<<TRANSMATHOME

III         Demons

This thesis addresses the relation of Deleuze and Kant in terms of these problems: forces, the image of thought, the principle of recognition, the question of production, the materiality of the thing-in-itself, the genesis of sense and immanence of criteria. An additional element, which comes from Deleuze’s book La philosophie critique de Kant, is that of a network. The network of faculties, Deleuze says, is the true transcendental method, and the Kant book (1963) is structured around the changing relations amongst them in each of the three Critiques. This notion of system also runs throughout Deleuze’s work. He understands systems as open, nested and interconnected: everything connects to everything else, everything is implicated in the genesis of everything else, not as a universal principle or conditioning element, but through the rhizomatic interaction of forces. The concept of an assemblage, which emerges through his collaboration with Félix Guattari, molecularizes the notion of a faculty system, of body as a complex and articulated construction of interconnected components whose operations shift depending on the bodies into which they plug and the nature of relations into which they enter.

However, these are not simply images, for Deleuze shares Kant’s insistence on the importance of science for philosophy. His theory of forces emerges from work on embryology, biology, technology; amongst the vast range covered with Guattari in Mille Plateaux are genetics, geology, the movement of populations - both molecular and animal, evolution. Whilst these themes are not explored in this thesis, Deleuze’s insistence that his own work, and that with Guattari, is empirical, must be kept in mind. ‘[E]n vérité, l’inconscient est de la physique (in reality, the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics)’.[xx] There are no metaphors; if something works, it is because it is real.

So what of becoming-woman? This too must be real. Philosophy has associated women with nature, matter, space and babies, ever since Plato spoke in the Timaeus of the receptacle or womb whose neutral plasticity accepted without discrimination the impress of eternal forms. The receptacle nurses becoming, but is itself immutable. It is this supposed permanence of function attendant on women which becoming-woman seeks to break away from; from women as reproductive and essentially sexual creatures to women as self-organizing systems which are effected only through their interactions with other machines in their environment, which is no longer defined as nature, indeed, which has no definition until it is generated.

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 women on the grounds that it comes from a male embodied subject. Yet 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, as a theory of woman, but as an element in the critical arsenal of pragmatics, or auto-critique. Essential to the diagnosis of limitations imposed on desiring or machinic production through the negative real generated by  transcendent, or illegitimate syntheses, to the destruction of the forms which perpetuate these limitations, and to the formation of a radical and positive critique, becoming-woman has no organic location or social image, aesthetic norm or political motivation.

‘Il y a un devenir-femme qui ne se confond pas avec les femmes, leur passé et leur avenir, et ce devenir, il faut bien que les femmes y entrent pour sorter de de leur passé et de leur avenir, de leur histoire.

(There is a becoming-woman which is not the same as women, their past and their future, and it is essential that women enter this becoming to get out of their past and their future, their history)’.[xxi]

It is comments such as this which have, unsurprisingly, led to women questioning the use of becoming-woman, especially at a time when women are uncovering the extent of their historical involvement, and the degree to which it has been obliterated by the macro-histories of the subject. Yet Deleuze’s comments always function in two directions at once. Womens’ history, on a macro-level, has been couched in terms of their relations with the subject: getting out of this history and the future it projects means at the very least changing the elements in relation to which women are  understood, and it is this transformation of the assemblages into which women move, and through which they are created which becoming-woman effects.

The other question, of course, might be; what right has a man to tell us what and what is not essential for us? And there are occasions on which Deleuze (and Guattari’s) philosophy takes on a prescriptive air; look out for the fascist within you, they say, suggesting everyone has a hidden policeman. Moreover, distinctions such as that in L’anti-oedipe, between legitimate and illegitimate synthesis suggest a bilateral disjunction and a potential re-vitalization of dialectics, against which the whole tenor of their work drives. However, this thesis does not challenge or address these problems, for three reasons. Firstly, because one of the most important and fruitful effects of Deleuze’s writing lies in its generosity towards those thinkers he admires. If the conflictual approach of dialectics, and the operation of the negative as a mechanism of movement is to be dissolved, such generosity is necessary as a strategy of reading. Secondly, because to address the molar sexuality of an author as a reason for discounting elements of his or her writing seems precisely what feminism must not do, and cannot, without reproducing precisely that against which it has argued. What a book does, and what movements it effects, are more important than the specifics of the physical bodies which wrote it. And lastly, to quote a friend: ‘The problem is one of thinking the included disjunction of the legitimate and the illegitimate; of thinking the transcendent such that its relation to the immanent is itself one of immanence.’[xxii] If this is misunderstood, the movement of becoming-women, as Deleuze and Guattari use it, is also misunderstood, because it is this problem which underlies the AND logics of Deleuze’s empiricism, and which mobilizes the movement of desire outside the conditions of its production without generating transcendence.

This perspective demands a new understanding of the body. Nature, matter, affection, passion, etc. are not static terms, and as technology drives the perpetual reformulation of their scientific conceptualization, so too must the understanding of their relations and interconnections with woman change. One aspect of the problem of a philosophical feminism is the generation of a response to these transformations: beginning from the perspective of “real women” as fully formed socio-political, cultural, ethical or aesthetic entities does not constitute a response, because it cannot negotiate changes which impact on the machinic production of bodies.

As they are philosophically formed, women, like God, are always around, usefully, and sometimes not usefully, creative and of great consolation.[xxiii] Schopenhauer attributes the dramatist, Jouy, and Byron, a poet, with ‘the correct viewpoint for estimating the value of women’. The former writes: ‘Without women, the beginning of our life would be deprived of help, the middle of pleasure, and the end of consolation.’[xxiv] The latter omits the middle pleasure zone, concentrating instead on womens’ rôle as breeder and educator of the young, and as nurse with patient ears for the dying sighs of men. Women are cast as altruists, essential components in framing the construction space within which humans live and die, whilst they themselves appear to be neither born nor to die.

Observation of actual women is mediated by a litany of exclusive disjunctions, each specialty or discipline incorporating its own version: if you don’t have a penis, you must be castrated; you may have facial hair, or you shouldn’t; you don’t have testes, you must have ovaries; you have no y chromosome, you must have two x’s; you have a flat chest or you have breasts; you desire men or you don’t; you raise your consciousness or produce an argument; you are either a woman or a man. Variations on the endless series of alternates which sift uniformity over bodies like a caul are considered accidents, the result of systematic errors in the interpretation and implementation of codes given in advance. Integrations of the body with non-organic matters are tolerable only to the extent that it is curative of these aberrations. You can get a pace-maker or have your penis involuted into the cavity of your body only if you are judged sufficiently sick first.

Deleuze calls the gods operating these exclusive disjunctions the forms of recognition and their statement is ‘C’est donc moi, le roi! c’est donc à moi que revient le royaume (so I am the king! So the kingdom belongs to me)!’[xxv] There is something remaining of this statement in the argument over possession of Deleuze’s thought. The lineage of the gods is one of repetition of identity, the occurrence and recurrence of the same analogies, myths and fears, whereas becoming-woman is a line of material invention, of ‘connexions qui sautent d’arbre et arbre, et aui déracinent (connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them)’.[xxvi] The problem is not how to distribute the fruits on an equal basis with men, but how to destroy the trees on which they grow.

Deleuze calls the jumping signals flashing between the trees demons: demons are ‘puissances du saut, de l’intervalle, de l’intensif ou de l’instant et qui ne comblent la différence qu’avec du différent (powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant; powers which cover difference with more difference)’.[xxvii]  With no identifiability or function separable from their productive synthesis, demons become signs only on assemblage, in the formation of matters into intensive patterns, communication structures.  Immanent to its function, nothing other than what it does, and it does and thus is nothing except through interaction, a demon is a pure information point, a pixel.

De Landa expands the theme of demons in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Demons create a space called a Pandemonium, where ‘control is never passed from a higher authority to a lesser authority. There are no hierarchical levels, but only a heterarchy of demons capturing control whenever they are invoked into action.’[xxviii] What invokes them into action are data patterns: indeed, they are themselves no more than data patterns, or packets of information, which function as both messages and addresses. The survival of a demon is a function of its interaction with other demons in its locality, where locality is not a geographical position given in advance, but the consequence of connections generated amongst demons in the process of developing problem-solving strategies, whose duration is a function of the patterns they form, rather than imposed by external criteria, or a function of the life-span of a single demon (indeed there are no such things). It is from here, from Deleuze and DeLanda, that the title of this thesis comes. It seeks to uncover the demon potential of Kant, the play of forces immanent to an actual continuum, an intensive and tactile space, which, if Kant is read “appropriately” - by which I mean, in line with the formulation of problems in Kant as they are articulated from the perspective of a subject, remain imperceptible.

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The range of the thesis is kept deliberately close: there are few other players than Kant and Deleuze. This is undoubtedly a betrayal of both Kant and Deleuze, since both can be addressed from a myriad other perspectives. There is no Marx and little Freud, no Fichte or Hegel, no Lacan or Lyotard, all of whom connect with both or either of Kant and Deleuze. However, there are reasons for this, which arise from the theme of feminism, or perhaps more accurately, the situation of women in and by philosophy, which is not of necessity equivalent to feminism. For women, the problem is not that of the subject: it once was, when feminism positioned itself as the victim of the power of a subject which it was not. Women have been situated by this subject alongside the object, as more or less its equivalent, in terms of being exchangeable commodities, and alongside nature, defined in terms of material reproduction rather than conceptual production. My intention is not to argue with this, but to utilize Deleuze’s method of eliminative deduction: to eliminate the subject and its perspective and discover the movements through which the object is formed, and to diagram the intensive field which the construction of a subjective space covers up (and which, as will be seen, makes Kant nauseous): to suggest a breeding ground for demons.