Becoming and Dialectics in Batman and Avatar
By Don’t Even Dream About it
And
Cody Without Organs
Introduction
In this essay, we have attempted to combine media analysis with continental philosophy - what Baudrillard and the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) have called theory fiction - to blur the lines between theory, the typically non-fiction, technical literature and fiction, the poetic and stylish literature. One aims to inform, the other to entertain.
Theoryfiction asks: 'Why not both?'
Our teleology and our aims are to illustrate and to entertain.
Our Spinozan Joyful Passions, is to diagnose the media of Batman and James Cameron’s Avatar with the ideas and concepts of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, G. W. F Hegel, Jean Baudrillard, Franz Fanon, Jacques Lacan and Mark Fisher. In a double-articulation, to explain how these concepts can be used for media analysis and how these media can be used to analyse these concepts.
Specifically, we want to use and explain the language developed by Deleuze and Guattari, most significantly in their second addition to the Capitalism and Schizophrenia series: A Thousand Plateaus.
We take a look at a couple of their Plateaus: Treatise on the Nomadic War Machine, and Becoming-intense, Becoming-animal.
What is the Nomadic War Machine? What do D&G mean by becoming? What is Becoming-animal?
To call upon another particular monster of philosophy, we use the dialectics of Hegel and Fanon combining our answers to these questions with the answers provided by the Phenomenology of Spirit and the master-slave dialectic. Ultimately, we only weaponize dialectics insofar as dialectics can be Negatively Mapped on a rhizomatic structure. Or on a Plane of Consistency.
We use media to illustrate the tension between two models of thinking: arboreal and rhizomatic. Dialectical and Pluralist.
Killing several birds with one stone.
Since it is Baudrillard too who has provided the background on which we operate, we use a couple of his more famous concepts (simulacra and hyperreality) and examine the critique of Baudrillard and the psychoanalysis of Lacan made by Gilles Deleuze in his 'Difference & Repetition'. Dragging this all through the films which had inspired this work to emerge, the 1992/2008 Batman and the 2009 Avatar.
Batman
1.1 Becoming-Bat, Becoming- Cat, Becoming-Penguin
Batman, in all of its iterations, has always been a story about becoming.
Bruce Wayne, the man beneath the mask of Batman, is a character with an unforgettable back story.
As a young child, Bruce witnessed the death of his parents, thus leading to his first becoming; becoming-orphan.
But unlike the orphans in a story like A Series of Unfortunate Events, Bruce’s childhood is of little significance. It is only significant insofar that it provides the catalyst for Wayne’s becoming. It is made significant retroactively through the story it goes on to tell.
This origin story is precisely that, an origin. All origins are the origins of a becoming. Of several becomings.
[...] "Becoming-" is a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage.
[...] In "becoming-" one piece of the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity."
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html
As the story goes, Bruce responds to the death of his parents with a thirst for vengeance. It is up to Batman, and Batman alone, to keep the streets of Gotham clean.
By "keeping the streets of Gotham clean" , Batman means striated.
This is the cleanliness the despotic Bat seeks, not smooth, but ordered and bordered. Locked down. Governed. Captured. Territorialized. The Fascist Bat of State Capture; the dark counterpart of the bourgeois man-suit puppet Bruce Wayne.
"Smooth spaces are the territory of the nomads, while striated spaces are created by the sedentary."1
Batman's own becoming is the unbecomings of others, the becoming of all authoritarian power is a becoming which makes sedentary, rigid, and structured. "Power builds walls"2.
His parents' death leads to the emergence of the Batman whose presence and absence becomes the gaze of the panopticon. When he is present, discipline is swiftly dealt to those who apparently warrant the hard, cold, dark justice of the now booted and suited Bruce Wayne become-bat. To produce docile subjects.
His absence equally is rendered as the possibility for surveillance. Criminals on the streets of Gotham can no longer tell when there is or isn't a bat watching, and it is always safer to assume the former. This is the disciplinary power of Batman which emerged from the fear of the Return of the Real3; the original trauma of the primal scene where a young Bruce witnesses the death of his parents.
This is the death drive of Batman - who beyond the Pleasure Principle - is compelled to prevent any future simulacra of having to witness his parents' death again. And to prevent this occurring for others.
Batman is the result of a becoming fully located within the oedipal triad. Daddy-mommy-me.
The results of this becoming-batman are the striated streets.
Batman becomes the law-providing and pleasure-prohibiting father figure of Gotham. Do as he tells you or get sent to your room (get beaten within an inch of your life and then interrogated for further Information).
Smooth spaces have no law of the father.
In The Batman (2022), one of his nemeses 'Riddler' makes a provocative and incredibly Lacanian statement about Batman and his 'true identity', he announces that he is not at all bothered about finding out who Batman really is, because he knows the mask itself, the Batman, Is who he really is.
Bruce Wayne is the Mask Batman wears. Bruce Wayne died with his parents, to become the batman.
What is not so obvious, is why he becomes-bat?
In Batman lore, this question is trivial. Perhaps Batman saw a bat and was inspired? Perhaps it is because Bats travel in the shadows? Batman’s power resides in his imperceptibility. According to the Batman wiki page, Batman described the purpose of his disguise to "... be able to strike terror into [criminals] hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible...". Batman doesn’t seek to resemble a Bat, but becomes-Bat in his becoming-imperceptible.
