<<TRANSMATHOME

IV         Out of the Middle

‘Bref, une ligne de fuite, déjà complexe, avec ses singularités; mais aussi une ligne molaire ou coutumière avec ses segments; et entre les deux (?), une ligne moléculaire, avec ses quanta qui la font pencher d’un côté ou de l’autre.

(In short, a line of flight, already complex, with  singularities; but also a molar or customary line with  segments; and between the two (?), a molecular line with quanta which cause it to tip to one side or the other)’. [308]

In Mille Plateaux the middle line, the line which causes the collapse back into an empty space of attraction and common sense, good sense and order, or becomes the subject of escape and effects a singular diffusion of intensive quanta and the distribution of full space is called becoming-woman. Becoming-woman is the in-between of the two systems, machining communications between orders of incommensurate potentials, that of the State and that of the nomad, of Compars and Dispars, logos and nomos, an itinerant vector. ‘[D]iffusion procède au milieu, par le milieu, comme tout ce qui “pousse”, du type rhizome (diffusion happens in the in-between, goes between, like everything that “grows” of the rhizome type)’.[309] There is thus an explicit connection between tactile, full space, and becoming-woman, the transverse line discussed in the previous chapter and the logic of conjunction, of the And, not as blockage and accumulation, but as an additive function. However, as seen, the middle is not enclosed within its terms, and so becoming-woman becomes associated with the formation of substantial  multiplicities with no relation to unity.

Deleuze and Guattari make no claim about “real women,” and what their experience might be.[310] There is no image of women, nor determined direction to becoming-woman as line: the plane of doors, as has been said, does not represent the outside behind it, but is constituted by moving through the openings. Indeed, Guattari writes of becoming-woman in the context of queer politics: ‘in order to understand the homosexual, we tell ourselves that it is sort of “like a woman”’.(G, 1981, p87) Women’s proximity to but absence of identification with or recognition in terms of the biunivocal relations of Law, empty striated space, etc., and the strangeness of their sexuality, from the perspective of an economy of desire based on a lacked object and an ejaculatory satisfaction, have marked them as dissident, deviant. Caught by the mechanisms designed to neutralize this deviance - marriage, domesticity, public invisibility, and sexual debt (in this economy, Guattari says, ‘the woman owes her orgasm to the man’ [Ibid.]), women become debtors to a system which uses their body to survive. The point is very similar to those made by Irigaray, regarding the position of women as necessarily inside and outside the space of representation.

Guattari argues that by detaching themselves from the profits promised to masculinity - power, control, monopolization of violence, etc. - men too become ‘directly linked to a becoming-feminine body, as an escape route from the repressive socius’ (Ibid.). (It is claims such as these which have worried feminism and led to the accusation of appropriation: a queer man is still a man, it is said.) In more general terms, he argues for the destruction of categories -woman, man, black, white, queer, straight, deviant - and for a distributed sexuality, n-sexes, without definition or border, temporal endurance or specificity. For a full space, of infinitely proximate and singular sexes. Again, this has been the focus of feminist objections.  Rosi Braidotti, for example, one of the first women to respond positively to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, calls it one of ‘sexual neutrality which does not allow for the fundamental lack of symmetry between the sexes’.[311] This criticism reflects Irigaray’s concern with the unexamined paradox of symmetry; but whilst de-stabilizing the rigid structures which form space as a three-dimensional domain of co-ordinating planes intersecting at the point of the subject, who provides the fourth dimension in the form of a time constant, Braidotti’s insistence on sexual difference as an articulation between male and female remains co-optable by that space. Difference is not, in her view, an immanently differential process which escapes the confines of the binary terms which it relates, however asymmetrical that relation might be.

Becoming-woman, as Deleuze and Guattari use it, is not biologically, hormonally, or chromosomally defined. Nor is it a gender theory; gender is a term whose field is composed by specific trajectories in the formation of socio-political and cultural spaces, which may or may not be attached to biological femaleness, which itself is not a transparent or determinate concept. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-woman is not a necessary condition of the possibility of biocultural concepts of femaleness or the feminine, but rather an immanent condition of becomings, and a positive element in an economics of desire, rather than in its socialization through codes and blockages. They refer to it as ‘le premier quantum, ou segment moléculaire (the first quantum, or molecular segment)’ [312] of becomings, and the key to a smooth itinerant line whose motion can be described neither in terms of convergence or rectilinearity, but through the smallest intervals, demon leaps effecting communication between the two orders of force, attraction and repulsion, in a patois which belongs to neither.

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Unlike Derrida, whose work was embraced enthusiastically by feminists, Deleuze and Guattari have for the most part been treated with suspicion. Yet Deleuze’s critique of common sense and good sense, his attack on the image of thought, his empiricism and the privileging of materiality and force all suggest connections between the direction of his thought and arguments in feminism. A major strand of feminisms’ criticism of philosophy is that it has no body; its exclusion, together with passions and sensuous interests - all identified by philosophy as “other” to the real problem of thought, and as the source of the apparent peculiarity and atheoretical nature of womens’ thought processes  - has limited and restricted its relevance to the approximately fifty per cent of the human population who are male, since it is precisely on the basis of this exclusion that the (male) subject has been theorized. So its claims to universal and necessary truths are unwarranted.

Deleuze has been criticized for neglecting feminist projects directed towards the constitution of a specifically female subjectivity. Rosi Braidotti describes herself as a Deleuzian, but nonetheless accuses his position on woman on the grounds that it comes from a male embodied subject. Criticisms such as these have limited purchase on the impulse infecting Deleuze’s work, which is to expose the mechanisms by which transcendence is produced, as a real rather than imaginary or ideal repressive mechanism. Deleuze does not deploy becoming-woman as a feminist theory or as a theory of woman, but as an element in the critical arsenal of pragmatics, or auto-critique.