<<TRANSMATHOME

V         A Hesitant Discipless

In Patterns of Dissonance Rosi Braidotti says of Deleuze:

‘He severs the thread which links the puppets to the master and lets them circulate freely in space, that is to say no longer activated by a central power but through the multiple effects of attraction and repulsion of spatial entities, bodies intersecting with each other’.[313]

Braidotti understands becoming-woman as a term operating outside bilateral oppositions, and as a departure from “the feminine” in its Derridean construction as essentially Heideggerian and derivative of a more primary ontological difference.[314] Locating the starting point of Deleuze’s work as the death of the subject[315], and noting the difference of a philosophy of intensities from one of representation, Braidotti goes on to explicate this difference through the body. The puppet body ‘as the other of a divinely-ordained mind’ is contrasted with a Deleuzian body defined as a ‘material surface where the codes of language interact...the pure product of cultural and social modes of interaction, there is nothing “natural” about them’.[316]

Braidotti’s formulation of Deleuze is essentially political, and this means her analysis of becoming-woman is informed less by its functional operation in the transformation of a system of forces, and more by an appeal to “real women”[317], where this “real” is neither explored or explained. This collapses the generation of machinic difference and the breaking symmetries of the line implicated in becoming-woman onto the side of a politics organized in terms of binary sexual difference, limiting it to socio-cultural field, and so contracting the sense of becoming-woman. She is not incorrect, but her reading is incomplete, since it tends to operate as a restriction on what she understands by ‘body’; material bodies - desiring-machines - become written and defined in relation to a socio-political space, and it is in terms of this alone that she understands becoming-woman. This is a retrograde step in relation to Irigaray. Irigaray’s force arises from her interrogation and consequent jamming of the theoretical bases of  the  relations into which Western philosophy has slotted women, and her simultaneous disengagement of a different women from the structural orders of its systems and so problematizes across different axes, both inside and out. By confining her debate to the political, Braidotti is unable to utilize this force.

Braidotti is critical of Deleuze’s ‘mechanized vision of desire’[318] on the grounds that it results in a genderless amalgam of sexuality, a ‘dispersed polysexuality’[319] which is uninformed by feminism, and she argues that he is caught in the paradox of a philosophy of difference which does not take into account the very difference that his use of becoming-woman suggests -that is, sexual difference. Her claim about dispersed polysexuality is not incorrect, since, as seen above, for Deleuze and Guattari sexuality does become a distribution rather than a bilateral disjunction. But their project is neither feminist nor prescriptive: ‘we do not mean to say that a creation of this kind is the prerogative of the man’,[320] and has broader implications than Braidotti’s reading suggests.

However, becoming-woman includes, but is not exhausted by the political trajectory of “real women”, and machinic process are not limited to sexuality or definable in its terms.

‘Nous ne croyons pas en général que la sexualité ait le rôle d’une infrastructure dans les agencements de désir, ni qu’elle forme une énergie capable de transformation, ou bien de neutralisation et sublimation. La sexualité ne peut être pensée que comme un flux parmi d’autres, entrant en conjonction avec d’autres flux, émettant dans particules qui entrent elles-mêmes sous tel ou tel rapport de vitesse et de lenteur dans le voisinage de telles autres particules.

(We do not believe in general that sexuality has the role of an infrastructure in the assemblages of desire, nor that it constitutes an energy capable of transformation or of neutralization and sublimation. Sexuality can only be thought of as one flux among others, entering into conjunction with other fluxes, emitting particles which themselves enter into particular relationships of speed and slowness in the vicinity of certain other particles)’. [321]

Sexuality is not equivalent to or a basis of desire, and a body is a geography and population of fluxes, a bloc of becoming, defined not in terms of its molar components - this one has breasts, this one a penis, this one is black and this one scarred, this one beautiful, this one plain - but by its affects and the linkages it effects with other bodies, by continguous intensities which release sexuality as a quality of their difference. Deleuze suggests relinquishing the term desiring-machine, which comes from Guattari, in order to prevent the confusion of desire and sexuality.

