<<TRANSMATHOME

Side-Communication

‘Philosophie, rien que de la philosophie, au sens traditionnel du mot’.[i]

Two primary themes inform the direction of this thesis. The first is the relation of Immanuel Kant and Gilles Deleuze and the second, the position of women in philosophy, both as philosophers and as creatures with a philosophical design which women themselves have had no part in creating. The two problems connect in the concept of becoming-woman, found in Mille Plateaux,(1980) the second of the two volumes of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, which Deleuze co-wrote with Félix Guattari.

I           Revolution

Each element - Kant, Deleuze and women - is attached in its own way to revolution. The French revolution ‘finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm’, Kant wrote, sounding close to enthusiasm himself, from the safe, if by that time censorial Prussian State under the rule of Frederick William II.[ii] Under his uncle, Frederick the Great, Germany had been shaped by a thirst for power and glory, rationalized through the medium of Enlightenment ideas. Unlike his mystically enclined nephew, Frederick was religiously indifferent, believing his authority rested in the State itself, and he set about shaping it in a way which would reflect this status. He instigated massive land-reclamation and colonization projects; he established a huge bureaucratic administration; his codification and uniformization of the law resulted in a new political character, the citizen; and he quieted the Prussian aristocracy, enlisting their services for the State with privileges and rewards. For Frederick, the idea of the State as servant to the people was anathema: to Voltaire, he wrote: ‘I view my subjects like a herd of stags on some noble’s estate[;] their only function is to reproduce and fill the space’.[iii] Nonetheless, Kant flourished on Frederick’s estate, and could observe from his safe distance events unfolding in less stable areas of the world, revolutions with less order than that of Frederick.

Deleuze’s pre-1968 writing has the appearance of conservatism, in both language and tone. But the appearance is misleading, and to sustain it requires deliberate effort. His collaboration with Félix Guattari in the two volumes of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie effected a transformation in thought, taking it out of the academy and restoring it to life and desire, energizing language with fresh air. It sides with no politics; ‘Démocratie, fascisme ou socialisme, lequel n’est hanté par l’Urstaat comme modèle inégalable (democracy, fascism, or socialism, which of these is not haunted by the Urstaat as a model without equal)?’[iv] Attacking, with joy, the oedipal, the familial, the statist, the fascistic, the ideological, the patrimonial and the repressive, L’anti-oedipe, the first volume, is thought as exterminating angel. To the extent that thought returns to the subject and to subjection, ‘L’anti-oedipe a été un échec complet’.[v]

Yet there are nonetheless continuities which run throughout his work, consistent themes; an initial list might include intensities, the problem of critique as production, the body, the strangulation of thought by consciousness and conscience. And consistent names: Spinoza, Artaud, Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Leibniz, Kant, Simondon, Canetti, Geoffroy St. Hilaire - again naming only a selection. May ‘68 and the collaboration with Guattari catalysed the assemblage of these characters and themes, together which many others, into an up and-running machine of thought without image or single origin, which proliferates potential directions with each reading. There is  treachery in choosing to follow the continuities, as this thesis does, rather than emphasizing the break. But:

‘Etre traître à son propre règne, être traître à son sexe, à sa classe, à sa majorité - quelle autre raison d’écrire?

(What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority?)’ (DP, 1977:56; 1987:44)

In an attack on the re-domestication of thought in France in the ‘70’s, Deleuze points to the convergence of disparate and apparently contrary positions on one agreed point: hatred of May ‘68, and the declared impossibility of revolution, either explicit or tacit, in the enthusiasm for the principle of election. For this, one must first place oneself as a subject, a citizen - a Staatsbürger; for this man, Deleuze argues, revolution becomes ‘l’acte pur du penseur qui la pense impossible (the pure act of a thinker who thinks it [revolution] impossible)’.[vi] A similar convergence can be seen today also, this time in relation to the reception of Deleuze’s work, and this time the point of unity is possession. Those who do not live up to the revolutionary potential are castigated for their ‘craven submission to the Academy’, whilst those who are less craven are charged with a range of crimes from mis-reading, philosophical inadequacy, outright lunacy, and desiring the impossible.[vii] Each side has its orthodoxies and its enemies, its image of revolution and of thought. A running theme throughout Deleuze’s writing is that of the image of thought, and the stultifying effect it has on the potentials for thinking. This thesis claims neither right or wrong, truth or falsity. It is an idea, a problem which does not here pretend to a solution. Indeed, whether writing solves anything is doubtful.

