Rosi Braidotti
»Teratologies: Montrous Technoscapes«

«Imagine, if you will, a lesbian cross-dresser who pumps iron, looks like Chiquita Banana, thinks like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, talks like Dorothy Parker, has the courage of Anita Hill, the political acumen of Hillary Clinton and is as pissed off as Valerie Solanis, and you really have something to worry about.»

Late postmodernity is in the grip of a teratological imaginary. The monstrous, the grotesque, the mutant and the downright freakish have gained widespread currency in urban post-industrial cultures. In his classic analysis, Lesley Fiedler points out that since the sixties a youth culture has evolved that entertains a strong, albeit ironic and parodic relationship to freaks. Feminist theory is no exception.

Freaks, the geek, the androgyne and the hermaphrodite crowd the space of multiple Rocky horror shows. Drugs, mysticism, satanism, various brands of insanity are also on the catalogue. Cannibalism, made visible by Romero in »Night of the Living Dead« in the sixties, became eroticized by Greenway in the eighties and made it into the mainstream by the nineties, with «Silence of the Lamb.» The analysis of the current fascination with the freakish half human/half animal or beast-figure alone would feel a page. We may think, as an example, of comic strips (the Ninja Turtles); TV classic series like «Star Trek;» the covers of records and LPs; video-games and CDroms; video clips and the computer-generated images of Internet and Virtual Reality as further evidence of the same trend. They are connected to the drug-culture, as much as to its spin-offs in music, video and computer cultures. A great deal of this culture is flirting with sexual indeterminacy, which has been rampant since David Bowie's path-breaking «Ziggy Stardust.»
Quite significant is also the contemporary trend for borderline figures, especially replicants, zombies and vampires, including lesbian vampires and other queer mutants, who seem to enjoy special favor in these post-AIDS days. This is not only the case as far as ‹low› popular culture genres are concerned, but it is equally true of relatively ‹high› literary genres. Authors like Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Martin Amis and Fay Weldon—as well as the established success of genres such as horror, crime stories, science fiction and cyberpunk—are a new ‹post-human› techno-teratological phenomenon that privileges the deviant or the mutant over the more conventional versions of the human.

There is a distinct teratological flair in contemporary cyber-space, with a proliferation of new monsters which often merely transpose into outer space very classical iconographic representations of monstrous others. Whether utopian (Close Encounters) or dystopian (Independence Day), messianic (E.T) or diabolical (Alien), the inter-galactic monstrous other is firmly settled in the imaginary of today's media and of the electronic frontier. As Sontag argued science fiction films are not about science, but about disaster. The freakish being descending from outer space allows for a cathartic display of belligerency, panic and cruelty, and thus for the enjoyment of both.
Contemporary culture has shifted the issue of genetic mutations from the high-tech laboratories into popular culture. Hence the relevance of the new monsters of science fiction and cyber-punk, which raise metamorphosis to the status of a cultural icon. ‹Altered states› are trend-setters: video drugs now compete with the pharmaceutical ones. This cyber-teratology gives a new twist to the century-old connection between the feminine and the monstrous.

The monstrous or teratological imaginary expresses the social, cultural and symbolic mutation that is taking place around the phenomenon of techno-culture. Visual regimes of representation are at the heart of it. From the Panoptical eye explored by Michel Foucault in his theory of ‹bio-power,› to the ubiquitous presence of television, surveillance video and computer screens, it is the visual dimension of contemporary technology that defines its all-pervading power. With the on-going electronic revolution reaching a peak, it is becoming quite clear that this dis-embodied gaze constitutes a collision of virtual spaces with which we coexist in increasing degrees of intimacy. In this context, feminist analysis has alerted us to the pleasures but also the dangers of ‹visual politics, › and the politics of visualisation, especially in the field of bio-technology.
Whereas the emphasis on the visualisation encourages some of the theoretical masters of nihilistic postmodern aesthetics. To reduce the bodily self to a mere surface of representation and to launch a sort of euphoric celebration of virtual embodiments, the feminist response has been more cautious and ambivalent. It consists in stressing both the liberating and the potentially one-sided application of the new technologies. They argue for the need to develop figurations of contemporary female subjectivities that would do justice to the complexities and the contradictions of our technological universe. I will return to this.
The fascination for the monstrous in the cultural imagination can be linked with the ‹post-nuclear sensibility,› often referred to as the ‹posthuman› predicament. The historical fact that marks this shift is that science and technology—far from being the leading principles in a teleological process aimed at the perfectibility of the human—have sort of ‹spilled over,› turning into sources of permanent anxiety over our present and future. The ‹thinkability› of nuclear disaster makes for an almost trivialized popularity of horror. An imaginary world filled with images of mutation marks much more than the definitive loss of the naturalistic paradigm: it also brings to the fore the previously unspeakable fact that our culture is historically condemned to the contemplation of its extinction. By eraction, it triggers in the humans an advanced state of machine-envy and the desire to imitate the inorganic or the non-human.

