Anyone who has read my blog regularly (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) knows that I sometimes write about the future of English Studies, often stridently. However, as I remarked in my last post, it would be nightmarish to imagine these ideas "applied" in departments across the country. That’s not the point. If anything it’s the point I’d like to avoid. Fortunately I don’t think there’s any danger of that happening, so avoiding it is not a labor-intensive task.

That said, I do sometimes like to think pragmatically and our ongoing hiring adventures and impending department retreat have me (and I assume others) thinking about the future of this department in more immediate and practical terms (which is not to say atheoretically, but rather theory in a different key or iteration). As many of our candidates have generously characterized us, we are a unique combination of literary studies, composition, professional writing, and teacher education. Our intellectual diversity is both our greatest strength and weakness.

So how to proceed? What to make of the future?

For me, the central value of our future is well-articulated by Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy:

Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy; the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit…The pluralist idea that a thing has many senses, the idea that there are many things and one thing can be seen as "this and then that" is philosophy’s greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its maturity and not its renunciation or infancy. For the evaluation of this and that, the delicate weighing of each thing and its sense, the estimation of the forces which define the aspects of a thing and its relations with others at every instant–all this (or all that) depends on philosophy’s highest art–that of interpretation.

And how do I interpret this (and that)? In celebrating pluaralism over dialectic, Deleuze points to a moving away from the agonistic conflict of ideas that seek to produce truth through negation. Nietzsche’s pluralism is an affirmation of the proliferation of concepts.

I want to work in a department that celebrates this and that and the other thing, not as the "diversity of differences," but as the multiplicty of identity. That is this is more than a policy of "tolerance" of the "other;" it is the recognition that while we can disagree and even quarrel, in the end, two ideas are always better than one, three better than two, and so on. Even my own ideas, my own "positions," are never self-identical. They are always this and that.

Like all communities, ours is hinged on certain exigencies. We don’t get together by some random occurence. On the most basic level, we share an ecology; we share resources. Hence perhaps we should begin with a kind of pluralistic bioethic: our ecology’s continued health is best assured through maintaining the delicate balance of its diversity. Our departmental ecology is both singular and multiple (differential and drifting within itself).

But our connection is more than that. We also share a concern for literacy and teaching, though we see these things as this and that and the other thing. Though I have strong opinions and will engage in debate and discussion, as opportunities for intellectual growth, I know that a department where everyone agreed would be a boring monoculture, a field of wheat. Out of conversation I am not looking for resolution or consensus but rather proliferation,  more opportunities for interpretation.

In the end though, in the most pragmatic terms, it is our teaching that links us. And here I will end with late Deleuze (and Guattari) as I began with early Deleuze. Here in What is Philosophy?

If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commericial professional training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third–an absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism.

And I won’t go into this whole business of the concept ("the chaoid state par excellence" as D/G term it). However, I think we all share a concern for the future, for the effects of "universal capitalism" and the ends to which it puts technological, human, and natural resources. While we are neither saviors nor superheroes, we have our humble part to play as intellectuals, as teachers of literacy, in engaging students in a critical, pluralistic literacy that precedes otherwise vis-a-vis the instrumental efficiency of globalization.