Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity

Abstract

This paper argues that affect and desire as an ontological passions play a central role in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical intervention. The political economy of this kind of affectivity, however, is linked to a neo-vitalist brand of anti-essentialist bodily materialism. This approach is openly critical of the linguistic paradigm of mediation which has been dominant in postmodern thought and especially in the North American reception of French post-structuralism. This begs the question, of course, of what exactly comes after postmodernism, but I cannot get into this discussion here. This establishes a convergence between the hype surrounding the new digital media and information technologies and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Technology is at the heart of a process of blurring fundamental categorical divides between self and other; a sort of heteroglossia of the species, a colossal hybridisation which combines cyborgs, monsters, insects and machines into a powerfully posthuman approach to what we used to call 'the embodied subject'. Moreover, the political economy of global capitalism consists in multiplying and distributing differences for the sake of profit. It produces ever-shifting waves of genderisation and sexualisation, racialisation and naturalisation of multiple 'others'. It expresses the subject's capacity for multiple, non-linear and outward-bound inter-connections with a number of external forces and others. What the 'machinic' element is expressing is the directness, I would say the literal-ness of the relations between forces, agents, sites and locations of subjectivity. The implications for gender, sexuality and sexual difference are no less momentous. The 'machinic' in contemporary culture is a highly eroticised space which conveys a trans-sexual social imaginary that I consider dominant in advanced capitalism. I find this approach unconvincing on two scores- the first is political: Deleuze and Guattari are prominent critics of the cybernetic individualism which shapes our political culture. The best way to explore this difference between Deleuze and the linguistically-based thinkers of difference like Lacan and Derrida is to look at their respective philosophies of time. I think that a form of neo-materialist appreciation of the body would be helpful here, to think through the kind of techno-teratological universe we are inhabiting. Rethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity requires an ethics of lucidity, as well as powers of innovation and creativity (Hayles, 1999). I wish to avoid references to the paradigms of human nature (be it biological, psychic or genetic essentialism) while taking fully into account the fact that bodies have indeed become techno-cultural constructs immersed in networks of complex, simultaneous and potentially conflicting power-relations. Radically immanent philosophical nomadism, on the other hand, sponsors a subject that is composed of external forces, of the non-human, inorganic or technological kind. The 'machinic' in Deleuze's thought refers to this dynamic process of unfolding subjectivity outside the classical frame of the anthropocentric humanistic subject, re-locating it into becomings and fields of composition of forces and becomings. This is as far removed from the advanced capitalist hype about technology as the future of humanity as can be. The human organism is neither wholly human, as a person, nor just an organism. As Hurley (1995) points out, however, the significant thing about posthuman bodies is not only that they occupy the spaces in between what is between the human and the machines, that is to say a dense materiality. Critics like Halberstam and Livingston are quick to point out how this generative disorder in contemporary molecular biology and genetics is both echoed and implemented by the everyday 'gender trouble' that is going on in societies where sexed identities and organic functions are in a state of flux. It is neither a question of flattening out structural differences, nor of drawing facile analogies, but rather of practicing the politics of location. What 'sustainability' stands for, therefore, is a re-grounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability for the environments s/he inhabits. According to Colebrook, Deleuze's emphasis on the productive and positive force of difference is troublesome for feminist theory in so far as it challenges the foundational value of sexual difference. For Irigaray, the metaphysical question of sexual difference is the horizon of feminist theory; for Grosz (1994) it is its pre-condition; for Butler (1993) it is the limit of the discourse of embodiment; for Braidotti (2002) it is a negotiable, transversal, affective space. Loyal to her Deleuzian premises, Colebrook defines the ethics of sexual difference "not as the telos of some universal law, but as the responsibility and recognition of the self-formation of the body" (Colebrook, 2000b: 88). In other words, as the becoming of bodies occurs within a single substance, the question is no longer; 'how are the sexes differentiated?' If for Colebrook sexual difference is no longer a problem, for even younger Guattarian feminists like Luciana Parisi (2004) it is not even a problem. A pragmatist, like all nomadic feminists, Parisi is committed to working out fully the implications of the current genetic revolution for the social and human sciences: "if molecular biotechnology is already detaching femininity from the imperative of sexual reproduction and genetic sex then why would a notion of femininity be relevant to the body politics?" Bodies are traditionally predicated on organic and genetic determinants of sex. Getting rid of femininity in order to replace it with the schizoanalysis of new dynamics of stratification and de-stratification of sex and reproduction is the key strategy, which Parisi borrows from vintage Deleuzian feminists like Grosz and Gatens. She also points to the incorporeal or potential becomings or capacity for assemblages as the key to the de-territorialisations and to Spinozist ethics as the way to evaluate the micro-politics of becoming. As we move "Towards a schizogenesis of sexual difference: towards the abstract construction of new modifications of sex and reproduction" (Parisi, 2004:86), a new transversal subjectivity emerges, which takes 'others' as constitutive moments in the construction of a common plane of becoming. This expression was coined by John Marks at the Deleuze conference, 'Experimenting with Intensities' at Trent University in May 2004. Boundas, Constantin and Dorothea Olkowski (eds) (1994) Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy.