• "when you sleep / where do your fingers go? / what do your fingers know? / what do your fingers show?"
            -- Cake, "When You Sleep," Prolonging the Magic
• ". . . the position of the sleeper: all the little bends and tiny creases engage relations that produce an attitude, a habitus, and a great sinuous fold as a good position can bring all of them together."
            -- Gilles Deleuze, "Perception in the Folds," The Fold
• "my actions make me beautiful / and dignify the flesh"
            -- REM, "Falls to Climb," Up

1. body-jumble

This is going to begin in a jumble and could end up in trouble. Trouble with exactly who or what I don't know yet. But call it a mere feeling or maybe, better, an intuition. There is a problem -- and perhaps it is only my problem -- that I want to talk about and I am not quite sure how to put it into words: hence, it is one of the best sorts of problems to have. For now, let's say it is a problem based, in part, around where flesh begins and ends and where the rest of the world figures in. Putting it that way probably makes it sound like some sort of profoundly -- profoundly pointless? -- philosophical problem when I mean it in a much more mundane way than that (. . . and never mind that the only philosophy that I've ever really had much time for is philosophy of the most determinedly mundane or heimlich/homely sort). At any rate, I can tell that I'm starting wrong. Let me begin again.

Last Friday I was at my local bank depositing my bi-weekly paycheck from Millersville University. It was late Friday afternoon, close to the end of the banking day, and I was the only customer in the bank. The teller was stamping the date on my various receipts (the minuscule savings deposit, the checking deposit, the cash-back receipt, the check itself, etc.), moving efficiently from ink pad to individual slips of paper with her little wooden-handled stamper. It was such a neat little routine: one hand with the stamper moving from ink pad to paper slip, the other hand lifting and turning over each of the slips/receipts (and all the while her eyes were scanning everything for the appropriate information: checking the numbers that had first been inputted into a calculator and fed out on yet another piece of paper as verification of my own hastily scrawled addition). The whole process--as motion and sound--was so seductively rhythmic that I asked her if she ever had dreams where she was using the stamper. "You know," I said, "have you ever stamped things in your sleep?"

I told her of my first "real" high school job -- bussing tables at a fairly upscale local restaurant with its elaborate table settings, especially the various layers of sharply angled table dressing and the fanned cloth napkins that had to be arranged "just so." And, then, how everything had to be stripped and tossed down a laundry chute in the kitchen with fresh table linens re-applied every time that one set of diners finished and new ones were about to be seated. I dreamed the routinized activity of changing and tossing and resetting those table linens constantly . . . until one morning I awoke to find that I had bussed my bed perfectly: bed sheet, blanket, and even the pillow case from my pillow were wadded together and tossed down some imaginary laundry chute in a corner of my bedroom.

The teller laughed and said that she wasn't sure that she'd ever dreamed about using the date-stamper in particular but she admitted that she regularly dreamed of the whole money-exchange process. Or, rather, she said that it wasn't so much the money-to-customer exchange (she said that she rarely dreamed of any particular customer) but the actual money handling itself. And she, then, demonstrated it for me in a quick moment of pantomime: the way that coins were scooped from out of their curved little compartments in the change drawer and, next, displayed outward across the palm of the hand and/or plinked individually onto the counter, the way that paper bills were grasped together and separated by the pad of a finger or tip of a fingernail, and, then, shuffled, fanned, and dealt, etc etc. The teller was laughing as she showed all of this to me, struck (I think) by the fact that she'd just realized that her dreaming-relationship to her job as bank teller was founded less on face-to-face interaction with individual customers and more upon an impersonal although intimately tactile connection with the heft and dimensions of differently sized coinage and with the continual tracing along thin-lipped slices of legal tender.

As I thanked the teller for my receipts and her mime and left the bank, I remember thinking that what she'd told me indeed paralleled my own experiences of bussing tables. I remembered that, although I sometimes dreamed of emotionally fraught situations with angry diners which invariably turned into revenge-dreams (of course, such fantasies of revenge transpired more often in daydreams while still on the job: hence, why all those apocryphal urban legends about behind-the-scenes wait-staff food sabotage resonate so completely), most of the time the activity of my dreams was bound up much more with the placing of silverware and glasses, the arranging of table linens, and the folding and fanning of pudgy cloth napkins. Thus, there I would be: lying in bed at night, dreaming a way of unlocking the amalgamation of moving flesh and often recalcitrant objects, searching for a rhythmic combining, seeking and sometimes finding an ease with new postures (balancing the serving tray loaded with a half-dozen meals and negotiating the tables and chairs and diners and co-workers in an overly busy restaurant was also a frequent dream), unfolding and folding one's malleable self across a continually readjusting bodily-repertoire.

