Becoming: Degrees of Infinity

I am not at all going to try to summarize this chapter. It is better, I think, to discuss it in class. These are a couple things that I perhaps wrongly think are related. And I'd say post on whatever you want on that's related.


Language map of the world by color, ca. 1900. Languages are political entities, and the color demarcation of language territories do not represent borders of comprehension, or even flexible areas of change. There are several identical languages that are separated for nationalistic reasons, just as there are those that are mutually unintellgible but "dialects" of the same language.


Hypothetical dialectal areas engaging with one another (the groups can be seen as distnict to the extent that they share more meanings than beyond some political or geographic or whatever obstacle) entails becomings-other which do not yield any thing that is perceptible, since it is not truly faithful to anything like political distinctions. All the doctors in the world (for example, since they have jargons (a technical term, incidentally)) may be able to relate on certain topics, in certain vocabularies, but the intermittent occurence of the compatibilities make them impossible to map. They are constantly shifting, yielding words which are phonetically identical in two languages that mean different things. To map or anticipate these connections would be impossible, since "becoming does not yield anything other than itself".

Intelligibility of language behaves in a continuum. To describe these interactions in terms of their political titles (English, German, etc) only gets at a small part of the smooth shift experienced over the territory (geographical and historical) that connect them. Intelligibility is not even possible to observe through the demarcation of a single body, since we constantly use words to reproduce behaviors for non-linguistic goals. We are not especially intelligible to ourselves, and the words we use often confuse people. There is a multiplicitous becoming-intelligible consisting in the con-incidence of approximate shared usage. Private understandings (never private languages) proliferate.

"The plane of consistency" seems to me to be about levelling the importance of nodes of connection. To talk about intelligibility in terms of the political title of a language is to leave this plain, elevating certain properties that do not have anything to do with the function of intelligibility. We are perfectly allowed to take a look at the structure of intelligibility in terms of hierarchy and privelaged nodes -points of connection that serve to make more things intelligible, and to do this is to examine the machine of the transfer of intelligibility. This is what I think they are getting at by saying, "At n dimensions, it is called the Hypersphere, the Mechanosphere." (252). Any product of the intelligibility machine is local to the points that connected it, so that even geographically, the slang (for example) of one town does not behave as a degree of the town next to it. Each point in a shift of two langauges becoming one another is a particularity. The intersection of multiple lines of change yields unique entities, not degrees ("Norwegian omelette" is not the same as any other omellete, and is not readable in the terms of any other omelette, though each factor can be described as a degree of a certain force).

Another Thing
Integers (1,2,3,4...) are infinite. Between integers there are various other types of numberings, which are more densely packed in the number system. Transcendental numbers (non-terminating, non-repeating numbers like pi) are infinitely dense within the infinite system. On pg 254, they write, "there are smaller and larger inifinities, not by virtue of their number, but by virtue of the composition of the relation into which their parts enter." The becoming of a thing into another, the multiplicitous proliferation of connections of that process, do not create a higher count of connections, but a formational utility specific to the forces involved. In other words, becoming entails a higher degree of infinity, an expanding of dimensions in the Mechanosphere, rather than a filiation of progress.

An analogy, and analogic thought, intends to make a movement based on compelling a correlation of qualities, which then implies that an unconnected by similar formation will behave in a similar manner. This movement reminds me of learning to drive. When I began to drive by myself, I realized that I had up until that point only ever learned a series of vectors to move me between two places, and had a lot of trouble recombining directions to figure out how to get somewhere from a novel starting point. But there were several moments when I drove over an overpass and saw the highway below me and recognized it as part of the trip to somewhere I was not then going (I was heading into town, and I realized that if I had been on the highway beneath me, I would have gone over the river). Suddenly I was travelling on a map, completely open to improvisation. I began to imagine what the place would look like from overhead, and what fields stood between points that I would never have considered traversing.