Enfleshed Complexities

I think that working through these issues with Gilles Deleuze can help us think through the kind of techno-teratological universe we are inhabiting. Rethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity after Foucault, I would recommend that we take as the starting point the paradox of the simultaneous over-exposure and disappearance of the body in the age of postmodernity. In other words, social constructivism and its corollary—antiessentialism—result in a proliferation of discourses about and practices of knowledge over the body. Bio-power constructs the body as a multi-layered entity that is situated over a multiple and potentially contradictory set of variables.
For Deleuze, the genealogy of the embodied nature of the subject can be ironically rendered as: Descartes’ nightmare, Spinoza’s hope, Nietzsche’s complaint, Freud’s obsession, Lacan’s favorite fantasy, Marx’ omission. A piece of meat activated by electric waves of desire, a text written by the unfolding of genetic encoding. Neither a sacralized inner sanctum, nor a pure socially shaped entity, the enfleshed Deleuzian subject is rather an ‹in-between›: it is a folding-in of external influences and a simultaneous unfolding outwards of affects. A mobile entity, an enfleshed sort of memory that repeats and is capable of lasting through sets of discontinuous variations, while remaining faithful to itself. The Deleuzian body is ultimately an embodied memory.
This ‹faithfulness to itself› 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. Nor is it a mark of authenticity for a self that expresses a B mostly pathetic B sense of importance of one’s ego, one’s petty likes and dislikes and one’s pets. It is rather the faithfulness of duration, of the repetition of the expression of one’s continuing and structuring adherence to certain dynamic spatio-temporal co-ordinates.