Not only dreaming one's way through this eternally shifting body-repertoire but, of course, living it out in the waking hours too: between them, an ebbing-and-flowing feedback loop of minute, local adjustments (a finger placed exactly there, a hand here, and the napkin-fan unfolds) and more global accommodations (e.g., negotiating a new relation with gravity by setting right palm to tray, neck crooked left, elbow drawn to body, hips pointed in the direction of the dining target, feet at a particular width and with a carefully measured gait: achieving a repeatable, although modifiable, balance and rhythm . . . or not [omitting here my embarrassing stories of spectacular crashes and personal minor injury]). I have never been able to understand it as anything less than one entire saturative process. Not two bodies -- a dreaming-body and a waking body -- but a single body working, via every and any means available to it, through a multitude of distinct and often inconspicuous things and encounters.

Thus, the dream informs the different tasks of the job (dreaming incorporatively fleshy solutions to previously unfamiliar waking motions and postures at the workplace or elsewhere in one's everyday life) as much as the different waking actions provoke dreams (and, so, a body now lies in a bed differently not only because it might be exhausted but because it has engaged and is continuing to engage the world in ways it hadn't before). A body: what can it do? what can it feel and sense? how does it move to action? where does a body -- or even its fingers -- go when thinking, when sleeping, etc?

The being of sensation, the bloc of percept and affect, will appear as the unity or reversibility of feeling and felt, their intimate intermingling like hands clasped together: it is the flesh that, at the same time, is freed from the lived body, the perceived world, and the intentionality of one toward the other that is still too tied to experience [as in the "experience" of phenomenology]; whereas flesh gives us the being of sensation and bears the original opinion distinct from the judgment of experience--flesh of the world and flesh of the body that are exchanged as correlates, ideal coincidence (Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p.178).

A completely marvelous (if not thoroughly mundane) coincidence -- flesh and world intertwined -- that finds itself, then, as only and ever one substance (a singular becoming: a single [un]ground[ing] where a body meets a bed, where a dream returns us to work, where work induces a night's dreaming, where a body finds its little bends and tiny creases and how they can fold/unfold like a cloth napkin) with an infinity of potential postures and modes.

Always in the midst of a processual engagement with relations of movement and rest, this simultaneity of flesh of the body/flesh of the world is, in part, a matter of rhythm and refrain. While such rhythms and refrains are capable of producing momentary comfort, accommodation, and reassurance, they are also, especially under desperate and unbearable conditions, just as capable of raising one (or, quite often, several) to divergence, refusal/counterpoint, and (sometimes awful, sometimes necessary, sometimes awful and necessary) violence. Even these apparent poles within the affectivity of rhythm and refrain are not so easily separable; divergence, after all, can be a means of accommodation (what body doesn't diverge or swerve slightly along its path of motion?) while reassurance can settle around a body as the most subtle and insidious form of violence, etc. These are some of the real and persistent predicaments (as well as potential pleasures) involved in parsing and engaging with this rhythmical interpenetration of affects -- acting, as they do, on the inextricably fleshy and incorporeal becomings of matter before, if ever, they extend into a particular level of consciousness to be adjudicated in "the judgment of experience" -- that will always be worth remembering.

And it is also always worth remembering one's checkbook (I so rarely carry my checkbook anymore that it has fallen out of habit, as they say). Fortunately, I remembered it just in time (as I was about to pull out of the bank's parking lot), recalling that I'd left it at the lobby's customer desk situated to the front and left of the tellers' windows. Running back in, as the bank manager was walking toward the front of the bank to lock its doors, I found the checkbook right where I had laid it as I'd scrawled numbers on receipts. Turning once more to depart (as the manager waited for me), I could hear the bank tellers -- behind a half-partition -- laughing, engaged in some kind of discussion about dreams, as they tallied up their day's transactions and prepared to go home.

2. theory-trouble

Having given, I hope, at least some sense of the body-jumble (the incorporeal becomings of fleshiness of body and world conjoined), I think that I can be brief about the thorniness of the (my) theory-trouble. However, I want to relay this part, not through the now-more-than-two-decades-old dreams of a former busboy chatting with an insightful bank teller, but the more contemporary dreams and daydreams of an "academic" (whatever that last word means, although -- in this case -- it may only mean that one's banking deposit slips tend to have the name of some sort of academy of higher learning scrawled in front of a dollar amount). There are, like the embodied daily tasks of a bank teller or a busser of tables, an infinity of postures and modes in academia. I want to talk about only one of these. However, I do think that it is one of the primary modes (a major site of conductance and resonance in cultural studies certainly) and, namely, that is: how does the bodily-repertoire of an academic engage with the affectivity of thought or, more to the point, with "theory"? When one theorizes, where do your fingers go?

(Side note. Here, I am immediately provoked to think of that age-old magicians' line: "Notice -- ladies and gentlemen -- that, at no point during this trick, do my fingers leave my hand.")

