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Social Text, 80 (Volume 22, Number 3), Fall 2004, pp. 25-49 (Article)
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Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that are without Luciana Parisi
fi nality but testify nonetheless to an action of the future on the present,
or of the present on the past, for example, the convergent wave and the
anticipated potential, which imply an inversion of time. More than breaks
or zigzags, it is these reverse causalities that shatter evolution.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
Social Textt 80, Vol. 22, No. 3, Fall 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.
tials, which, as Henri Bergson argues, are real insofar as they defi ne the
inexhaustible heterogeneity of matter in its dynamics of actualization. 3
The virtual does not defi ne a set of possibilities or actualities, whose
forms and functions have already become visible. Quite the contrary, the
virtual only maps a field of potentials out of which actuals emerge. The
virtual is never completely actualized, and actuals are never completely
virtualized. Rather, the virtual-actual circuit entails a continual yet par-
tial feedback between two mutual yet nonidentical planes of becoming.
There is no dualistic opposition between the virtual and the actual. All
dynamics entail a virtual-actual circuit of individuation, which is an open
process occurring in the middle: on the fi ssure or crack disclosing between
adjacent surfaces.
Drawing on Bergson’s notion of the virtual-actual, I want to reengi-
neer the notion of feminine desire and move beyond the critical impasse
between biological essentialism and cultural constructivism. Although this
notion has historically been at the forefront of feminist cultural criticism,
my argument engages with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of
molecular desire, to highlight the micropolitical importance of the notions
of feminine desire and sex in cybernetic culture.
From this standpoint, feminine desire cannot cease to engage with the
micropolitics of “becoming-woman”: a crucial practice in the interrup-
tion of the economy of sex, which lays out the oedipalization of the body,
building on the biological order of sexual reproduction or the biological
stratification of sex.4 Feminine desire is not in women or in men but entails
a micropolitics of becoming, which is not quick to dismiss femininity as
a given essence or a cultural construction. Questioning the metaphysical
teleology of nature also entails challenging the metaphysical tradition of
essence in which matter remains inert, animated by a form or essence. In
critical studies, such a challenge has corresponded to a cultural interven-
tion, in which matter is created by human culture—the extrinsic mediator
that makes matter readable or interpretable through signification. This
article instead intervenes against the metaphysics of essence by engaging
with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract materialism, in which matter lays
out a virtual-actual process of individuation, a continual modification of
particles-forces without linear descent. For abstract materialism, there are
only bodies in motion enveloped in dynamics of transmission out of which
distinct phases of material order arise. These dynamics above all include
the collision of bodies in movement rather than their states of equilibrium,
and virtual or potential emergences rather than possible outcomes.
In this sense, this article links feminine desire to virtual matter. The
notion of feminine desire is not to be confused with feminine forms and
functions, with the realm of the possible, which has already been calcu-
26 Luciana Parisi
lated. Quite the contrary, feminine desire here entails the heterogeneity
of preindividual potentials tending toward actualizations in the most
unpredictable fashion. Actualizations are emergences spilling out from the
indeterminate yet differentiated potentials of matter. Yet I am not drawing
an analogy between feminine desire and virtual matter. I am arguing that
feminine desire, far from being an essence or a human construction, is
entangled with virtual and actual dynamics of the organization of matter,
which do not cease to emerge without unleashing new potential mutations.
In other words, feminine desire is plunged in a virtual-actual field of rela-
tions, out of which the micropolitics of bodies constitutes distinct levels
of material order. Thus I suggest that feminine desire has to be related to
potential mutations rather than to identity so as to build up a micropolitics
of difference, which is not based on determinantal positions (sex-gender
analogy), but on emergences that encompass the biological, cultural,
technological orders of matter.
The reengineering of the notion of feminine desire also entails a recon-
struction of the notion of sex, which, far from determining an essence,
entails nonlinear transmission of virtual potentials, operating by means
of contagion rather than fi liation. With abstract materialism, the notion of
sex involves a reconceptualization of the modes of transmission that have
associated sex with fi liative heredity or sexual reproduction, and sexual
organs. In short, sex needs to be disentangled from the Darwinian and
neo-Darwinian models of evolution that have contributed to reducing the
notion of sex to sexual organs, genital transmission, and fi liative genetic
transfer. This article instead argues that the notion of sex has to be related
to contagious transmission, which is explained by microbiologist Lynn
Margulis’s theory of endosymbiosis, or SET (serial endosymbiotic theory).
