BETWEEN THE NO LONGER AND THE NOT YET: NOMADIC
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
Rosi Braidotti
I.
PRELUDE: EMBODIMENT IN FEMINIST THEORY
These are strange times, and
strange things are happening. Times of ever expanding, yet spasmodic waves of
change, which engender the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory effects.
Times of fast-moving changes which do not wipe out the brutality of power
relations, but in many ways intensify them and bring them to the point of
implosion. If the only constant at the dawn of the third millenium is change,
than the challenge lies in how to think about processes, rather than concepts.
This is neither a simple, nor a particularly welcome task in the theoretical
language and conventions which have become the norm in social and political
theory as well as cultural critique. In spite of the sustained efforts of many
radical critics, the mental habit of linearity and objectivity persists in its
hegemonic hold over our thinking. Thus, it is by far simpler to think about the
concept A or B or of B as non A, rather than the process of what goes
in-between A and B. Thinking through flows and inter-connections remains a
difficult challenge. I think feminist theory and practice over the last 30
years of the previous century has provided a significant model for renewing the
way we think about the human subject and her/his embodied and embedded
structures.
The embodied structure of the
subject is a key-term in feminist struggle. It is to be understood as neither a
biologically nor sociologically fixed category, but,rather as a point of
overlapping between the physical, the symbolic and the material social
conditions. The body is an inter-face, a threshold, a field of intersecting
material and symbolic forces, it is a surface where multiple codes (race, sex,
class, age, etc.) are inscribed; it's a cultural construction that capitalizes
on energies of a heterogeneous, discontinuous and affective or unconscious
nature. This vision of the body contains sexuality as a process and as a
constitutive element. Embodiment provides a common but at best very complex ground on which to
postulate the feminist project. On the luna-park that marks the website of this
conference, the body would definitely be on the roller-coaster.
Being embodied means being in
and of sexualized matter. This sexual fibre is intrinsically and multiply
connected to social and political relations; it is anything but an
individualistic entity. Sexuality is simultaneously the most intimate and the
most external, socially-driven, power-drenched practice of the self. As a
social and symbolic, material and semiotic institution, sexuality in singled out by feminism as the primary
location of power, in a complex manner which encompasses both macro and micro
relations. Sexual difference - the sexualized bi-polarity, is another word for
power in both the negative or repressive (potestas) and the positive or
empowering (potentia) meaning of the term.
Throught the 70’s and 80’s in Europe psychoanalysis
played a major role – institutionalizing this libidinal reading of the subject
and thus stressing the non-coincidence
of the subject with his/her consciousness. The impact of psychoanalysis has
been a radical deconstruction of the subject, which separates subjectivity from
the supervision of rationality. No longer identified with consciousness, the
subject is positioned ex-centrically in relation to it. This is the philosophy
of 'desidero ergo sum', which replaced
the old cogito. In other words, the activity of thinking is enlargened to
encompass a number of faculties of which embodiment, sexuality, affectivity,
desire and the imagination are prime movers.
In the 90’s the psychoanalytic paradigm came under
attack from a number of quarters. The result was a shift away from
linguistically-mediated understandings of the subject and a return to embodied
materiality. Alternative labelled as the end of postmodernism by those who
always hated it anyway, or as the return of realism by those who thought the
Phallus was just a dressed-up penis, the rejection of the linguistic turn
coincided historically with a wave of political conservatism. The 1990’s were
marked A return to the safety of a definition of 'reality' which is neither
empirically verifiable, nor epistemologically credible, but nonetheless, or rather
because of that, is distressingly re-assuring. Politically, it resulted in the
partial hegemony of a colder, more cruel sensibility. Woman-centered
perspectives are out and a feminine
approach is not suitable to the age of the Internet trans-sexual imaginary.
They’re here, they’re queer and they’re hardly human,
Considering however the politically conservative
climate in which these shifts of paradigm are taking place, one is left to
wonder what exactly the alternatives are. How can we imagine collectively a
return to the corporeal roots of subjectivity that would avoid the twin traps
of biological essentialism on the one hand and on the other nostalgic
ethno-centrism and the authoritarian assertion of a maternally-dominated
definition of a fundamentalist ‘feminine’ which would stand somehow alone,
beyond history and social transformation, stuck in narcissistic
self-reflexivity? Is there, finally, a way out of the long, long shadow the 19th
century cast over the 20th, also and especially in feminists' relationship
to the body? ?
One of the side-effects of this shift of perspective
is an open quarrel with dialectics, A vision of desire, not as lack but as the
embodied yearning for its own fulfilment is being voiced, which means the joyful affirmation of positive and
multiple differences, the culture of loving irreverence towards the stately
institution of thinking, academic training, high theory and the creative
empowerment of new ideas and forms of thought.
The
implications of this for political practice are significant . Politics in this
framework has as much to do with the constitution and organization of
affectivity, memory and desire as it has with consciousness and resistance. The
embodied self, sexuality, memory and the imagination are crucial to the making
of political subjectivity. Again, feminism saw all this before any of the 20th
century social movements and, I would argued, thought this through better than
any of them. Think, for instance, of the feminist practice of the politics of
locations. A 'location' is
not a self-appointed and self-designed subject-position. It is a collectively
shared and constructed, jointly occupied spatio-temporal territory. A great
deal of our location, in other words requires a process of
consciousness-raising, a political awakening
and hence the intervention of others. 'Politics of locations' are
cartographies of power which rest on a form of self-criticism, a critical,
genealogical self-narrative; they are relational and outside-directed. This
means that 'embodied' accounts illuminate and transform our knowledge of
ourselves and of the world. Thus, black women's texts and experiences make
white women see the limitations of our locations, truths and discourses.