Braidotti, The Ethics of Sexual Difference: The case of Foucault and Irigaray

In this chapter, Grosz addresses the relationship between images, metaphorical representations of the feminine and feminist discourse and practice in the terms of power and strategy. Using the concept of ethics in contemporary philosophy specifically its importance in post modern philosophy and the theorizing of the subjective, Grosz juxtaposes Foucault and Irigaray’s basic concepts of alterity and otherness. Alterity is a major theme of post modern philosophy because of the problematization of structures of subjectivity. Grosz sees the women’s movement as one of the primary sources for the dislocation of the rational subject. This echoes our class discussion and previous readings on the invisibility of woman, the void ascribed to the feminine and the purpose of feminist theorizing to speak woman, redefine subjectivity into non-patriarchal, plural terms that include woman.
The most important difference between Foucault and Irigaray is how they theorize sexual difference. Clearly Irigaray has theorized an ontology based on the concept of fundamental sexual difference that is constitutive of the human experience, it’s the starting point. Foucault, as a male philosopher speaking within the patriarchal masculine ontology discusses the constitution of the subject within the confines of sexual sameness. This fundamental disconnect between theories weights the feminist argument of sexual difference by highlighting Foucault’s perspective of society not including invisible women and leaning toward the dominance of masculinity.
Foucault’s work takes place in three phases. First, the analysis of the type of discourse that claims the status of science which leads him to the critique of the role that the “knowing subject” plays in the history of western philosophy. Secondly, the constitution of the subject through “dividing practices” like exclusion, separation and domination within oneself as well as towards others. Lastly, he takes on the question, what is sexuality and by what means do we all become sexual subjects? Overall his work brings out the highly sexed rules that govern philosophical discourse and how phallogocentric discourse is a specific political and libidinal economy that assigns the sexes to precise roles, poles and function to the detriment of the feminine.
We all know the quick on Irigaray. What I found most important about the difference of the presentation of Foucault and Irigaray was that Foucault is a theory and Irigaray is an action. Grosz presents Foucault as problematizing and deconstructing society but Irigaray is adding to the feminist project, in other words her work is useful, active, and consequential.
This was a breaking moment for me on sexual difference. Up until this point, I’ve been able to understand the idea of fundamental sexual difference as lived. While reading this chapter I connected the importance, the meaning behind sexual difference and its usefulness politically and ontologically.

Questions:
Why Foucault and Irigaray?
What do you think the most important difference/similarity is between these two prominent, might I say royal, theorist?

Sexual Difference As a Nomadic Project

Braidotti starts by describing the nomadic condition (of sexual difference) as a "new figuration of subjectivity in a multidifferentiatied non hierachichal way" (62). Before talking about the "new difference," she first focuses on the "old difference" in European history that was/is "predicated on relations of domination and exclusion," which led/leads to "entire categories of beings [being identifiable as] disposable" (63). This patriarchal mode is monolithic and not subject (excuse the puns) to subtle manipulations by marginal groups.

Briadotti explores three categories, or "phases," of nomaic subjectivity, which are not dialectical or hierachical nature. Acting as conceptual operators of difference between (men and women), among and within (women), these "phases...can coexist chronologically and each and every one continutes to be available as an option for political and theoretical practice" (73). Here Briadotti is insistant that this concept be thought of as spacial-temporal map of the becoming-subject that can be "entered at any level and at any moment" (73). This still sounds fractal to me...

Difference between men and women

Phallocentric symbolic order.

Men = rational self

Women = irrational other

yada yada

Difference among women

"...this recognition of a common condition of sister hood in oppresion cannot be the final aim; women may have common situations and experiences, but they are not, in any way, the same. In this respect, the idea of the politicas of location is very important" (77). Here Briadotti is calling for a "theory of recognition of the multiple differences that exist among women" (77). Using such a theory can allow for a multiplicity of female identities to situated differently, coexist and still communitcate within a common condition of sisterhood.

Difference within each woman

Each female subject is a "multiplicity within herself...in an imaginary relationship to variable like class, race, age, sexual choice" (79). The female subject is fractured within herself. Because of this internal splintering, she is always in flux (Heraclitus style), always in a state of becoming. This phase is linked to Kristeva's notion of the "inner, discontinuous time of genealogy" (81).

"The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say, different practices. This multiplicity is contained in a multilayed temporal sequence, whereby discontintuities and even contradictions can find a place" (84).

Nomadism calls for "multiple female feminst emodied voices," located in transient, shifting spaces and times to use complex forms of action that respect contradiction and complexity without drowning in them....

Q: How does the transient becoming multiple female feminist, become solid and visible enough to participate in collective action?...and for how long? Does that "crystalization" then negate the nomadic-ness of the identity in question?