This theory has challenged the classical evolutionary understanding of
heredity and transmission, using the work of the Russian scholar-biologist
Konstantin S. Mereschovsky, who, in the fi rst quarter of the twentieth
century, had already rejected the Darwinian theory of natural selection
and invented the term symbiogenesis to describe the prolonged symbiotic,
parasitic associations that precede the appearance of a new organism.5 A
“guest” bacteria entering the cell takes part in a transfer of DNA informa-
tion with the “host” bacteria already present. Dismissed for a long time,
symbiogenesis has now acquired a constitutive scientific importance,
supported by molecular biology and biochemistry’s questioning of the
classical division between the plant and animal kingdoms and the clas-
sifications based on this division. Bacteria are cells without a bounded
membrane nucleus that transfer information across phyla without regard
for such distinctions, altering the genetic material of each lineage as they
go through. These symbiotic processes, which now in fact seem to explain
28 Luciana Parisi
but occupy regions in between the virtual and the actual worlds. Machinic
nature defi nes such regions of engineering bodies out of which distinct
levels of order emerge: biological, cultural, technological, and so on. In
other words, machinic nature maps the mutual relations between all kinds
of partial bodies laying out the virtual potentials of matter (continual
variation). Machinic nature only coincides with assemblages that cut
across lineages and fi liative heredity without ceasing to affi rm the aimless
mutations of nature.
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic nature, I want to point
to the virtual tendencies of sex (the potentials of contagious transmis-
sion) emerging from what I call the “biodigital symbiosis of matter.” In
this instance, sex does not correspond to the biological and cultural forms
or technical functions of the organism (sex-gender identity). More pre-
cisely, the latter defi ne the resonating determinants of a vaster process of
transmission from which they arise. This process requires a notion of sex
abstract enough to catch the amodal or virtual links between the phase
spaces of nature: from unicellular to multicellular bodies, from the biologi-
cal body to the body of culture. As I show, this notion of abstract sex thus
entails processes of contagious transmission mapping the emergence of
virtual potentials at each actualization.
For feminist cultural criticism, the notion of machinic nature may
contribute to reproblematizing the binarism of embodiment and disem-
bodiment, nature and culture, sex and gender that has accompanied recent
debates in cyberculture and cyberfeminism.7 In particular, the engage-
ment with a nongenealogical model of evolution, far from identifying sex
with genitality or the biological function of coupling and fi liation, opens
up the materiality of sex onto contagious dynamics of transmission. These
dynamics may suggest a new critical approach to the politics of a body or
a third way out of the impasse between the essentialist (the world of the
given) and the constructivist (the world of culture) conceptions of nature
that have shaped recent debates about information sciences and technolo-
gies. In other words, it may contribute to extending the politics of desire
on a nature-culture continuum by generating a new understanding of the
changing conditions of power in bioinformatic capitalism. 8
Thus machinic nature may help readdress the relation between tech-
nology and desire beyond the logic of analogy and similitude of technology
and women, the female body and biological nature. This logic fails to map
the processual relation between terms that are never completely fi nite. It
confuses the zone in-between, the passage or movement of all elements and
particles participating in a relation, with the properties, types, and func-
tions resulting from a process of formation. In this sense, this logic cannot
account for the differential process of becoming of nature and culture; the
Schizogenesis
By mapping a third critical route away from the impasse between bio-
logical essentialism and discursive constructivism, I argue for a nonteleo-
logical notion of nature, challenging models of evolution that defi ne the
biological understanding of the body, sex, and reproduction according to
the arborescent logic of inheritance. In particular, Darwinism—and to
some extent neo-Darwinism—implies a fi liative model of the body based
on the binary logic of sexual exchange.
