Undisciplined

by Christina Nadler    |   Issue 3 (2014), Plenaries, Presidential Plenaries, Universities in Question

ABSTRACT     Cultural studies should be a political act against the institutionalizing processes of becoming disciplined

cultural studies should be a political act against the institutionalizing processes of becoming disciplined

disciplining disciplines are what have produced the need for cultural studies

as a response to the limiting of disciplines and their necessary exclusions, cultural studies emerges to respond, undisciplined, to the problems of what has been left out

cultural studies must remain undisciplined, or it ironically reproduces the circumstances that led to its creation and produces its own redundancy

ways to remain undisciplined are to

resist canonization and to

resist asserting certain methods as our own

 

we must be flexible

 

we must also practice our theories, not just apply them through methods

 

understanding both cultural theory and cultural method as a practice makes them necessarily unable to be disciplined

 

because practice is never fixed or final

 

to facilitate this undisciplined becoming of cultural studies we can understand it, and practice it as a

field

 

not a discipline, but a field above and below and unbounded by the disciplining of disciplines

 

cultural studies
could become a field
is a field
was always already a field

this field is like a plane of immanence

smooth unstructured space

as deleuze and guattari* describe the field of immanence,

there are only

complex networks of forces,
particles,
connections,
relations,
affects and
becomings…

there are only

relations of
movement and rest,
speed and slowness
between unformed elements….

there are only

haecceities,
affects,
subjectless individuations that
constitute collective assemblages

of course, this is not how everyone understands cultural studies

cultural studies
could become disciplined
is disciplined
was always already disciplined

but i see the undisciplined potential in cultural studies like a body without organs

in understanding cultural studies like a body without organs we see that we are productive
that our measures are productive
that we are in a quantum entanglement with culture
and like desire we produce it
we are not removed from it, lacking it, and looking in on it.

as foucault* has said the intellectual’s role is not to report on the truth of the masses but it “is to struggle against the forms of power that transform us into its object and instrument in the sphere of “knowledge,” “truth,” “consciousness,” and “discourse””

we must resist the forms of power that seek to discipline cultural studies
and that includes us as we will be the ones to do this especially when
we privilege certain requirements for
publications,
funding, and
tenure,
and indeed the academy itself.

if we do resist the putting up of fences we will have the space to

work and play
desire and produce
theorize and practice
on and of

this immanent field of cultural studies

____________________

 

*a thousand plateaus

*intellectuals and power

 

A video of the 2013 Presidential Plenary is available at https://archive.org/details/CSA13Plenary.
[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org/issue3/universities-in-question/nadler. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral3.]

Author Information

Christina Nadler

\Christina Nadler is a doctoral candidate in the sociology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She has taught at Hunter College since 2008 and at Brooklyn College from 2008-2011. Some of the courses she has taught most recently include Classical Sociological Theory, Current Social Theory, and Sociology of Gender, but she has also taught courses on race, social networks, and family. For the 2011-12 school year she served as a Writing Fellow at Bronx Community College. She is currently working as the OpenCUNY Academic Digital Medium Coordinator for Organizing and Action. OpenCUNY provides Graduate Center students access to free and open source digital media. Christina’s particular role is to extend integrate action-oriented media within the OpenCUNY medium and foster connections with organizations who share OpenCUNY’s mission. She serves on numerous committees, including a position on the Graduate Center’s Doctoral Students’ Council from 2009-2014, and as a member of the Executive Committee from 2011-2013. Christina serves on the Cultural Studies Association’s Executive Committee and the 2014 Conference Planning Committee. Her areas of interest include cultural studies, science and technology, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, race, gender, animal studies, queer theory, new materialism and ontology. Her dissertation explores how the ontological turn presents challenges to sociology’s reliance on social constructionism as its primary paradigm.\