(Inhuman) Forces

Unfortunately, pages 192 and 193 were missing from the reading. I dont give an account of those pages.

Grosz begins by tracing out the relation of non-subjective forces to principles of pleasure and desire. Here she takes a very much molecular approach to both ideas, introducing a notion of forces which is composed of particles and which is pure movement without direction. This initial distinction is made in alignment with Nietzsche, employing the notion that it is forces which continually constitute and destroy subjects and not the other way round. From there Grosz goes on to ask how forces can be read in relation to pleasure and desire. Her answer is that both pleasure and desire are the registrations of the movement of forces. These are the sensory receptors of something which is operative outside of them. Thus by the time the subject can feel a desire or pleasure, already those forces have had their impact upon that subject.
Grosz points out that for Foucault, there is an intersection of force in the form of power with pleasure as that which both induces participation in channelings of pleasure and that which produces resistances to the power which has consolidated technologies of pleasure.
She goes on to discuss a Deleuzian conception of pleasure. Unfortunately these are the pages which are missing.
Grosz's conclusion based on these two views is that the goal of feminists should not be to consolidate a politics surrounding the use of pleasure or concerning desire. Rather, the attempt should be to all ow the human to "liberate from its own orbit" the imperceptible forces which together compose pleasure and desire. Thus the engagement of groups in alternative sexualities should not be read as itself directly or necessarily political but instead as creative. The participation in an outlawed sexuality can then viewed as productive of a new assemblage which will itself reconfigure the subject. These new formations of subjectivity will then continuously realign with new formations of pleasure and desire, ever- reconfiguring, ever reconstituting a subject who remains always changing and thus always elusive of the grasping clutch of power systems.

The Force of Sexual Difference

This text aims at disturbing and displacing the politics of identity through theorizing sexual difference as an ontological force. Grosz suggests a theoretical move in order to develop and ask new kinds of questions concerning:

not the body – but messy biology, matter, materiality
not ideology – but force, energy, affect
not gender – but sexual difference

To provide alternative approaches and forgo a reduction of ontology to epistemology (which she believes structuralism and poststructuralism is guilty of) she turns to Deleuze’s work on “the outside” and Irigaray’s project of sexual difference.

Grosz Interpreting Irigaray’s Notion of Ontology and Sexual Difference:

* A transformation of ontology entails a transformation of our conceptions of epistemology, and vice versa. How we understand space and time transform our conceptions of matter, subjectivity, and politics. A reconfiguration of subjectivity will dramatically change our understanding of space and time.
* Sexual difference should be seen as a constituting difference preexisting entities, rather than a difference between entities.
* Irigaray does not seek the “real” woman beyond patriarchy – she wants to counter male domination, challenge conceptual systems, and allow for ways to think, read, and write otherwise. She wants to open up the position of knowing subject to the occupation of women.
* Sexual difference exists in virtuality, as a future anteriority, because it is impossible to specify in advance what will come out of the installment of sexual difference.
* Sexual difference entails an ontology that cannot be understood as self-identical but must be composed of difference and engaged in becoming.
* This difference comes out of the central ontological difference between time and space.
* The challenge facing feminism is to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form. This may render the feminine obsolete or the object of profound or inhuman becomings.
* This defines an ontology of becoming where time is privileged as a repressed or feminized condition of the world, conceived of in terms of the preeminence of an undeterminable, incalculable future. A subject is never what it is; it is always in the process of becoming something else.

Grosz notion of time as a force of differing leads her to consider the works of Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson and, most importantly, Deleuze. Through them she gives a schematic characterization of time as 1) an active force forward 2) the underlying, inherent principle of the transformation of objects/space 3) the never changing force of variation 4) a singularity underlying the multiplicity of changing things 5) the outside in which other forces impinge on each other 6) an enduring past which can be illuminated again and again through the active work of the present.

Such an understanding of time is important to feminist theory, writes Grosz, since it supersedes the past and the present and enables us to access the untimely. It allows us to envision a future unlike the present without being able to specify in advance what it entails. It is the investment in the power of the leap that makes feminism a project without end. Feminism as processes and becomings will ensure that difference continues to be made.

