Cultural | Critique oO ee) Fall 2004MLETAMORPIIOSES: TOWARDS A MATERIALIST THEORY OF BECOMING BY ROSI BRAIDOTTI Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2002 Nv" Peltier Wonderfully thought provoking, highly stylized, and imaginatively written, Rosi Braidotti’s latest critical endeavor, Metamorphoses, seeks to elaborate a theory of becoming that is adequate to the complexities, of the twenty-first century. Discarding an antiquated. concept-bound language ill-equipped to represent the speed at which change occurs, Metamorphoses deploys instead a figurative language that resists linear conceptions of history and teleological assumptions of the subject—a language, in other words, that is more suitable for theoriz~ ing change and transformation. A fundamental impulse informing, Braidotti’s thought is a desire “not to know who we are,” but “what, at last, we want to become” (2), and itis this desire that incites her to interrogate the shortage of figurations that would otherwise allow her to map “structural transformations of subjectivity” in postindus- trial postmodernity. Metamorphoses consists of two basic divisions: the first is comprised by the prologue and the first two chapters in which Braidotti situates herself vie A vio Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze, the two philosophers with whom she is most closely aligned. and to whom she remains most indebted. In this first division, Braidotti elucidates her notions of “enfleshed materialism” and sex- ual difference that she maintains are crucial to a philosophy of becoming. In the second division, comprised by the third, fourth, and fifth chapters, as well as the epilogue, Braidotti explores modern figurations as she seeks to think difference and transformation in nonnegative, nonpejorative terms. The animal, insect, cyborg, and machine are several of the key representations Braidotti examines 00K REVIEWS | 203, with the intent of discovering their efficacy for mapping change and tracing lines of becoming, braidotti describes her theory of becoming as a materialist “philosophical nomadism” that brings about the collapse of phallo- gocentrism precisely by shattering the Same/Other binary that has characterized Western cultural and philosophical thought. Braldotti borrows from Irigaray’s notion of the “sensible transcendental” to argue that the body is a “complex interplay of highly constructed social and symbolic forces . .. not an essence. let alane a hinlngieal substance, but a play of forces, a surface of intensities, pure simulacra withont originals” (21). Accordingly, itis essential to see “feiale cor- poreal reality” not as that which already “is,” and not as something that merely reinscribes its polarized opposition to the masculine, “but as virtual... as a process of becoming” (24-25). Its this view of “woman,” one that emphasizes the “multi-centered, internally differ- entiated fomale faminict cubjectivity/” that, for Draidutti, stands as powerful critique of phallogocentrism. Braidotti links this notion of the virtual feminine to Deleuze’s notion of the “empirical transcen- dental,” with its focus on the embodied subject that flows rhizomati- cally “as a multiplicity and along multiple axes" (75). Conjoining Irigaray to Delenze enables Braidotti to reconccive the Feminine/ Other as “a complex, heterogeneous, non-unitary entity” (72), a block vf Leong of nomadic subjectivity, a subject in process, never fin- ally fixed, but existing “in different levels of power and desire, con- stantly shifting between willful choice and unconscious drives" (76-77). While the Irigaray-Neleuze matrix is vital to Braidotti’s analysis, her commitment to Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference as some- thing that is given as a condition of the body instead of discursively constituted creates some inconsistencies in the text. These inconsis- tencies arise, not because she wants to maintain a materialist theory of sexual difference per se, but hecause sexual difference, which she describes as “always already there” (164) persists when the notion of persistence itself, as a symptom of binaristic thinking, is something that her entire analysis attempts to undo. In other words, Braidotti 4s quite right to suggest that “becoming-woman" is a process that can only be mapped along sexually diforantiated linee—comething, she claims, Deleuze and Guattari fail to consider—but this sexual204 | 600K REVIEWS differentiation can only be understood as part of what she calls a “politics of location,” that is, a critique of the specific context in which « numadic subject is situated. The ways men and women nego- tiate their becomings necessarily differ as a result of the asymmetri- cal social relations that exist between them. If sexual difference plays a part here, it is only because sexual difference matters as a “molar” line constitutive of the heteronormative, phallogocentric social order, not as some ahistorical or Lraditionless givent. Anticipating