A Deleuzian body is an assemblage of forces or passions that solidify (in space) and consolidate (in time) within the singular configuration commonly known as an ‹individual.› This intensive and dynamic entity is not, however, the emanation of an inner essence, nor is it merely the effect of biology. The Deleuzian body is rather a portion of forces that is stable enough—spatio-temporally speaking—to sustain them and to undergo constant, though necessarily contained, fluxes of transformation. It is a field of transformative affects whose availability for changes of intensity depends firstly on its ability to sustain and secondly to encounter the impact of other forces or affects.
In Deleuze’s radical philosophy of temporally inscribed immanence, subjects come in different mileage, temperatures and beats. One can change gears and move across these coordinates, but it cannot claim all of them, all of the time. This is extremely important to prevent nihilism and self-destruction. Thus, to suggest that the subject for Deleuze is a process of becoming in active processes of transformation does not make it limitless: that would be the expression of a delirium of megalomania and regression. The containment of the intensities, their duration is a crucial pre-requisite to allow them to do their job, which consists in shooting through the field of the subject, exploding its frame. In other words, the dosage or threshold of intensity is crucial to the Deleuzian process of becoming.
Deleuze’s enfleshed, vitalistic but not essentialist vision of the subject is a self-sustainable one, which in some ways owes a lot to the ecology of the self. The rhythm, speed and sequencing of the affects and the selection of the constitutive elements are crucial to the whole process. It is the pattern of re-occurrence of these changes that marks the successive steps in the process of becoming, thus allowing for the actualization of a field of forces that is apt to frame and thus to express the singularity of the subject.
This is a way of containing the excessive edges of the postmodernist discourse about the body, notably the denial of the materiality of the bodily self. Deleuze proposes instead a form of neo-materialism and a blend of vitalism that is attuned to the technological era. Thinking through the body and not in a flight away from it, means confronting boundaries and limitations.
These claims also constitute the basis of Deleuze’s critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Special emphasis is placed on the criticism of the sacralization of the sexual self by Lacan as well as the teleological structure of identity formation in psychoanalytic theory, which shows its Hegelian legacy. Not the least of this concerns the definition of desire as lack, to which Deleuze never ceases to oppose the positivity of desire. More on this later.
On an everyday sociological level, as Camilla Griggers points out, the body is striking back, with a vengeance. An estimated two million American women have silicon breast implants B 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 one third of the younger women of the opulent world B as Princess Diana so clearly illustrated. Killer diseases today do not include only the great exterminators, like cancer and AIDS, but also the return of traditional diseases which we thought we had conquered, like tuberculosis and malaria. The human immunity system has adapted to the anti-bodies and we are vulnerable again.
In such a historical, bio-political and geo-political context, there is no question that what, even and especially in feminism, we go on calling, quite nostalgically ‹our bodies, ourselves,› are abstract technological constructs fully immersed in advanced psycho-pharmacological industry, bio-science and the new media. This does not make them any less embodied, or less ourselves, it just complicates considerably the task of representing to ourselves the experience of inhabiting them.
What is equally clear is that a culture that is in the grip of a techno-teratological imaginary is in need of Deleuze's philosophy. The techno-hype needs to be kept in check by a sustainable understanding of the self: we need to assess more lucidly the price we are prepared to pay for our high technological environments. We got our prosthetic promises of perfectability, now we need to hand over our pound of flesh. In this discussion that in some way juxtaposes the rhetoric of ‘the desire to be wired’ to a more radical sense of materialism, there is no doubt that Deleuze’s philosophy lends precious help to those—including the feminists of sexual difference—who remain ‹proud to be flesh.›
Like Irigaray, Deleuze is in fact a philosopher of radical immanence who takes temporality seriously. Both argue that we need to think the deep, dense materiality of bodies-in-time, so as to dis-engage them from he liberal bourgeois definition of the self. As utterly singular but collectively constituted enfleshed complexity, or embodied genealogy, the Deleuzian subject is sustainable, that is: limited, while having firmly departed from any reference to the ‹natural› order.

Significantly, both Irigaray and Deleuze are post-Lacanians, though in dissymetrical ways. However critical Irigaray has been of Lacan's psychic essentialism and of his rejection of any possibility of transformation of the structures of the unconscious and the positioning of Woman in it, she remains faithful to the conceptual structure of Lacan's reading of the unconscious. For instance, the symbolic system remains Irigaray's point of reference, although in her reading it is more porous to the influence of historical changes and thus more affected by the workings of the imaginary. Irigaray's radical feminism rests precisely on the investment on the power of the feminine to redefine the symbolic.
Deleuze's goes much further in rejecting the Lacanian conceptual scheme of the unconscious altogether. Dismissing the metaphysics of the self, Deleuze redefines the unconscious as a productive, forward-propelling theory of flows or intensities. This rests to a large degree of Deleuze's philosophy of time: his Bergsonian reading of a continuous present can be opposed to the tyranny of the past in the psychoanalytic reading of memory, repetition or the process of repression and retrieval of the repressed material.
Deleuze's ‹minoritarian› definition of memory as a nomadic or deterritorializing force runs against the established definitions of memory as a centralized data bank of frozen information. As a vector of deterritorialization, memory for Deleuze destabilizes identity by stringing together virtual possibilities. Re-membering in this mode requires careful lay-outs of empowering conditions which allow for the actualization to take place. Like a choreography of flows or intensities that require adequate framing in order to compose into a form, memories require empathy and cohesion between the constitutive elements. It is like a constantly reshuffling that yearns for the moment of sustainable balance or expression, before they dissolve again and move on. And on it goes, never equal to itself, but close enough not to lose sight of the structure altogether.
As I have argued elsewhere, in the short term Deleuze's radical reconceptualization erodes the foundations of a specific feminist epistemology and of a theory of feminine subjectivity, in so far as it rejects the masculine/feminine dichotomy altogether. In the longer run, however, the radically projective concept of the intensive Deleuzian subject opens the door to possible configurations of a variety of subject-positions that are post-metaphysics of gender, or beyond sexual difference.