According to Darwin, natural selection is the principle by which each
slight variation is preserved through heredity to benefit the individual’s
adaptation to an ever-changing environment.11 Darwin’s model of evolu-
tion had challenged the creationist idea of the universe, by insisting that
populations develop through a gradual accumulation of variations spe-
cifically selected through their relations with the environment. In other
words, all species existing in the world have not always been the same
but are the result of slow changes subjected to the regulatory function
30 Luciana Parisi
of natural selection. Natural selection regulates variations by ensuring
common descent.12
August Weismann’s model of heredity transmission contributes to
defi ne common descent through the function of sexual reproduction.13
The inheritance of the germplasm through sexual coupling enables the
preservation of variations in a species. His theory, famously summarized
as “the Weismann Barrier,” argues that only the germline (the nucleic or
chromosomal DNA of the cell) guarantees direct fi liation. Indeed, germ
material is passed intact from parents to offspring. The barrier points to a
noncommunicative relation between germinal material (nucleic material of
the cell) and somatic material (nonnucleic material residing in the body of
the cell), in which only germ cells carry out the function of heredity trans-
mission. The soma is merely instructed by germinal material to express
the hereditary traits, but itself cannot transmit information. The somatic
parts of the animal cell lack vital genetic material. They have discrete life
spans and die. Thus germinal transmission ensures the inheritance of life
beyond somatic death. In other words, the sexual reproduction of living
substance surpasses its cellular destiny, which is to die.
This model of evolution is also central to Freud’s libidinal economy
of life, which explains how erotic impulses ward off the regression toward
inorganic death. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1929), Freud hypoth-
esizes that sexual reproduction counterbalances living organisms’ tendency
to die by transmitting germinal life. In his articulation, sexual instincts (or
eros), also defi ned as the “preserver of all things” or as “life instinct,” aim
at the coalescence of portions of living substance. The sexual inheritance
of germ cells explains the notion of libido as a self-preservative instinct,
or narcissistic eros, extended to individual cells.14
Like Darwin, Freud considers evolution in terms of a tendency toward
disorder. Sexual reproduction has the regulatory function of preserving
and rejuvenating variations by counterbalancing the drive toward the
inorganic (disorganization), less differentiated, fi nite soma. This return
to equilibrium requires a discharging of excessive energy. Pleasure is this
discharging of excitation: the channeling of accumulated internal tension
toward the outside. This libidinal economy of evolution is embedded in the
cyclic return of death into life, marked by a principle of constancy. In other
words, the discharge of variations through sexual reproduction. Accord-
ing to Freud, this thermodynamic equilibrium ensures the regeneration
of organic life.15 For Freud as for Darwin, the evolution of the organism
is regulated by the aim to discharge in order to charge again, the purpose
to reproduce life beyond the tendency to die.
In Creative Evolution (1983), Bergson argues against this entropic
model of evolution insofar as it tries to derive life from preexisting indi-
In this view, rather than a passage from actual to actual, the transmission
of variations involves the emergence of something new. Bergson intro-
duces indetermination in matter: virtually present forces entering into a
new actual relation through chance encounters. Virtuality in matter does
not have to be opposed to real matter. The virtual is not opposed to the
real but to the possible. The latter defi nes the realm of predictability: the
expected results deriving from one cause. The virtual, on the contrary, is
the real: the realm of pure potentials. In this sense, the virtual needs to be
related to the actual insofar as the virtual gives something different to the
actual that it generates by always enveloping the potential for something
else than the actual. Thus evolution can no longer be thought without the
unexpected emergence of potential variations, without the heterogeneous
production of actual forms of life that do not cease to actualize without
unleashing new potentials. Evolution does not entail the passage from
actuals to actuals—from the possible to the possible—but it can only be
conceived as a movement of individuation of the virtual tending toward
the actual; heterogeneous potentials tending toward heterogeneous forma-
tions. Thus variations emerge as an actualization of a virtual multiplicity:
a sudden stoppage of running flows (élan vital) whose potential surpasses
individuated actuals. In this sense, the transmission of life entails the
passage of virtual and not only actual energy. This passage of qualitative
variations zigzags across planes of actualization through infi nite splittings
and divisions.