In Batman Returns (1992), Bruce Wayne’s becoming-bat is contrasted by Oswald Cobblepot’s becoming-penguin and Selina Kyle’s becoming-cat. It is clear that within this film that one never becomes one bat, one cat, or one penguin. But rather, each of these becomings are several.
In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ Deleuze and Guattari argue that, “becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (239).
Becoming is never an imitation, nor is it a form of method acting. Becoming requires real change.
Batman lives in his cave of bats, as well as with his butler Alfred who serves as Bruce’s pseudo-Oedipal father. It is fairly well known that Bruce became Batman following the death of his parents. The Bourgeois Batman, seeking to avenge his parents, uses his becoming-bat to bring “order” to the already striated city of Gotham.
Like Batman, Oswalds' parents are dead.
Oswald, who as a baby was thrown into a river because his parents couldn’t bear to accommodate his disabled body, was raised by a pack of penguins in the sewer of Gotham. Where perhaps a psychoanalyst would read Oswald’s becoming-penguin as Oswald filling in the gaps left by his parents, this would fail to account for Oswald’s becoming. It isn’t that he saw the penguins as his parents. But rather, that he formed a multiplicity with the penguins. He became a part of the pact! He formed an alliance with them.
Oswolds becoming-Penguin is not hyperreal simulacra, but is what makes him extraordinary. The Penguin recognizes himself as a human-animal subject: “My Name Is Not Oswald! It's Penguin. I Am Not A Human Being! I Am An Animal!".
Oswald doesn't become-penguin simply because he lacks parents. In a typical analysis, we might read that the Penguin was repressing this so-called lack through a penguin expression, which is ultimately the repressed thing returning through signification.
Perhaps, but his desire is productive.
His becoming-penguin is a process whereby he undergoes a multiplicity of microscopic changes; such as forming a clownish crime mob which operates in the cold sewers under the zoo. As such, his becoming-penguin was accompanied by a series of other becomings: such as becoming-coldblooded and becoming-crimeboss.
Selina’s becoming-cat is even more explicitly anti-oedipal. After being pushed out of a window by her corrupt capitalist boss, Max Shreck, Selina is brought back to life by a swarm of cats -- each who gives Selina one of their nine lives. Even upon resurrection, when Seline becomes-cat, she doesn’t just gain one life, but several!
Cat Woman is killed many times throughout the film, but remains standing. Which means in one sense, being a cat means becoming-indestructible. She adopts the behaviours and mannerisms of what it means to be a cat. She is agile, playful, and at the same time, seductive and murderous.
Like Batman and the Penguin, she operates mostly at night. She lurks in the shadows, and gains an upper hand in her imperceptibility.
"[Becoming-imperceptible] is having no need for masks and nothing to hide [...] According to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming imperceptible is the crucial final stage of any genuine escape path".4
The point is that all of these characters' desires are nothing but productive. They are not filling in the gaps left by a tragic backstory -- such as the gap of missing parents. Rather as they spring from their own annihilation, they form bonds and connections with the animals around them. They adopt a set of characteristics, mannerisms and behaviours which incorporate their bodies into a new post-human subjectivity.
Desire seeks connections, seeks expression, seeks power. Batman, Catwoman, and the penguin share a similar need for power, a similar need to connect, but their expression differs.
1.2 One or Many Dialectics?: Hegel, Fanon, and Deleuze
Batman and his quintessential villains all undergo, what G. W. F Hegel refers to as master-slave dialectics (also known as ‘Herrschaft und Knechtschaft’ or ‘Lordship and Bondage’).5
Each character strives to be recognised. By power, by strength, by money, by force. Both hero and villain want to be recognised without giving out any recognition.
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic about recognition and the fight for it. It is a back and forth. It is history. It is consciousness.
Hegel’s viewpoint is that consciousness arises from the mutual struggle between opposing subjects. In Todd McGowan’s reading of Hegel, this contradiction between subjects is what constitutes forms of identity.
Or in other words, identity is formed by the struggle between opposing things.
The Joker needs Batman to exist, and vice-versa.
In The Dark Knight (2008), there's a scene where Batman interrogates the Joker. Batman asks the Joker ‘why do you want to kill me?”. The Joker laughs maniacally, and responds ‘I don't wanna kill you. What would I do without you? Going back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no. No, you. You complete me’.
Batman appears as the master (or as Lordship, the being-for-itself) the interrogator, who must be recognised by the Joker as ruthless justice. As that which 'completes' the Joker. Batman's striated order to Joker's smooth chaos.
But, the Joker has all of this in his pocket! He's planned to be caught, and planned for Batman to choose between his love and the 'white knight' Harvey Dent, who later Becomes-Two-face due to the plans laid out by the Joker.
The same thing occurs earlier in the film during a confrontation after the SWAT vehicle chase sequence, the Joker drags himself out of a flipped truck, grabbing a machine gun. Batman turns around and rides his bat-bike straight towards the Joker at full speed, whilst Joker shoots at nearby traffic to clear the path for Batman to 'hit him' : "I want you to do it. I want you to do it. Hit me. Hit me! I want you to hit me! Come on. Do it! Hit me!".
Right at the last moment, the Batman steers away from the Joker, skidding out and knocking himself unconscious as he collides into a crashed vehicle on the road. Batman's code of pacifism remains intact. Batman's mask remains on. Literally and symbolically.
The Master, for Hegel, is the one who's willing to die. Who's will-to-death and will-to-power is stronger. Who's willing to die for the recognition of the other. Just as Joker does here.
Batman is forced to recognise Joker as the agent of chaos. Batman's law, Justice and code. Slave to Joker's anarchy. And they are both forced to recognise themselves, through the other.