This brings me to the third theme, that of women. At the time of both revolutions, the Kantian and Deleuzian, the rôle of women was in transformation. What characterized female nature became uncertain towards the end of the eighteenth century; many qualities previously attributed to women became associated with maleness - the sublime and genius both attribute a femininity to men, and a relation with nature and imagination which had previously been associated with the wildness and unrestrained immorality of women. Christine Battersby writes: ‘there was no longer a consensus about which features of the psyche doomed females to perpetual inferiority’, and traces their re-definition as culturally refined, self-controlled (when virtuous), and generally domesticated.[viii]

Kant solves the problem of apparently contrary qualities of sexual wildness and culture refinement by distinguishing between an anthropological and a cultural perspective on women. In an uncivilized state, superiority belongs to man, and the proper nature of women is as unrecognizable in a crude state of nature as ‘that of the crab apple and the wild pear, which reveal their diversity only when they are grafted or inoculated’.[ix] It is only through culture -which is the end of a reason which women do not have - that properly female qualities develop, a beautiful understanding and sensible virtue, fitting her for marriage and legal reception of nature’s true gift, the foetus. Women’s truth, Kant says, comes from the world: what it says is true and what it does is good. They can as well learn theoretical principles as they grow beards, he mutters; as for girls, they ‘must be got used to smiling in an easy, unconstrained way when they are still very young’ for smiling ‘gradually moulds them within as well and establishes a disposition to joy, friendliness and sociability’.[x]  Moulding, growing, pruning, cultivating; women become problems of the landscape, country gardens created as a resource and for relaxation from the real life of public affairs. By encouraging smiling in girls, Kant seems to envisage the prospect of self-pruning women.

In the 1960’s and ‘70s, Western womens’ lives were affected in radically different ways: the Pill removed sexuality from reproduction; women began to work in greater numbers (though still for the most part in menial “female” occupations); lesbian separatism developed; women began to attack their assimilation into class structures based on the social status of men; to question the exclusion of home labour from economics; to play with the images assigned to them on their own terms; they began to write and to be published; to uncover a richer and more diverse view of womens’ rôles in history, and to move into territories previously defined as male, either positively so, or on the grounds that womens’ biology/minds/ hormones etc., naturally excluded them from large areas of life. Most importantly, women ceased to prune themselves in line with male expectations. Men began to concern themselves with the movements of women, and many could find no more original response to the changes than ridicule or tired appeals to the proper and natural function of women as reproduction animals.

The most important argument is economic. In the West, the decline of industrial capital and the emergence of information technology has transformed the labour market: physical strength and brute force have lost their value, to be replaced by manoeuvrability, flexibility, ease of transition between different areas of life, interactive skills. One in four women in Britain chooses not to bear children, and many women who do have children prefer to bring them up without men. Fewer and fewer women are choosing to confine themselves within the legal bondage of marriage. The Internet has opened up space for playing with gender assignations, whilst cyberfeminism drives home historical connections between women and technology, messing up its image as toys for the boys. Oedipus collapses all around, as women begin (slowly) to gain the economic control over their lives which releases them from their historical dependency on men.

What, however does this have to do with the debate over Deleuze, from where this discussion of women began? The issue is treachery. The academic debate over Deleuze divides him into two parts, one revolutionary, of the streets, and the other institutional, of the university, but it can be paraphrased as an argument over which side is the most treacherous? Is there more treachery in throwing aside the constraints of the academy, rejecting its theory, descrying the ascription of labels, or in assimilating Deleuze with, for example, problems coming out of deconstruction. In the context of economic viability, there is no difference, since these debates occur for the most part amongst well-paid men. It is therefore not a debate into which women fit easily, anymore than they fit easily into philosophy, or into class structures. Rage against the academy is less clearly a revolutionary position for those who have been fighting against restrictions on their entry into it, and the rejection of theoretical approaches to Deleuze’s work sits differently when history has spent much effort persuading women of their theoretical inadequacies. This is why remarks such as those of Rosi Braidotti’s are problematic. She writes:

‘Philosophy creates itself through what it excludes as much as through what it asserts. High theory, especially philosophy, posits its values through the exclusion of many - non-men, non-whites, non-learned, etc.. The structural necessity of these perjorative figurations of otherness makes me doubt the capacity, let alone the moral and political willingness, of theoretical discourse to act in a non-hegemonic, non-exclusionary manner’.[xi]

History has created itself through similar exclusions: science, economics, law, engineering, politics, - the list can be continued at will - all have exercised either theoretical or practical restraints against women. Philosophical theory provides an abstract structural account of these exclusions and is, as Braidotti says, created through them. However, unless one subscribes to the view that thought, as opposed to institutional philosophy, is generated by exclusion and the exercise of the negative on difference, the case against infiltrating theory as well as practice seems slight. Moreover, the theory/practice distinction is, once more, an artifice of the exclusionary mind. As will be discussed in the thesis, Deleuze’s understanding of the theory/practice relation is not one which divides down a central line; their relation is one of mutual and reciprocal interaction, theory opening space where practices are blocked, and so transforming the potentials of practice, and practice mobilizing theory, breaking down walls and moving through crevices, and in so doing transforming what is understood by both theory and practice.

Bedtime stories for children need not of necessity be peopled by fairies, and uncut minds understand power with ease, since it is exercised upon them without the possibility of their easy escape. Children are pragmatists too: generating variations without regard for rule, in response to the situations they discover, transforming language into a toy, a game which changes whilst it is played, a field of edible words. Leaving girls to think so they can smile for themselves, rather than re-furbishing historical tales of their necessary exclusion from certain domains whilst at the same time leaving boys to do the same, rather than imposing the burden of history of their backs; these seem most profitable for the future becoming-woman. It is for these reasons, amongst others, that I am disinterested in the attribution of reactionary/revolutionary labels and the fight for possession over Deleuze (or Kant). Revolution belongs to the young. Cold indifference to opinion is something one learns.