Bergson suggests that the internal principle of germinal life is not at
all the result of selection from purely contingent variations. This principle
involves the continual self-modification of a genetic energy whose potential
is indeterminable. Such a continuum resides in the intuitive perception of
time as duration (5). The past is not in the past and the future is not in the
advent of that which is to come. Duration defi nes the coexistence of the
past with the future through a passing present: a transductive (transitua-
32 Luciana Parisi
tional) time. Similarly, according to Bergson, evolution does not proceed
through the gradual cumulation of substances summing up to a whole.
“Evolution requires a real continuity of the past in the present,” where the
past is something that endures in itself and is actualized through maximally
divergent lines (5). This implies a qualitative differentiation of time rather
than the juxtaposition of segments of time or the inheritance of the past
through a frozen present (linear heredity) (26).
As Bergson observes, Darwinism is unable to defi ne novelty in evolu-
tion (such as the emergence of new species) because it does not explain
movement in itself: movement as motor of nonpossible—or already actu-
alized—but potential variation. For Bergson, the energetic conception
of motion as merely stemming from a point or source of contact—a
leveler—needs to be replaced by another conception of movement as an
action of nonpunctual particles, particles that are without an anchoring
center and yet ceaselessly move, passing and traversing singular phases,
expanding through thousands of tendencies (258).
Bergson argues that natural selection is inadequate because all it
requires is an actualized organism’s adaptation to an external environ-
ment (169). But, he suggests, adaptation is not an effort to add new traits.
Adaptation entails a potential modification of the body, that is, a virtual
action as opposed to a passive accommodation. The body replies to selec-
tive pressures by changing its field of action. It invents new internal regions
of reception that are resonances of an outside in which they are, as it were,
in permanent metastable communication. Internal resonances do not
represent a genuine interiority or internal will of the individual body. The
invention of internal regions merely deploys a transduction of information
between milieus, a process that takes place on the porous membranes of a
body. As Gilbert Simondon argues: “The living being can be considered
to be a node of information that is being transmitted inside itself—it is a
system within a system, containing within itselff a mediation between two
different orders of magnitude.”18
In this sense, variations are not actualities accumulated and transmit-
ted through sexual reproduction. On the contrary, as recent theories of
evolution that embrace the molecular dynamics of organization argue,
variations emerge through the parallel networks between populations
and territories poised at the edge of a phase transition from one state to
another.19 Selection does not impose an order of fitness on these networked
relations. Rather, it is immanent to their regulatory circuits because it acts
at their differential degrees of complexity. 20 From the standpoint of virtual
evolution, sexual reproduction coincides with a phase of organization of
cellular and genetic architectures. These latter deploy processes of paral-
lel communication: the network relations between the germline and the
34 Luciana Parisi
determine the unpredictable emergence of mutations across and within
While the
species.
eukaryotes
Endosymbiosis challenges the Darwinian and Freudian economy of
evolution centered on the difference between simple and complex, homo- reproduce
geneous and heterogeneous, death and life, inorganic and organic. This
difference based on the germinal or nucleic function of information trans- by sexual
mission through sexual reproduction is believed to ensure the gradual
complexification of the species—the accumulation and discharge of varia- coupling that
tions enabling the overcoming of somatic death or the regression toward
inorganic and simpler levels of matter. Endosymbiosis exposes a parallel involves both
process of transmission previously all but unknown to science and thus
unaccounted from within the dominant paradigms of Darwinism and neo- nucleic and
Darwinism. It is thus not a question of organic and inorganic, simple and
mitochondrial
complex, life and death, progression and regression. Rather, as Margulis
argues, it is about endosymbiotic modifications pointing to the unpredict-
transmission,
able emergence of mutations.