Feminist knowledge is an inter-active process that brings out aspects of our
existence, especially our own implication with power, that we had not noticed
before. It 'de-territorializes' us, i.e. it estranges us from the familiar, the
intimate, the known and casts an external light upon it.
The
sort of `figurations' of alternative subjectivity, which feminism has invented,
like the womanist/ the lesbian/ the cyborg/ the inappropriate(d) other/ the
nomadic feminist etc. etc differ from classical `metaphors' in calling into
play a sense of accountability for one's locations. They express materially
embedded cartographies and as such are self-reflexive and not parasitic upon a
process of metaphorization of `others'. They provide, on the critical level,
materially embedded and embodied accounts of one's power-relations.
Feminist
theory is about multiple and potentially contradictory locations and
differences, among women but also within each woman. To account for them,
locations are approached as geo-political, but also as time-zones, related to
memory. Feminism is not about restoring another dominant memory, but rather
about installing a counter-memory, or an embedded and embodied genealogy.
Feminist thinking takes place between the no longer and the not yet, in the
in-between zone between wilful , conscious
political practice and the not-necessarily conscious yearning for
transformation and change. I see feminist theory as the activity aimed at
articulating the questions of individual gendered identity with issues related
to political subjectivity, the production of knowledge, diversity, and
epistemological legitimation.
The feminist subject of knowledge is an intensive,
multiple subject, functioning in a net of inter-connections. It is non-unitary,
non-linear, web-like, embodied and therefore perfectly artificial. As an
artifact it is machinic, complex, endowed with multiple capacities for
inter-connectedness in the impersonal mode. It is sexed, but it’s, all over the
place. It is abstract and perfectly, operationally real and one of the main
fields of operation is sexual difference. The 'feminine' at stake in sexual
difference is neither one essentialized entity, nor an immediately accessible
one: it is rather a virtual reality, in the sense that it is the effect of a
project, a political and conceptual project of transcending the traditional
subject position of Woman as the Other of the Same, so as to express her as the
multiple other of the Other. This transcendence, however, occurs through the
flesh, into embodied locations and not in a flight away from them. To the very end – feminists are proud to be
flesh.
II. THE
PLACE OF THE BODY IN POSTMODERNITY
Even
the most convinced social constructivists today argue that the performances of
bodies cannot be ascribed exclusively to the social codes or to symbolic and
imaginary orders - nor can they be read back into the Holy Scriptures of the
DNA Scrolls. Both 'nature' and 'the body' are slippery categories - that tend
to slide towards essentialism; get caught into positivist reductions - or in
their opposite: new-age naive celebrations. In the age of the politics of
bio-diversity, the inter-dependence of the natural and the social, needs to be
explored outside classical, dualistic habits of thought. I prefer a deeply
embedded vision of the embodied subject. In the light of contemporary genetics
and molecular biology, it is more than feasible to speak of the body as a
complex system of self-sustaining forces. The DNA an the cells communicate
effectively with each other, transferring vital information. In terms of bio-diversity,
we humans are actively and destructively involved in manipulating our
environment. Neuro-sciences have increased our understanding of memory and the
extent to which the storage and retrieval of information is essential to the
progress of the self. This is evidence which can no longer be ignored by
critical, Left-leaning intellectuals. Nor need it be left to the delusions of
grandeur of professional scientists and their industrial, financial backers.
The
body has come back in late postmodernity and with a vengeance in social
practices and discourses as well as in science and bio-technology; in
contemporary evolutionary theory and under the impact of information
technologies. The body remains a bundle of contradictions: it is a zoological
entity; a genetic data-bank, while it also remains a bio-social entity, that is
to say a slab of codified, personalized memories. As such it is part animal,
part machine but the dualistic opposition of the two, which our culture has
adopted since the 18th century as the dominant model, is inadequate today.
Contemporary science and technology in fact have reached right into the most
intimate layers of the living organism and the structures of the self,
dissolving boundaries that had been established by centuries of humanistic
thinking. This means that we can now
think of the body as an entity that inhabits different time-zones
simultaneously, and is animated by different speeds and a variety of internal
and external clocks which do not necessarily coincide.
At both
the macro and the micro levels the body is caught in a network of power effects
mostly induced by technology. This is the driving force of the globalization
system and the trans-national economy which engender continuous constitutive
contradictions at the 'g-local' level. Whether we take bio-technologies, or the
new information and communication technologies, the evidence is overwhelming.
Capital-flow undeterred by topological or territorial constraints has achieved
a double goal. It has simultaneously 'dematerialised' and re-solidified power
differentials. Think for instance of media-events such as Princess Diana's
burial, or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing of Kosovo - which are experienced in the
relative quiet of one's living room television set as virtual happenings. But
they are not of course. The 'virtual' reality of the migrants, asylum seekers
or refugees is not high tech, but rather comes close to a very low-tech brand
of social invisibility. Power these days means high-definition visibility, as
opposed to the over-exposed anonymity of the excluded, the losers. Accordingly
the virtual reality of cyber-space is also a highly contested social space, or
rather - a set of social relations mediated by technological flow of
information.
An
implication of this process is that cyberspace and the 'cyborg' subjectivity it
offers are no longer the stuff science fiction is made of. On the contrary, the
blurring of the boundaries between humans and machines is socially enacted at
all level: from medicine, to tele-/communication, finance and modern warfare,
cyber-relations define our social framework.