The feminized or monstrous Other

In the contemporary imaginary, the monstrous refers to the play of representation and discourses that surround the body of late postmodernity. It is the expression of a deep anxiety about the bodily roots of subjectivity.
I tend to view this as the counterpart and the counterpoint to the emphasis that dominant post-industrial culture has placed on the construction of clean, healthy, fit, white, decent, law-abiding, heterosexual and forever young bodies. The techniques aimed at perfecting the bodily self and at correcting the traces of mortality of the corporeal self: plastic surgery, dieting, the fitness craze and other techniques for disciplining the body also simultaneously help it supersede its ‹natural› state. What we witness in popular culture is almost a Bachtinian ritual of transgression. The fascination for the monstrous, the freaky body-double is directly proportional to the suppression of images of both ugliness and disease in contemporary post-industrial culture. It is as if what we are chasing out the front door: the spectacle of the poor, fat, homeless, homosexual, black, dying, ageing, decaying, leaky body, were actually creeping in through the back window. The monstrous marks the ‹return of the repressed› of techno-culture and as such it is intrinsic to it.
The monstrous body fulfils the magical or symptomatic function of indicator of the register of difference. Which is why the monster has never been able to avoid a blind date with women. In the post-nuclear cybernetic era, however, the encounter between the maternal body and the technological apparatus is so intense that it calls for new frames of analysis. Contemporary ‹monstrous others,› as I argued earlier, blur the dividing line between the organic and the inorganic, thus rendering superfluous also the political divide between technophobia and technophilia. In an age where, as Haraway astutely observes, the machines are so restless while the humans are so inert, the issue becomes how to redefine the techno-body in such a way as to preserve a sense of singularity, without falling into nostalgic reappraisal of an essential self. The issue of the boundaries of identity raises its monstrous head.
The specific historicity of this situation may also help to explain the peculiarly reassuring function that the representation of freaky bodies fulfills in the anxiety-ridden contemporary imagination. As Diana Arbus suggests: freaks have already been through it and have come out at the other end. If not quite survivors, they are at least resilient in their capacity to metamorphose and thus survive and cope. Many late twenty-century humans may instead have serious doubt about their capacity to cope, let alone survive. Contemporary horror and science fiction literature and films show an exacerbated version of anxiety in the form of the 'otherness within': the monster dwells in your embodied self and it may burst out any minute into unexpected and definitely unwanted mutations. The monster is in you embodied self, ready to unfold, as in David Cronenberg's remake of «The Fly.» The monstrous growths spreading within one's organism, as Jacky Stacey reminds us, in the form of cancer or other post-nuclear diseases, are also variations on the theme of the ‹enemy within.›

