<<TRANSMATHOME

Breeding Demons

‘we will call them “demons,” because they are not controlled by a master program.’[333]

I           Changing the Object

‘Warton was held down by wardresses as the doctor inserted a four-foot-long tube down her throat. A few seconds after the tube was down, she vomited all over her hair, her clothes and the wall, yet the task continued until all the liquid had been emptied into her stomach.’[334]

It is easy to lose sight of the violence to which women have been subjected in their struggles to transform their situation, and to which they are still subjected. Jane Warton’s treatment in prison was a consequence of her protestation against this same treatment, which she had seen inflicted on women who, like her, had been imprisoned for engaging in suffragist activities. She was in reality Lady Constance Lytton, and had disguised her identity in order to illustrate the different treatments meted out to women in prison on the basis of their class status; on their visibility as appendages to men. On a previous occasion, under her family name, she had been treated more leniently, and released after a couple of days. This simple example illustrates that analyses of connections amongst women is not comprehended by class determined as a relation to modes of production. Warton was on the womens’ side.

Yet class relations are only one example of the different orders across which women move, at odds with the major directions, passing through them but never at home. This difference is also inscribed in the theoretical operations of philosophy, and means that finding where women are distributed within philosophical theories, such as Kant’s, is problematic: the elements privileged by commentators are for the most part those which are explicitly associated with men - spontaneity, superior strength, activity, reason, genius, abstract logical thought, firmness and accuracy of judgement, moral fortitude, duty, respect, honesty...the list could be longer, but the idea is clear. And it is not only that women are conceptually disconnected from the major concerns of philosophy; where those themes with which they have been associated are discussed - nature, passion, madness, imagination, beauty, receptivity, lying, sensibility, etc. - the relations according to which they are constructed do not emerge from those themes, nor indeed distribute them, but are imposed upon them from outside. Understanding is, after all, the lawgiver of nature.

This is why a system such as Kant’s appears so different when addressed from a perspective whose interest is in the theoretical underpinnings of philosophical misogyny, and looks to discover how deeply ingrained they are. Deleuze’s philosophy is not feminist, but it does not claim to be so: what it does, however, is build a machine which does not follow orthodox patterns, which is creatively destructive and rigorously and acutely composed, and which, by exploring the structures which support the spontaneously acting and judging subject, or man of State, crosses lines with feminist thought and provides means of accelerating the collapse of philosophical preciousness regarding what is appropriate to it. Deleuze does not provide a model: unlike Braidotti, I do not think one can “be a Deleuzian”. However, it is an exemplary machine of thought, and it is in this that its value for feminism rests, rather than in its explicit remarks on becoming-woman.

 The isolated remarks which Kant makes about women in discussions of anthropology and aesthetics are the effects of more deeply ingrained structural and systematic misogynies, and it is to these that violence refers for its justifications and validations. Fernand Braudel writes:

‘The role of women is always a structural element in any civilization -a test: it is a long-lived reality, resistant to external pressure, and hard to change overnight. A civilization generally refuses to accept a cultural innovation that calls in question one of its own structural elements.’[335]

Transformations in the visible images and operations of women, the collapse of the orders of their historical containment, such as the family,  together with their accelerating infiltration into disciplines and cultures erected on the exclusion of women (and blacks, and anyone else who does not fit the model of recognition and image of thought) are changing the long-lived reality. In tracking the forces and flows of woman independently of the subject, in connection with natural technologies and material flows, one seeks to diagnose and generate legitimate descriptions of the future tense of women. This is the line of becoming-woman.

Women cannot simply be identified with objects, although they have been objects in part. Irigaray, reading Marx, writes:

‘Merchandises, les femmes sont...deux choses à la fois: objets d’utilité et porte-valeur.

(As commodities, women are thus two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value).’[336]

In terms of its utility, a woman’s body is material, but this is of secondary importance to its exchange value, Irigaray argues, which rests in abstraction and in the resulting cancellation of material difference. But this abstraction from utility generates problems, since it produces a value that lacks location: women do not have the visible signs of power, she writes, which are necessary in reflective economies, and thus the abstraction can be realized only through exchange, only by measurement in relation to a third term, to which neither of them correspond. However, for this to take place, horizontal relations amongst women need to be cancelled, or overcoded, the materiality of their bodies re-configured, for, in terms of their own affinities, the qualities which support abstraction are lacking.