The
cyborg that is to say an embodied human subject that is structurally
inter-connected to technological elements or apparati, is however, not a
unitary subject position. It is rather a multi-layered, complex and internally
differentiated subject. Cyborgs today would include for me as much the
under-paid, exploitative labour of women and children on off-shore production
plants, as the sleek and highly trained physiques of jet-fighters war-pilots,
who interface with computer technologies at post-human levels of speed and
simultaneity. Both the highly groomed body of Princess Diana and the highly
disposable bodies of women in war-torn, ethnic-cleansing lands. Both the triumphant charge of
Schwarzenegger's Terminator and the frail bodies of those workers whose
bodily juices - mostly sweat and blood - fuel the technological revolution. One
does not stir without the other.
Contemporary
culture tends to react to the cyber-world according to a double-pull : on the
one hand the hype and on the other hand the nostalgia, I would plea for a more
'passionately distant' approach. I think that a form of neo-materialist
appreciation of the body would be helpful here, to think through the kind of
techno-monstrous universe we are inhabiting. Rethinking the embodied structure
of human subjectivity at such a point in history requires an ethics of
lucidity, as well as powers of innovation and creativity. I wish to avoid
references to 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. I do not want to fall, however, into either moral relativism
or the suspension of ethical judgement.
Another
implication of this situation is that in late postmodernity, advanced
capitalism functions as the great nomad, the organizer of the mobility of
commodified products. 'Free circulation' pertains almost exclusively to the
domain of goods and commodities. People do not circulate nearly as freely. It
is therefore crucial to expose the logic of economic exploitation that equates
nomadic flux with profit-minded circulation of commodities. Moreover, knowing
that hardly 20% of households in the world have electricity, let alone
telephone-lines and modems, will may one wonder about the 'democratic', let
alone the 'revolutionary' potential of the new electronic frontier. Thus,
access and participation to the new high-tech world is unevenly distributed
world-wide, with gender, age and ethnicity acting as major axes of negative
differentiation.
On a
more philosophical level, in relation to the embodied subject, the new
technologies make for prosthetic extensions of our bodily functions: answering
machines, pagers and portable phones multiply our aural and memory capacities;
microwave ovens and freezers offer timeless food-supply; sex can be performed
over telephone or modem lines in the fast-growing area of 'teledildonics';
electrical tooth-brushes and frozen embryos enlarge other bodily functions:
video and cam-corders, Internet networks and a plethora of simulated images
open up a field that challenges the Platonic notion of 'representation' that
has been sedimented by centuries of practice. The technologies have affected
the social space of postmodernity by bringing about a dislocation of the
space-time continuum. Technologies induce a dislocation of the subject,
allowing not only for deferred or virtual social and personal relations, but
also for a pervasive social imaginary of ubiquity and timelessness.
In
such a hyped-up context it is only inevitable that the body of the 'others'
will strike back. On an everyday sociological level, the body is striking back,
with a vengeance. And as usual, the female body is the avant-garde. An
estimated 2 million American women have silicon breast implants - most of which
leak, bounce off during bumpy airplane flights, or cause undesirable side-effects.
Millions of women throughout the advanced world are on Prozac or other
mood-enhancement drugs. The hidden epidemic of anorexia-boulimia continues to
strike 1/3 of the females in the opulent world . Killer-diseases today don't
include only the great exterminators, like cancer and AIDS, but also the return
of traditional diseases which we thought we had conquered, like malaria and
T.B. Our immunity system has re-adjusted to the anti-biotics and we're
vulnerable again. There is no question that what we still go on calling -
somewhat nostalgically - 'our bodies, ourselves' are abstract technological
constructs fully immersed in advanced psycho-pharmacology chemical industry,
bio-science and the electronic media. What is equally clear for me is that we
need to be vigilant. The techno-hype is over and we need to assess more lucidly
the price that we are paying for being so 'high tech'. We got our prosthetic
promises of perfectibility - now, let's hand over our pound of flesh, shall we?
III.
1. BODIES-IN-TIME
A body
is, spatially speaking, a slice of forces that have specific qualities,
relations, speed and rates of change. Their common denominator is that they are
intelligent matter, ie: are endowed with the capacity to affect and be
affected, to inter-relate. Temporally speaking, a body is a portion of living
memory that endures that lasts, that goes on – for a while – by undergoing constant internal modifications
following the encounter with other bodies and forces. The key point is the embodied subject's capacity
for encounters and inter-relation. As such, desire and yearning for
inter-connections with others lies at the heart of subjectivity.
This
ontological vision of the primacy of desire, however, is expressed also as a
critique of the psychoanalytic reduction of desire to (hetero) sexuality and of
both to preferably reproductive
genital activity. I want
to 'nomadise' desire so as to free it from the normative cage within which it
was enclosed. Affectivity (conatus)
is indeed the heart of the subject, but this desire is not internalized, but
external. It happens in the encounter between different embodied and embedded
subjects who are joined in the sameness of the forces that propel them.
Intensive, affective, external resonances make desire into a force that propels
forward, but also always remains in front of us, as a dynamic, shifting horizon
of multiple other encounters, of territorial and border-crossings of all kind.
Being
– in-time means essentially being or subject of/in memories.
Remembering
is about repetition and the retrieval of information. In the human subject,
such information is stored throughout the physical experiental structure of the
embodied self and not only in the ‘black box’ of the psyche. It’s the whole
body that functions as a slab of enfleshed genealogy.
Re-membering
requires composition, selection and dosage. Like a choreography of flows or
intensities that require adequate framing in order to compose into a form of
their own, memories coalesce through empathy and cohesion between their
constitutive elements. Memories materialize like a quest for temporary moments
when an affective balance can be sustained, before the forces dissolve again
and more on. And on it goes, never equal to itself, but faithful enough to
itself to endure, and to pass on.