The monstrous, decadent or mutant body is ‹feminized› as being abject. Marina Warner argues that the image of the destructive monstrous female is especially current in the ways in which contemporary culture portrays feminism. The monstrous female has turned into the monstrous feminist, whom the conservatives hold responsible for all the evils of today's society. Especially targeted for criticism is the single mother. As Warner rightly points out, this is not only a prominent ‹problem› for the enemies of the welfare state, but also a general threat to masculine authority. Reproduction without men triggers a deep malaise in the patriarchal imaginary, that moves fast in the direction of resurrecting the century-old myth of gynocracy. Women's bodies today are in the same position monstrous bodies were over a century ago: testing-ground for various brands of mechanized reproduction. Are Corea's nightmare world of ‹gender-cide› or Atwood's dystopia of the techno-brothel likely scenarios?
Much feminist ink has been spilled in the attempt to analyze the link between the monstrous and the proliferation of discourses about ‹the feminine› in late postmodernity. This discursive inflation concerns mostly male philosophers, artists, cultural and media activists. With the investment into this kind of ‹feminine› as the site of virile display of a crisis, the topos of the monstrous female has proportionally gained in currency. I think it emerges as the expression of the fantasy of dangers that threaten postmodern, or ‹soft› patriarchy.
Moreover, both the feminine and the monstrous are signs of an embodied negative difference which makes them ideal targets for the ‹metaphysical cannibalism› of a subject which feeds upon what it excludes. Pejorative otherness, or ‹monstrous others› help illuminate the paradoxical and dissymetrical power relations within Western theories of subjectivity. The freak, not unlike the feminine and the ethnic ‹others› signifies devalued difference. By virtue of its structural inter-connection to the dominant subject position, it also helps define sameness or normalcy among some types. Normality is the zero degree of monstrosity.
If the monstrous feminist haunts the imagination of the operators of the backlash, a less destructive reappraisal of the monstrous other has been undertaken by feminists needing to redefine ‹difference› positively. Multiculturalism and the critique of orientalism and racism have also contributed to rethink the cultural and scientific practices around monstrous bodies. The need has emerged for a new epistemology to deal with difference in non-pejorative terms. In this case, the freak/monstrous other becomes emblematic of the vast political and theoretical efforts aimed to redefine human subjectivity away from the persistently logocentric and racist ways of thinking that used to characterize it in Western culture.
Confronted with such a discursive inflation of monstrous images, I refuse the nostalgic position that tends to read them as signs of the cultural decadence of our times, also known as the decline of ‹master narratives,› or the loss of the great canon of ‹high culture.› I think that the proliferation of a monstrous social imaginary calls instead for adequate forms of analysis. More particularly it calls for a form of philosophical teratology which Deleuze is in a unique position to provide.
I want to argue that a culture, both mainstream and feminist, where the imaginary is so monstrous and deviant, especially in its cybernetic variants, can profit greatly from Deleuze’s philosophical teratology. Deleuze’s emphasis on the project of reconfiguring the positivity of difference, his philosophy of becoming and the emphasis he places on thinking about changes and the speed of transformation are a very illuminating way to approach the complexities of our age. There is a profound sense of adequacy in both the political and aesthetic sensibility of Deleuze, as if he were indeed attuned to the most problematic questions of the day.
From a more cultural angle, Deleuze’s intensive approach to contemporary cultural production B be it conceptual, scientific or artistic—casts a most significant light upon some of the most unprecedented aspects of advanced postindustrial cultures. Among them I would list: the desegregation of humanistic subject-positions and values, the ubiquitous presence of narcotic practices and of cultural artifacts derived from the drug culture, the all-pervasive political violence and the intermingling of the enfleshed and the technological. These features, which are often referred to as the ‹post-human› universe can be read in an altogether more positive light if they are approached from the angle of Deleuze’s philosophy of radical immanence, his multiple patterns of becoming and the overthrowing of the humanistic parameters of representation, while avoiding relativism by grounding his practice into a tight spatio-temporal framework.