Endosymbiosis argues that the classical evolutionary understanding of bacteria trade
the development of life, based on differences of degree (increasing com-
plexity) and types (species) and on random mutation (Darwin’s theory information
of natural selection), dismisses the symbiotic processes of inheritance
that explain the continual modifications of cellular and genetic trans- in an open
mission. Endosymbiosis challenges the “zoocentrism” of the theories of
evolution (based on linear evolution from the simple to the complex) and communication
demonstrates that “each animal cell is, in fact, an uncanny assembly, the
evolutionary merger of distinct bacterial metabolisms.”23
system by-
For endosymbiosis, bacteria (i.e., cells without a membrane-bounded
passing genetic
nucleus) defi ne the dynamics of transmission in evolution through the viral
trading of genetic information. Although not undifferentiated, bacteria speciation.
are not species-classified organisms that breed among themselves and
reproduce through mating. Bacteria are colonies of unicellular bodies that
send genes by a simple contact, thus transferring and receiving informa-
tion across phyla without regard for species distinctions, reengineering the
genetic material of each lineage as they go through. Thus nucleic trans-
mission at the core of the eukaryotic realm of metazoa (plants, animals,
and humans) does not defi ne the complexification of life. According to
Margulis, eukaryotes (cells with a membrane-bounded nucleus) are the
unexpected result of the long symbiotic parasitism between distinct bac-
teria, among which mitochondria, under certain pressures, became their
permanent hosts. Nucleic transmission, therefore, far from exemplifying
complexification, is a modification of bacterial communication. However,
while the eukaryotes reproduce by sexual coupling that involves both
36 Luciana Parisi
ing transmission 3,900 million years ago. Genetic engineering takes as
its model the trading of genes across bacterial bodies that use viruses as
vectors. This recombination of genetic material between independent cel-
lular bodies marks the reemergence of the most ancient sex: bacterial sex.
Since the lower Precambrian times, bacteria have traded genes across the
most divergent lineages. Biotech opens a new channel for bacterial trading,
but what is transmitted across the channel will not reliably conform to the
possible outcomes programmed by science.
Biotechnologies, such as transgenesis, also entail the horizontal trans-
fer of genetic material, the reengineering of cells across species barriers to
improve organs and cell transplants, to make insulin, and to produce new
cells and tissues for “cell therapies.”25 This nonfi liative recombination of
genetic sequences and cellular compounds favors the emergence of new
viruses that have come to defi ne new generations of mutant vegetables,
insects, fi shes, reptiles, sheep, and humans. Transgenesis accelerates dif-
ferential mutations in patterns of evolution that exceed differences in kind
and degree between species as well as within the same species.
Cloning also challenges Weismann and Freud’s libidinal economy of
life (the barrier between the germline and the somaline). In particular,
mammal cloning suggests that the somatic material contained in the
cell outside the nucleus is not destined to die but is itself transmissible. 26
According to the central belief in evolutionary dynamics and embryology,
nucleic DNA—the germline—is considered to be the true organizer of life,
that which decides the destiny of parts. Cloning, on the contrary, suggests
that somatic substances themselves have specific abilities and potentials
of individuation unknown to nucleic DNA. Thus the putative organiz-
ing function of life attributed to DNA—the germline—results in a mere
induction, whose nature is a matter of indifference. 27 It is not nucleic DNA
that determines variation. The latter emerges from an immanent relation
between the germline—the arrow of time for Darwin and Freud—and the
somaline—the inorganic or regressive line of death: that is, the capacity
of the body of the cell, the inorganic somatic body, to feed back on the
germline. This relation points to the nonlinear circuits of reversible causal-
ity whereby actual variations act back or affect the virtual potentials of a
body. Thus it is no longer a question of either regressive or inorganic line
of death and progressive or organic line of life. Death and life no longer
can be thought in terms of simple and complex matter. On the contrary,
with endosymbiosis, death does not cease happening in every becoming. It
defi nes an intensive movement of matter: continual mutations rather than
ultimate points of discharge.
38 Luciana Parisi
does not suggest the accomplishment of a natural design, which ensures
the complexification of life through the overcoming of death.
The virtual tendencies of biodigital sex—that is, the symbiotic assem-
blage of the biological and technological levels of information transfer—
feed neither back nor forward in time. Rather, this modification indicates
a transition: a continual variation between distinct phases such as the bio-
logical and the technological orders of matter. This transition points to
a transductive (or a continual variation) of time: a present futurity (the
action of the present on the past, and of the past on the future on a machinic
plane of nature), according to which the biodigital sex feeds back on the
biological order of matter, which in turn unleashes indeterminate potentials
of transmission across the technological order in the future.