Memory
is fluid and flowing, it opens up unexpected or virtual possibilities and it is
transgressive in that it works against the programmes of the dominant
memory-system. This continuous memory is however not necessarily or inevitably
linked to 'real' experience. As against the authority of 'experience' and the
extent to which the appeal to experience both confirms and perpetuates the
belief in steady and unitary identity, I would rather link memory to the
imagination.
The
imaginative, affective force of remembrance - that which returns and is
re-membered/re-peated - is the propelling force in this idea. When your
re-member in the intensive or minority-mode, in fact, you open up spaces of
movement - of de-territorialisation - that actualise virtual possibilities
which had been frozen in the image of the past.
2. BIO-CENTERED
EGALITARIANISM
Being-in-time also refers to the biological clock that
is in-built into the embodied organism. It is very difficult to find a 21st
century word to describe adequately, that is to say: lucidly, secularly, fairly
and with a sense of social justice what is commonly referred to as ‘life’.
Life is half animal: Zoe (Zoology, zoophilic,
zoo), and half discursive : bios (bio-logy). Zoe, of course, is
the poor half of a couple that foregrounds bios defined as intelligent
life. Centuries of Christian indoctrination have left a deep mark here. The
relationship to animal life: to zoe, rather that bios constitutes
one of those qualitative distinctions upon which Western reason erected its
empire. Bios is holy, Zoe quite gritty. That they intersect in
the human body turns the physical self into a contested space, i.e.: a
political arena. The mind-body dualism has historically functioned as a
shortcut through the complexities of this in-between contested zone. I believe
that one of the most persistent and unhelpful fictions that is being told about
human 'life' is its alleged self-evidence, its implicit worth. Zoe is
always second best and the idea of life carrying on independently of, even
regardless of and at times in spite of rational control - is the dubious
privilege attributed to the non-humans. These covers all of the animal kingdoms
as well as the classical ‘others’ of metaphysically based visions of the subject,
namely the sexual other (woman) the ethnic other (the native). In the old
regime, this used to be called ‘Nature’.
The point here is that, traditionally, the
self-reflexive control over life is reserved for the humans, whereas the mere
unfolding of biological sequences is for the non-humans and given that this
concept has been ‘the human’ colonized by phallogocentrism, has come to be
identified with male, white, heterosexual, Christian, property owning, standard
language speaking citizens. The rest since Darwin and evolutionary theory,
however, the non-human, Zoe has grown to encompass increasingly large
and central zones of the human. Contemporary scientific practices have forced
us to touch the bottom of some inhumanity that connects to the human precisely
in the immanence of its bodily materialism. With the collapse of the
qualitative divide between the human and His (the gender is no
coincidence) others, the deep vitality
of the embodied self has re-surfaced from under the crust of the old metaphysical
vision of the subject. A meta-morphosis, which is no metaphor – but something
closer to a metabolic mutation. This is the bottom line. This obscenity, this
life in me, is intrinsic to my being and yet so much 'itself', that it is
independent of the will, the demands and expectations of the sovereign
consciousness. This Zoe makes me tick and yet escapes the control of the
supervision of the Self. Zoe carries on relentlessly and gets cast out
of the holy precinct of the 'me' that demands control and fails to obtain it.
It thus ends up being experienced as an alien other. This potency (potentia)
of Life is experienced as 'other' by a mind that cannot do anything else but
fold upon itself in narcissism and paranoia, the two pillars on which the West
was won. And go on patrolling its own constitutive borders as if it were in
charge of them. Life is experienced as in-human, but only because it is all too
human; obscene, because it lives mindlessly on. This scandal, this wonder, this
zoe, that is to say an idea of Life that is more than bios and
supremely indifferent to logos, this piece of flesh called my 'body',
this aching meat called my 'self' expresses the abject/divine potency of a Life
which consciousness lives in fear of. Nomadic subjectivity is, by contrast, in
love with Zoe. It’s about the post-human as becoming animal/becoming
other/becoming insect – trespassing all metaphisically-grounded boundaries.
Ultimately, becoming-imperceptible and fading, death being just another time
sequence.
The
significant thing about posthuman bodies is not so much that they occupy the
spaces in between what is between the human the animal and the machines, that
is to say a dense materiality. Posthuman bodies are also surprisingly
generative, in that they stubbornly and relentlessly reproduce themselves. The
terms of their reproduction are slightly off-beat by good old human standards
in that they involve animal, insect, and inorganic models. In fact they
represent a whole array of possible alternative morphologies and 'other' sexual
and reproductive systems. The paradigm of cancerous proliferation of cells is
mentioned as an example of this mindless self-duplicating capacity of
generative/life.
This
marks a shift in terms of a new paradigm: we are at the end of the post-nuclear
model of embodied subjectivity and we have entered the 'viral' or 'parasitic'
mode. This is a graphic way of explaining the extent to which today's body is
immersed in a set of technologically mediated practices of prosthetic
extension. It expresses in fact the co-extensivity of the body with its
environment or territory. A body is a portion of forces life-bound to the
environment that feeds it. All organisms are collective and inter-dependent.
Parasites and viruses are hetero-directed: they need other organisms.
Admittedly, they relate to them as incubators or hosts, releasing their
genetically encoded message with evident glee. This expresses a selfish cruelty
that horror movies capture perfectly, but it is a mere detail in a much broader
picture. The virus/parasite constitutes a model of a symbiotic relationship
that defeat binary oppositions. It is a simulacrum that duplicates itself to
infinity without any representational pretensions. As such it is an inspiring
model for a nomadic eco-philosophy.
This
points to an ancestral continuity between the human and its previous
incarnations at different stages of its evolution. A kind of genetic legacy, a
trans-species proximity, which bio-technologies bring out and exploit cleverly.