charges of her own “molar” thinking, the only defense Braidotti gives is that at least she is aware of it (167). Notwithstanding some of the internal contradictions that appear with regard to sexual difference, Braidotti’s text powerfully indicts Western culture with what she calls a “deficit in the scale of repre- sentation” needed for a cartography of contemporary metamorphos- ing subjects. Thus, she spends considerable time working through some current figurations, especially the insect. the monster. and the machine, to see how they might aid in mapping the nomadic subject and its “differences within” (28), and it is in these sections that she is especially exciting and provocative. For instance, the figure of the insect, which Braidotti says “provides a new paradigm for discontin- ‘uous transmutations without major disruptions,” is a key figuration of difference, for it represents “multiple singularities without fixed iddentitico” (149). The opeed at which it metamorphoses a2 well a2 its “immense power of adaptation” make the insect “the entity most closely related to [Deleuze's notions of] the becoming-molecular and becoming-imperceptible” (157). Braidotti also looks at the cur rent fascination with the monster or “teratological other” (177), espe- cially as a way for disrupting phallogocentric hegemony. According, to Braidotti, even though monsters represent an otherness that is “simultaneously commodiitied into objects of material and discursive consumption,” they are also “emerging in their own right as alterna- tive, resisting and empowering counter-subjectivities” (198). The monster, in other words, blurs the distinction between self and other, while underscoring the differences that exist “within the same en- tity” (204), Because the monster has been culturally linked with “woman,” the multiplicity of the monstrous other counterposes the phallogocentric sense of “woman’” as a fixed, immobile, unitary other. BODK REVIEWS | 205, Similarly, Braidotti reads the “body-machine” as seen in science fiction (aptly described by Braidotti as meta())morphosis) “as simply Yet another guration for the non-unitary nature of the subject” (254), The part of the subject that is machine represents, for Braidotti, “the subject's capacity for multiple, outward-bound interrelations with a number of external forces or others” (254), also called “symbi- otic interdependence” (226); this is a figuration that dislodges the subject from its state of insularity and unified stasis as it represents the subject's “co-presence of different elements .... different stages of evolution” (226) that are central to nomadic becoming, While this summary in no way exhausts the kinds of figurations that interest Braidotti, they do emphasize the concerns that she has for uansforming feminist discourse into a discourse of becoming. More figurations make their way into her analysis to assist her in achieving this goal: the animal, the freak, the automaton, the body double, the mhot, and Rraidotti carofully attendo to each with sensi tive and insightful analyses. While she looks to these figurations as ‘ways of thinking difference and desire in positive ways, she is careful not to romanticize them as ideals or as ends in themselves. For instance, she does not valorize the “body-machine" as a state of per- fectibility, nor does she desire an escape from the human body fo the mechanical body (223), She is more interested in viewing these rela- tions syusbivtivally, as blocks of becoming, as processes “ot intersect- ing forces (affects) and spatio-temporal variables (connections)” (21). There are, however, one or two conspicuous gaps in Braidott’s text that leave room for further work. First, Braidotti states throughout her book that the theory of becoming she is advocating has practical political applicability (see pages 20, 61, 206, 245, for instance), and yet she never really explains how a practical politics would emerge from a fluid nomadic position. All she says is that her brand of philosoph- ical nomadism can “complexify” politics (206). Moreover, while the energy that propels her thinking and the celebratory mood that is characteristically hers is, in so many ways, infectious, the trauma of metamorphosis is never thoroughly considered. That is to say, Braidotti does not give much thought to the possibility of “becom. ing” being a painful experience rather than an erstatic ona ‘Tho son sation of always being in flux, far from any stable ground, is, for206 | 800K Reviews Braidotti, only to be extolled. Might there be disadvantages to this absence of stability? Nevertheless, Braidotti has offered a significant, ‘oulsibutivn Wy Uke gsvwvings umber of philosophies of becoming, Her analysis is refreshing in the possibilities it opens up and inwigo- rating to read. And in these “strange times,” with these “strange things that are happening” (1), Braidotti has securely positioned her- self at the forefront of contemporary feminist debates.