“GUIDED BY A GREAT FEELING OF LOVE:” TOWARD AN ETYMOLOGY FOR THE MOVEMENT OF MOVEMENTS IN CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS FOR THE PERMANENT-REVOLUTION-OF-THE-COMMON By MICHAEL ROWLEY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Michael Rowley 2 To Ctenocephalides felis, the common flea, who, for years, has silently been teaching me about persistence, swarm intelligence, the protection and importance of the milieu, networks of symbiotic parasitism and coalition, clandestine operations, and the inner urge of survival. Quite often, I stand bitten with sheer respect and admiration. The cock-roach is a Johnny-come-lately in comparison to this machine. To Michael (February 24, 1951-December 31, 1980) “It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m near-sighted and psychopathic anyway.” – Allen Ginsberg, “America” (1956) For young Michael, who died over a thousand days, who breathed fumes—at a factory corp. that, for fear of a lawsuit, remains un-named— with carcinogens in oil made from arsenic that ascended lathes’ sides below the catwalks where he loomed, who supervised machines, who fixed precision parts, who turned lathes that rendered metal into screws. 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I met Phil Wegner, my dissertation committee chair, in 2002 at the MRG conference; the conference and Phil’s participation in it were a large part of the reason that I matriculated at UF. Since 2004, I have benefited from his guidance and direction in a wide range of settings and for a broad set of projects. I have learned much from his insight in two seminars, in an independent study, and from his conference presentations. But most of all, I have benefited greatly from the two-hour and sometimes three-hour meetings over coffee, lunch, or at his office. Phil was generous with his time, enthusiasm, and framing of the over-determined problems produced by the ideologies of global capitalism. He has read my work for the dissertation and has meticulously edited it. He has read much of my work outside of the dissertation as well. In recent years, Phil has spent many hours helping me with job-related material, with the exams and prospectus, and with the sweeping gestures of this project. I want to express my gratitude for the many meetings through which Phil was able to help me reorganize much of my thinking about this project and about my future contributions to the field and beyond. My dissertation committee member, Tace Hedrick, has helped me to grasp the finer workings of the scholarly-reviewed journal article and the world of public academic discourse. She has read papers of mine that figure outside of the dissertation and has helped me immensely with my writing style and clarity and with recognition of the larger significance in my writing and its potential broader audience. She has also helped me to hone my craft as a scholar in Latin American and Chicana Theory. Tace allowed me to accompany her to the major Latin American conference and to learn from her about professional development in the field. She has observed my teaching and given me 4 notes as well as written on my behalf. Her work on biological sex and race has informed my work in labor and helped me to diversify my thinking on the engage critical projects. It is this diversity, the commitment to those singularities, that are at the heart of the ethics of the subject of this dissertation, the Movement of Movements and its multitudinous subjectivity. Above all, Tace has supported my confidence and has helped me to recognize the value in what I am doing. In addition to reading the entirety of the dissertation, my dissertation committee member, Susan Hegeman, has helped me with grasping the discourses of modernity in seminar, with her generosity in helping me with my own seminar teaching and in allowing me to observe hers, and with the relationship between our own field and cultural anthropology. Susan’s navigation of the discourses of late modernity inform the theoretical underpinnings of the introductory and concluding chapters. The intellectual rigor that she brings to the critique of master narratives and ideological interpellation in top-down lenses has kept my work from the totalizing gestures to which I am prone. Susan’s rigor and organization are essential to a project like this and I have benefited from the modeling of behavior that she has provided as a dedicated and rigorous scholar. I would like to thank Phil and Susan for their hospitality over the years and for their great taste in food. I would also like to thank my dissertation outside reader, Efrain Barradas, who brought insight and rigor to my work, especially in Latin American Studies and in Cuban-Flat painting and in visual culture. It was Efrain who helped me to situate the difficult over-determined space of the border murals within the context of a larger twentieth century Latin American revolutionary tradition. His kindness has been a great 5 help to me. Efrain’s kindness and general approach are a model for me of how to be toward students. Tace and Efrain offered especially vital insight that inform Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Aron Pease has greatly helped me to clarify my thinking about this project for its larger significance beyond the dissertation. Aron has meticulously read the dissertation and copiously commented on it for style, clarity, and most importantly for the larger gestures that would help to shape this project as a contribution to the field. Over the years, Aron and I have developed a series of ideas for seminar and teaching, for contemporary political philosophy and economic theory, and for navigating graduate school. He has been the factory in which I think through some of my best ideas. He is a patient, dedicated, and persistent scholar whose project addresses, among other things, no less than the significance of the labor theory of value in our own global moment. And he is a good friend. I would like to thank scholars at the University of Texas, particularly Ann Perry who helped me to develop Chapter 3. It was Cynthia Farah’s photograph of one of the border murals that interested me in the material in Chapter 3. Emma Perez informed my Latin American Historiography, helped me to think like a scholar, and helped me to recognize the importance of Queer Theory in my work. Meredith Abarca helped me with my work in Chicana Theory. It was Elaine Fredericksen who first helped me to conceive of myself as able to work subversively within larger institutions and to offer critique of them from the inside. It was with her guidance that I began the project on corporatization. 6 In 1998, I began the theoretical underpinnings for this project with the guidance of Saree Makdisi who introduced me to the field of Critical Theory and contemporary Materialism. Herman Sinaiko read early material from this project and introduced me to aesthetics and philosophy and helped me to think in interdisciplinary modes. Two bosses acted as mentors as well. Raul Sanchez, the director of writing programs, helped me with the scope of the second project, with my clarity, with my editing, and with my teaching. Raul has continued to help me to think of my work at the level of the book. Raul’s advice always came from a place of calm benevolence, which I greatly respect and try to emulate. Sid Dobrin, the former director of writing programs, helped my writing style and helped me to attain the professionalism that I needed for publication. I never asked Sid to serve on the committee and yet he worked with a diligence and care that improved my writing style and helped me to begin to see myself as a rhetorician. He helped me greatly with my teaching and with systems thinking. I will not forget how he engaged me in long discussions about rhetoric and helped me to feel that I was contributing. No boss had ever made me feel like a colleague before Sid. Finally Sid read a great deal of another project, which addresses rhetoric and corporatization in the university, and that informs this one. Sid first helped me to think of my work at the level of the book. Several intelelctuals and writers helped me with my thinking through many of these problems. I would like to thank John Leavey, Julian Wolfreys, Mic Lemon, Paul Martinez-Pompa, Mauricio Rodriguez, Javier Huerta, Aron Pease, Roberto E. Villarreal, Daniel Chacon, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gil Herdt, and Emmet Larkin. 7 I would like to thank two people from my childhood and adolescence whose inspiration helped to make it possible. The first is a teacher who supported me for six years from the age of six, who fostered my curiosity and intellect, and who still inquires about how I am doing today—Sharon Malito. She taught me that I could. The second is a cadre who passed on to me that knowledge which has been passed on in the West since at least the English Civil War, if not since the revolt of Spartacus and who, for reasons that are well-known to those in that work, must remain known professionally only by pseudonym – Guy. Finally, I would like to thank Carla Blount, Loretta Dampier, Melissa Davis, Pamela Gilbert, Kenneth Kidd, John Leavey, Janet Moore, Jeri White, and Kathy Williams. These are the people who keep or have kept the UF English offices running while I was at UF and whose work makes all other work in our department possible.