Exit Heidegger and enter instead the private horror museum depicted in Alien
IV, where the heroine is able to see the earlier versions of herself,
dutifully conserved in a bio-technological laboratory which traces her
evolutionary history as a perfect clone of herself. A genetic family album. I
cannot think of a better image for the posthuman predicament than this set of
duplicates or simulacra, which have fed upon the original organism, consuming
it like parasites. Horrific, unholy technologically-mediated births of copies
from copies, cells multiplying from cells in a DNA-driven display of life as a
multiplicity of force that encompass both zoe and bios.
The
model of the body proposed by the brand of philosophical nomadism I am
defending is symbiotic inter-dependence. This points to the co-presence of
different elements, from different stages of evolution: like inhabiting
different time-zones simultaneously. The human organism is neither wholly
human, nor just an organism. It's an abstract machine, which captures, transforms
and produces inter-connections. The power of such an organism, is certainly
neither contained nor confined to consciousness.
Nomadic subjectivity aims at putting consciousness
back into its rightful place, as one form - albeit a hegemonic one - of expression
of the subject. A form that is structured around a tightly held bundle of
negative passions, retentive tendencies, festering suspicion: the ego is a
temple to narcissism and paranoia.
What if consciousness were, in fact, an inferior mode
of relating to one's own environment and to others? What if consciousness were
no cognitively or morally different from the pathetic howling of wolves in the
full moonlight? What if, by comparison with the know-how of animals, conscious
self-representation were blighted by narcissistic delusions and consequently
blinded by its own aspirations to self-transparency? What if consciousness were
ultimately incapable of finding a remedy to its obscure disease, this life,
this zoe, an impersonal force that moves me without asking for my
permission to do so?
IV. ACOUSTIC
ENVIRONMENTS
The challenge to humanistic assumptions is intensified
by what I would call an insect paradigm in contemporary subjectivity. Insects
are a very perfect machinic organism which are as other from the mammals and
therefore the humans as biologically possible. What is particularly interesting
about the speed of the insects body is their technological performativity. For
instance, they have extremely fast reproductive cycles; they undergo fabulous
mutation overnight and most of them, like bees, are engineering geniuses.
Insects are fantastic music-makers. That does not mean the usual bodily noises
that one makes in moving about the planet, but rather the specific capacity to
produce sounds that have speeds, variations and intensities worthy of human
compositions. Insects offer convincing examples of nonlinguistic communication,
ranging from visual apprehension to sonar and other acoustic technologies,
including an acute sense of internal time. It is probably on this score that
insects constitute a challenge for humanity, they deprive the human of his/her
alleged monopoly over music-making: let me explain this slightly off-beat
point.
Most dwellers of the post-industrial urban space have
developed a paradoxical relationship to their own acoustic space. Technology has endowed us with the capacity
to create and to carry around in our own embodied self our own musical habitat.
Of all technologies we inhabit, the musical, acoustic or sound ones are the
most pervasive, yet also the most collective. They thus summarize the paradoxes
of nomadic subjectivity as simultaneously external and singular.
The inter-connection between
sounds/technology/insects/music, however, prompts another observation. Namely
how rare it is to encounter music or sound that reflects the acoustic quality
of the environment most of us inhabit. That is to say, a very crowded, noisy,
highly resonant urban environment where stillness and silence are practically
unknown. I think that a great deal of music or sound production of the
alternative kind today aims precisely at capturing the intense sonority of our
lived-in spaces, and yet to empty it of its representational value.
Techno-sounds, and the technological performances of
music colorists like Robin Rimbaud, also known as Scanner, or D.J. Spooky, or
of contemporary artists like Soundlab, Cultural Alchemy is a gamble with this
apparently contradictory aim: to map out the acoustic environments of here and
now, while undoing the classical function of music as the incarnation of the
most sublime ideals of the humanist subject.
In music, time can be heard. It is a pure form of time
through the mediation of rhythm. This, in a nutshell, is its relevance for
nomadic subjectivity. Technologically mediated music de-naturalises and
de-humanises the time-sequence. It can push speed and pitch to post-human
heights, but it can also fade them to pre-human depths of inaudibility. How to
make us hear the inaudible, the imperceptible, that roar which lies on the
other side of silence, is what at stake in this process. How to impose an
audible form upon the amorphous, mass of sounds we inhabit is, the challenge.
In music one can hear the transitions in the form of intervals. In nomadic
music, the interval marks the proximity but also the singularity of each sound,
so as to avoid, synthesis, harmony or melodic resolution. It is a way of
pursuing dissonance by returning it to the external world, where sounds belong,
always in-transit, like radio-waves moving ineluctably to outer spaces,
chatting on, with nobody to listen.
Traditionally, music is expected to be linear,
sequential, based on mathematical order. This order is created by repetition,
that is to say melodies constructed by rhythm. It can express the memory of the
majority subject, or the web-like genealogies of the minoritarian ones. Pick
your tune. Whereas classical music, including pop, rock and their off-shoots
aims at resonances , and at best the constitution of alternative resisting,
counter-cultural subjectivities - technologically - based experimental music
attempts to make us hear the inaudible. It aims at "a virtual sound
space". This is a space of de-territorialization of our acoustic habits
through the production of unexpected, speedy, hostile sounds that: for once,
make us stand up and listen.
In fact, the example of insects suggest that we
inhabit unfamiliar, post-human acoustic environments all the time. We just do
not hear them - we are not used to 'take them in', or to tune into them. To do
as we need to create our own environment, an acoustic territory, a position of
spatio-temporal co-ordinates where rhythms are produced, remembered or stored.
