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4.3 Becoming-Woman and Other Male Phantasies

One of the most promising and contentious elements of the Deleuzian/Guattarian theory of becoming is becoming-woman. It represents the pinnacle of Benhabib’s anxieties about the death of subjectivity, where the death of man has the potential to be the appropriation of ‘woman’ by men. Such a strategy enhances the subversive qualities of being oppressed and disdainful to dominant, desirable ‘male’ subjectivity without being accountable for this oppression or aware of the realities of living in a perhaps subversive but more pertinently often painful, marginalized and most remarkably, male-given, male-articulated body. From fighting for equality, safety in our bodies and the ability to articulate our own selves, the idea that our bodies are now fashionable theoretically, and ripe for assimilation by the logic that marginalized us in the first place is the current trend in post-modern theory. Any desire to transform subjectivity potentially fails to address these problems, because of the speaking position the thought presumes no longer exists, may still exist or be important (hence post-modernism which, when espoused by male theorists, potentially believes ‘female’ is a position no longer implicit and hence no longer pertinent). The importance of becoming-woman is twofold for this book. First where does the specificity of a lived woman’s body and history go when the desire to become process, non-fixity and becoming replaces the idea of an historical embodied self? Second, does the creation of a constantly altering transforming self relinquish concepts of accountability, ethical responsibility, and include responsibility for history? My response to these questions is thus: The activity of locating and transforming through ‘others within the self’ produces an active engagement with:

1)      Concepts of other not limited by and not entirely deposing of the borders of the flesh; an embodied self which actively desires others as molecular not molar, either the other in the self or other bodies which themselves have their own boundless others, such that all specificities of all concrete others are actively engaged with at every moment; a self which identifies the borders of the flesh and its memories but does not see them as indicative of wholes or organisms for the future due to such borders.

2)      Concepts which deconstruct, sometimes violently, any notion of the sanctity and integrity of a subject created to resemble a valuable capital commodity, be it over-valued male subjectivity or objectified female biology.

3)      The nature of what is being deconstructed so that history and accountability are always in process with transformation - we can transform to something else but we transform from whenever we transform to.

Becoming-woman as a strategy, not a prescription, by Deleuze and Guattari has potential in that it elucidates the hyper-constructivism of the term ‘female’; to be male is simply to be while to be female is to be something in particular. Both men and women need to actively become woman because to become woman is unbound, while to be woman in culture is highly bound. This is why Deleuze and Guattari state the need for women also to become woman, because the concept ‘woman’ is never necessarily where actual lived women are. They point to the molar woman, the little girl robbed of her own body’s potential, who could have become woman molecularly, piece-by-piece with indeterminate specificities. Through phallologocentric intervention, regulation, or as Grosz calls it, “culture’s most intensified disinvestments and recastings of the body”, [17] the little girl ceased becoming and is now being as stagnant, as molar-woman. Woman, according to Deleuze and Guattari

 Is defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haeccity. She never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight. Thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right though. The only way to get out of the dualism is to be-between… [18]

What Deleuze and Guattari fail to express is that this constant un-being of woman, who promises so much for becoming, exists at a place or a be-between that woman neither made for herself nor resides in willingly. Feminism has attempted to re-appropriate the in-between and abstractedness of woman’s representation in culture in order to affirm female being and take away the power of naming-her-there, which phallologocentrism exercises. Feminism’s re-appropriation of woman’s other-ness is as much about a will to autonomy and attaining a voice as it is a making valuable of any position woman finds herself in. What Deleuze and Guattari do is make desirable the position without acknowledging the importance of speaking and valuing the position in the process of its becoming desirable. Woman needs to speak her own subversion, as much for the speech as for the subversion. As Rosi Braidotti points out

The problem for Deleuze is how to disengage the subject position ‘woman’ from the dualistic structure that opposes it to the masculine norm, thereby reducing it to a mirror image of the same… To put it in more feminist terms, the problem is also how to free ‘woman’ from the subjugated position of annexed ‘other’ so as to make her expressive of a different difference, of pure difference, of an entirely new plane of becoming, out of which differences can multiply and differ from each other. Here the focus is more on the experience and the potential becoming of real life women, in all of their diverse ways of understanding and inhabiting the subject position ‘woman’. [19]

