Undoing Gender (33 page)

Multiplicity is not the death of agency, but its very condition. We misconstrue where action comes from if we fail to understand how multiple forces interact and produce the very dynamism of life.

Transformation is produced by the play of forces, some of which are importantly unconscious, working through bodily means, so that when creativity takes place and something new is inaugurated, it is the result of an activity that precedes the knowing subject, but is not, for that reason, fully external to the subject. Something that precedes me constitutes who I am, and this paradox gives articulation to a conception of the subject irreducible to consciousness. We are not referring to a master subject—a liberal individual who knows and decides on a course of action—as if the subject only inaugurates action and is not acted upon in various ways. That the subject is produced in sexual difference seems to mean, for Braidotti, that this is a body acted upon by other bodies, producing the possibility of a certain transformation. It is an induction into life, a seduction to life, where life itself cannot be understood apart from the dynamic transformation for which we seek to give an account.

This philosophical view has particular global and cultural relevance for those who seek to know what transformation might look like in the context of dynamic global networks. Whereas some would say, in a Marxist vein for instance, that the social world is a sum of totalizing and totalized effects, Braidotti would, I think, oppose this stasis, and seek to know how from various networks, technological and economic, possibilities of transformation are conditioned and produced.

But here again, we have to understand that this transformation can only take place if we understand bodily processes as its condition and venue. For Braidotti, bodily processes have to be specified in terms of sexual difference. And sexual difference is the name for a future symbolic that comes to value the not-one as the condition of life itself.

In a way, and without my quite knowing it, I have produced some of the texts that Braidotti’s position opposes. Like Braidotti, I have come to represent a version of feminist poststructuralism that has overlapping commitments with hers, but one that tends to work with different texts and different problematics. Poststructuralism is not a monolith; it is not a unitary event or set of texts, but a wide range of works that emerged in the aftermath of Ferdinand de Saussure, the French Hegel, existentialism, phenomenology, and various forms of linguistic formalism. My sense is that it would be right to say, as Braidotti does, that I sometimes stay within the theology of lack, that I sometimes focus on the labor of the negative in the Hegelian sense, and that this involves me in considerations of melancholy, mourning, conscience, guilt, terror, and the like. I tend to think that this is simply what happens when a Jewish girl with a Holocaustal psychic inheritance sits down to read philosophy at an early age, especially when she turns to philosophy from violent circumstances. It may be also that I am concerned very often with questions of survival since I wasn’t sure that either my own gender or my own sexuality—whatever those terms finally mean—were going to allow me to be immune from social violence of various forms. Survival is not the same as affirmation, but there is no affirmation without survival (unless we read certain suicidal acts as affirmative). Survival, however, is not enough, even as nothing more can happen for a subject without survival.
¹⁵
When Braidotti considers pain and suffering and limitation, she is moved to find the way through and beyond them, to engage a certain activism that overcomes passivity without taking the form of mastery or control. This is a fine art form that is crafted through a certain insistence on finding the possibilities for both affirmation and transformation in what might be difficult, if not potentially dangerous: new technologies of the body, global communication networks, and patterns of transnational immigration and displacement.

I suppose the questions I would be compelled to ask about forced emigration would include the following: What forms of loss do those who are compelled to emigrate undergo? What kind of dissonance is experienced by those who no longer have a home in one country, and do not yet have a home in a new country, but live in a suspended zone of citizenship? What forms do the pains and sufferings of continued colonization take? What is it to be displaced at home, which is surely the case for Palestinians under occupation at the present time?

My wager is that Braidotti would not dismiss these scenes of suffering
as
suffering, but that, methodologically, she would seek to identify these sites of fracture and mobility as conditions for new possibility.

In this sense, her critical mode of reading seeks to identify possible sites of transformation, seeking to open up what might otherwise seem like a trap or a dead end, and finding there a new social condition for affirmation. That there is a fractured state, or a state of displacement, can surely be a site of suffering, but it can also be the site for a new possibility of agency. We might lament the loss of proximity and privacy as conditions for human communication but also consider the possibilities for transformation by global networks and the possibilities for global alliance.