The two need each other to exist.
And in their final confrontation, they finally recognise each other. On an equal playing field.
After all, what's the point in being a Joker if there's no one to hear your jokes?
A similar event between the two occurs at the end of the Killing Joke Batman comic:
Any fight between a hero and villain is ultimately a master-slave dialectic, because these stories are ultimately a fight for recognition between the Hero and Villain. The Hero(and-the-Villain struggle to become the being for-itself and not the being for-the-other. To become self-causing and recognised.
Batman wants to be recognised as justice. Moral. And as fear. Retribution. His enemies make fun to avoid recognising him as such ("he's just a man in a rubber bat suit!") they attempt to render him perceptible, to pin him down as a nobody capable of nothing. Not worthy of recognition.
Batmans becoming-imperceptible involves remaining hidden in the shadows, hiding his true identity, masking his voice, and delivering choreographed fight sequences which force his opponents to recognise him as their superior. Batman fights the ‘criminally insane’ -- which are absurdist and zany villains -- whose comically violent actions grant the Batman Machines legitimacy to reinstall a Goth(am)ic order.
At the same time, despite Batman’s imperceptibility, he ends up mimicking — or tracing — the brutal, vengeful criminal justice system which is upheld by the striated Gotham. Batman isn’t so much outside of Gotham, but at Gotham’s internal limit. Batman is the expression of Gotham's self regulating force. It is no mistake that Batman’s alter ego is Bruce Wayne, the capitalist.
This is Batman’s personification: not to give the Bat a human face, but to give the State a Bat face.
Although Batman may appear to work alone — a lone bat —- he also must be seen as an extension of the criminal justice system of Gotham.
It has been said before that Batman would not exist without The Joker. Or that, the Joker wouldn’t exist without Batman. Even more, neither would not exist without the striated space of Gotham.
This is precisely what Hegel means when he talks about the dialectic. The identity of ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ are mutually dependent. But that isn’t to say that if one of them were to disappear, the other would too. Either case would be a disaster. Gotham creates its heroes and its villains. Heroes create their villains, and villains create their heroes. Creation is not limited to a dialectic or contradiction, dialectics and contradictions exist rhizomatically, pluralistically. There is always something else going on.
Batman may not be justice, it does not matter what he represents, it only matters what he does. What does a batman do? He kicks your fucking ass. Using Mommy and Daddy's money.
Multiple becomings: bat, animal, intense, imperceptible, night. But also, even Batman cannot escape his inevitable expression of the State War Machine. How like Clint Eastwood, he takes the law into his own hands, which in turn, reinforces the legitimacy of the law!
Becoming an agent of some abstract conception of retribution which ultimately reifies the existing molar status quo: liberal moralism, humanism, and a fondness for state apparatus of capture. This type of vigilantism is not a radical alternative to the police state; instead, it is the logical and almost necessary 'exception to the rule' which maintains the function of the police state par excellence.
Let’s take take Frantz Fanon's conceptualisation of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, such as the one represented throughout his Black Skin, White Masks. In his examination of the colonised Black American subject, the contemporary slave who is not our basic conception of a slave, but is a Hegelian slave in the sense that they receive no recognition from those in power. Black is not recognised by White, which remains the racial molar power structure which systematically dehumanises and oppresses. (see pages 27/28 of Black Skins, White Masks for a more in depth look on Fanon’s usage of the master slave dialectic).
In Hegel’s as well as Fanon’s usage of the concept, the Master (or Lordship), is the subject for-itself, where as the Slave (or Bondage) is the subject for-the-other. Both subjects strive to be recognized by the other in a struggle for power. You could also swap out out Master/Slave with Recognizer/Recognized or Oppressor/Oppressed for a similar effect.
The importance of the concept is less about the terms used, and more about the relationship between recognition and subjectivity.
The White Mask refers to the means by which the Black subject attempts to assimilate into the lives of the Hegelian Master, or oppressor, by imitating and attempting to ingratiate themselves (and their children) into the culture, behaviours, attitudes and appearances of the White collective. In order to be recognised by the oppressor - who in this Foucauldian sense, is the collective power structure which privileges certain subjectivities by design. Specifically, in the context of Black Skin, White Masks Fanon discusses the way in which the colonial Black subject sought the recognition of the coloniser White subject by adopting the oppressors language.
For Fanon, the only way to resolve this contradiction is to create the conditions for mutual recognition between opposing forms of subjectivity which the colonial white subject prohibited. However, this recognition for Fanon requires conflict. As Fanon beautifully puts it:
“The only way to break this vicious circle that refers me back to myself is to restore to the other his human reality, different from his natural reality, by way of mediation and recognition. The other, however, must perform a similar operation. “Action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both. . . . They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other.
I ask that I be taken into consideration on the basis of my desire. I am not only here-now, locked in thinghood. I desire somewhere else and something else. I demand that an account be taken of my contradictory activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I am fighting for the birth of a human world, in other words, a world of reciprocal recognitions.”
(Black Skins, White Masks, 273)
Despite Fanon’s Hegelian tendencies, it is also important to acknowledge how Fanon breaks from Hegel. For Fanon, the conception of the slave must also be understood in the context of labor exploitation and production. Or in other words, it is not just that the master/oppressor/colonist doesn’t recognize the slave/oppressed/colonized, but that the former views the latter only as a means to their own economic ends. As an object which produces objects, as a commodity which produces commodities ("the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities" - Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) not as a subject.