The idea of ‘real life women’ is one which both postmodernism and philosophy in general see as somewhat trite. Reverberating from the desire for transcendental enlightenment and affirmed by postmodernism’s desire for a body and self undefinable and continually in process, is the intolerance both have with any idea of ‘real life’ in comparison with cultural structuration, textuality or representation. [20] What this elucidates is postmodernism’s adherence to an element of Enlightenment philosophy - that of real life experience being irrelevant and even detrimental to the formulation of a self that is beyond material immanent experience. Enlightenment is against privileging body over mind within a system of cogito. It affirms transcendent truth for all ‘man’ against a micro-experiential formation of existence. Postmodernism is resistant towards too much meaning being read into experience and hence affixing meaning (against ‘performativity’ where there is no real agency behind the ‘mask’) to action. When referring to bodies which may have experienced oppression, to read only the performative value of their experience as acts available for signification, or monolithic expressions of power versus ‘no power’ is to once again bring experience, the body and the relationship between history and the immediate lived self forward, away from ‘real women’ and into the arena of philosophy, discourse or at its worst, ideas towards transformation of the male philosophical subject. In his wonderful conclusion ‘The Memory of Resistance’, Rodowick challenges the idea that power may simply be taken by the less powerful and exchanged for already-available (already-thought) power through Deleuze and Guattari’s idea, from What is Philosophy? of resistance and memory. He claims “the relation of history and memory is equivalent to that of power and resistance. The memory of resistance is not a ‘human memory’ [male/majoritarian]… this absolute memory of resistance, that founds all acts of resistance, is minoritarian.”(My insertion, original grammar) [21] Rodowick’s use of resistance is attractive because it makes becoming-minoritarian available for all subjects without conflating the desire and most importantly memory of all subjects in their processes of becoming. Where Deleuze and Guattari advocate becoming-woman, the memory of ‘woman’ is different to the history of women. A male becoming-woman would utilize the history of ‘woman’ (the idea of woman) resistant to the memory of being (powerful) majoritarian.  Women per se would utilize their memory of being women (in all their specificities) resistant to majoritarian powers in history. Male becoming-woman teeters on a precipice of assimilation. How can the majoritarian, he who desires becoming, know woman further from the basic fact of her not-being-man/majoritarian? A claim that man knows woman’s memory (which would not be her memory but his history of her) would be more offensive. The enigma that is majoritarianism’s relationship to women figures ‘Woman’ in ‘History’ over women’s memory. Rodowick cites Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy, which fathoms memory as  “the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their recreated protestations, their constantly resumed struggle.” [22] This crucial point (although Deleuze and Guattari’s conflation of man-and-woman and their choice of order are questionable) emphasizes that woman’s suffering can never be known because her marginality, her minoritarianism is never constant and never clear, (this is the majoritarian power that forces her to resist constantly). So what then do Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they call for a becoming-woman? Is it their own phantasy of resistance itself opposing majoritarian power? What is the attraction to ‘woman’?

Brian Massumi states

The added exhortation for women to lead the way by first ‘becoming-woman’ themselves has the rings of the all-too-familiar gesture of abstracting an essence of ‘femininity’ and exalting it as a state of grace that all women should occupy, in blatant disregard of the real conditions under which real women actually live. [23]

Deleuze and Guattari are potentially guilty of either making women trivial by affirming their difference, based only on their difference in respect to men, or phallologocentric culture, or dominant systems of power, or they are using the lived experience of real women constantly being differed as a philosophical strategy. Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that women first become-woman is problematic because it insinuates that beneath phallologocentric repression of the potential within female bodies is some kind of residual memory of how to be ‘woman unbound’. So while the male subject may lose his subjectivity while being made explicitly aware of that which he has oppressed through becoming-woman, woman is leading the way by setting out the true unbound mode of being. Women are re-differed through the suggestion that we might know better how to unbind ourselves, albeit after being told as much by two male philosophers. Unbinding ourselves makes us forget our memories while setting up some kind of mystical innate path for others to follow. No matter how literal Deleuze and Guattari wish becoming to be, they are still positing the experiences of a group of bodies they have never been as the ideal bodies for ‘not fitting in’ or for representing a line of flight.