There is, I think, not so much a program for transformation in this text that is a detailed agenda about what should be transformed and how. Rather, the work of transformation is exemplified by the text, in its practice of reading, in its relentless search for what is mobile and generative. Braidotti counters, on the one hand, the pessimistic predictions of a Left that thinks that social processes have already done all their dirty work, and that we live as the lifeless effects of their prior efficacy. On the other hand, she counters forms of agency—usually modeled as phallogocentric mastery—that either deny the body or refuse sexual difference, thereby, in her terms, fail to understand how life itself requires the play of multiplicity.

There are, of course, some unsettled questions between Braidotti’s position and mine. I’ll try to formulate them in question form with the hope that this text, like others, will be taken up as part of an ongoing critical conversation.

Sexual Difference

Braidotti argues that sexual difference is often rejected by theorists because femininity is itself associated with a pejorative understanding of its meaning. She dislikes this pejorative use of the term, but thinks that the term itself can be released into a different future. This may well be true. But is it fair to say that those who oppose this framework therefore demean or debase femininity, or believe that femininity can only have a debased meaning? Is it fair to say that those who do not subscribe to this framework are therefore against the feminine, or even misogynist? It seems to me that the future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple possibilities, where it is, as Braidotti herself claims, released from the demand to be one thing, or to comply with a singular norm, the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means. But must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this feminine multiplicity to emerge? Why can’t the framework for sexual difference itself move beyond binarity into multiplicity?

Butch Desire

As a coda to the above remark, consider the following: There may be women who love women, who even love what we might call “femininity,” but who cannot find a way to understand their own love through the category of women or as a permutation of femininity.
¹⁶

Butch desire may, as some say, be experienced as part of “women’s desire,” but it can also be experienced, that is, named and interpreted, as a kind of masculinity, one that is not to be found in men. There are many ways of approaching this issue of desire and gender. We could immediately blame the butch community, and say that they/we are simply antifeminine or that we have disavowed a primary femininity, but then we would be left with the quandary that for the most part (but not exclusively) butches are deeply, if not fatally, attracted to the feminine and, in this sense, love the feminine.

We could say, extending Braidotti’s frame of reference, that this negative judgment of butch desire is an example of what happens when the feminine is defined too narrowly as an instrument of phallogocentrism, namely, that the full range of possible femininity is not encompassed within its terms, and that butch desire ought properly to be described as another permutation of feminine desire. This last view seeks a more open account of femininity, one that goes against the grain of the phallogocentric version. The view improves upon the first position, which simply attributes a psychological disposition of self-loathing or misogyny to the desiring subject at hand. But if there is masculinity at work in butch desire, that is, if that is the name through which that desire comes to make sense, then why shy away from the fact that there may be ways that masculinity emerges in women, and that feminine and masculine do not belong to differently sexed bodies?

Why shouldn’t it be that we are at an edge of sexual difference for which the language of sexual difference might not suffice, and that this follows, in a way, from an understanding of the body as constituted by, and constituting, multiple forces? If this particular construction of desire exceeds the binary frame, or confounds its terms, why could it not be an instance of the multiple play of forces that Braidotti accepts on other occasions?