 Amongst the criticisms directed at Deleuze and Guattari is that they perpetuate historically entrenched associations of women - with madness, for example. History has also devoted much time to reducing women to sexual objects, however, and for feminism to perpetuate this attachment and use sexuality as the major defining factor of women seems not only to mitigate against their criticism of Deleuze and Guattari, but also to privilege one type of flow, rather than addressing the vast complexities of womens’ lives and the myriad qualities of the force lines with which they connect.

Braidotti counteracts her positive response to connections between Deleuze’s work and feminist interrogations of traditional philosophical tales, both of which are engaged in ‘developing forms of subjectivity and modes of desire at the furthest remove from the Phallic model’: he is, she writes, ‘normative by omission’ and

‘[A]t no point in his thought does he take into account the specific history of women’s own attempts to redefine their subjectivity’.[322]    

Her position is no doubt strategic, borne out of a reaction against the proliferating philosophical use of “woman” as a newly privileged term through which to negotiate problems coming out of the “death of the subject.”  However, it remains within the reach of negative operations connected with a traditional metaphysic of the subject, because it continues to search, however disguised that search might be, for something essential to women, an exclusive definition which characterizes them as a unified group, as “real women”. As has been remarked, above, Deleuze and Guattari are not claiming either to be feminists, or to be providing a theory of women; as for appropriation, the phantom of the victim is buried in this term. Braidotti’s criticisms might be filled out by examining the economic systems which produce women as consumers/subjects; by exploring the different empirical relations which generate their various and diverse situations. However, it is, as it stands, unsatisfying as a response to becoming-woman.

Becoming-woman does not, for Braidotti, result in the upheaval of exchange between men of women, and nor does she engage with desiring-machines outside the realm of metaphor: she quotes Irigaray - ‘isn’t it a sort of metaphor for her/it, that men can use?’[323]  Rather than leading to problems of material self-organization, undoing the possibility of implementing the schema of subjectivity by dissolving its parameters as it passes through, becoming-woman remains within a representational frame-work, where women’s bodies are still whole objects, defined sexually, with no critical account of this sexuality being provided outside the realm of social, symbolic and cultural images; this implies that despite her recognition of the intensive/extensive disjunction, she continues to conceive of this as exclusive, in order to retain a bilateral distinction between man and woman which is as a consequence only extensively legitimate - which is to say, illegitimate in Deleuze’s terms. Matter remains outside.

Inside (representation) she is quite correct to say:

‘The ‘becoming-woman of...’is a force which appropriates women’s bodies, an exchange among the master-thinkers of the feminine body: it perpetuates an ancestral habit of domination as the trait of the masculine discourse on women. It is still a misogynist mode of thought.’(B,1991: 123)

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Returning to Deleuze’s work in a later book, Nomad Subjects, Braidotti’s hesitance is reduced. Nomadic becoming is seen as expressing Deleuze’s ‘quest for postmetaphysical figurations of the subject’[324], which is no longer centralized and productive, nor even dead, but ‘a term in a process of intersecting forces’. The later reading is more incisive, in that rather than being concerned with what she sees as the starting point - “the death of the subject” -her attention has shifted to the periphery, to the point of exit from death, and the question of the exportation and return of the model of death, as the immanence of experience, the zero added to each body as an assemblage. However, despite being more materialist, characterizing becoming in terms of ‘sensitive matter, independently of the subjects involved and their determined forms’[325] her understanding of force as ‘highly constructed social and symbolic’[326] continues to restrict it to a molar régime.