This requires the composition of refrains or rhythms understood as patterns of
repetition and occupation and marking of a space. Invisible acoustic
signatures, so to speak.
Refrains or patterns of repetition are crucial. They
create spaces of transition or becoming-in-between passages that de-stabilize
the linearity of recorded time, packaged as musical sounds.
Contemporary insect-machine music wants to de-link the
cosmos from its reliance on the rationality of a mathematical order. They
approach it instead as an open system, uncontainable and incommensurable with
the human capacity to count. Music is accordingly liberated from its human
constraints and turned into a transversal space of becomings. The sheer
materiality of the human body and its fleshy contents (lungs, nerves, brains,
intestines, etc) are sound-making, acoustic chambers. Enhanced technologically,
these internal sounds can confront the listener with as shocking a sensation of
unfamiliarity as the external rumbles of the cosmos.
Music increases the intensity of change: it is about
crossing as many thresholds as the subject can sustain. Music is constant
becoming, its refrains and rhythmic narrations. It makes audible the
irreducibility of in-between spaces, polyphomic hybridization, multiple sonic
interferences. If I were to speak in the old language, I would
express such an embodied subject as a text by Gertrude Stein, set to music by
Phillip Glass, performed by Diamanda Galas.
V.
CONCLUSION (ROSI WITH SOUNDLAB)
1.
THE ETHICS OF SUSTAINABILITY
This bio-philosophy is a topology of affects, based on
the selection of these passions or forces. This process of unfolding
affectivity is central to the composition of immanent bodies. The selection of
the forces is regulated by an ethics of joy and affirmation which functions
through the transformation of negative into positive passions. These imply the
repetition of pleasure and the avoidance of sadness and of the relations that
express sadness. The selection of the composite positive passions constitutes
spaces of becoming or corporeal affects. These are essentially a matter of
affinity: being able to enter a relation with another entity whose elements
appeal to one produces a joyful encounter. They expresses one's potentia
and increases the subject's capacity to enter into further relations, grow and
expand. This expansion is time-bound: the nomadic subject by expressing and
increasing its positive passions empowers itself to last, to endure, to
continue through and in time it makes possible future perspectives it writes
the pre-history of a future. Entering into relations, or nomadic becomings
engenders possible futures, it constructs the world by making possible a web of
sustainable inter-connections.
I want
to think sustainable subjects. The concept of sustainability is no easy matter.
I am of the generation that lost so many of its specimen to dead-end
experimentations of the narcotic, political, sexual or technological kind.
Although it is true that we lost as many if not more of our members to the
stultifying inertia of the status quo - a sort of generalized 'Stepford
wives' syndrome - it is nonetheless the case that I have developed an acute
awareness of how painful, dangerous and difficult changes are. They need to be
dosed and timed carefully, according to one's threshold of sustainability. For
the moment, let me stress then that the process of becoming is this trip across
different fields of perception, different spatio-temporal coordinates. It is
simultaneously a slowing-down of the rhythm of daily frenzy and an acceleration
of awareness, self-knowledge and the senses. When dosed correctly it can lead
to shifts in one's sense and orientation in the world - nothing as grandiose as
Huxley's drugs-induced hope of throwing open the doors of perception. Rather
something more humble, like a quickening of one's perception, a being-there
with and for other entities, forces, beings, so as to be transported fully into
the magnificent chaos of life.
What
is, then, this sustainable subject?
It is
a slice of living, sensible matter activated by a fundamental drive to life: a potentia
(rather than potestas) - neither by the will of God, nor the secret
encryption of the genetic code - and yet this subject is psychologically
embedded in the corporeal materiality of the self - the enfleshed intensive or
nomadic subject is rather an in-between: a folding - in of external influences
an d a simultaneous unfolding - outwards of affects. A mobile entity - in space
and time - an enfleshed kind of memory - this subject is in-process, but is
also capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while
remaining extra - ordinarily faithful to itself.
This
'faithfulness to oneself' is not to be understood in the mode of the
psychological or sentimental attachment to an 'identity' that often is little
more than a social security number and a set of photo albums. Nor is it the
mark of authenticity of a self; it is rather the faithfulness of duration, the
expression of one's continuing belonging to certain dynamic spatio-temporal
co-ordinates.
In a
philosophy of temporally-inscribed radical immanence, subjects differ. But they
differ along materially embedded co-ordinates: they come in different mileage,
temperatures and beats. One can and does change gears and more across these
co-ordinates, but cannot claim all of them, all of the time. There are limits
and their threshold is sustainability.
This
sense of limits is extremely important to prevent nihilistic
self-destruction. To be active, intensive-nomadic, does not mean that
one is limit-less. That would be indeed the kind of delirious expression of
megalomania that you find a lot in the cyber-freaks of today, ready and willing
to: "dissolve the bodily self into the matrix". I want to argue
instead that - in the contrary, to make sense of this intensive, materially
embedded vision of the subject, we need a sustainability threshold. The dosage
of the threshold of intensity is both crucial and inherent to the process of
becoming.
What
is this threshold of sustainability and how does it get fixed?
The
subject lies at the intersections with external, relational forces. It's about
assemblages. Encountering them, is almost a matter for geography: it's a
question of orientations, points of entry and exit, a constant un-folding. In
this field of transformative forces, sustainability is a very concrete practice
- not the abstract ideal that some of our development and social-planning
specialist often reduce it to: it is a basic concept about the embodied and
embedded nature of the subject. The sensibility to and availability for changes
or transformation are directly proportional to the subject's ability to sustain
the shifts without cracking. The border, the framing or containing practices
are crucial to the whole operation - one which aims at affirmative and not
dissipative processes of becoming - joyful-becoming - potentia - as a
radical force of empowerment.