Deleuze

Although Braidotti refers to my 1987 book,
Subjects of Desire
, to support the claim that I reject Deleuze, she needs to know that every year I receive several essays and comments from people who insist that I am Deleuzian. I think this might be a terrible thought for her, but I would ask that she consider that the Spinozan
conatus
remains at the core of my own work. Like her, I am in favor of a deinstitionalized philosophy (a “minority” philosophy), and that I am also looking for the new, for possibilities that emerge from failed dialectics and that exceed the dialectic itself. I confess, however, that I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language. This is not because I think that the body is reducible to language; it is not. Language emerges from the body, constituting an emission of sorts. The body is that upon which language falters, and the body carries its own signs, its own signifiers, in ways that remain largely unconscious. Although Deleuze opposed psychoanalysis, Braidotti does not. Psychoanalysis seems centered on the problem of the lack for Deleuze, but I tend to center on the problem of negativity. One reason I have opposed Deleuze is that I find no registration of the negative in his work, and I feared that he was proposing a manic defense against negativity. Braidotti relinks Deleuze with psychoanalysis in a new way and thus makes him readable in a new way. But how does she reconcile the Deleuze who rejects the unconscious with a psychoanalysis that insists, rightly, upon it?

Speech, Bodies, and Performativity

In my view, performativity is not just about speech acts. It is also about bodily acts. The relation between the two is complicated, and I called it a “chiasmus” in
Bodies that Matter
. There is always a dimension of bodily life that cannot be fully represented, even as it works as the condition and activating condition of language.

Generally, I follow Shoshana Felman’s view in
The Scandal of the
Speaking Body
in which she claims, following Lacan, that the body gives rise to language, and that language carries bodily aims, and performs bodily deeds that are not always understood by those who use language to accomplish certain conscious aims. I take it that this is the importance of the transference not only for the therapeutic situation but for the theorization of language that it occasions. We say something, and mean something by what we say, but we also do something with our speech, and what we do, how we act upon another with our language, is not the same as the meaning we consciously convey. It is in this sense that the significations of the body exceed the intentions of the subject.

Heterosexuality

It would be a mistake to say that I am against it. I just think that heterosexuality doesn’t belong exclusively to heterosexuals. Moreover, heterosexual practices are not the same as heterosexual norms; heterosexual normativity worries me and becomes the occasion of my critique. No doubt, practicing heterosexuals have all kinds of critical and comedic perspectives on heterosexual normativity. On the occasions where I have sought to elucidate a heterosexual melancholia, that is, a refusal of homosexual attachment that emerges within heterosexuality as the consolidation of gender norms (“I am a woman, therefore I do not want one”), I am trying to show how a prohibition on certain forms of love becomes installed as an ontological truth about the subject: The “am” of “I am a man” encodes the prohibition “I may not love a man,” so that the ontological claim carries the force of prohibition itself. This only happens, however, under conditions of melancholia, and it does not mean that all heterosexuality is structured in this way or that there cannot be plain “indifference” to the question of homosexuality on the part of some heterosexuals rather than unconscious repudiation. (I take this point from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.) Neither do I mean to suggest that I support a developmental model in which first and foremost there is homosexual love, and then that love becomes repressed, and then heterosexuality emerges as a consequence.

I do find it interesting, though, that this account would seem to follow from Freud’s own postulates.

I fully support Braidotti’s view, for instance, that a child is always in love with a mother whose desire is directed elsewhere, and that this triangulation makes sense as the condition of the desiring subject. If this is her formulation of oedipalization, then neither of us rejects oedipalization, although she will
not
read oedipalization through the lack, and I will incorporate prohibition in my account of compulsory heterosexuality. It is only according to the model that posits heterosexual disposition in the child as a given, that it makes sense to ask, as Freud asked in
The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
, how heterosexuality is accomplished. In other words, only within the thesis of a primary heterosexuality does the question of a prior homosexuality emerge, since there will have to be some account given of how heterosexuality becomes established. My critical engagement with these developmental schemes has been to show how the theory of heterosexual dispositions presupposes what would defeat it, namely a preheterosexual erotic history from which it emerges. If there is a triangularity that we call oedipalization, it emerges only on the basis of a set of prohibitions or constraints. Although I accept that triangularity is no doubt a condition of desire, I also have trouble accepting it. That trouble is no doubt a sign of its working, since it is what introduces difficulty into desire, psychoanalytically considered. What interests me most, however, is disarticulating oedipalization from the thesis of a primary or universalized heterosexuality.