QUESTIONS: How are ontology (of becoming) and epistemology linked in Grosz way of thinking? In what ways does theorizing sexual difference as an ontolgical force avoid reducing ontology to epistemology? How come sexual difference is said not to exist at the same time as it is said to be consitutive? Why is sexual difference, as an ontological force (beyond the realm of subjectivity and identity politics), in need of theorizing feminist subjects in order to come forth?

The Future of Female Sexuality

Kinsey, who sought what Grosz calls a taxonomic (to me a word which recalls the similar ‘taxidermic’) view of human sexuality, is the target and subject of this essay.
His mission affirmed “it was only science, in its disinterested search for truth, that could rid of us our prejudices and assumptions” concerning human sexual behavior (pg. 198). This selection awakens the contemporary philosophical audience to suspicion.

Each of the theses of the essay are accompanied by a destruction via paralepsis of Kinsey’s works.

We are told: “my goal is not a philosophical critique”, “I am not really interested in undertaking an epistemological analyses”, nor “psychobiography”, nor “ [Kinsey’s] scientific contributions to knowledge”, nor his connection to “the tradition of the science of sexuality”.

These brief expenditures of breath are plenty to knock down the straw discourses of an easy target, and we become free to examine the impulse that created them.

Grosz IS interested in “what [Kinsey’s work’s] implications for an understanding of the radical future of female sexuality”, an “ontological approach: the desire to know everything about a mysterious and unknown object”, to “detach [his work] from their assumed context in sexology”.
To make Kinsey “an event”.

The second section heading’s tone of colloquial whimsy brings our suspicions to a climax:
“Five Great Things About Kinsey”.

What are they?

1. First person reports are important, and statistical empirics are problematic, and just plain hard besides.
2. He did not seek a “generic mode of sexuality”; “he sought difference”.
3. He did not limit his subjects selection on religious or moral grounds; he sought a full range of sexual activities.
4. He understood that sexuality is “a cohesive series of disparate responses to various external triggers”. Or, that conceptual banner beloved by the postmodern crowd, “a complex confluence of forces”.
5. He did not oppose the two sexes or see them as a couple (he did not explicitly binarize).

The wacky thing about him, Grosz points out, is that despite his recognition of the chaotic factors involved, he saw sexuality as something essentially knowable.

Here’s pointless side-note (those who are in a hurry are referred to the next line break):
I’m coining my own rhetorical term. I’ll call it ‘polynomy’ until I can talk to a classics scholar. Grosz practices it with exuberance and subtlety. Polynomy:
Repetition of a name (in this case, Kinsey) in situations where a pronoun, its antecedent not yet violated, would grammatically suffice, in order to create a kind of tacit nya-nya-ny’-nya-nya effect (his name seems to occur at least 4 times per page throughout).


“The Science of Sex”

Kinsey contributed to what Foucault called “the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure”.

His method, with its fondness for large numbers, made sex extensive rather than intensive. His (or more properly I should say ‘its’, as Kinsey is taken as the ‘Kinsey-event’) statistical “cover of objectivity” (pg. 205) itself runs up against a variety of problems, where the tangible record of who-does-what-to-whom-and-how-and-how-much intersects with the phenomena of lived experience.

Grosz elaborates this point. Sex is messy, and it’s hard to tell when it’s really going on, and KE relied on the orgasm as a punctuating event to count when it has been accomplished. Kinsey admits a certain distrust of the female orgasm in statistical matters, but decides, “there seems no better unit for measuring.. sexual activity.” (pg. 206).

Interviews, though invaluable for some reason, often potentially involved the projection of fantasy (anticipating Foucault’s observation).

The reintegration of the psychology/physiology dualism proved highly problematic.

A crucial articulation of the problem this causes occurs on pg. 207:
“The point of numerical analysis is that anything can be calculated, but the calculation is not a neutral activity: IT TRANSFORMS WHAT IS A CONTINUITY INTO COMPARABLE UNITS, IT IMPOSES THE FORM OF THE UNIT ONTO ALL PARTICULARS, it is transformational of quality into quantity.”

Grosz seems to be problematizing the numbering of anything, as numbering involves collapsing individual units into masses with which they must be in some way identical. Numericity, as it seeks to unit groups through shared qualities (and, I would add, this is only possible by opposing, making corollary those qualities that differentiate them from some quality shared by a different group) entails the destruction of individual difference.

“In the process he lost what is sexual about sexual behavior,” and retained an accountancy of his own constructions- the orgasm as marker of a sex act.

