Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism

Cheri Carr, Janae Sholtz, Cheri Carr, Janae Sholtz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350080430
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Féminisme et théorie féministe

The schizoanalytic method and the lines of flight that it has inspired align with contemporary feminist concerns and practices in productive and revealing ways in this ground-breaking collection. To address the relevance of schizoanalysis for contemporary developments in new materialism, affect theory, transnational feminism, political ontology, feminist critiques of globalization and capitalism, feminist pedagogy, and ethics, the overarching questions explored are: What can schizoanalysis do for feminist theory? What would a feminist schizoanalysis look like? Is it possible to perform a schizoanalysis of feminism? How do schizoanalytic-feminist alliances create new ways of understanding the future, sexuality and bodily transformation, political resistance, new subjectivities, and ethical relationships? Highlighting the strength, richness, and diversity of feminist perspectives this collection shows how issues of re-conceiving desire, theorizing embodiment and materiality, interrogating the status of sexuality and difference, decentring feminist practice to be inclusive of transnational and de-colonial concerns, critiques of binary logic and gender, transversal politics, and the need for new political visions in light of advanced capitalism are all enhanced by this alliance.

PART ONE

REALIGNING METHODOLOGY

Figure 1.1 “#59”, 2018, watercolor, ink, chalk, and salt on paper, Fredrica Introne

Photo taken by the artist.

CHAPTER 1

WHITE ANALOGY: TRANSCENDENTAL BECOMING-WOMAN AND THE FRAGILITIES OF RACE AND GENDER

Claire Colebrook

In this essay I want to draw together two recent, apparently only vaguely related, cases of sexual politics: the Hypatia/Tuvel case (or affair or scandal)¹ and the social media #metoo campaign. Both events were more significant in their aftermath than they were in their original occurrence because both seemed to create a whole series of problems for whatever was left of a shared theoretical political lexicon. Both events, in different ways, expose the oddly robust (while fragile) politics of identity, and—I will argue—require a reassessment of what one might possibly mean by becoming-woman. The #metoo movement seemed to revive the possibility of a general women’s movement, at the same time as it brought attention to the privileged voices that were able to speak out against sexual violence. Identity seems to be a necessary strategy for resistance at the same time as any claims for political identity draw attention to both the privileges and impossibilities of identity. Not all women have the power to declare “#metoo”; not all those who have suffered violence are women, and some forms of suffering take the form of having one’s identity denied. Being able to declare “#metoo” is at one and the same time to have felt harm because of one’s sexual identity—in a gender system that seems to entitle some men to enjoy violence with impunity—and to be able to enjoy an identity. Not only were the first women to voice their claims women of white privilege, the campaign that followed—like the much smaller Tuvel/Hypatia social media event—raised the problem of the positions of power required to feel aggrieved. In both cases the dominant voices were those of white women, in a world where women of color and transgendered persons are rarely granted the identity and recognition required to voice a complaint. In both cases those who called out abuse or voiced objections were accused of engaging in a witch hunt (Berlinski 2017; Magness 2017; Singal 2017), as though the revolt against oppression was becoming oppressive in turn, filled with a new self-righteousness that still left those without power and recognition on the losing side of the identity politics game.

Yet, even if there are those who always lose in struggles over identity, the ways in which identity is questioned or refused are not analogous. Arguing that women who object to the widespread and systemic nature of sexual predation is a warlock-hunt, or that objecting to a practice of philosophy that continually silences women of color is a witch hunt, forecloses the possibility of identifying an antiblackness and masculine supremacy that is so constitutive of thinking that its removal would seem to be catastrophic. Here, one might understand the forms of “panic” that accuse outrage over white supremacy as unreasonable and too extreme as stemming from just how deeply intertwined philosophical reasonableness is with whiteness and gender normalization. That is, there is a violence already in the ways in which identity, being, and reasonableness have been secured. As Fred Moten argues, “The state is a mechanism for the monopolization of violence, its placement in or under reserve, in and as the strict regulation of generativity. And western thought and culture has been the place where this monopolization is theorized and defended, in the name and by way of sovereignty, self-possession, and self- determination” (2017: 224). What I want to do in this essay is look at blackness and transgender as forces that are an affront to the violence of analogical reason (Bey 2017); so resistant are they to the calm of cool reason that their affirmation can only provoke outrage. In brief, arguing—supposedly philosophically—that one ought to consider the legitimacy of transracial identity because one has already admitted the legitimacy of transgendered identity must assume that identity is something like a detachable, equivalent and comparable predicate, something that attaches to a subject. Here I am as a unique individual who may, (or may not) claim to be a, b, c. In the case of the #metoo movement it seemed, once again, that something like “woman” would create one grand, unifying, solidarity-generating cause that could be defined against patriarchy, as though being able to say “me too” could unite movie stars, journalists, Walmart employees, women of color. In both cases there is an underlying substrate—the self who can make a claim to “a” race or “a” gender—and, then, it seems objections were made regarding the ways in which identity occluded complexity.