For Braidotti, sexual difference

‘cannot be considered as one difference among many but rather as a founding, fundamental structural difference on which all others rest and that cannot be dissolved easily.’[327]

This contrasts directly with Deleuze’s remark above, about sexuality being one flux amongst others. She is critical of Deleuze for privileging one becoming amongst others, that of becoming-women, but seems to want to privilege one difference amongst others, that of sexuality. Yet the idea of a fundamental structural difference is anathema to materialism: structures are generated, not original, plastic not fixed. Appeals to a founding structural difference which grounds all others and which is close-to immune from dissolution pushes Braidotti back towards basic bilateral disjunctions and a transcendent metaphysic. 

Braidotti closes her chapter on Deleuze’s becoming-woman as follows:

‘Speaking as a Deleuzian who believes that desire is the effective motor of political change, as opposed to wailful transformation, I experience that “I know, but...” mode as a genuine, positive contradiction in Deleuze’s thinking.’[328]

 “I know, but...” expresses her hesitancy in calling herself a Deleuzian because - “but”  - he’s a man. A hesitancy well-placed, since, like sexuality, Deleuze is one flux amongst others, and moreover, disciplehood is not a condition one associates with his writing. Moreover, her understanding of this as a positive contradiction makes it a fertile move rather than one which closes down her relation with Deleuze. Whilst he (like Kant) privileges following over imitation, to attribute him with mastery of the lines he himself follows is in the end to approach his machines with cynicism, the capitalist disease. Some strange innocence is needed, ‘d’une autre espèce, d’une autre nature, d’une autre origine (another species, another nature, another origin)’.[329]

 Her remark above obviates in a sense any need to critique the particulars of her argument: it is engaged less with what he writes, than with the difficulties feminists discover, when open to engagements with ‘male’ philosophies whose direction is not - unusually -antagonistic towards women, either openly or, like the work of Derrida, sycophantic - he’d love to write like a woman, he says, even though he finds feminism castrating![330] And Braidotti is not as naïve in her reading of Deleuze as the above criticisms imply: she understands that what is useful for feminism in Deleuze’s writing is not what is said ‘about women’[331] - which is very little, but in its interdisciplinarity, in the abstract nature of the tools it offers.

In Patterns of Dissonance, Braidotti asks:

 ‘What is the point of using the term “becoming-woman” in the analysis of masculine texts when it is clear that the study bears on the vicissitudes and the internal evolution of a system closed -and foreclosed - to women, that is, philosophy?’[332]

Several questions could be asked. Since Braidotti speaks as a Deleuzian, but claims philosophy is closed to women, where does this mean she locates Deleuze? Or, has her understanding of philosophy changed in the three years between the two books, between Deleuze as essentially misogynist and herself as hesitantly Deleuzian? Or, has she decided that whether or not Deleuze is a philosopher, he is at least a socio-political thinker who engages with feminism? Attempting to answer these questions maps one into an implied agreement with the basic claim that philosophy is systematically closed to women. This reduces philosophy to the canon of its history, to its secondary texts and academic institutions. Making it a discipline rather than an exploration.

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Limiting its attention to “female/feminine” centred problems and building systems and epistemologies on unexamined concepts of experience, based on metaphysically unquestioned assumptions, feminism will be doomed to intellectual ghettoization, and close down a potential market for its subversions. If it limits its attentions to science to pointing out the intrusion of social theory into scientific claims about women, and fails to deploy positively the technological transformations immanent to the new models science is producing, whose trajectory suggests the collapse of precisely those concepts against which feminism has in the past argued - objectivity, identity, idealism and dead matter, - feminism will be a side-line, of interest only to women fuelled by the political fluxes of desire. If it is the case that philosophy has misconstrued women, positioned them in places they would rather not be, and made claims about their intelligence, their bodies, their capabilities, etc., which are both disagreed with and are looking increasingly ridiculous, then there is little point attached to a continuing argument with reason designed from the position of its victim. For if women are not its victim, reason is either empty and impotent, or its function must be understood differently. Feminism becomes normative when it becomes incapable of engaging with philosophy beyond the limits of theorizations of gender and suggests that such an engagement is anathema to women. Kant says the same: women may as well grow beards as learn how to think.