This symbiotic modification—that is, the biodigital assemblage—is
not part of a natural design, in which new dimensions are added to a
simpler matter. Symbiotic mutations are not the end result of previous
parasitic relations: the possible outcomes of already actualized forms and
functions of transmission. Symbiotic assemblages are not induced by a
forced or spontaneous cooperation between individuated bodies to reach
a shared goal or to survive in a hostile environment. These mutations
defi ne neither a harmonious nor a confl ictual state of nature driven by
group collaboration or individual competition—altruism and egoism both
being rooted in the humanization of evolution. Symbiosis involves chance
encounters opened up to potential abductions, viral infection, nucleariza-
tion, and multiparasitism between bodies out of which unprecedented com-
positions emerge. These are processes of becoming or machinic involutions
on a nature-culture continuum. They entail the mutation of all the parts
caught up in a composition. I call these potential mutations, occurring
in all dynamics of contagious transfer across linear time, abstract sex. In
this sense, abstract sex does not coincide with a specific level or time of
transmission, but it catches the virtual potentials accompanying singular
modes of transmission and therefore exposes an indeterminate multiplicity,
which is never assimilated in actualization. In other words, abstract sex
designates a mutant plane that envelops and is enveloped by all modes of
transmission operating by means of contagious proliferation rather than
fi liative sexual reproduction.
Abstract sex challenges the germinal or organic model of sexual
reproduction. Although I do not have time to demonstrate it here, it is
important to say that abstract sex is not synonymous with Bergson’s élan
vital understood as the differential complexification of matter. 28 Abstract
sex designates virtual potentials that are not enclosed in themselves but
are asymmetrically adjacent to every point in the actual world: intensive
40 Luciana Parisi
dynamics of materiality. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, there is another,
nondeterministic process that constitutes a phylum of immanent relations
traversing strata, as well as layers within the same stratum. 32 This is the
process of destratification consisting of a phylum of intensive links falling
outside, or in the cracks between, the strata. This phylum lays out the
autonomy of indeterminate yet differential potentials from the strata that
themselves actualize. It suggests that virtual potentials are never com-
pletely actualized. The virtual is partially siphoned into the actual but in
doing so the process itself kick-starts a revirtualization of the actual: the
reemergence of a turbulent swerve away from equilibrium.
Abstract sex maps the parallel dynamics of destratification or becom-
ing of virtual matter. In this sense, the biodigital assemblage implies nei-
ther the complexification of nor the return to bacterial sex. Theories of
complexity, indeed, risk reintroducing teleology in nature by highlighting
the boundless creativity of reproductive life—either confi rmed by sexual
reproduction or by the self-replicating genes—aiming to enrich matter.
Theories of complexity still distinguish unicellular from multicellular
levels of organization according to the gradual scale of the simple and the
complex, inorganic and organic, death and life. On the contrary, endo-
symbiosis helps us break away from teleological nature by mapping an
antigenealogical emergence of mutations, which follow no natural design.
Such an antigenealogy involves a contagious trading between singular
compositions of bodies forming nonfi liative packs able to produce their
own lines of invention (i.e., symbiotic modifications). From this stand-
point, I argue that information trading or contagion implies no aim in
nature. This trading precedes and exceeds the patterns of transmission
governed by a transcendent principle of fi liative reproduction.