The metaphoric Dimension

On this score, feminism has much to learn from Deleuze. Contemporary feminist culture is just as ‹freakified› as other aspects of cultural practice in late post-industrial societies. Sexual indeterminacy, rather than seventies' style lesbianism has entered mainstream culture. ‹Queer› is no longer the noun that marks an identity they taught us to despise, but it has become a verb that destabilizes any claim to identity. The heroine chic of C. Klein's advertising campaign and the success of anorexic top models like Kate Moss have fashioned the body in the direction of a the abject, as hybrid mutant bodies seem to be the trend. A colder, more ironic sensibility with a flair for sadomasochism is the contemporary version of ‹no more nice girls.› Mae West has replaced Rebecca West as feminist mother, as Madonna claims in her «Sex» album. Bad girls are in and bad girls carry a teratological imaginary. As Warner puts it: «in rock music, in films, in fiction, even in pornography, women are grasping the she-beast of demonology for themselves. The bad girl is the heroine of our times, and transgression a staple entertainment.»
Let me analyze some of the reasons why feminist culture is teratological. I want to argue that the reason why the monstrous is a dominant part of the feminist imaginary is that it offers privileged mirror-images. We identify with them, out of fear or of fascination. The monsters are ‹metamorphic› creatures who fulfill a kaleidoscopic mirror function and make us aware of the mutation that we are living through in these post-nuclear/industrial/modern/human days.
The structural analogy between 'the monstrous' and ‹the feminine›—which has become a topos of post-war science fiction films, has a much older pedigree. Fielder’s analysis of the typology of contemporary monsters classifies them in terms of lack, of excess and of displacement of organs. This facilitates the analogy with the feminine. As psychoanalytic feminism has successfully argued, the feminine also bears a privileged relation to lack, excess and displacement. By being posited as eccentric vis-a-vis the dominant mode, or as constantly off-centre, the feminine marks the threshold between the human and its ‹outside.› This outside is a multi-layered framework that both distinguishes the human from and it also connects it to the animal, the vegetable, the mineral and also the divine. As an in-between link between the sacred and the abject, the feminine is paradoxical in its monstrosity. In other words, it functions by displacement and its ubiquity as a social or philosophical ‹problem› is equal to the awe and the horror it inspires.
Metamorphic creatures are uncomfortable ‹body-doubles› or simulacra that simultaneously attract and repel, comfort and unsettle: they are objects of adoration and aberration. In her account of science fiction texts written by women, Sarah Lefanu argues that these texts tend to depict women in a bond of empathy with monstrous and alien others. A sort of deep complicity runs between the other of the male of the species and the other of the species as a whole.
Psychoanalytic feminist theory has also cast an interesting light on this aspect of the monstrous imaginary. Firstly, women who are caught in the phallogocentric gaze tend to have a negative self-image and to dread what they see when they look in the mirror. One is reminded of Virginia Woolf and Silvia Plath who saw monsters emerging from the depth of their mirrors. Difference is often experienced as negative by women and represented in their cultural production in terms of aberration or monstrosity. The Gothic genre can be read as female projection of an inner sense of inadequacy. In this perspective, the monster fulfills primarily a specular function, thereby playing a major role in the definition of female self-identity. Frankenstein—the product of the daughter of a historic feminist—is also the portrait of a deep lack of self-confidence and even deeper sense of displacement. Not only does Mary Shelley side with the monstrous creature, accusing its creator of avoiding his responsibilities, but also she presents Frankenstein as her abject body-double, which allows her to express self-loathing with staggering lucidity.
The metamorphic dimension fulfills another function. I argued earlier that the monstrous as a borderline figure blurs the boundaries between hierarchically established distinctions (between human/non-human; Western/non-Western, etc.) and also between horizontal or adjacent differences. In other words, the monstrous triggers the recognition of a sense of multiplicity contained within the same entity. It is an entity whose multiple parts are neither totally merged nor totally separate from the human observer. Thus, the monstrous signifies the difficulty in keeping manageable margins of differentiation of the boundaries between self and other.
This problem with boundaries and differentiation is at the core of the mother-daughter question, following the analyses of Irigaray, Hirsch and Chodorow. Any daughter, that is, any woman, has a self that is not completely individuated but rather is constitutively connected to another woman—her mother. The term mother is already quite tangled and complex, being the site of a symbiotic mix-up, which—according to Lacan—requires the ordering power of the Law of the Father in order to restore the boundaries. This is also the line pursued by Barbara Johnson, in: ‹My monster/My self› (an allusion to Nancy Friday's popular «My mother/My self»). Who is the monster? The mother or the self? Or does the monstrosity lie in the undecidability of what goes on in-between ? The inability to answer that question has to do with the difficulty of negotiating stable and positive boundaries with one's mother. The monstrous feminine is precisely the signpost of that structural and highly significant difficulty.
What is important to note here is that in the eighties feminist theory celebrated both the ambiguities and the intensity of the mother/daughter bond in positive terms—‹écriture féminine› and Irigaray's paradigm of ‹labial politics› being somewhat the epitome of this trend. By the late nineties, however, the maternalist/feminine paradigm was well under attack, if not discarded. This shift away from gyno-centric psychoanalytic feminism towards a definitely bad attitude to the mother coincides, as often is the case in feminism, with a generation gap. Kolbowski argues that Melanie Klein's ‹bad› mother has replaced the Lacanian-inspired ‹vanilla sex› representation of the M/other as object of desire. Accordingly, parodic politics has replaced strategic essentialism and other forms of affirmative mimesis in feminist theories of difference.
Nixon reads the anti-Lacanian climate of the 90s, best illustrated by the revival of interest in Melanie Klein's theory of the aggressive drives: «in part as a critique of psychoanalytic feminist work of the 70's and 80's, privileging pleasure and desire over hatred and aggression.» I would like to situate the new alliance that is currently being negotiated between feminists and Deleuze in this context of historical decline of Lacan's theory of desire as lack and the revival of Klein's theory of the drives. A colder and more aggressive political sensibility is dominant in the 90's.

