In “Reconfiguring Lesbian Desire”, Grosz begins by stating her problems with the way desire has been articulated. She critiques the ontology of lack as necessitating binarism. Grosz argues that the ontology of lack sexualizes desire in terms of the characteristics attributed to masculine/feminine opposition: presence and absence (177). She holds that “such a model…performs an act of violence: for any consideration of the autonomy of the two sexes, particularly the autonomy of women, is rendered impossible. It feminizes, heterosexualizes, and binarizes desire at an ontological and epistemological level. Its activity is merely a reaction to its perceived shortcomings, its own failure to sustain itself” (177).
Grosz explains that the psychoanalytic account of desire configure it as inherently masculine, as there is only the masculine libido: desire only exists as an activity, which is associated with the masculine, whereas the feminine is associated with passivity. Therefore, according to a Freudian model of desire, woman can only love and desire as a man (via female inversion); a woman cannot desire as a woman, as woman is characterized by a lack of desire. She thus reasons that women’s desire is inconceivable according formulations of desire as activity: women function within that system as objects of male desire (179). Such a model of desire makes it impossible to understand lesbian desire (180).
As a solution, Grosz calls for a reconfiguration of desire as, instead of a lack, an intensity, enervation, positivity, or force (179). She draws upon Spinoza’s model of desire “as the force of positive production, the action that creates things, makes alliances, and forges interactions” (179) and Deleuze and Guattari’s model of desire as experimental, creative, and fundamentally inventive (180). She then draws further upon Deleuze and Guattari to read lesbian sexuality and desire in terms of bodies, pleasures, surfaces, intensities (180). Grosz insists that sexual relations are, and should be formulated as, “contiguous with and a part of other relations" (181). She states that “the bedroom is no more the privileged site of sexuality than any other space; sexuality and desire are part of the intensity and passion of life itself” (181). She expounds that sites most invested in desire always occur at a conjunction or point of machinic connection between one thing and another (182). In order to understand this notion, she calls for the necessity of focusing on parts and elements outside of the context of their integration or organization (182). She holds that focus should thus not be limited to pre-designated erogenous zones, and should instead by concerned with “the coming together of two surfaces for their own sake and not for the benefit of the entity or organism as a whole” (182).
Grosz notes that “to use the machinic connections a body-part forms with another, whether it be organic or inorganic, to form an intensity, a investment of libido is to see desire, sexuality as productive…but in no way reproductive” (183). She postulates further that focus on intensities and surfaces instead of relations between an impulse and its absent other allows a conception of others, human subjects, and women as “not simply the privileged objects of desire”. She then draws upon Mary Fallon’s illustration of desire as “one ‘thing’ transmut[ing] into another; becom[ing] something else through its connections with something or someone outside” (184). She parallels this with the Deleuzian notion of becoming, which “entails…entry into an arrangement, an assemblage of other fragments, other things, becoming bound up in some other production, forming part of a machine” (184). Grosz states that it is not a question of being a certain entity (such as animal, woman, or lesbian), or of attaining a conclusive status, but of “moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a multiplicity of flows, or what Deleuze and Guattari have described as ‘a thousand tiny sexes’: to liberate the myriad of flows, to proliferate connections, to intensify” (184). She elaborates that “the question is not am I…a lesbian, but rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of lesbian-machine, we invest our time, energy, and bodies in, what other kinds of bodies, and to what effects?” (184). She continues to posit that this question is “what it is that together, in parts and bits, and interconnections, we can make that is new, exploratory, opens up further spaces, induces further intensities, speeds up, enervates, and proliferates production” (184).
Discussion Questions:
What do you think of Grosz’s model of desire, or of her critiques of the ways that (gay and lesbian) desire has been formulated? Do you think it’s an optimal solution to the problems posed by psychoanalysis and the ontology of lack?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
In this piece, I especially like how Grosz traces desire/lack back throughout philosophy/psychology.
In terms of figuring desire as productive rather than lack, do you think she (in addition to Spinoza) relates to Foucault? The same way that Foucault (partially) reverses power as repressive into power as productive, Grosz wants to posit desire as production rather than lack.
Also, how do the parts about touching surfaces relate back to Irigaray? I like the way in which she takes the focus away from genital touching towards "energies, excitations, impulses, actions, movements, practices, moments, pulses of feeling" (182) of all parts of the body.
I do not follow. Isn't the becoming-other initiated by desire, and something different from desire itself? Kristeva's ontology indicate to me (as I've probably said too many times: becuase the "casting off" of desire from its object reveals desire as a discrete apparatus) that desire was not the same thing as the engagement with the object. In fact, Kristeva aside, even if we were to believe desire to be a lack of an object, desire is something other than the object itself. Now, the terms that lesbian desire is reconfigured into in Grosz do not seem opposed to desire as a kind of lack, because they do not actually appear to me to be describing desire itself but a resulting engagement with another. I think the Deleuzian vocabulary and the dynamics of engagement are useful to emancipate relations from being the appropriation of an object, but they appear to describe the relations themselves and not the impetus that initiated them, which is desire. A lack of relations.
To say that everything is fluidly reconstituted according to a chaotic interaction of changing circumstances (desires, attitudes, locations, whatever) is true, but not specific enough. What does that mean, anyway? That "everything changes everything"? That one can demonstrate that everything is related and can therefore never be stratified in any way? Maybe it is true that we should not give any particular dynamic a special metaphysical status by calling it something like "desire" (it being just a stage in an infinite process), but the point of doing so would be to look at the way a certain relation has already been defined.
I was very happy to see the use of Deleuze and Guattari as well as Lyotard in the project of this essay. I feel quite strongly that the reconceptualization of the body and the libidinal offered by these theorists carries a potency we are only beginning to tap. Essays such as this one, in which these novel
conceptualizations are invested in a particular project, such as refiguring lesbian desire, indicate the potentials effectively. I believe that if we can carry these new thoughts forth, if we can reorient the dominant architecture of our mind to embody the radicality of these ideas, then we will be taking immense steps in not simply remaking theory, or even thought, but the very ways in which
we know and actualize life. There is a world of difference between the individual asphyxiated by its own lack and impossible desire, and the fleeting storm of multiplicitous flows all producing newness in their very desiring.
Using lesbian desire as the vehicle for her concepts of desire is non-trivial. Lesbian implies that both partners in the standard two partner desire exchange are women. It is mandatory to speak the other in this model. Further, conceptualizing desire from the standpoint of the lack, when both actors involved are considered lack automatically negates that women are lack.
Post a Comment