Information trading entails the contagious propagation of variations
not regulated by sexual exchange, copulation, and fi liative inheritance of the
same. Trading opens up sex to symbiotic assemblages laying out a micro-
political field of contagious relations between the most diverse bodies on a
nature-culture continuum. 33 This micropolitics shatters the evolutionary
model of sex determining the biological function of gender. In this sense,
Darwinian and neo-Darwinian models of evolution predicated on the
selection of sexual reproduction as the best-adapted mode of transmis-
sion that ensures variations across species needs to give in to a nonfi lia-
tive dynamics of information transfer, an a-organic sex opened up to the
emergence of virtual potentials. In other words, the sex-gender system of
identification based on the function of mating or sexed organisms reduces
the notions of inheritance and transmission to a purposive notion of nature,
defi ned by progressive and regressive movements, organic and inorganic
matter, life and death drives. To challenge such a notion without dismissing
Symbiotic Micropolitics
42 Luciana Parisi
lular) body. Symbiotic transmission suggests that a body does not corre-
spond to actual forms and functions but is open to its potential contagions
arising from the indeterminate transfer between molecular bodies. Such a
transfer between hosts and guests cutting across lineages suggests a notion
of contagious sex that refutes the libidinal logic of fi liation. Contagious
sex—or transmission—enables us to map the open-ended potentials of a
body, by affi rming, together with Spinoza, “we do not yet know what a
body is capable of.”34
From this standpoint, micropolitics maps the molecular levels of body
politics defi ned by intensive relations—the symbiotic association and disas-
sociation of particles and forces operating on the networked body-mind
parallelism. It exposes body politics to the schizogenic plane of symbiotic
variations swerving from the linear trajectories of the economy of fi lia-
tion. Thus micropolitics is not synonymous with local politics confi ned to
specific biotechnological conditions. For micropolitics, each local relation
resonates with collective conditions expanding on a larger scale (continuity
in variation). Similarly, micropolitics needs not be confused with a situated
politics of embodiment defi ned by given partialities. Micropolitics does
not associate relations of power with actual terms without accounting for
their indeterminate potentials. In this sense, micropolitics encompasses all
levels of stratification (biophysical, biocultural, and biodigital), suggesting
not an identity but a continual feedback of relations between distinct levels
of order, which are virtually linked insofar as they emerge from a material
plane of potential variations.
Thus sex is not an actual form and function of transmission reiterat-
ing dominant models of evolution but becomes an indeterminate quantum
of thought and extension, proliferating through the contagious trading
of matter that affect—impinge on—the sociocultural determination of
positions (gender). The sex-gender relation no longer determines the iden-
tity—analogy or resemblance—between biological function and cultural
behavior, but involves the emergence of virtual potentials that act on the
sex-gender biocultural determinants. Thus the biocultural actualizations
of sex and gender, based on the central function of sexual reproduction,
are never to be embraced as the ultimate forms and functions of sex. Sex
rather involves a virtual-actual process of transmission, a nonclimac-
tic distribution in which actualizations do not exhaust but intensify the
capacity of an open-ended body to enter new symbiotic compositions.
From this standpoint, it would be misleading to argue that this capacity
coincides with the present biodigital mode of transmission transforming
the sex-gender relation. The actualization of biodigital sex lays open the
emergence of new mutations, which act back on the biocultural order of
matter, which will in turn unleash unpredictable transformations of the
44 Luciana Parisi
In this sense, micropolitics points to the amodal link between tech-
nologies of reproduction, nature, and feminine desire: the virtual plane of
immanence out of which the most varied modifications of matter emerge.
This link suggests a new approach to body politics involving a materialist
construction of sex that moves beyond the critical impasse of the politics
of representation. The latter congeals the microchanges of relations into
one structural aggregate (the subject, the organism, and the signifier) that
is erected as a delegate of a potential multiplicity. In this sense, the politics
of representation is a macropolitics concerned with points of equilibrium,
the perception of movement from a distance, from above and from afar;
the structuring of movement. Macropolitics will always ask molecular
femininity to represent the sociopolitical position of the subject woman,
and biological forms and functions of reproductive sex to represent desire.
Yet it can be argued that macropolitics only corresponds to one level of
the processual dynamics of power that affects—and in turn transforms—
the macropolitics of sociocultural positions. Micropolitics comes neither
before nor after macropolitics. It is immanent to all forms and functions
of macropolitics. It resonates through all kinds of political organizations
insofar as it precedes and exceeds the constitution of sociocultural deter-
minants (gender, race, class).
