not to exclude the participation of the nomadic or untimely thinkers that care little about names and are interested solely in ideas, concepts, or structures of thinking, becoming, being. It is the purpose of this site to explore the limits and excesses of thinking these kinds of relations, foldings, juxtapositions, contradictions or conflicts to see what emerges.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. -Gilles Deleuze, from “Control and Becoming”
Below is the infamous video of a man being tasered for asking a question. In case we wondered exactly what was at stake in merely asking questions.
