<<TRANSMATHOME

IV          Becoming-imperceptible

‘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)’ (DG, 1980:249; 1988:203 - translation amended).

Deleuze and Guattari position becoming-woman as the first quanta, the first demon flash which tips the balance of becoming away from the strata, from customary orders and patterns and towards the molecular line. It is in this respect that becoming-woman relates to the town, and to time, as an itinerant movement which is in-between the State and the market, facing onto the strata and away from it simultaneously. Precisely, it seems, as philosophy has always positioned women, as neither inside or outside, not properly one thing or another.

It is the potential for positioning women in relation to the town, rather than to nature, and for becoming-woman as a movement  towards the market which effects the release of monetary flows from the accumulative tendencies of capital; it is this relation of women to the economy, as a bias of escape, rather than as an object exchanged between subjects in state capitalism, which includes socialism as well - that is missed by a purely politico-sexual analysis. For in the movement the balance tips from the molar to molecular, and women cease to be commodities, or even, as Irigaray says, commodities which speak, and instead begin to function as partial objects, biases, evaluations. Whilst their interactions are not regulated from any external position, the combined effect - to those who remain outside, in the rare air of the State, capital, the subject - the movement appears purposeful, directed, the biases appear correlated, caused. If it is this latter, it is in the sense spoken of before, of reverse causality without finality, testifying to an action of the future on the present. Becoming-woman is this movement, a future not yet synthesized, but whose effects are becoming concrete today.

Both Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, in their readings of becoming-woman refer to a Cartesian model of the subject, which has no relation with either time nor town. Not only does this make life much easier, for the Cartesian subject is something of a straw-dog against which to pitch an argument, but it also misses the philosophical forces on which Deleuze draws. The labyrinthine lines of the pure form of time feed throughout his work, and philosophy becomes a market-place without rules, with no historical pre-conditions determining the directions one can take, the associations and alliances one can make. Kant argues against Leibniz? Deleuze makes them bargain for space. Against Spinoza? He draws a Spinozist substance together with the critical demand for immanence. There is no truth, only ideas, no profit, only surplus flows to return to the horizontal integrations and latitudes of the market.

Deleuze and Guattari call this ‘communication d’à-côte (side-communication)’;[370] side-communication is surplus but not profit, composed of transferable fragments, ‘suppléments dans l’order d’une multiplicité, plus-values dans l’order d’un rhizome (supplements in the order of a multiplicity, surplus values in the order of a rhizome)’[371] which transfer information from one order to another, from one species to another, in an aparallel evolution - like the wasp and the orchid mentioned in an earlier chapter. It is perhaps because there is no grandeur or magnificence in this tiny connections that they have been overlooked, and so little thought has gone into the patterns they follow and the systems they effect. Where nature is conceived of as red in tooth and claw, or a subject of rape rather than of passive exploration, its real patterns remain imperceptible. It is these movements which this thesis has showed are necessary to the construction of the extensive theatre of representation; singular asymmetrical connections, horizontal side-communications, intensities escaping points, money escaping the banks, sexuality escaping biology, desire escaping sexuality, everywhere a shifting drifting flow of mobile distributions on the body of the earth.

Side-communication relates also to Deleuze’s method of theft; because the market is not driven by ideology - as are state capitalism/socialism - the history of philosophy itself becomes a market, the tendencies and directions of which are not fixed, but which can be broken into, pieces and fragments stolen, taken elsewhere, connected with other machines. What counts is only if something works, which is to say, only if something releases flows, rather than containers, accounts in which to keep them. Because women have been characterized as both inside and outside, their movement - as Irigaray saw - is double; inside, on the strata, which corresponds to Irigaray’s occupation of the philosophical body, to her careful and elegant tracings of its magic geographies and logics - inside, women move in perceptible, and sometimes apparently recognizable ways.[372] But through their relations with the outside, they are also and simultaneously imperceptible, their movements disappearing, becoming secret, only to re-appear elsewhere, different, re-configured, transformed. This is what deterritorialization means: the connection of leaps, tiny intervals, demons breeding demons, in a smooth continuous line of escape which re-territorializes somewhere else, differently - as Irigaray says, when she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere.

‘Mais que signifie devenir-imperceptible, à la fin de tous les devenirs moléculaires qui commençaient par le devenir-femme?

(But what does becoming-imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the molecular becomings that begin with becoming-woman)?’[373]

Elizabeth Grosz’s response to becoming-imperceptible, or an-organic, is to situate it within a molar political context and refer it to the potential ‘obliteration or marginalization of women’s struggles.’[374] She argues that, by the ‘uncritical internalization of perspectives and interests devised and developed by men’, women fail to notice the pit-falls of a movement which suggests, once more, that women function as a means towards the ends of men.[375] Not only does becoming-woman not have any intrinsic or essential relation to women (that is, it is not an empirical concept, in the sense that it has the apparent stability of the concrete present - it does not “look like” a woman), but moreoever, Deleuze and Guattari are explicit in saying that women must become-woman in order for men to be able to become-woman, and that sexuality goes by way of this latter becoming - ‘par le devenir-femme de l’homme (by way of the becoming-woman of the man)’.[376] Grosz equates becoming-imperceptible with the invisibility of women in a molar domain, and with the annexation of their desire to systems whose interests are elsewhere - in other words, with a failure of recognition.

However, that is to mistake the nature of becoming: it is not women who become imperceptible, or anorganic. Imperceptibility refers to the nature of movement, rather than to something that moves. To Irigaray’s secret movements, to intensive distributions, connections amongst women and men, women and women, men and men, and all with machines, which have shattered the categories, broken the codes, dissolved the restrictions and emptied the bodies of meaning, effecting a release of sexuality from binary distinctions, effecting n-sexes, a million tiny sexes, and have released women from sexuality, by making it a quality of desire, rather than the defining characteristic of their bodies. Because the problem is one of relations which escape their terms, and relation which effect biases, partial objects, not of how fully constituted whole objects are related. Becoming-imperceptible is sliding a body into machines,  camouflaging movements and appearing, as if from nowhere, in the middle.

Deleuze notes that biologists have often questioned why life is  effected through carbon, rather than through silicon, and goes on to say that ‘la vie des machines modernes passe par le silicium (the life of modern machines runs through silicon)’.[377] This is where becoming-women moves, where money released from capital moves, where life becomes non-organic, nature becomes a thinking machine, infinities of tiny demons leap, effecting a co-ordinated and fluid movement, eroding the statues of power, the historical . Becoming-woman moves towards becoming-imperceptible, but women do not dissolve or disappear in that movement: it is rather than life itself becomes mobile, because it is not longer in the womb  nor arranged in the organisms which emerge from them, but instead becomes a movement, a cycle that turns on its hinges. Humans are no longer the privileged class, but the surrogate reproductive machinery of a machinic phylum which is passing across into a different base, in a movement which effects the conjunction of teleology and mechanism, and transforming the nature of intelligence.