Deconstructive Creation

                                                                            

                                                                                  

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity.

                                                                                                                – Gilles Deleuze -

                                                                                                                      

Delphi, Greece (December 2006)

As I sat on the ledge of Mount Parnassus, the sacred home of the Muses, staring across great planes of olive groves and violent rock formations, I wondered whether we, like nature, were capable of such creation, whether we could create naturally.

 

With lithospheric shifts, mountains and valleys can hardly avoid structural instability, they too constantly shift, mutate, flow into streams of otherness. Nature is constantly destroying, destructuring, deconstructing itself; yet in its deconstruction of itself it is always creating itself anew: its deconstruction is creation. I remember sitting on that ledge in Delphi wondering whether there was a path beyond deconstruction, a path on which we could once again create. I soon understood that any creative path would have to move through not beyond deconstruction, that it would have to deny any structured creation, any building of systems and artifices, damns and dikes, to resist the flow of difference and its liquid multiplicities. Yet can we create without constructing stable foundations? Can we set out on the path of thinking and not arrive at an end, a conclusion, a telos?

 

This course, its multiplicities of themes and diverse pathways of discussion, offered me an opportunity to return to this seminal question, perhaps the only valid questioning of our time. I witnessed among us the opening of diverse paths of movement, paths that did not abandon the myth of presence, of stability and of a structured or constructional creation; paths that in their very insecurity emanated a paradoxical sense of security, abandoning the stability of ground, of the permanence of presence; and paths that moved between these, that felt the great unease of the abyss dividing them and their movements. As one who has with great unease and difficulty moved away from a longing for ground, for stability and certainty, who has dwelled along destructured margins, I was offered an open field wherein I could think about our potential for deconstructively creating. Thus, for me, the course was an opportunity to think the potentiality for creating, a creating upon open seas, upon the unpredictable waters of finitude.

 

I still wonder at times how it is that although the Earth has been shown to be in constant motion, that although the very ground beneath our feet has been shown to be ever mutating and morphing, itself ungrounded in space, moving us along with it, we nevertheless refuse to abandon our belief in stability, in a secure, unchanging ground beneath the horizon of temporality. Yet when I begin to think about this, I remember that long ago we internalized the security of the Earth, that we internalized its permanence and stability, its ground, its earth; I remember the myth of the soul, the age-old narrative that within us remains an unchanging core of identity, of constancy. Against this hidden reality I place a manifest reality, a deconstructive creation. A creation that creates as it moves, that is always in motion, that does not yearn for ground or to become complete, to ‘resolve’ its tensions by denying them, by feigning them.

 

The method of reading multiple pieces by multiple scholars on the ‘same’ topic served to undermine the supposed sameness of each topic, of each term. ‘Gender’, ‘emotion’, ‘ritual’ were all problematized, complicated, seen to be heterogeneous. The stability of each term, its construction, its identity, faded with every attempt to plant it into the ground, with every approach towards presence. As the terms were allowed to freely move about, they began to create, to diversify, to open multifarious paths of thinking. ‘Gender’, for example, was itself shown to be created and creative; its genealogy and potentiality made manifest both the forces at work in structuring and limiting it in order to control and dominate it and through it and the deconstructive creative forces at work in undermining and calling into question the very forces that created it, that limited its fluidity, its potentiality for being other than it was structured to be.

 

A deconstructively creative reading creates with and through its reading, while always acknowledging the potentiality for creating otherwise, for creating other than it has; it recognizes the infinite potentiality of finitude in its finite actuality, the multiplicity of potential creations in the singularity of its actual creation. Amidst such a multiplicity, deconstructive creation resists the temptation to unify the diverse singularities, to crush the movement of difference, to make it stand still and become self-same, it is not architectonic. The multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field of religious studies is ideally suited for such a method. It is a field where a singular topic is viewed from infinitely different disciplinary perspectives, where soon the very singularity of the topic becomes multiple, where traditions flow into one another and interact as they interpenetrate. Its very subject matter, that of religion, deals with singularities that often claim to be totalities, to be absolutes, each vying for dominance and refusing otherness. Yet the field’s diversity and difference demands communication in community and otherness and so a method that works to constantly reaffirm fluid movement.

 

   Remarks On Fluidity and Communal Formations:

The Course Practically Considered

 

 Though below I’ll offer some remarks as to how the course could be other than it was, I do so  out of the necessity of the assignment, rather than a desire to change particular elements of the course. I found the course, both its organization and execution, to be rich and will thus only offer some minor suggestions.   