This move is clear in Kant. Whilst he allows that individual men will have preferences for different women - blondes or brunettes, slim or curvaceous, vivacious or coy - when it comes to evaluations of beauty, as the quality of women which bears the value of abstraction, these differences, since they are based on physical attractions, must be discounted. All the ‘other merits of a woman should unite solely to enhance the character of the beautiful, which is the proper reference point’.[337] However, judgements of the beautiful do not locate it as a quality of a body so judged, but refer it to a subject, and his feelings of pleasure or displeasure; only thus can a judgement be universal, since it is devoid of any specific attraction or agreeability. In such circumstances, Kant writes, one

 ‘must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying this liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.’[338]

In the case of judgements of the beautiful on bodies public taste is appended to a moral concept, presupposing an idea of what that body is supposed to be, what its function or purpose is. And for women, it is reproduction; in terms of this value, women’s materiality is re-configured, in order to become the repository of an abstract exchange value, that attached to the capacity to produce a child. As the practical value of women, reproduction is visible, has form and beauty; the image is the Madonna. However, as a material and bodily function, it is fearsome and gives rise to disgust: to prevent this, which would suggest the tangling of sensible elements in the form of the object (the body) and so degrade the judgement both aesthetically and morally, women need to develop a sense of shame, which ‘serves to draw a curtain of mystery before even the most appropriate and necessary purposes of nature’.[339] Women must thus contribute to their production as exchangeable objects, whose abstract value is rests in their reproductive capacity. They must, as was remarked in the Introduction, be self-pruning. The intensive materiality of their bodies is thus made relative to extension, to a public and universally agreed upon quality of form which excites the contemplation of a community of subjects whilst simultaneously confirming the function of reproduction, which is no longer a messy material process, but a moral duty. Only then can this object become related on a plane of equality to other objects of the same type, through the medium of a third party, the judging subject.

Donna Haraway problematizes theorizations of women as objects, by complicating the idea of it as inert and passive in the face of such judgements. Her challenge is directed at Irigaray’s critique of specular economies and the privilege of touch. As a scientist and primatologist, observation is essential to her work; but her theorization of vision removes it from the mirrored economy of reflection, so it no longer operates as an identification or recognition principle. Observation is no longer necessarily a power move, coded in advance through structures specific to a subject, but a manoeuvrable and manoeuvring direction, which neither takes charge of, nor submits to, an object; rather, it is a movement between, echoing Deleuze’s AND logics, a relation which effectuates both sides as both observer and observed, in a manner which carries the logic of Irigaray’s two lips, as a positive feedback process. The object is no longer the result of formal impositions pressed onto intensive matter, but a formation generated through material interactivity which does not arrive at the logic of subjectivity, since the conditions of its production are technically incompatible with the closed systems protective of a unified (or even fractured) identity.

‘The body, the object of biological discourse, itself becomes a most engaging being. Claims of biological determinism can never be the same again. When female “sex” has been so thoroughly re-theorized and revisualised that it emerges as practically indistinguishable from “mind”, something basic has happened to the category of biology.’[340]

Haraway’s claim is strong. Theorizations of female ‘sex’ no longer run directly (or even indirectly) through the womb; desire connects instead with the intellect, and this circuit has effects which bleed beyond the limits of feminism, to the very category of biology itself. Feminist discourse feeds back into science, not as an addenda, but as a challenge to its basic categories and methodologies. Haraway’s demon, the cyborg, draws technologically enhanced sensibilities together with female desire, in the production of a body whose boundaries are no longer definable through a linear and maternal nature, and for whom reproduction is no longer a privileged term. Intensities are no longer confined within extensive form, nor re-structured according to moral purposes, and, most importantly, the cyborg dissolves the veil of shame which lingered in feminism in its depiction of women as victims.

Remembering the violence remarked at the opening of this chapter does not necessitate an identification with the position of its victims (and certainly not with its perpetrators: who wants equality with this?). This is based on sentiment and turns women, once more, into objects of pity, as well as perpetuating an image of nature as violence and conflict. The cyborg is not based on identifications between women and ‘nature in the Western sense’, Haraway writes, but moves towards an anorganic nature, a technological nature which debunks the privilege of both the organism and of the human, since her work on primatology connects with the cyborg also; it is not therefore simply a relation of humanity with technology, but a much broader concept, which upsets the easy separation of teleological and mechanical orders and human and “other” primates. It is in this respect that it connects with Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic phylum.[341]

Haraway attacks both the production of women (by women as well as men) as victims, and the prescriptive voices which call for a unity amongst women, in the interests of some political aim, on the grounds that it attributes a shared identity amongst them, which effects the same cancellation of differences which women have argued against. ‘There is nothing about being “female” that naturally binds women.’[342] This has already been questioned in the last chapter, with respect to references to “real women”; Haraway’s cyborg dissolves the possibility of such categories having any purchase on bodies, by dispersing sexuality, by dislocating it from discussions of lack, and relating it to the positive operations of the intellect.