Imaginary Figurations

Technological culture expresses a colder and more depersonalized kind of sensibility. In order to illustrate the paradox of the bio-technological era, also known as the era of the information technologies, let us consider the World Wide web: a huge and practically uncontrollable social space which confronts us with a paradox: on the one hand a cheerful cacophony of clashing bits and bytes of the most diverse information and, on the other hand, with the threat of monoculture and the largest concentration of military-industrial monopolies in the world. I could not think of a better image for the paradox of globalization and concentration, uniformity and fragmentation which characterizes the trans-national economy. The theoretical appraisal of this specific historical moment is very varied, ranging from the euphoric promises of the electronic democracy (John Barlow and the Krokers) to prophecies of doom (Unibomber). Only a few sober scholars like Castells and Haraway can actually articulate a theoretical framework that is up to the challenges of our day. For such scholars, the crisis of representation, values and agency that is engendered by the new world disorder is not necessarily a negative mark of decline, but it rather opens up new perspectives fro critical thought.
The arena where this discussion is being deployed is the social imaginary, which is a highly contested social space where the techno-teratological imaginary, supported and promoted by post-industrial societies, is rampant. Whether we like it or not, and most of us do not, we are made to desire the interface human/machine. I want to argue consequently that, given that importance of both the social imaginary and the role of technology in coding it, we need to develop both forms of representation and of resistance that are adequate.
Adequate representations are the heart of the matter. As I have often argued, Deleuze shares with a great deal of feminists the need for a renewal of our imaginary repertoires. Conceptual creativity is called for, new figurations are needed to help us think through the maze of techno-teratological culture.
Let me clarify one important point here. I have been referring to the ‹imaginary› as a set of socially mediated practices which function as the anchoring point—albeit unstable and contingent- for identifications and therefore for identity formation. These practices act like interactive structures where desire as a subjective yearning and agency in a broader socio-political sense are mutually shaped by one another. Neither ‹pure› imagination—locked in its classical opposition to reason—nor fantasy in the Freudian sense, the imaginary for me marks a space of transitions and transactions. Nomadic, in a Deleuzian sense, it flows like symbolic glue between the social and the self, the outside (‹constitutive outside›, as Stuart Hall would say, quoting Derrida) and the subject; the material and the ethereal. It flows, but it is sticky: it catches on as it goes. It possesses fluidity, but it distinctly lacks transparency, let alone purity. I have used the term ‹desire›—in keeping with my poststructuralist training—to connote the subject's own investment—or enmeshment—in this sticky network of inter-related social and discursive effects. This network constitutes the social field as a libidinal—or affective—landscape, as well as a normative—or disciplinary—framework.
Considering the structure of the imaginary, one cannot claim it possesses any unitary or generalized meaning, nor can any philosopher easily promise an immediate Nietzschean transmutation of values. It is rather the case that the task of decoding and accounting for the imaginary has been a critical concern for social and cultural critics since the sixties. It has provided the arena in which different and often conflicting critiques of representation have clashed, fueling the discourse of the crisis of representation. I think this crisis needs to be read in the context of the decline of Europe as a world power. It is also intrinsic to the postnuclear predicament of an advanced world whose social realities become virtual—or de-materialized—because they are changing at such a fast rate under the pressure and the acceleration of a digitally-clad economy.

This state of crisis had engendered a positive and highly stimulating response in the conceptual teratology proposed by Deleuze. Deleuze innovates on the notion of the ‹cartographic diagramme› proposed by Foucault in his attempt to provide a materially-based practice of representation of the fast-shifting social landscape of postindustrial societies. The ‹diagramme› is a cartographic device that enables the tracking of an intersecting network of power-effects that simultaneously enable and constrain the subjects. It also functions as a point of support for the task of redesigning a framework for subjectivity.
The imagination plays a major role in this process of conceptual creativity. For Deleuze—following Bergson and Nietzsche—the imagination is a transformative force that propels multiple, heterogeneous ‹becomings,› or repositioning of the subject. The process of becoming is collectively-driven, that is to say relational and external; it is also framed by affectivity or desire, and is thus ex-centric to rational control. The notion of ‹figurations›—in contrast to the representational function of ‹metaphors›—emerges as crucial to Deleuze's notion of a conceptually charged use of the imagination. Deleuze, not unlike Haraway or, for that matter, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, thinks by inventing unconventional and even disturbing conceptual personae. These mark different steps in the process of ‹becoming-minoritaria,› that is of undoing power relations in the very structures of one's subject position. Figurations of these multiple becomings are: the rhizome, the nomad, the bodies-without-organs, the cyborg, the onco-mouse and acoustic masks of all electronic kinds.
Terms like ‹figuration› or ‹fabulation› are often used to describe this politically charged practice of alternative representation. It is a way of bringing into representation the unthinkable, in so far as it requires awareness of the limitations as well as the specificity of one's locations. Figurations thus act as the spot-light that illuminates aspects of one's practice which were blind spots before. A conceptual persona is no metaphor, but a materially embodied stage of metamorphosis of a dominant subject towards all that the phallogocentric system does not want it to become. Massumi refers to this process as the actualization of monstrosity.

