Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (review)

Pelletier, Kevin.

Cultural Critique, 58, Fall 2004, pp. 202-206 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota PressDOI: 10.1353/cul.2004.0028

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METAMORPHOSES: TOWARDS A MATERIALISTTHEORY OF BECOMINGBY ROSI BRAIDOTTIBlackwell Publishers, Inc., 2002

Kevin Pelletier

Wonderfully thought provoking, highly stylized, and imaginativelywritten, Rosi Braidotti’s latest critical endeavor, Metamorphoses, seeksto elaborate a theory of becoming that is adequate to the complexitiesof the twenty-Wrst century. Discarding an antiquated, concept-boundlanguage ill-equipped to represent the speed at which change occurs,Metamorphoses deploys instead a Wgurative language that resistslinear conceptions of history and teleological assumptions of thesubject—a language, in other words, that is more suitable for theoriz-ing change and transformation. A fundamental impulse informingBraidotti’s thought is a desire “not to know who we are,” but “what,at last, we want to become” (2), and it is this desire that incites her tointerrogate the shortage of Wgurations that would otherwise allowher to map “structural transformations of subjectivity” in postindus-trial postmodernity. Metamorphoses consists of two basic divisions:the Wrst is comprised by the prologue and the Wrst two chapters inwhich Braidotti situates herself vis-à-vis Luce Irigaray and GillesDeleuze, the two philosophers with whom she is most closely alignedand to whom she remains most indebted. In this Wrst division,Braidotti elucidates her notions of “enXeshed materialism” and sex-ual difference that she maintains are crucial to a philosophy ofbecoming. In the second division, comprised by the third, fourth, andWfth chapters, as well as the epilogue, Braidotti explores modernWgurations as she seeks to think difference and transformation innonnegative, nonpejorative terms. The animal, insect, cyborg, andmachine are several of the key representations Braidotti examines

Cultural Critique 58—Fall 2004—Copyright 2004 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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with the intent of discovering their efWcacy for mapping change andtracing 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 hascharacterized Western cultural and philosophical thought. Braidottiborrows from Irigaray’s notion of the “sensible transcendental” toargue that the body is a “complex interplay of highly constructedsocial and symbolic forces . . . not an essence, let alone a biologicalsubstance, but a play of forces, a surface of intensities, pure simulacrawithout originals” (21). Accordingly, it is essential to see “female cor-poreal reality” not as that which already “is,” and not as somethingthat merely reinscribes its polarized opposition to the masculine,“but as virtual . . . as a process of becoming” (24–25). It is this view of“woman,” one that emphasizes the “multi-centered, internally differ-entiated female feminist subjectivity,” that, for Braidotti, stands asa powerful critique of phallogocentrism. Braidotti links this notion ofthe virtual feminine to Deleuze’s notion of the “empirical transcen-dental,” with its focus on the embodied subject that Xows rhizomati-cally “as a multiplicity and along multiple axes” (75). ConjoiningIrigaray to Deleuze enables Braidotti to reconceive the Feminine/Other as “a complex, heterogeneous, non-unitary entity” (72), a blockof becoming of nomadic subjectivity, a subject in process, never Wn-ally Wxed, but existing “in different levels of power and desire, con-stantly shifting between willful choice and unconscious drives” (76–77).

While the Irigaray-Deleuze 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 discursivelyconstituted creates some inconsistencies in the text. These inconsis-tencies arise, not because she wants to maintain a materialist theoryof sexual difference per se, but because sexual difference, which shedescribes as “always already there” (164) persists when the notion ofpersistence itself, as a symptom of binaristic thinking, is somethingthat her entire analysis attempts to undo. In other words, Braidottiis quite right to suggest that “becoming-woman” is a process thatcan only be mapped along sexually differentiated lines—something,she claims, Deleuze and Guattari fail to consider—but this sexual

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differentiation can only be understood as part of what she calls a“politics of location,” that is, a critique of the speciWc context inwhich a nomadic 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 playsa 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 traditionless given. Anticipating charges ofher own “molar” thinking, the only defense Braidotti gives is that atleast she is aware of it (167).

Notwithstanding some of the internal contradictions that appearwith regard to sexual difference, Braidotti’s text powerfully indictsWestern culture with what she calls a “deWcit in the scale of repre-sentation” needed for a cartography of contemporary metamorphos-ing subjects. Thus, she spends considerable time working throughsome current Wgurations, especially the insect, the monster, and themachine, to see how they might aid in mapping the nomadic subjectand its “differences within” (28), and it is in these sections that sheis especially exciting and provocative. For instance, the Wgure of theinsect, which Braidotti says “provides a new paradigm for discontin-uous transmutations without major disruptions,” is a key Wgurationof difference, for it represents “multiple singularities without Wxedidentities” (149). The speed at which it metamorphoses as well asits “immense power of adaptation” make the insect “the entity mostclosely related to [Deleuze’s notions of] the becoming-molecularand 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. Accordingto Braidotti, even though monsters represent an otherness that is“simultaneously commodiWed into objects of material and discursiveconsumption,” they are also “emerging in their own right as alterna-tive, resisting and empowering counter-subjectivities” (198). Themonster, 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 thephallogocentric sense of “woman” as a Wxed, immobile, unitary other.

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Similarly, Braidotti reads the “body-machine” as seen in scienceWction (aptly described by Braidotti as meta(l)morphosis) “as simplyyet another Wguration 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 interrelationswith a number of external forces or others” (254), also called “symbi-otic interdependence” (226); this is a Wguration that dislodges thesubject from its state of insularity and uniWed stasis as it representsthe subject’s “co-presence of different elements . . . different stages ofevolution” (226) that are central to nomadic becoming.

While this summary in no way exhausts the kinds of Wgurationsthat interest Braidotti, they do emphasize the concerns that she hasfor transforming feminist discourse into a discourse of becoming.More Wgurations make their way into her analysis to assist her inachieving this goal: the animal, the freak, the automaton, the bodydouble, the robot, and Braidotti carefully attends to each with sensi-tive and insightful analyses. While she looks to these Wgurations asways of thinking difference and desire in positive ways, she is carefulnot to romanticize them as ideals or as ends in themselves. Forinstance, she does not valorize the “body-machine” as a state of per-fectibility, nor does she desire an escape from the human body to themechanical body (223). She is more interested in viewing these rela-tions symbiotically, as blocks of becoming, as processes “of intersect-ing forces (affects) and spatio-temporal variables (connections)” (21).There are, however, one or two conspicuous gaps in Braidotti’s textthat leave room for further work. First, Braidotti states throughouther book that the theory of becoming she is advocating has practicalpolitical applicability (see pages 20, 61, 206, 245, for instance), and yetshe never really explains how a practical politics would emerge froma Xuid nomadic position. All she says is that her brand of philosoph-ical nomadism can “complexify” politics (206). Moreover, while theenergy that propels her thinking and the celebratory mood that ischaracteristically hers is, in so many ways, infectious, the traumaof 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 ecstatic one. The sen-sation of always being in Xux, far from any stable ground, is, for

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Braidotti, only to be extolled. Might there be disadvantages to thisabsence of stability? Nevertheless, Braidotti has offered a signiWcantcontribution to the growing number of philosophies of becoming.Her analysis is refreshing in the possibilities it opens up and invigo-rating to read. And in these “strange times,” with these “strangethings that are happening” (1), Braidotti has securely positioned her-self at the forefront of contemporary feminist debates.

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