Additionally, Fanon argued that white colonists weaponized their position to simultaneously demand and withhold recognition from colonised Black subjects. The dialectic is thus twofold, the demand for recognition from slave to master, and the denial of recognition from slave to master. The master upholds both the demand and the denial. Always wanting it, never getting it, and at the same time, never wanting it, but always getting it.
This is what many people would call a double bind or a catch 22, or a double impasse.
This Fanonical difference to Hegel, is the same as the one classically made by Marx (following Feuerbach).
Which is to say Hegel is stuck within the realm of ideas, and of a recognition between psychic forces. What is truly of concern, is the material world, which these psychic forces/desires arise out of in the first place. The slave is recognised as a means to an end, not an end In itself. The means to Labour-production.
This is what Marx meant when he flipped Hegel’s dialectics on its head. For Marx, as well as Fanon, consciousness arises from social activity, not from the recognition of others. Marx writes in the Critique of Political Economy: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness".
Capitalism privileges the bourgeois, American racist structures privilege the White.
These assimilated or imitated white attitudes on behalf of the Black subject is the White Mask. It is the self-alienating behaviour a Hegelian slave will perform in order to receive recognition from their master counterparts. Since they recognise the White as the privileged class, the molar represented subjectivity. And recognises themselves as the underprivileged minoritarian. Who is denied access and opportunity in the Deleuzian society of control.
In this way, Bruce Wayne recognises Bats. After an earlier incident involving bats in childhood leaving the boy terrified, he is taken back to this original trauma by the Freudian Primal scene of having to watch his parents die. He recognises the bat as the manifest object of his fear which has power over him.
In his wish to become recognised by fear, he dons the Bat Mask. Imitating his Hegelian Master, in an attempt to become it. White Skin, Bat Mask. Slave becomes Master.
The case of the real world, we are brought back to the Lacanian concept of anxiety and the Nick Land approach to Alan Turing's test:
As Nick Land says of a paper by Tyler Cowen and Michelle Dawson in “Imitation Games”,
“As Nick Land says of a paper by Tyler Cowen and Michelle Dawson in “Imitation Games” they point out that Alan Turing, as a homosexual retrospectively diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, would have been thoroughly versed in the difficulties of ‘passing’ imitation games, long before the composition of his landmark 1950 essay on Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” [...] For queer people, passing is a reality, much like it is a reality for AI. Passing as human isn't a broad and inclusive category, anything but. For women there is already the notion of alienness or otherness that makes them out to be less than human in the eyes of patriarchal humanism, and likewise for queer people because they reject the futurity of humanism (the literal reproduction of the same). But for no one else, especially in the latter half of the 2010s, is passing a more pronounced facet of daily life than for the trans woman. So much so that ‘passing’ is literally the word for what many trans women aspire towards, to pass as a cis person. There are many reasons to have this desire, but the biggest one, the one that AI and trans women both share to a very literal degree is this: “If an emerging AI lies to you, even just a little, it has to be terminated instantly.” (Land, “Imitation Games”)
The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto Blackpaper
Lacan's anxiety harks to this conception of the Turing test as a real subjective battle to be recognised as human by those who fill the role of the Hegelian master. To recognise oneself as an object in the gaze of the other/master. We all wear our masks of subjectivity, according to Lacan, and our anxiety is much like the situation between the male and female praying mantis after copulation. We know that the female praying mantis decapitates and eats the head of their male sexual partner. Imagine knowing this, and approaching a female praying mantis, wearing a mask. The only thing is, we can't see the mask we are wearing. If it is the mask of a male mantis, we will be eaten. If it is female, we will survive. Anxiety stems from the gaze of the other who sees our mask. And based on their perception, will eat us ("it has to be terminated instantly") or let us go. 6
The Black subject who wears the white mask is always anxious and alienated. They are alienated from themselves by becoming that which negates and contradicts them, by imitating and becoming their oppressors. And anxious because they can never know how their masks will be perceived. As white/male/master or as black/female/slave, or any combinations or intersections of these identity categories.
Batman goes through this too. Alienation is the Hegelian and Nietzschean becoming of the subject. For Hegel, this is via negation (and negation of the negation). For Nietzsche, becoming is the affirmation of difference itself:
""[...] The negative is a product of existence itself: the aggression necessarily linked to an active existence, the aggression of an affirmation. As for the negative concept (that is to say, negation as a concept) "it is only a subsequently-invented pale contrasting image in relation to its positive basic concept — filled with life and passion through and through" (GM I 10 p. 37). For the speculative element of negation, opposition or contradiction Nietzsche substitutes the practical element of difference, the object of affirmation and enjoyment"
Deleuze, On Nietzsche, Against the Dialectic
Batman's anxiety is the driving point of his narratives, his alienated battle with himself as Capitalist Bruce Wayne, and as the Masked Bat. His gaze of the other is located no longer in the Bat, whom he has fully assimilated, but in the foes he faces.
There are many similarities between real life alienated subjects and this narrative, some in fact do become Capitalist bourgeois subjects who finally find privilege and mastery by exploiting the working class. Exacerbating the conditions which caused alienation in the first place: such as the archetype of the ‘self-made billionaire’ - or the 'entrepreneur'.
The Marxist conceptions of the dialectic and in our readings seems perhaps too obvious to bring up here, the way out of alienation is indeed through, to draw upon the internal limits and drag them out as far as we can. The Marxist slave-master dialectic is sublated not when there is a perfect equilibrium between the two, but when the two altogether collapse in on one another. Creating something completely new.