We should seek an ars erotica rather than a scientia sexualis (echoes of Susan Sontag).

It is likely that female sexuality is inherently uncountable, and possibly male sexuality as well (reconfigured). The current configuration of female sexuality, being wholly intensive to the point of merger with all other activity (“the impossibility to distinguish between the sexual and nonsexual” pg. 210), makes the extensive discourses incomprehensibly irrelevant.

Grosz asks, “can it be that male sexuality.. is the origin of the number itself?” The tangibility of male sexuality actually causing the virtual identification of objects, not the other way around? Not that female sexuality is indescribable, but that it does not correspond to a masculinist schema of knowledge.

The moment of first-person collection in KE project was the opportunity for ars erotica, a recognized experimentation (engagement with the discourse in the first place being a sexual event).

So, “what is the radical future of female sexuality?” (213). In understanding the fundamental indeterminacy of sexuality. And it may consist in part in a certain distrust of identity politics, as they involve tabulation of past events and intelligibility relying on those events.

It is not the elusiveness of female sexuality, but its openness to any examination that makes it radical.

“This is its radical quality: not that it is unknowable, but that it is unknowable through any particular discourse or method.” (213).

The future of female sexuality is “the acknowledgment and celebration of [its] openness.”

Elizabeth Grosz, “The Time of Thought”

Part I: Introduction
In the introductory remarks to this chapter, Grosz asserts her interest in political and intellectual practices. She asks, “How can new models of thought, new intellectual practices come into being?” (155) Specifically, she asks questions about how to think the future, how to transform both philosophical and feminist theory, which Grosz argues intersect in their interests in ontology and epistemology. Although philosophy has traditionally excluded women, Grosz declares the need of feminist theory to investigate and use philosophy to its advantage, especially where philosophy/theory is brave, risky, and innovative. Grosz describes the theories of Deleuze and Irigaray as such theories.

Part II: Deleuzian concepts
For Deleuze, theory is not a unified system composed of arguments. Rather, theory/knowledge is made up of concepts which themselves are not “unitary or singular” (158), but always multiple. Concepts attempt to answer questions, which are occasioned by historically locatable, singular events (which can be natural, cultural, or political). The question/problem cannot necessarily be solved, but “enacted, lived through, negotiated” (160). Concepts/solutions arise at the same time questions are determined, and thus contribute to ideas and thought. Thus theory and practice flow into each other, “each [as] a mode of the other’s proliferation” (162). [for a summary of the concepts, see 1-4 on pages 161-162]

Part III: Irigaray and sexual difference
Grosz distinguishes two kinds of feminist theory: the first kind is that in which feminism is temporary, the second in which feminism is eternal. Feminism is temporary when it aims to overcome the oppression of women. In other words, once women have gained equality with men in economic, political, and legal realms, feminist goals will be fulfilled. Thus in this view, feminism is a temporary project.
Feminism is eternal when it posits sexual difference, such as the work of Irigaray. This kind of feminism seeks “the entire restructuring of the symbolic order, of the social apparatuses, including language, forms of knowledge, and modes of representation” (163). In other words, since everything up till now has been phallocentric, only one part of sexual difference has been represented. Irigaray argues that the other perspective (that of woman) has yet to be articulate and advocates for a “revolution in thought” that would reconsider and transform everything (all fields and disciplines) (165).
Deleuze and Irigaray “meet” in that their concept/solution will transform and continue to transform theory/action in unknown ways, but in ways that will be multiple (at least two) and continual.

Part IV: Solutions?
Grosz concludes with four suggestions/solutions (?) for feminist theory and politics:
1) Feminism should not necessarily be centered around struggles for the recognition of women in various groups. Instead, “it may be understood as the struggle around the right to act and to make according to one’s own interests and perspectives, the mobilization and opening up of identity to an uncontained and unpredictable future” (167).
2) Feminism should seek actions which generate transformations that are not necessarily linked to individuals, groups, or organizations.
3) Sexual difference should be recognized as a factor in all human affairs.
4) Feminism should produce concepts that “welcome and generate political, conceptual, and artistic experimentation” (168).

Questions: What do you make of Grosz’s shift in emphasis in feminist theory from a project-based, temporary entity to an eternal process of transformation? What dis/advantages do you think this entails for feminist projects?