Rather than see a tension between identity and complexity, we can turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s quite specific conceptualization of individuation to see identity as made possible by intensive complexity. This is not a complexity where one adds more and more predicates to be the unique individual one claims to be, as in some notions of intersectionality, but an identity-complexity where relations among forces transform what each force is. For Deleuze and Guattari encounters among forces pulverize the “I” and this is because the “collective” is not a “we” given through a shared long-circuit of reading and history, but a far more anonymous crowd. The “we” is not a plural “I” or “me” but a “they” insofar as everything that composes us is not ours:

Desiring-production and machines, psychic apparatuses and machines of desire, desiring-machines and the assembling of an analytic machine suited to decode them: the domain of free syntheses where everything is possible; partial connections, included disjunctions, nomadic conjunctions, polyvocal flows and chains, transductive breaks; the relation of desiring-machines as formations of the unconscious with the molar formations that they constitute statistically in organized crowds; and the apparatus of social and psychic repression resulting from these formations—such is the composition of the analytic field. And this subrepresentative field will continue to survive and work, even through Oedipus, even through myth and tragedy, which nevertheless mark the reconciliation of psychoanalysis with representation. The fact remains that a conflict cuts across the whole of psychoanalysis, the conflict between mythic and tragic familial representation and social and desiring-production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 300)

Put more simply, Deleuze argues that the “I” and self are possible because of the way in which humans as a species have taken on a certain type of individuation. There has to be individuation before there can be individuals, and this in turn means that other modes of individuation might not lead to the “I” or “humanity”:

For the I and the Self are perhaps no more than indices of the species: of humanity as a species with divisions. The species has undoubtedly reached an implicit state in man. As a result, the form of the I can serve as a universal principle for recognition and representation, whereas the specific explicit forms are recognised only by means of this I, and the determination of species is only the rule of one of the elements of representation. The I is therefore not a species; rather—since it implicitly contains what the species and kinds explicitly develop, in particular the represented becoming of the form—they have a common fate, Eudoxus and Epistemon. Individuation, by contrast, has nothing to do with even the continued process of determining species. Not only does it differ in kind from all determination of species but, as we shall see, it precedes and renders the latter possible. It involves fields of fluid intensive factors which no more take the form of an I than of a Self. Individuation as such, as it operates beneath all forms, is inseparable from a pure ground that it brings to the surface and trails with it … Turning over the ground is the most dangerous occupation, but also the most tempting in the stupefied moments of an obtuse will. For this ground, along with the individual, rises to the surface yet assumes neither form nor figure … The individual distinguishes itself from it, but it does not distinguish itself, continuing rather to cohabit with that which divorces itself from it. It is the indeterminate, but the indeterminate in so far as it continues to embrace determination, as the ground does the shoe. Animals are in a sense forewarned against this ground, protected by their explicit forms. Not so for the I and the Self, undermined by the fields of individuation which work beneath them, defenceless against a rising of the ground which holds up to them a distorted or distorting mirror in which all presently thought forms dissolve. (Deleuze 1994: 152)

