<<TRANSMATHOME

Becoming-woman

In the last chapter, the relation of passivity, as Deleuze and Guattari formulate it, to the active/passive difference in Kant’s philosophy was teased apart. A question arising from this is what instigates the leap? Is there an initiating function which drives a system over from the side of mechanism vs. teleology to machinic production, conjuncting the arms of the disjunction into a multiplicity without reference to unity, full of exits, cracks, tiny intervals of difference leeching through the strict limits of possibility. There is such a function, which Deleuze and Guattari call becoming-woman. Becoming-woman, they say, has a special introductory power, as the key or first quanta in all becomings, on the way to becoming-animal, rushing towards becoming-imperceptible. In this chapter, becoming-woman will be introduced, but largely in the context of readings by those few feminists who have engaged with Deleuze. Irigaray’s reading of Kant will also be looked at. It will be argued that her project is not successful for reasons similar to the limited effectiveness of feminist criticisms, in that both adopt an uncritical position with respect to sexual difference, in their different ways. A fuller discussion of becoming-woman is found in the next chapter, pulling out the relations of this line to themes which have arisen in previous chapter.

I           Receptacle, which is now called space[264]

Between the two layers of skin, the lower dermis and the upper epidermis are colonies of touch receptors. Merkel’s disks respond to sustained pressure; Pacinian corpuscles respond to changes in pressure, converting mechanical into electrical energy; Meissner’s corpuscles record low-frequency vibrations. On a hand there are flexure lines, tension lines, papillary ridges. A tongue is replete with sensory talents, a nose collects moistures, sweet and dusty. Irigaray’s economy is one of touch.

‘Quand elle y revient, c’est pour repartir d’ailleurs.

(When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere)’.[265]

As do Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray explores difference through the middle; not as a medium between two terms, but as distributing a tactile and intensive space. Multiple and interconnected, immediately autoerotic with her body, Irigaray’s woman is before the possibility of distinguishing activity and passivity. ‘L’homme...a besoin d’un instrument pour se toucher; sa main, le sexe de la femme, le langage (man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s body, language...’[266]), but woman ‘est déjà deux - mais non divisibles en un(e)s - qui s’affectent (is already two -but not divisible into one(s) - that caress each other).’[267] Everything begins from a different place. The privilege given to sight by philosophy was remarked in chapter three, in the point of intersection behind the eyes functioning as the centre of resonance, and principle of recognition. Irigaray privileges touch: ‘La femme jouit plus du toucher que du regard (woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking)’, she takes pleasure ‘justement de cette incomplétude de forme de son sexe qui fait qu’il se re-touche indéfiniment lui-même (precisely from [an] incompleteness of form which allows her organ to touch itself over and over again).’[268] However, her theorization of touch does not describe a simple oscillation between two terms, but a positive feedback which continually dissolves the middle, precluding it from functioning as a dividing term which would articulate the two lips as different in relation to unity, which could privilege a right over a left side, a one over the two. She keeps herself as a secret, without knowing it.

In the context of a discussion of Freud, Irigaray calls the laws of the conservation of energy and of the fundamental dissymmetry of nature, (the move from the present to the future, as if from the particular to the general and the first two laws of thermodynamics), ‘isomorphs of masculine rather than feminine sexuality’.[269]  This criticism is coincident with Deleuze’s characterization of thermodynamics in terms of good sense. She continues:

‘Feminine sexuality would perhaps harmonize better, if you need to invoke a scientific model, with what Prigogine calls “dissipative” structures which function by means of an exchange with the exterior world, which proceed by energy levels and whose order is not one that seeks balance but one that seeks passage over thresholds corresponding to a movement beyond disorder or entropy without any discharge.’[270]

In the last chapter, the sublime was characterized in terms of discharge, as an accumulation of heterogeneous force vectors channelled along a single route, and contrasted with the plane of consistency, as a plane of doors where relations fly outside the terms related. Irigaray’s use of dissipative structures as a model suggest a coincident direction, (and Deleuze does refer to Prigogine): in far-from-equilibrium conditions, the behaviour of a system becomes highly specific, and there are no universal laws from which its overall behaviour, or future, can be deduced. It is in that sense a model which is not a model, since to make any further claims about a dissipative system, its particular behaviour must be explored. The system itself determines its own intrinsic size and distribution, since its future is undetermined, which means that although associated with chaotic attractors, it can also return to a zero-dimensional or limit attractor; however, it is the implication of chaotic attractors and symmetry-breaking properties of dissipative systems to which Irigaray and Deleuze alike are drawn.

Of the tactile economy that she formulates, Irigaray writes that not only can the distinction between touching and touched not be upheld, but also that it is mobile and ubiquitous: ‘la femme a des sexes un peu partout (woman has sex organs more or less everywhere)’.[271]  There is no gap or room for intrusion, and no  possibility of logically distinguishing what is seeing from what is seen, for the difference between them is not extensive with the co-ordinated intersections of space which meet behind the eyes.  Nor is there a possibility of female sexuality according privilege to genitalia: the body becomes sexualized, not through a single privileged term, but as a surface of mobile passions.

For Irigaray and Deleuze alike positive feedback emerges through similar moves. Irigaray writes:

‘[S]on sexe, qui nést pas un sexe, est compté comme pas de sexe. Négatif, envers, revers, du seul sexe visible et morphologiquement désignable (même si cela pose quelques problèmes de passage de l’érection à la détumescence): le pénis.

([H]her sexual organ, which is not one organ, is counted as none. The negative, the underside, the reverse of the only visible and morphologically designable organ (even if the passage from erection to detumescence does pose some problems): the penis).’[272]

The comment echoes that of Deleuze’s, when he calls the negative difference seen from below, inverted.[273] By removing the one from the multiple, she seeks to describe a specifically female space, which both engages with the philosophical tradition, whilst at the same time subverting its directions, by exposing the logical tricks, reductions, negations and limitations by which it secures the privilege of the subject. She explores the mystification of women, in systems of supposed transparency, their positioning as passive “other” to reason, and the primacy accorded to that faculty. Her abstract machine, or problem, is the gap, or hole in the system of representation, a crack: ‘son sexe représente l’horreur du rien à voir (her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see.)’[274] By opening up this space and materializing it, she introduces it to Kant, to the tactility of the actual continuum, and the problem of fluidity, but in the process it loses its function as a receptacle.

Irigaray’s early writings in Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One opened up a rich field of problems for feminism. Her method is one of mimesis: through detailed re-workings of writers, including Plato, Freud, Marx, Hegel, Kant, Aristotle..., she works at jamming their systems and exposing their inconsistencies, incoherences and uncritical assumptions:

‘[L]’enjeu n’est pas d’élaborer une nouvelle théorie dont la femme serait le sujet ou l’objet, mais d’enrayer la machinerie théorique elle-même, de suspendre sa prétention à la production d’une vérité et d’un sens par trop univoques. Ce qui suppose que les femmes ne se veuillent pas simplement les égales des hommes dans le savoir.

(The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and a meaning that are excessively univocal. Which presupposes that women do not aspire simply to be men’s equals in knowledge).’[275]

The extent to which her method is successful has been argued, and will be touched on below, but of primary interest here is her reading of Kant.

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