The Marxist seeks to collapse the master-slave dialectic as it exists in the case of class struggle. Perhaps our way out of this particular type of alienation is through another. Or through the total collapse of alienation in its current forms altogether.
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology
" What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming?"
Marx, Grundrisse
"The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate.
Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way."
Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Anti-Oedipus
The Negative Map is always moving, becoming, imagining a Marxist Batman. A Deleuzo-Guattarian Batman.
Deleuze asks "what does a dialectician will?", by this he means why do we even use dialectic? To do what?
By prioritising the negative in the relation, whilst important, we miss the multiplicity of becoming which surrounds it.
In the Negative dialectical aspect between Batman and the 'criminal scum' which he seeks to rid the streets of Gotham, and what we will later explore between Avatar's RDA and Na'vi, we have demand, need, and 'desire'; the surplus remainder from the two (this is a Lacanian formula). 7
When we instead look at the the antiproductive and productive elements (that is, negation in terms of affirmation, and affirmation for itself) we can begin to appreciate what it is that Deleuze and Guattari meant by The Rhizome8, by forming one ourselves.
For instance, the antiproduction9 and production of recognition.
In the approach of the dialectic, there can occur a sublation or equality between the two opposing forces, such as master and slave. But this is also not just a universal (in this case, recognition) but individual particulars.
Batman doesn't recognise criminal scum, doesn't want to associate with criminal scum, doesn't seek to find a way to elevate criminal scum, rehabilitate, or come to recognise them as products of their upbringing and environment.
No, Batman places criminal scum in the same double bind that the French Colonist did to the Black colonised subjects (which Fanon wrote about). Batman denies and demands recognition from the so called ‘criminal scum’ at the same time.
Out of these multiplicities there are various productions on the Body without Organs.
The production of insane bat-technology, the production of a skilled martial artist detective, the production of broken Jaws, noses, necks, elbows, knees. The productions of full prisons. The Arkham Asylum.
As discussed in the next section, RDA and Na'vi relations are no different, the antiproduction of an authentic means to recognise one another, of connectivity, of interspecies relations.
The productions of the State War Machine, military technology, armed forces, scientific endeavours.
The productions of the Nomadic War Machine, military strategy and tactics, connections between Na'vi and the animals and ecology which surrounds them, of relations between themselves and the dreamwalkers. 10
All production is the product of desiring. Desiring is productive.11
This is what it means to use the model of the Rhizome over the model of the tree, or the arboreal.
Multiplicity over singularity, minority over molarity.12 Not referring to a single point of reference (the molar or root-tree) but to the many middles of connection and productivity (the mycelium, the Rhizome, the n).
You might say "aren't these just several other dialectics?" and we would say yes! And no.
These can be indeed recognised as the several dialectical positions which surround activity (and non-activity), but all dialectical positions require an arboreal abstraction, the priority of a universal and a negative relation between A and Not-A (absence and presence, being and Nothingness etc). Whereas the Rhizome spreads out, connections are made not between pure oppositions but parallels and Individual forces which come to be connected as expressions of the same monistic substance (or monad)13, A and B, and C, and D (n).
Not just relating the one to its other, the one and the not-one. And not between the one and the many, but instead where the one IS the many. Pluralism = Monism.14
”Substitute the AND for IS. A and B.
The AND is not even a specific relation or conjunction, it is that which subtends all relations, the path of all relations, which makes relations shoot outside their terms and outside the set of their terms, and outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole."15
Deleuze & Parnet: Dialogues II, French edition 1977, English 2007, p. 57
Not to isolate individual forces: Batman, RDA, criminal scum, Na'vi.
But to explore these identities as differences, as flows, as themselves constantly becoming, moving, self-annihilating, creating, producing and antiproducing.
The dialectic sets in stone its process, between A and not-A, the Rhizome has no A which is not also B, and not also C, whilst also entirely unique and individual from them, and at the same time interconnected and interdependent.
Think of a finger on a hand. Not all the fingers on a hand are the same (a pinky finger is not an index finger) but they are still fingers, and all are fingers by their connectivity to the hand. (a pinky finger is an index finger insofar as it is related and connected to the hand, making them fingers).
The Rhizome's Spinozist monist Substance is the hand - Its attributes (be it extensions or thoughts) - are; the fingers. The nails. The knuckles.
These expressions are unique, individual, and at the same time, connected, the same, and interdependent (dividual).
You might say again "aha! You are back at the dialectic".
And we would say sure! But we are pluralists, we never will the dialectic alone. Or a just single dialectic. Or a single universal. Our Universal is Difference.
Whatever willing comes to us, in its many, in its multiplicity, in its difference. Not in its identity.
We call upon the particulars. We embrace the wills of dialecticians insofar as it does something, but it never seems to will beyond the universal contradiction. It cannot seem to travel beyond A and not-A towards an A and a B, and we are indeed travellers. Nomads. Who "have a new plot of land at all times".16
Avatar
"The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Becoming-intense, Becoming-animal, p238
One dialectic has several becomings.
"PLURALISM = MONISM"
The master-slave dialectic between Jake Sully and animal, Jake and Avatar, Jake and Na'vi, Jake and Military et cetera opens up a multiplicity of becomings and intensities; flight, speed, strength, bond, imperceptibility. What we in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms call lines of flight:
"Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions."
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction: Rhizome
The avatar; a first stage simulacra.