The strange attraction between feminine desire, information trading,
and biotechnologies invites us to engage with a micropolitical field of rela-
tions that coincides with a Spinozist ethics-ethology of nature. This field
implies working against the ground of a morality founded on the illusion-
ary hierarchy of consciousness over thought, mind over body, and on the
ultimate domination of bodily passions through the judgment of that which
is good and evil. 37 The primacy of judgment over unpredictable dynamics
of encounter between bodies defi nes the morality of the human-centered
perspective of nature. Spinoza’s ethics departs from such a perspective
with the notion of parallelism, according to which, rather than a body-mind
hierarchy, each action in the mind coincides with an action in the body, and
each passion in the body with a passion in the mind. 38 The moral system
of judgment is replaced by the qualitative differences (good and bad) of
modes of existence that are relative and partial. Good d is not a value but
entails a direct relation between bodies that increases collective capaci-
ties to act and become. Bad, on the other hand, is defi ned by poisonous
encounters between bodies that decompose a body’s relations of parts.
This ethics-ethology of nature defi nes the micropolitics of sex as
involving the joyful and sad passions of a body-mind. For Spinoza, only
joyful encounters catalyze the power of a collective body to become active.
Yet this power does not then entail the pleasurable release of an ultimate
Notes
46 Luciana Parisi
7. For a recent insight in these debates, see Mary Flagan and Austin Booth,
eds., Reload: Rethinking WWomen and Cyberculture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002); Katherine N. Hayles, How W We Became Posthuman (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999); Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones (London: Fourth Estate,
1997).
8. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, the dynamics of desire are not to be
associated with the notion of lack, the natural given, or the Freudian notion of
pleasure. Desire implies the constitution of a field of immanence—a body without
organs—marked by thresholds of intensity. This body is biological, collective,
and political. The politics of desire suggests a politics of materiality that places
feminine desire on collective assemblages. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 530n39; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism, and Schizophre-
nia, 333; Gilles Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” in Foucault and His Interlocutors,
ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. D. W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1997), 183–95. On the bioinformatic logic of power in cybernetic capitalism, see
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (London: FA Books), 1991; Eugene
Thacker, “Redefi ning Bioinformatics: A Critical Analysis of Technoscientific
Bodies,” Enculturation, Post-Digital Studies 3 (2000), www.enculturation.gmu.edu/
3_1/toc.html; and Thacker, “The Post-Genomic Era Has Already Happened,”
Biopolicy Journal 3 (2000), www.bioline.org.br/.
9. The model of representation refers to a system of organization of signs
where structures of meaning arrange gestural, perceptual, cognitive, cultural,
and technological signs under the hierarchies of the signifier. See Félix Guattari,
Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York:
Penguin, 1984).
10. On the notion of materialist constructivism, see Brian Massumi, The
Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002), x.
11. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, By Means of Natural Selection
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: Modern
Library, 1993). See Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche
and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997), 117; Ansell Pearson,
Germinal Life, 69.
12. In the nineteenth century, Alfred Russel W Wallace associated Darwin’s
notion of descent with modification with the term evolution intended as organic
progress. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Philogeny (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1977).
13. See August Weismann,
W Studies in the Theory of Descent, 2 vols., trans. R.
Medola (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882); Ansell
Pearson, Germinal Life, 4–9, 10–11.
14. For Freud, libido is a regressive satisfaction bound up with the death
instinct—the inorganic. For Deleuze and Guattari, libido operates as a productive
impulse tending toward turbulent becoming (supermolecular declinations) rather
than circling in a self-enclosed cycle. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, 333.
15. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychological W
Works of Sigmund Freud , ed. James Strachey, vol.
8 (London: Hogarth, 1920–22), 55–56.
48 Luciana Parisi
35. This ethology entails the passions and actions of a body that defi ne the
materiality of desire. For Spinoza, desire is appetite (appetitus) accompanied by
the awareness of a passage, the information of the state of the affection of the
body. See Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 3, 9, scholium.
36. This micropolitics also relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-
woman. On the importance of the becoming-woman for body politics, see Grosz,
Volatile Bodies, 176–77; and Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook, eds., Deleuze and
Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
37. Spinoza, Ethics, pts. 1, 3.
38. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 22.