The positive of their strategy is a fluidity of gender and flesh based not on a binary but on a dominant versus ‘everything else’ system where the dominant position is no longer necessarily the most desirable position. The gaps in reference to the consideration of being a real lived female body in this current culture makes their consideration of a potentially feminist strategy seem a little too much like admittedly corporeal but nonetheless male philosophical transvestitism. At this stage however, I do not believe Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming-woman’ should be relinquished because of its inherent problems, I would suggest an appropriation by the very real women it addresses could pose more useful modes of women becoming-woman. Not so that men may follow but in order that the masquerade theories of performativity and the real lived experiences of women’s bodies can formulate a philosophy which goes beyond masks versus meaning and creates accountable yet still transformative subjects. Benhabib concludes with this very idea when she states

Yet we have reached an important conclusion: the issues generated by the complex interaction between feminism and postmodernism around concepts of the self and subjectivity cannot be captured by bombastic proclamations of the ‘Death of the Subject’… To embark upon a meaningful answer… involves not yet another decoding of metaphors and tropes about the self, but a serious interchange between philosophy and the social sciences like sociolinguistics, social interactionist psychology, socialization theory, psychoanalysis and cultural history among others. [24]  

Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming are hopeful because they demand corporeal being, a version of real, social matter, in philosophy and vice versa. The socially lived body becomes the actual material of philosophical transformation without being extricated from it or subordinated to it. In one way they are addressing the bodies of real women by emphasizing the bodily nature of lived women’s experience when it is juxtaposed against the anti-immanence of the transcendental male philosopher. Against the death of the subject is the making visible of an other subject in history, that of the woman, because the death of the subject can only occur when there is a subjectivity to lose in the first place. Deleuze and Guattari shift their becomings towards less, and eventually un-identifiable aims, such as becoming-intense and becoming-imperceptible. Becoming-woman is what they see as a necessary first step in order to escape the dominant term of culture’s prime binary by choosing, more than to become-woman, to become not-man. The genealogy of becomings in Deleuze and Guattari is mirrored in this book, beginning with the broad and simple launching, becoming-anything through pleasure, continuing with the literal becoming filmic and leaving off with the potentials of becoming-horror. Like becoming intense, becoming horror offers a becoming in a series where there are more and less literal becomings based on the stage of becoming we are at. Becoming woman, like becoming-through-watching-television, is a stage that does not fly too far too fast from the culture it flies from, hence, it does not represent an impossible halcyon practice.

Perhaps becoming-woman is an easing into losing subjectivity for the male-with-something-to-lose. But perhaps it is simultaneously not wishing to be rid of a subjectivity fully historicized into sanctioned or disallowed subjects, such as man who must be accountable for the oppression of a certain form of subjectivity, ‘woman’ by first living her in order to ever transform into anything else. Guattari explicates an important point, which he sees as a problem in getting out of the idea of a fixed subject. He states:

There are singular incorporeal constellations which belong to natural and human history and at the same time escape them by a thousand lines of flight. The moment mathematical universes start to appear, it is no longer possible to act as though the abstract machines which support them had not always existed everywhere and for all time and as though they do not project themselves onto future possibilities. [25]

This may begin to explain why Deleuze and Guattari chose a concept, ‘woman’, which suggested a line of flight within our existing abstract machine. They utilize something they can think within the existing system, which already projects itself into future possibilities, and they hope to change the outcomes of those possibilities through a re-negotiation with the value and unbound potential of this concept. Woman is a line of flight as a singular while simultaneously escaping her system through her permanent differentiation (and subjugation) in history. Guattari points out that it is impossible to imagine such systems in operation have not existed always and everywhere, which does not posit that such attitudes towards women dominant today have always existed identically. But Guattari could be suggesting a need to retain a concept of the past when that past has been volatile, and often terrifying. I do not think Guattari, in his hopes for a transformed future, is advocating forgetting the old systems, but that is what many feminist have an anxiety about when it comes to both the death of subjectivity and the concept of becoming or transforming. The best possible hope is one which recognizes such singular constellations but within these singulars would remain the memory of historical intersections with current dominant culture. This assures both accountability and a consideration with the other as the entire system of singulars (generalized) and with each intersection the self crosses (concrete), inevitably the plane of consistency. [26]

Thus far I have discussed the need to create subjects in process, which are both accountable and not simply fashionable within existing modes of what is other and what is dominant. From considering ‘real lived women’ I will now turn to the other most contentious point in this book, which is the differentiation of ‘real lived horror’ that effects those oppressed subjects I am so adamant to make visible and historical, with the horror on-screen, affect-ive horror.

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