"The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation, p6)
Artificial flesh and blood made to imitate the native, nomadic coded population of Pandora. The Pandoran Na'vi refer to these distinctly simulacral parodies of themselves as 'dreamwalkers'.
The aim of this scientific avatar program is to successfully integrate the human species with this 'alien' one. In order for the capitalist imperialist private militia owning corporation to access and mine a rare resource known as 'unobtanium'.
Even a Deleuzian can’t help but see the irony in the capitalist-subject who can’t help but constantly reach for its empty object, the Lacanian objet petit a (a) or object cause of desire.
Capitalism Realism here permeates. It is 2154 and Capitalism has only accelerated itself to imperialise not only the earth as we know it but also the outer reaches of space. It brings with it business ontology, the idea that everything must be modelled like a business. Space travel included. One thinks of other science fiction media such as Futurama which draws Capitalist Realist parallels.
The logic of capital is to continue growing. Forever growing, forever expanding. Ian Wright, with his Dark Marxism, argues that Capital is a Real God. An oppressive feedback loop, whose vampiric logic sustains its ability to possess all it comes into contact with. Capitalist Realism and the business ontology it spurs is only an expression of the Real God of Capital. But not the mundane business ontology of ‘working from home, homing from work’, but the brutal imperial-capitalism that Lenin warns of: Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalist Realism.
There is absolutely no subtlety in the way in which James Cameron has recreated the real historical narrative of the colonial White invasion of America. You might as well call ‘Avatar’ ‘Pocahontas but in space’. Not much Hegelian analysis is needed to see the portrayal of 'history repeating itself'. The 1800s meets 2100s. The Resources Development Administration or RDA aims to assimilate the culture of the Pandorians into their own. Initially setting up hospitals and school programs to raise their young to speak English, learn American values, and become 'like us'. (Us here being the Molar representation, I.e the White Western Oedipal subject).
A very similar thing happened with the early colonisers of America. Once native American tribes were territorialized, forced into small areas of land where the capacity to travel freely was revoked. Once nomadic peoples were forced to live in a state-based domestic Realism. No more wandering the planes, no more living and moving according to the ecology of the animal and plant bio-systems, now you are stuck here.
The smooth space of America was stratified by colonialism. The American Imperial War machine works by conquering all smooth space, codifying it, bordering it, and subjecting all things to its colonial law. ("I AM THE LAW!" - Judge Dredd).
"Smooth space" exists in contrast to "striated space"— a partitioned field of movement which prohibits free motion. Smooth space refers to an environment, a landscape (vast or microscopic) in which a subject operates."
After the State war machine finished with its total territorialization of the people who freely roamed the land of America and it's Great Plains; whether by forcing tribes to submit, or by wiping them out completely. Tribes which did resist (the Nomadic War Machine) were destroyed by white imperialist forces. The state has an army now. And chiefs and leaders of rebellions were lynched, hung, and their executions displayed.
"The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo."
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, the Nomadic War Machine
Those who did submit to territorialization, had their young assimilated into white Christian schooling systems. Some of these children grew up never to be accepted by either white imperialists or native American. They had become a minoritarian community, nomadic once again. Not in the sense that they were free to move, not at all, they were stuck where they were. Instead they became nomadic in the sense that they had no official home. Neither here nor there.
In Avatar, the project to imitate and assimilate the native culture 'fails' due to resistance. And they instead send in the avatars to try and assimilate into the native culture, Jake Sully successfully becoming one of "the people" and is accepted as not just a dreamwalker, but as one of them. One becomes several.
The Deleuzian point to be made here and seen in the film, which produced a new line of flight out of the ideas of representation in Baudrillard and Lacan, is also a question. At what point do we become? Is Jake Sully simply imitating the Na'vi, existing as some hyperreal simulacra which mocks and parodies the Real - or is he becoming-Na'vi?
Is Avatar Baudrillardian or Deleuzian? Hyperreal, parody, mimicry, imitation, representation. Or, Real, becoming, not copying but affirming.
”To become is never to imitate, nor to 'do like', nor to conform to a model, whether it is of justice or of truth. There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. " - Deleuze, Dialogues II.
“If becoming-animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become." - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p238.
There is some truth that Sully, at least at the beginning, only seeks a simulated-becoming. Sully’s desire to simulate the Na’vi is at first less to do with a becoming-na’vi, and more to do with Sully regaining mobility. Disability politics are woven into Sully’s simulated experience. He isn’t Na’vi yet, but is occupying an avatar. He is a Baudrillardian fool here, who believes one can simulate without becoming. Simulation, representation, these are all repetitions. By way of simulating, parodying, imitating, one actively engages in the forces of that which one mimics. One is always becoming.
In his essay, “THEY KILLED THEIR MOTHER": AVATAR AS IDEOLOGICAL SYMPTOM”, Mark Fisher discusses the politics of disability, colonialism, and capitalist realism latent in ‘Avatar’:
“Sully attains wholeness through his avatar Na'vi body in a double sense: first, because the avatar is able-bodied, and, secondly, because the Na'vi are intrinsically more "whole" than the (self-)destructive humans. Sully, the marine who is "really" a tree-hugging primitive, is a paradigm of that late capitalist subjectivity which disavows its modernity. There's something wonderfully ironic about the fact that Sully's - and our - identification with the Na'vi depends upon the very advanced technology that the Na'vi's way of life makes impossible”
To reinsert Baudrillard into Fisher’s statement, Sully’s becoming more closely resembles a simulation because it is mediated by technology. Yet "the simulacrum is true" (Baudrillard, Simulacra & Simulation) and as Fisher points out in his Flatline Constructs, there is no true distinction, no absolute point which marks the difference between artificial and natural. Between technological and organic. Techno-naturalism. Between simulation and reality (hyper-reality). All simulations are kinds of becoming on the gothic flatline.