 

The use of terms, around which each week’s discussions and readings circulated, worked well to show the diversity of possible readings of what on the surface may have seemed to be homogeneous entities. What was interesting was that quite often, through the readings and classroom discussions, we saw how the terms, isolated from one another, overlapped and leaked into one another’s space. The readings on ‘emotion’, for example, could not avoid discussing ‘performance’ or ‘ritual’, and vice versa. Again, such terms as ‘method’ or ‘methodology’ and ‘text’ or ‘writing’ could not be restricted or isolated to a single week and a single set of readings, since they underlaid and were relevant to every other term or issue. This situation makes me wonder what could have been done to more explicitly point to this interplay, this ‘leaking out’. Perhaps the naturalness of this occurrence suffices to highlight its fluidity. After all, the choice of guiding the course by having various scholars converse with one another on various terms or words is what allowed for this leaking out, whereas the choice, for example, to structure the course through individual scholars (and not individual terms), thereby isolating them from one another, as though singular authorities, and so hindering them from speaking to one another on a given theme, would have certainly closed off the flow of any leaks.       

 

As for the readings themselves, they were well chosen for introducing young scholars to some prominent, contemporary figures and ideas in the field of religious studies. Yet the work of the original thinkers, whose ideas were the basis for much of the readings, were not read. With each week’s contemporary scholarly readings I would have included a short piece or two from the writings of thinkers who had originally formulated the theories being consciously or unconsciously employed or applied by the scholars whom we read. I would have also chosen readings from other, non-contemporary historical periods, whether ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, or early modern, and would have aimed to find some non-Western sources, thus simultaneously showing a different or lateral methodological approach to the study of religion. I would have attempted to allow space for not just the gaze of the self (of the other), but also of the other (of the self) – this would be different from a self-reflexive gaze (even to a large extent in the case of Masuzawa), which, though important, is nevertheless the self’s gaze of itself. This might be overreaching, but I would, to whatever degree possible, aim to temporally and culturally (or linguistically) diversify the readings and to include some work from the original thinkers whose theories were richly exploited by the scholars whom we read. Given this, I would still heavily emphasise contemporary scholarly approaches in the field for obvious practical reasons.

 

The role played by the instructor, lying somewhere between detached interlocutor and Socratic gadfly, not only coaxed the students to offer their thoughts and ideas, but at times also served to softly undermine their tacit assumptions. The ideal role of the instructor in such a course and perhaps in most courses would be to both work to draw out the students’ thoughts and arguments and to deconstruct or destructure them. Greater emphasis, however, might perhaps be placed on the latter function. While playing this role, the instructor would simultaneously offer students potential openings for finding paths for thinking otherwise. The instructor would only softly offer possible openings, not the paths themselves. This role is somewhat of a tightrope act and so quite often difficult to maintain, if, as I suggest, the instructor places greater emphasis on actively deconstructing the students’ ideas. There is a danger here of being too forceful, too violent, but that’s the nature of thought, of creation. Creation necessitates destruction and violence, however uncomfortable it makes us feel. A phoenix is born anew from amidst its own ashes.     

 

The role of the students in the course was active and productive. I’ve taken part in seminars at various institutions in various countries over the years and the discussions and atmosphere of ours was quite rich and communal. The students were required to and took active roles in the path taken during classroom discussions and this led to a more communal and interactive experience. The active role of the students in the course was also manifest in the nature of the assignments, which required responding not only to each week’s readings, but also to one another’s responses to the readings. Having to write on something forces one to actively engage the ideas one reads, which, when being read, are only felt passively. In this spirit of greater activism, given the immense diversity and richness of the students’ backgrounds and intellectual formations, perhaps each student could have been required to select a piece of reading for one of the themes of the course, reflecting his/her interests and reading of the given theme.

 

I quite like this ‘active’ mode of pedagogy or education – both words at their roots mean ‘to lead’ – where students help lead themselves through and with the instructor, rather than the instructor taking the reins and guiding passive, unthinking followers. What this reveals is a belief, a faith, in community, in a genuine walking and being together. Yet this does not always work; in fact, it rarely works well, since there are so many diverse factors that must come together to mould such an interactive community. We can be thankful that in our case, for our course, it happened as it did, that a community was formed.                                                                          

                          

~ by Babak on November 29, 2008.