The process of conceptual creativity in Deleuze and the transformative repossession of knowledge in feminism amount to a common quest for alternative figurations of subjects-in-becoming.
Feminist theories of ‹politics of location,› or ‹situated knowledges› also stress the material basis of alternative forms of representation, as well as their transgressive and transformative potential. In feminism, these ideas are coupled with that of epistemological and political accountability, that is the practice that consists in unveiling the power locations which one inevitably inhabits as the site of one's identity.
The practice of accountability (for one's embodied and embedded locations) as a relational, collective activity of undoing power differentials is linked to two crucial notions: memory and narratives. They activate the process of putting into words, that is to say bringing into symbolic representation, that which by definition escapes consciousness, in so far as it is relational—that is interactive—retrospective—that is memory-driven—and invested by a yearning or desire for change—that is outside-oriented. Feminists knew this well before Deleuze theorized it in his rhizomic philosophy, that there is a hiatus between the new subject-positions women have begun to develop and the forms of representation of their subjectivity which their culture makes available to them.
In the postnuclear context of the end of the second millennium a feminist quest for a new imaginary representation has exploded. Myths, metaphors, or alternative figurations have merged feminist theory with fictions. It is precisely this mixture of the techno-scientific with the fictional or fantastic that also triggers the contemporary fascination with the monstrous, both among feminists and in mainstream culture. The monstrous refers to the potentially explosive social subjects for whom contemporary cultural and social theory has no adequate schemes of representation. It expresses a positive potential of the ‹crisis› of the humanist subject, which is the leitmotif of modernity.

Conclusion

A new alliance between feminism and Deleuze is being negotiated in the new anti-Lacanian and ‹anti-maternalist› colder political sensibilities on the nineties. This tends to get expressed in a cyber-teratological imaginary which may appear disturbing, even in its parodic manifestations. I have argued that there is a nostalgic or negative appropriation of the monstrous imaginary for the purpose of the conservative backlash or of a crisis of masculinity. There is also however a positive appropriation of it by feminists for the purpose of legitimating alternative representations of subject positions that are made possible by the crisis of the dominant subject. Feminist figurations are an eminent example of the creative and transformative use of the monstrous imaginary. This profoundly dissymmetry in the approach to the crisis has to do with power differentials in the locations or places of enunciation.
As Deleuze's philosophical teratology—his valorization of the positivity of difference—shows, a shift of paradigm is in course, towards the teratological or the abnormal/ anomalous/deviant. This does not automatically or directly translate into moral, political or cultural decadence. This associative link that connects the pathological or abnormal to the morally deficient or the politically bankrupt is a nineteenth century topos that strikes me as utterly inadequate as a framework of analysis for the cultural realities of postnuclear societies.
The challenge that the monstrous throws in our direction is a dissociation of the sensibility we have inherited from the previous end of century. We need to learn to think of the anomalous, the monstrously different not as a sign of pejoration but as the unfolding of virtual possibilities that point to positive alternativities for us all. As Deleuze would put it: the pattern of becoming cuts across the experiential field of all that phallogocentrism did not program us to become. In that sense, the fantasmagoric diversity of monstrous beings points the way to the kind of line of becoming which our crisis-afflicted culture badly needs. I tend to think of this as the last-to-date episode in the de-centering of Western thought: the human is now displaced in the direction of a glittering range of posthuman variable, however painful this may be to the collective hubris we—including Western feminists—have inherited from centuries of codified Western humanism.

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