We've started working on a pretty exciting project over here in my department. Last year, several women in the program successfully launched a conference called Articulations. The aim of this conference was to challenge the traditional formats of the presentations created by theatre and performance scholars. For some reason, scholars in our field stand behind podiums and read at rooms full of people instead of engaging in performances or alternate methods of sharing work. I'm being slightly coy; afterall, I know why scholars act in this way. People stick to what works. Brief side note and metaphor: when I was driving out here from New York with my friend Andy, we got caught up in a traffic jam on the Chicago tollway. It was the mother of all traffic jams. It was Traffic Jam. The last stretch was almost unbearable because every quarter of a mile there is a toll, which slows the progress of the already viscous traffic flow. There came a point when we thought that perhaps we had died and gone to hell. The mileage trackers on the side of the road were going up, even though we were approaching the Wisconsin border. Why aren't the numbers going down? What's going on? It was excuciating. At the penultimate toll we asked the attendant, "Why is this road set up like this? Why isn't there just one toll at the end?" The man took my money and just siad, "It's always been like this." Andy said, "Yeah, well that's what they said about slavery but..." and then I sped off.

Articulations succeeded in several ways and it also left us wanting more. We saw a couple great presentations, and the conversations that the presentations generated were very interesting. Nevertheless, we knew that we were still mired in the confines of academia. We were in a gray room on the campus. In fact, all the sessions were in that one room. While the space in that one room was surely activated in all sorts of ways, we felt the stasis of the university setting. Next fall, we're trying something new. I'm going to begin building suspense (if in fact you care at all, which I hope you do) and hold off on details about the conference. I can tell you that I will be reaching out to all of you as the months go by to get information and perhaps solicit your attendance. For now, let me tell you what we've been thinking about as we start the process of organizing this event:

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have a mind blowing series of books, one of which is called A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In that book, the philosophers forward an idea about the multiplicity of self, and they talk about the idea by referencing a semi-well-known patient of Freud and Lacan who goes by the title of The Wolf Man. The Wolf Man had dreams about wolves and his analysts identified his dreams as neurotic. Deleuze and Guattari take the man's dreams in a completely different direction and talk about the fact that Wolves always travel in packs. Wolves are multiple. Here's a relevant snippit from the book: "[I]n a pack each member is alone and even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt); each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band. 'In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the center. When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighborsto the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.'" So we're thinking about ourselves as those wolves.

Hardt and Negri are two more thinkers who we're taking a close look at. They have abook called Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire in which they forward many ideas about class. They actually do an amzing thing in the book because they find common ground between the ideas of Deleuze and Marx, which is rare because those two schools of thought frequently battle against each other instead of work together. One of their notions is that we are, all of us, the multitude. The multitude is a grouping of people in which individuals retain their differences while also come together in the name of something they have in common. So we're asking ourselves, "What do we have in common?" "What performances are we all a part of?" "Where do our disciplines cross each other?" "How do we understand our network in this world?"

If any of you have ideas about these thoughts, let me know. If you are a grad student somewhere in the world, get in touch with me and let's start a conversation. I'll keep you all updated on this as the wolf pack moves a long.