"the anthropocentric tendency to give agency to inanimate objects is subverted, so that everything — animate or inanimate — is seen as ‘dead’. Rather than privileging human agency over the agency of objects, Mark argues for their radical immanence within the emerging technosphere: the world of cybernetics. He asks, “what if we are as ‘dead’ as the machines”?
https://xenogothic.com/2017/11/06/introduction-to-flatline-constructs/
One is perhaps drawn to the Cyborg of Donna Harroway: "In [the Cyborg Manifesto], the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating “human” from “animal” and “human” from “machine.”
The Nomadic War Machine of Pandora (Na'vi) succeeded in avoiding territorialization, effectively deterritorializing the State War Machine by means of military action. Guerilla warfare. Such as the tactics deployed by Vietnamese Communists (U. S Derogatory slang 'Vietcong') or the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh Communist Resistance) who defended themselves against an outnumbered force of U.S troops during the Vietnam War of the 60s-70s. Avoiding major confrontation and instead using their knowledge of the land, jungle structure, makeshift traps such as punji sticks, the Vietnamese Nomadic-War Machine successfully defended itself from the U.S state.
"One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilise smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire "exterior," over all flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects."
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, the Nomadic War Machine
The case for the Real historical situation of the native American people, unfortunately does not parallel this.
In this film, the Pandorans not only succeed in resistance to state territorialization, they also win the end of the film battle between the assembled mass of the total military force of RDA. Much unlike the historical narrative which Avatar draws upon, where there was not a single all-in battle deciding the fate of the Victor. Instead, massacres took place over a hundred years across the Great landscape of North America. Tribes and collectives stood no chance against their colonisers. Whole communities were destroyed in only days of the Indian Removal Act being put in place by President Jackson. The 1800s is the century of the victory of the State War Machine.
The Na'vi and the Avatar both have a biological extension of their nervous system, whilst appearing to be a long braid of hair at the back, in the end it contains an incredibly uniquely living structure, which connects to other structures like it. In the same way a synapse connects with another, and the passage of the communication of information works in the same way too. Fisher says: “[The Na’vi] are Deleuzean Spinozists who recognise that a vital flow pervades everything”.
This allows for the connection between biological systems, a nerve Rhizome can connect to any other. However, there is another Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic here; in order for the Avatar to effectively connect and communicate with the biological system it wishes to control and communicate with (Becoming-animal) the Avatar must first fight to the death in order to be recognised by the animal. This is the 'battle' between what Hegel describes as the being-in-itself (BII) and the Being-for-itself (BFI) . The latter is the cause of their existence, and is to be recognised as a self-causing being. The former is not recognised as at all self-causing, but instead as caused by the being for itself. Since it has submitted its life to the BFI, and is granted no recognition by the BFI. Despite this, the BII must give recognition to the BFI. This is what is explained in the Lordship & Bondage section of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as the dialectic of recognition between two consciousnesses.
When these two beings come across one another for the first time, they engage in a fight to be recognised by the other. In a literal and vulgar Kojevian reading, this is a literal fight to the death. In this case there are a few outcomes:
Both conscious beings die, and the dialectic ends.
One being dies, and the other is unable to receive recognition from a corpse. The dialectic ends.
Both beings live, but one submits. In this case, they fear their own death, and recognise the other being as the one who is willing to die. By submitting, they grant the other recognition (they become the Master/Being-for-itself) and are themselves not given any recognition in return (the Slave/Being-in-itself/for-the-other) and the dialectic is in process.
"The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman [...] [t] he master is the consciousness that exists for itself; but no longer merely the general notion of existence for self. Rather, it is a consciousness existing on its own account which is mediated with itself through an other consciousness"
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, A: Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage
Avatar repeats this Kojevian master slave dialectic in the moments when the Avatar Jake Sully must connect with a winged beast of flight. He Is told that he must not only choose the beast to tame, but the beast must also choose him. When he asks "how will I know its chosen me?" he is told "it will try to kill you".
He succeeds in a fight with the beast who has chosen him, connecting his hair-rhizome with the beast's, and becomes the being-for-itself for whom the being-in-itself must recognise and serve. The master and the slave.
Hegel's dialectical reasoning in the Phenomenology of Spirit has been interpreted in many ways (Kojeve, Hyppolite, Miller etc) but usually it is considered a historical account of consciousness. It is a lens by which the history of consciousness itself is mapped out. (literally, the Phenomenology, study of appearance, of Geistes, meaning spirit or mind. Consciousness). Through this dialectic, new stages of consciousness and self consciousness develop. The classical Marxist approach to Hegel is to see this historical progression as the history of class struggle.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Throughout history we see the oppressor and oppressed in constant opposition to each other. This fight is sometimes hidden and sometimes open."
Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, Introduction.
But even then, we Deleuzians know that this Hegelian/Marxist reading doesn’t go far enough. It doesn't go Nietzschean enough.
Although it is true to say that the two become an assemblage through their struggle, through their fight for recognition of the other - Master becomes slave, slave becomes master, slave becomes labourer, master becomes employer, slave becomes proletariat - we know that there are many more becomings involved. "An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of "things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive, destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc".17
The Hegel-Deleuzian question is thus, are all becomings a dialectic? (Are all becomings dialectical?)