What happens when one dreams cultural studies? I, of course, cannot speak for everyone in cultural studies (whatever those last two words mean) any more than I can speak to the nightly experiences of bussing staff everywhere. But I know that when I dream (and daydream) cultural studies, it is often a dream where passionate, critical thought finds a means to (physically) move and affectively engage, at once, with an interwoven set of relations -- material and immaterial, organic and inorganic, corporeal and incorporeal, human and non-human -- so as to initiate an immanent transformation of social/cultural/political existence[s] (even, and usually, if only very very small and very very local) where the broadest commonalties and the subtlest distinctions are recognized, shared, left radically open to continual revision. (Yeah, it is a very big dream, even in its most local evocations ... and probably not terribly original.)

It is a sign of my own limitations -- quite precisely the limitations of an academic no doubt -- that I still tend to dream this immanent transformation as beginning in the form of a text, a book. That is, I regularly dream of reading books that haven't quite yet been written (a marker of dissatisfaction with most of what currently exists in cultural studies), of writing what hasn't quite yet been read (an indication of the frustration with the slownesses, movements, tones, and inadequacies of my own writing), of unlocking a way that the affects of writing and the fleshiness of bodies and worlds might merge and unfold by sensing that, although variously pockmarked and riven with honest and often historically-contoured divisions, all are intricately enmeshed in the potential for becoming something slightly other than what obtained in this space and this time just a half-second ago. (I am, of course, leaving to one side another of the predominant cultural studies' dreams: the one where you find yourself in front of a classroom and have finally managed to divine the right mixture of elements and magical incantations that instantly reveal to your students why this all matters.)

And, so it was -- to get to the crux of this essay and swiftly to its conclusion -- a few of weeks ago that I was seated around a large table with about a dozen or so other people in cultural studies for whom I have the greatest respect and admiration. At one point in the midst of very invigorating discussion, I found myself leaning across the table and saying something like, "You know what I cannot stand? The whole notion, in cultural studies, of the 'detour through theory' -- I wish it would go away." On the surface -- and I would maintain that this is how the phrase 'detour through theory' tends to be deployed (whatever its original intentions or subsequent inflections), the 'detour through theory' implicitly speaks to the assumed physicality of cultural studies' practice and, thus, to the fact that, when cultural studies turns (apparently) more ephemerally cerebral, it must -- by necessity of the very notion of detour -- depart the immediately tangible situatedness of its objects/events (etc.) in order to journey elsewhere (because, presumably, theory is not already present in the situation?). Out of the situation. Now, into theory. Then, in rejoining the main route (back now from the detour and re-entering the articulated situatedness of the object/event), either theory or the situation (or both) may have been transformed in their mutual encounter. Although it is supposed to sound fluid and open-ended (and neither does it want to argue that theory is something to be "applied"), it nonetheless always strikes my ears as a completely clunky and mechanical metaphor. And the Cartesian split of such a conception seems plainly obvious, although almost anyone in cultural studies would be loathe to say that they buy into such a split.

Yet, I find that this notion of making a "detour through theory" is invoked just often enough (and, in ways, that enact the too-easy separation of substance and thought) that I no longer wonder for too long at why finer-grained ontological speculations about the conjunctions of materiality and incorporeality have only begun to enter into cultural studies discourse. It was, after all, not entirely accidental that I tried to smuggle in shards of Spinoza during the fleshy body/world becomings of this essay's first half. Borrowing from Moira Gatens' wonderful Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality,

In contemporary philosophy, Spinoza is almost invariably presented, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three great rationalists of the seventeenth century. Although it is certainly the case that for him reason is the greatest power available to human beings, his notion of reason, unlike Descartes, is immanent and embodied. Yovel puts this point well. He argues that "[for Spinoza] knowledge is more a mode of being than of having, not something we possess but something we are or become, As Monique Schneider notes, in attaining knowledge we do not gain an acquisition, as if something new were added to the inventory of our possessions, but rather we exist differently" (Gatens, 1996, p.127).

Similarly, I can never really imagine theory as "elsewhere" -- as a possession to be put down or picked up or as a place that one reaches via a detour -- other than right here: immanent and embodied (which doesn't mean fixed or inflexible, of course). I don't wish to exalt theory as above or somehow outside; thinking of theory as a detour seems, to me, to do just that. Rather, I'd argue that it is simply always here in the way that one exists, in the way that one endeavors to persist in existence across innumerable everyday variations (in their reassurances, accommodations, refusals/counterpoints, etc.), and in the way that one moves into and out of any encounter with objects/events in their particular situatedness.

To paraphrase Henri Bergson on the problems with certain philosophies of consciousness, perhaps cultural studies might do well to imagine that theory is not always of something but, more immediately, theory is something -- theory, then, as merely one thing among a whole host of other things. And, like them, it is living, changing: a "thing" or an "event" that can be breathed in, breathed out (or spit out), made, remade, and available from anywhere, irreducible and inapplicable to any other thing except in the way that it is cut from the very same cloth. But never elsewhere. And, so, I will continue to dream of a cultural studies that knows that its fingers will be there, even when it's been sleeping or theorizing.