Creative Destruction
VIOLENCE & DANCING
By Cody Without Organs
"There are n sexes" says Gilles Deleuze;
"There are not two sexes, there are n sexes; there are as many sexes as there are assemblages. And since each of us enters into several assemblages, each of us has n sexes. When children discover that they are reduced to one sex, male or female, they discover their powerlessness: they lose the machinic sense and are left only with the signification of a tool. And then a child really does fall into depression. They have been damaged; their countless sexes have been stolen!"
-Interpretation of Utterances
On my journey to finally understanding what the f*ck a 'Body without Organs' is - I came across several, beautiful ideas from two beautiful French women.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Their project was twofold: anti-capitalism and anti-fascism.
I would never realise the scope of their project until many years after first coming across their names.
In their rampaging assault on psychoanalysis and structuralist interpretations of Marxism, D&G continuously carve out a literature for those of us who've felt left out by mainstream academic philosophy.
'Us' being the 'minority', opposed to the 'molar'- referring more to power than to population (Woman is a minority yet is not a minority in terms of population).
This is what becoming-minor means.
I.e becoming-woman.
'Us' being trans-anarchists, gender-abolitionary marxists, Nietzscheans, post-colonial queer theorists, et cetera.
Deleuze & Guattari write for us a minor literature.
A literature carved out from/for the minority.
"How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?"
-Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
They produce concepts (such is the thesis of 'What is Philosophy?' - to create concepts) enough new concepts and you have yourself a new language game.
Their philosophy is more like a toolbox than an instruction manual, it never tells you how a thing should be used, it simply provides tools and guidelines to allow you to work out how a thing can be used.
Utility.
This includes things which seem to us as segmented and necessary, for many this includes sex. Orientation. Gender. Nationality. History.
But, we the minority have always known that even the most sedmented of concepts can be destroyed.
“Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
-Capitalist Realism
"There are n sexes".
-Interpretation of Utterances
Brian Massumi's foreword to A Thousand Plateaus describes a concept as "like a brick", "it can be used to build a courthouse of reason, or it can be thrown through the window."
As a trans-person, my initial desire was always to build my courthouse of reason, or at the very least - to come across a courthouse already built.
Such is the constitutive element of queer theory, which tries to invent and propel a language and a way of thinking. This allowed me to find new ways of expressing myself, new ways of becoming-active.
But there is also a destitute element. The element of de(con)struction. To tear down walls, to throw concepts through windows.
It would be a mistake to think the two (constitutive/destitute) as mutually exclusive. After all;
"how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?"
-Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Becoming-trans has destructive and constructive strata. Its lines of flight operate not only in production, but also in antiproduction.
We are not just producing our own form of life but we are also critiquing alternative forms of life. And we are also always critiquing our own. To carve out a way of life, means to slice, to cut, to remove something in order to give life to something new.
Something else1.
The attachment of biology to gender, this string is cut.
A new string is made. Or new strings. We choose plurality over singularity. We choose the Rhizome and its multiplicity over arboreal structures and their limiting models.
We cut one string, so several more can grow.
New lines of flight.
Transness, non-binary, non-essentialism, performativity, queerness, gender abolition.
"One is also always several" - a trans person is never alone.
Becoming-trans is always becoming-multiple. For the same reason;
"you can't be one wolf, you're always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others."
- One or Several Wolves
For a wolf is always pack. Trans is always a community.
A language carved out for us. Contingent agents of constitutive destruction. We seek to create life out of destruction. In the same way one destroys an ailment with medicine to restore life to the ailed.
We create our own language, but we are not limited to ourselves. We are always active to bring our language with us wherever we are. It is a "new plot of land".
We can also always leave where we are to enter this language instead.
"I would prefer not to" - says Bartleby.
Kant calls this the 'affirmation of a non-predicate'.
- "I would prefer" - affirmation, "not to" - non-predicate.
"For Kant, infinite judgments [...] are "infinite” insofar as they extend to the infinite range of things that remain after we exclude everything of the predicate. predicate within a category, negative infinite judgments deny the category itself."
-Hegel on Infinite Judgements
Simply by saying "no" we say "yes" to a thousand ("infinite") different things.
By saying "I would prefer not to" to a binary format of gender, we open up a vista for a thousand new ones to flourish.
By saying "I would prefer not to" to gender, we open up a vista for a thousand new forms of identity and subjectivity to flourish.
When we create and use language we create and use ourselves. This is good. This is labour, living labour as Marx describes. It's the active "absolute becoming" of the subject and its role in history.
Language in any materialism must be prepared to deal with itself in the material world. With a material subject.
Which is to say, materialism is a kind of monism, in which everything is connected (by something else).
This connection is the world-itself.
“The world is all that is the case”.
Tractatus Lógico-Philosophicus
We are this world-itself.
Everything we do is everything the world does.
Heidegger calls this Dasein or Being-in-the-world.
Destroying worlds to give birth to a thousand new ones.
Destroying the world-itself to plant the seeds for an entirely new world. Destroying ourselves to plant the seeds for an entirely new us.
Destroying capitalism, destroying fascism, destroying Essentialism, destroying humanism, destroying identity.
Destroying is always a resisting.
Out of this resistance comes the ground for the new.
That is to say, resistance is a 'grounding'.
This grounding is a platform of smooth space.
Out of this smooth space, the Body without Organs operates.
Actuality meets Virtuality and returns to Actuality again.
Grounding is the first Act. And the Third Term. It is Primary. It comes in from the outside to mediate relations.
From this, potentials and intensities (Virtuality) can flow and blossom (Actuality).
We call these blossoming of potential; 'becomings'.
I.e Becoming-grounded.
As Michel Foucault says in the History of Sexuality:
“Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power".
This resistance in power can only take place within power, never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.
This is what we do.
We are a force. A power. Coming into contact with other forces and powers.
Will we flourish (and find ground?) Or will we die.
We have to die, say Hardt and Negri in their Empire.
"Don’t try to save yourself — in fact, your self has, to be sacrificed! This does not mean that liberation casts us into an indifferent sea with no objects of identification, but rather the existing identities will no longer serve as anchors."
"Abolition also requires the destruction of all the institutions of the corruption of the common […], such as the family, the corporation, and the nation. This involves an often violent battle against the ruling powers and also, since these institutions in part define who we now are, an operation surely more painful than bloodshed.
Revolution is not for the faint of heart. It is for monsters.
You have to lose who you are to discover what you can become”.
-Empire
I have always been becoming-trans. This has always been violent.
Sometimes it's fun.
Transness is like dancing. Dancing with oneself in the world.
Dancing with linguistically reified concepts like biology and gender.
Dancing with euphoria and dysphoria. Dancing with the world-itself.
Violence is like dancing. Dancing with life and death.
“[T]wo elemental pugnacious forces in the mind, Eros and Thanatos, locked in eternal battle."
— Beyond the Pleasure Principle
There are n dances.
Go out and destroy the world. Go in and destroy yourself.
Cut the roots which are impotent and can no longer grow.
Carve out new paths and roots which will give birth to a thousand new ones.
A thousand new dances.
This is something which we have called Negative Mapping.