Deleuze says no. and it is in the 'Anti-Hegelianism' of Nietzsche where Deleuze stands his ground: "Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche's work as its cutting edge[...]we must take seriously the resolutely anti-dialectical character of Nietzsche's philosophy. "
"Not all relations between "same" and "other" are sufficient to form a dialectic, even essential ones: everything depends on the role of the negative in this relation. Nietzsche emphasises the fact that force has another force as its object. But it is important to see that forces enter into relations with other forces. Life struggles with another kind of life. Pluralism sometimes appears to be dialectical — but it is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy."
Deleuze, On Nietzsche, Against the Dialectic
The Hegelian dialectic describes the meeting of two opposing concepts or terms to determine the relation between them. A contradiction consists of two propositions or concepts which cannot both be true; or the other must give way. A and Not-A
In the Nietzschean hierarchy, two forces encounter each other; one of which is already stronger than the other, before their encounter. So that the encounter is not a struggle or a fight over dominance, but rather a joyous meeting of two things which were already different to begin with. A and B.
When we recognise here a single dialectic between master and slave (a becoming-master and a becoming-slave) there is also always several dialectics ongoing which surround it. Several active forces.
Becoming is not the resolution of dualist forces; nor only the maintenance of the two. It's the plurification of oppositions and parallels —contagion.
Several becomings.
The dialectic between Avatar and animal (becoming-avatar, Becoming-animal), between the Human Jake Sully and his avatar form (becoming-other, Becoming-avatar), between Jake and the Na'vi (becoming-several,Becoming-nomad), between the State War Machine RDA and its conflict with the Na'vi (Nomadic War Machine).
Becoming is an assemblage, it is multiple. And contained within its multiplicity is an element of ambiguity. One is never always entirely sure of what they are becoming.
"The question 'What are you becoming?' is particularly stupid.
For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. Becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture, of non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns. There are animal-becomings of man which do not consist in playing the dog or the cat, since man and the animal only meet on the trajectory of a common but asymmetrical deterritorialization. Becomings - they are the thing which is the most imperceptible, they are acts which can only be contained in a life and expressed in a style. ”
Deleuze & Parnet: Dialogues II, p. 2f.
https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-processes-of-smoothing-and-striation-of-space-in-urban-warfare#:~:text=Smooth%20spaces%20are%20the%20territory,royal%20science%20and%20nomad%20science
The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when its apparent object is negative. Force is not to be confused with power. Force arrives from outside to break constraints and open new vistas. Power builds walls." - Brian Massumi's translator's forward to A Thousand Plateaus
Engendered by the Real of trauma, repetition is perpetuated by the failure of symbolization.
From this point on, Lacan defined the Real as "that which always returns to the same place" (Lacan, 1978, p. 49).
Trauma, which Freud situated within the framework of the death drive, Lacan conceptualised as the impossible-to-symbolise Real.
The Real exists 'outside' or 'beyond' the symbolic.
The Real is that which resists symbolization and signification.
Defined as what escapes the symbolic, the Real can be neither spoken nor written.
Thus it is related to the impossible, defined as "that which never ceases to write itself." -https://nosubject.com/Talk:Real
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.otherlife.co/becoming-imperceptible-1/amp/
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit — B — Self Consciousness A: Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage
Reference: Lacan's Seminar X
"Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.", "Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need." - Jacques Lacan, Ecrits
A nonlinear network that "connects any point to any other point" - Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
"The State machine and the machine of repression produce anti-production, that is to say signifiers that exist to block and prevent the emergence of any subjective process" - Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics (1972)
"anti-production represents a moment in production that occurs as a result of primal repression. For them anti-production appears to be autonomous but is not: it operates alongside production but is liable to being rerouted into the dominant productive processes and becoming recoded into the forms of representation used by that system. This definition, takes the form of an internal process that can become hijacked by capitalism" -http://particulations.blogspot.com/2009/08/anti-production.html?m=1
Avatar means "descent, alight, to make one's appearance", and refers to the embodiment of the essence of a superhuman being or a deity in another form. The word also implies "to overcome, to remove, to bring down, to cross something".
In Hindu traditions, the "crossing or coming down" is symbolism, states Daniel Bassuk, of the divine descent from "eternity into the temporal realm, from unconditioned to the conditioned, from infinitude to finitude" - Wikipedia
"If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality." - Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p26
Molar concentration is a measure of the concentration of a chemical species,
"The molar and molecular are not presented as opposed terms in binary tension, but as overlapping tendencies or ‘segmentations’." - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775818776976
The concept of "one essence" in the metaphysical and theological theory.
Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Introduction: Rhizome.
etween their terms, or between two sets, from one to the other, but the AND gives relations another direction, and puts to flight terms and sets, the former and the latter on the line of flight which it actively creates.
Thinking with AND, instead of thinking IS, instead of thinking for IS.
And it is not the thought of an aesthete, as when one says 'one more', 'one more woman'. And it is not a dialectical thought, as when one says 'one gives two, which will give three'.
The multiple is no longer an adjective which is still subordinate to the One which divides or the Being which encompasses it.
It has become noun, a multiplicity which constantly inhabits each thing. A multiplicity is never in terms, however many there are, nor in their set or totality. A multiplicity is only in the AND, which does not have the same nature as the elements, the sets or even their relations.
While it may come about between just two, it nevertheless sends dualism off course."
Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, How to Become a Body without Organs?
http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html