A
radically immanent intensive nomadic body is an assemblage of forces, or flows,
intensities and passions that solidify - in space - and consolidate - in time -
within the singular configuration commonly known as an 'individual' self. This
intensive and dynamic entity - it's worth stressing it again - is not an inner
rationalist essence, nor is it merely the unfolding of genetic information. It
is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough - spatio-temporally
speaking - to sustain them and to undergo constant, though, non-destructive,
fluxes of transformation. Mutation, yes - but not into the nihilism of some of
the narco-philosophers of today, who celebrate 'altered states' for their own
sake. It is a field of transformative affects whose availability for changes of
intensity depends firstly on its ability to sustain, the encounter with and the
impact of other forces or affects.
So how
does one know if one has reached the threshold of sustainability? - the body
tells you by opposing resistance, falling ill, feeling nauseous. Others will
warn you - here the film Trainspotting or the famous heart-shot in the
overdose scene of Pulp Fiction offer graphic representations of being
over the top. Your own potentia or joyful, affirmative energy will
suffer. The room for affirmative expression shrinks and negative passions fold
in upon the subject, diminishing him/her. These are all powerful indications of
the limit. This is sort of an ecology of the self. The rhythm, speed and
sequencing of the affects as well as the selection of the forces are crucial to
the process.
The
concept of a sustainable self aims at endurance. Endurance has a temporal
dimension: it has to do with lasting in time - hence duration and
self-perpetuation. But it also has a spatial side to do with the space of the
body. It means putting up with, tolerating hardship and physical pain.
Ultimately, as Irigaray put, it requires a generous belief in the
potentialities of a virtual future, also known as: “I had a dream”. Isn’t it
paradoxical that one’s deepest longing for change, social justice, empowerment
for women and a better world – all forward-looking activities, get expressed in
the mode of the past. “I had a dream” translates for me into: “I will have
wanted to make a difference to the world”. The past is only the prelude to
future perfect, if not to perfect futures.
2. WHATEVER GETS YOU THROUGH THE DAY
Crucial
to the ethics of sustainability: the transformation of negative into positive
passion and through that a non-normative concept of limit. Affectivity in fact
is that which activates an embodied subject, empowering him/her to interact
with others. This acceleration of one's existential speed, or increase of one's
affective temperature, is the dynamic process of becoming.
What
bodies are capable of doing or not, is biologically, physically, psychically,
historically, sexually and emotionally specific, i.e.: partial. Ultimately, the
thresholds of sustainable becoming also mark their limits. In this respect:
"I can't take it anymore" in pain as in pleasure is an ethical
statement, not the assertion of defeat – it sets the boundary of a
subject-in-process who is shot through with waves of intensity. Learning to
recognize threshold, borders or limits is thus crucial to the work of the
understanding and to the process of becoming nomadic.
The
question of the limit can also be discussed in terms of mathematical
approximation, as that which can hardly ever be reached. It can also be
rendered, however, in terms of addiction. For instance reminiscing on his own
early alcoholism, Deleuze notes that the limit, or frame for the kind of
alterations that are induced by alcohol is to be set with reference not so much
to the last glass; because that is the glass that is going to kill you. What
matters instead is the 'second-last' glass - the one that is going to allow you
to survive, to last, to endure - and consequently also to go on drinking again.
A true addict always stops at the second-last glass one - removed - from the
fatal sip, or shot. A death-bound entity, however, usually shoots straight for
the last one. There is no expression of a desire to start again tomorrow - or
to repeat that 'last shot'. In fact, there is no sense of a possible tomorrow:
time folds in upon itself and excavates a black hole into which the subject
dissolves.
I
would speak out clearly against the unsustainable lows of transformation
induced by drug-consumption. Though I’m not against 'mind-expansion' and
'mood-enhancement' drugs. What they are against is addiction, which tips over
the threshold of tolerance of the organism. Addiction is not an opening
up, but a narrowing-down of the field of possible becomings. It locks the subject
up in a black hole of inner fragmentation without encounters with others. The
black hole is the point beyond which the subject implodes and disintegrates.
I am
saying this because I want to attempt to strike a new position that would
coincide neither with the 'laissez-faire' ideology, nor with the repression and
moralism (which for me are synonymous).
In
stressing the notion of sustainability, I want to re-focus the debate around
the need for embodied and embedded perspectives - i.e.: not the fantasy of
boundlessness. I also want to re-iterate the importance and positivity of transformative
experimentations, which construct differences without, however, going too far.
Vitality and transgression, but without self-destruction.
I
argued against the christian-based belief in the alleged self-evidence and
implicit worth of 'life'. This belief system has confined into the
container-category of 'sin', or 'nihilism' phenomena which are of daily
significance to my culture and society: dis-affection of all kinds; addictions
of the legal (coffee; cigarettes; alcohol; over-work; achievement) and of the
illegal kind; suicide, especially youth-suicide; birth-control, abortion, and
the choice of sexual practices and sexual identities; the agony of long-term
diseases; life-supporting systems in hospitals and outside; depression and
burn-out syndromes.
In
contrast with the mixture of apathy and hypocrisy that marks the habits of
thought that sacralize `life', I would like to cross-refer to a somewhat more
'darker', but more lucid tradition of thought that does not start from the
assumption of the inherent, self-evident and intrinsic worth of 'life'.