There is a long history of seeing women and non-whites as less than human, although in different ways: the feminine is man’s enigmatic complementary other, differing in degree, while blackness is the negation of humanity tout court, which threatens the very stability of personhood precisely required for gender normativity. Sometimes this alterity is imagined nostalgically, as in Freud’s notion of woman as the “dark continent”—when even knowing what women might want is elusive given the feminine capacity to remain neither fully determined nor differentiated from the ground of intensities from which humanity proper ought to emerge (Freud 1926: 211). One might think of becoming-woman as the “key to all becomings” not because another relatively stable assemblage of forces negates the supposed unity of “man,” but rather because what becomes known and lived as “man” (the “I,” self or individual) emerges from individuation. More specifically, “woman” is not the marked or inflected form that differs from the ground or generic subject of “man.” Similarly, but not analogously, “blackness” is not the marked form that is defined against generic whiteness. Quite the contrary, “woman” or “becoming-woman” would be a movement away from the individual toward individuation—all those intense forces through which we become who “we” are. Blackness differs again in being that which does not come to own itself (Hartman 1997: 25).

In what follows I hope to make the following three points. First, it is illegitimate to think of race and gender analogously, as predicates that mark an otherwise neutral subject who is the ground for various identities or acts of identification. Second, sexual identity—being male or female—is possible because of a far more complex field of individuation. The human species has become what it is, capable of saying “I” because of its particular modes of individuation: its living in common, in sexual relations, and bearing a relation to a past and future of desire. It may, however, not accede to that becoming “I”; it is this possibility of not being singular that Deleuze and Guattari embrace. Third, racial identity operates by a different historical logic from forms of gender identity, or by a different relation to individuation. For Deleuze and Guattari both sexual and racial individuation have a history that happened to result in what now passes for race and gender. Race is not the discrimination of the human, the marking of differences in an otherwise universal humanity. Rather, the “intense germinal influx” of life generates assemblages of bodies, such as tribes or packs, but these become deterritorialized when a part of that assemblage governs of stand for the whole (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 170). In deterritorialization a punishing despot sets a law of the body outside the body political. It is in reterritorialization that a universal “we” becomes possible: the socius is not seen as the result of a coming-into-relation of differences, but as the effect of an underlying commonality (humanity) that is then inflected differently in each one of us. “Race” is the effect of imagining a common humanity within which there are differences or identifying markers. Deleuze and Guattari will argue that the very notion of “the human” is possible only because one has occluded delirium. “Man” emerges because one has repressed differences in order to achieve the human race. Accordingly, “becoming-woman” and “racial-delirium” are two very different events in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, even if both move away from the individual who is able to claim “a” race or a gender. “Becoming-woman” is the beginning of a movement toward becoming-imperceptible, the taking up of more and more intensive traits that will end in the dissolution of the self’s capacity to be defined by the exclusive disjunction of male or female. Racial delirium is the global and historical dimension of every sexualized subject: I become dependent on the male/female disjunction because of a history in which colonization and imperialism subjected complex social assemblages to a single power, increasingly contracting the nexus of power-desire to the notion of “a” humanity—all defined through the oedipal complex where “I” internalize the authority of the father in opposition to the seeming indistinction of maternal plenitude. For Deleuze and Guattari, “the father” becomes a figure of generic human authority only after a long history of despots, lords, tyrants, colonizers, police, and kleptocrats. In the beginning is not the social contract—an agreement to live in common for our private security—but the seizing of excess that allows a single body to appear to be the law of all. It is the event of plunder that produces authority and the figure of humanity. It follows that what is plundered is not another, lesser, marked or sub-humanity, but nothing more than the (black) property through which man comes to be. The forming of “a” human race becomes possible first through races, which in turn become possible only through the seizing of power that creates a sovereign body. When that sovereign body becomes “humanity,” that which is seized, held, used, and sold is not even less than human; blackness is therefore bound up with but utterly distinct from the logic of the sexual binary.

The oedipal family is at the end of a history of violence and theft that passes from despotism to humanism. On the one hand, one might say that race precedes and makes possible the relation of sexual difference: there cannot be a mother-father-child triangle unless tribes have assembled to form polities that eventually enable the great family of man that imagines itself as a subject, necessarily lining up with the male/female binary. Deleuze and Guattari describe the emergence of the de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Alliances and Allies
• Part One Realigning Methodology
• Part Two Rethinking Sexuality and Subjectivity
• Part Three Deterritorializing Feminist Praxes
• Part Four Redrawing Aesthetic Alliances
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page