I
think that one has to 'jump-start' into life each and every day; the
electro-magnetic charge needs to be renewed constantly: there is nothing
natural or given about it. As a consequence, I find that the non-evidence of
'getting on with it' generates another relevant question that is: 'what is the
point?'. I do not mean this in the plaintive or narcissistic mode, but rather
as the necessary moment of stasis that precedes action. The question mark that
both prefaces and frames the possibility of ethical agency. When Primo Levi,
who asked that question all his life, and struggled to answer it all his
life - actually failed to find the motivation for raising the question once
more, suicide followed. That gesture, however, was not the sign of moral
defeat, or a lowering of one's standards. On the contrary, it expresses one's
determination not to accept life at an impoverished or diminished level
of intensity.
Commenting
on Primo Levi's and Virginia Woolf's suicides Deleuze - who will choose himself
this way to terminate his own existence - put it very clearly: you can suppress
your own life, in its specific and radically immanent form and still affirm the
potency of life, especially in cases where deteriorating health or social
conditions may seriously hinder your power to affirm and to joyfully endure.
This is no Christian affirmation of Life nor transcendental delegation of the
meaning and value system to categories higher than the embodied self. Quite on
the contrary, it is the intelligence of radically immanent flesh that states
with every single breath that the life in you is not marked by any signifier
and it most certainly does not bear your name. Death is just another interval.
A long one.
Because
of this ethics of affirmation and positivity, ‘whatever gets you through the
day', whatever life-support, mood-enhancement system one is dependent on, is
not to be the object of moral indictment, but rather a neutral term of
reference: a prop along the way.
Whatever
facilitates the release of adrenaline, including high levels of physical
exercise; work-alcoholism or the standard assemblage: 'writing/books/the
friendly purr of the pc/e-mails/music/concentration/think think'. We all have
the patterns of dependency that we deserve. Most mood-enhancement systems are
minor and quite legal. Even the standard line of assemblage described above,
however, can take sure hell-bent deviations, towards excessive snacks
(anorexia/bulimia variable); or drinks (alcoholism variable) or any other 'fix'
(the narcotics variable). The boundaries between these and the other,
'normalised' life-support systems, however, is merely one of degrees, not of kind.
If life is not a self-evident category, in fact; if 'what's the point?'
is an ethically viable question, then whatever gets you through the day is an
equally viable option.
The
subject-in-becoming is the one for whom "what's the point?" is an
all-important question. A high-intensity subject is also animated by
unparalleled levels of vulnerability. With nomadic patterns comes also a
fundamental fragility. Processes without foundations need to be handled with
care; potentia requires great levels of containment in the mode of
framing.
Sustainability
assumes the idea of continuity - it does assume faith in a future, and also a
sense of responsibility for 'passing on' to future generations a world that is
liveable and worth living in. A present that endures is a sustainable model of
the future.
You
play you win you play you lose, you play.
Hence
the importance of stopping at the second last drink/smoke/shot. 'Enough', or
'not going too far' expresses the necessity of framing, not the common-sense
morality of the mainstream cultural orthodoxy. 'Enough' designs a cartography
of sustainability. “Whatever gets you through the day” need not be the
manifesto for self-destruction that is often made to be. It can merely help us
frame a threshold of sustainable patterns of transformative changes, of
becomings as modes and moods of empowerment.
I
would like to develop this notion of sustainability into an ethics of
differential sustainable subjects. I would like to propose a public
discussion on these issues right across some of the problematic social issues
of today: drugs; addictions of all kind; youth suicide; AIDS prevention and sex
education; euthanasia; anorexia/boulimia; abortion; the burn-out and stress
related to post-industrial life-styles. I would like this agenda to be taken
seriously. As important at this stage is for me to challenge any chain by any
conceptual, theoretical or philosophical school to the monopoly over issues of
ethics and moral values. Whether in the neo-liberal brand of cosmopolitanism
defended by Nussbaum, or in the neo-Kantian mode that is so prevalent in
feminist theory today, and is best exemplified by Benhabib, or the classical
ethics of sexual difference. Such claims to moral superiority or rectitude are
simply untenable, as well as internally contradictory.
I want
to plead instead for a less moralistic and conceptually more rigorous agenda
that combines a broader approach with a serious commitment to think alongside
contemporary culture and not against its grain.
"Whatever
gets you through the day" as the melancholy refrain of 'fin-de sičcle'
covers the depression of suburban opulence, as much as the despair of homeless
life in the streets. Both the centre and the periphery are shot through by
profoundly de-stabilizing, perverse power-relations which engender equally
sombre social relations.
It
seems to me that a critical agenda for the next millennium, both in feminist
theory and in the mainstream, cannot fail to address these issues. We need to
talk about the simultaneity of opposite social and cultural effects, and to
address them in a non-moralistic manner.
What
is at stake, ultimately, is an acceleration that would allow us to jump over
the high fence of the ruins of metaphysics. Not in a utopian mode, but in a
very embodied and embedded way, actualized in the here and now. We need a
process by which 'Being' gets dislodged from its fundamentalist pedestal,
starts whirling off its logocentric base - and gets a beat. Losing its dogmatic
authority, 'Being' can expose at last the multiple 'differences within' -
exposing also its function as the great pretender, stitching together the
different moments it enacts but which it does not encompass into a unity which
'Being' would then supervise.
As in
Gertrude Stein's operatic prose, a swift exhilaration emanates from texts which
are clearly indexed on the potentia empowerment of life. Something that
puts wings on our feet and infuses joyfulness.
If it
doesn't have the right beat, it will not work - but if it blasts off our minds
with excessive intensity, it will not be much good either. Let us just choose
for the staggering intelligence of 'just a life'. Just a life in its radical
immanence, in affirmation and sets of discontinuous but sustainable becomings.
It may be a way of returning back subject to the specific complexity of one's
singularity - and returning the activity of 'thinking' to a lightness of touch,
a speed which many of us passionately aspire to. The rest, of course, is
silence.