Ashgate Post Queer Politics

Post-queer Politics

Queer Interventions Series editor: University of Limerick, Ireland and Michael O’Rourke Queer Interventions is an exciting, fresh and unique new series designed to publish innovative, experimental and theoretically engaged work in the burgeoning field of queer studies. The aim of the series is to interrogate, develop and challenge queer theory, publishing queer work which intersects with other theoretical schools and is accessible whilst valuing difficulty; empirical work which is metatheoretical in focus; ethical and political projects and most importantly work which is self-reflexive about methodological and geographical location. The series is interdisciplinary in focus and publishes monographs and collections of essays by new and established scholars. The editors intend the series to promote and maintain high scholarly standards of research and to be attentive to queer theory’s shortcomings, silences, hegemonies and exclusions. They aim to encourage independence, creativity and experimentation: to make a queer theory that matters and to recreate it as something important; a space where new and exciting things can happen. Titles in this series: Queering the Non/Human Edited by Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird ISBN: 978-0-7546-7128-2 Cinesexuality Patricia MacCormack ISBN: 978-0-7546-7175-6 Jewish/Christian/Queer Edited by Frederick Roden ISBN: 978-0-7546-7375-0 Critical Intersex Edited by Morgan Holmes ISBN: 978-0-7546-7311-8 Queer Movie Medievalisms Edited by Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh ISBN: 978-0-7546-7592-1

Post-Queer Politics

David V. Ruffolo University of Toronto, Canada

© David V. Ruffolo 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. David V. Ruffolo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Ruffolo, David. Post-queer politics. -- (Queer interventions) 1. Sociology--Philosophy. I. Title II. Series 301'.01-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ruffolo, David. Post-queer politics / by David Ruffolo. p. cm. -- (Queer interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7675-1 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-7676-8 (ebook) 1. Gay men--Political activity. 2. Lesbians--Political activity. 3. Gay rights. 4. Queer theory. 5. Gay and lesbian studies. I. Title.



HQ76.R183 2009 306.76'601--dc22

ISBN 9780754676751 (hbk) ISBN 9780754676768 (ebk.V)

2009023289

Contents Series Editors’ Preface TwO (Theory without Organs) Acknowledgments

ix xv

PLATEAU 1 Post-Queer Mappings “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Nomadic Becomings Discursive Inscriptions: From Humans to Subjects Genealogically Queer: Governmentality, Panopticism, Confessions Performative Materializatons Matrix of Un/Intelligibility Dragging Identities Post-Queering Queer The Plateaus

1 1 5 8 12 17 23 25 27 32

PLATEAU 2 A Critical Politics of Becoming Schizoanalytic Assemblages Desiring-Production Rhizomatic Multiplicities Deterritorialized Becomings Body without Organs Not So Happily Ever After-Queer

39 39 43 45 48 50 55

PLATEAU 3 Dialogic Creativities “The Problem of Agency in Foucault” A Problem with Language Dialogism, Speech Genres, and Utterances The Heteroglossia of Political Theorizations Post-Queer Quotes  Carnival Regenerations  Now That’s Grotesque  Creative Potentialities 

59 59 61 65 69 75 77 81 85

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PLATEAU 4 The Materialities of Life Itself  Disciplining Life From Discipline to Control: What Can Bodies Do? From Individual Production to Dividual Metaproduction The Underbelly What’s so Radical about a Plural Democracy? Merely Subjective Deterritorializing Democracy Becoming Radically Nomadic Agency as Schizo

87 87 89 95 97 100 107 112 115 119

PLATEAU 5 Schizo-Academia Disciplining the Academy Scholarly Performatives Academic Becomings Schizo-Academia Masochistic Intensifications Managing and Evaluating through Differential Accumulation Academic Carnivals Immanent Processes

123 123 125 127 129 131 136 145 149

PLATEAU 6 Biovirtualities Potentialities versus Possibilities Knowledge Societies Biotechnological Innovations Biosecurity and Biovalue: Producing New Life Forms

151 151 157 159 162

PLATEAU 7 Involutionary Matters

167

Bibliography Index

175 185

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This project is dedicated to all the creative potentialities of equitable and social justice virtualities that have yet to be actualized.

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Series Editors’ Preface

TwO (Theory without Organs) David V. Ruffolo’s Post-Queer Politics puts queer studies and queer theory on the line. The body of queer studies (the institutionalised body of knowledges which have sedimented queer theory, stultifying it, often empting out its potential) is he tells us ‘stagnant’, ‘dormant’, ‘solidified’, ‘stale’. Queer has reached its ‘peak’, reached the end, as it were, of the line. But Ruffolo’s book disrupts this gloomy narrative by seeking to re-fluidify queer studies, to re-invent a queer theory with the capacity to intervene, disrupt, and produce (the new, the unforeseen). Rather than suggesting or glorying in the ‘end of queer’ Ruffolo seeks instead to re-draw the maps, to bring about new lines of flight, and to effect a ‘potential deterritorialisation of queer as we know it today’. As Alain Badiou says in his Handbook of Inaesthetics ‘we want a theatre of capacity, not of incapacity’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 75) and what we get in Post-Queer Politics is a theatre for the production of intensive politics, a smooth space where the potentialities of life can be renegotiated. Ruffolo’s schizoanalytic strategy is one of reading through rather than rejecting, one of anticipation rather than paranoia. In the face of the increasing disciplining of all sorts of bodies (of theoretical work, of knowledge, of thought) he energetically revivifies queer studies. The post- of the title is interruptive, anticipatory and Jasbir Puar advocates a similar strategy: ‘A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of ‘politics of the open end’, of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking risks rather than guarding against them” (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, xx). We are, the author riskily tells us, post-subjectivity, post-discursivity, post-identity, post-representation. This does not mean, nor should it, that we are after subjectivity, or discourse, or identity. Ruffolo finds such binary thinking unproductive and invents a new language which is more fructive, less about the after and more about the beside, the peri- rather than the post- understood as after, assemblage rather than gridlock. By fusing Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari and Mikhail Bakhtin (and implicitly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s later Deleuzian inspired work on affect and periperformativity) he is able to emphasise crowding, besideness and dialogical connection. This move has massive ramifications for queer studies and queer theory, and as Ruffolo himself points out, for theory in general. The post-queering

post-queer politics

of queer shifts all the cornerstones (if one can say such a thing) of queer studies, shapes a new ontology (or even, perhaps, a deontology) for queer theory, one which strongly resembles Chrysanthi Nigianni’s vision in Deleuze and Queer Theory where she exhorts us to ‘imagine, form and actualise new forms of political agency: instead of communities of an identitarian logic, machinic assemblages; instead of the individual, a crowd; instead of identities, singularities; instead of representations, expressions’ (‘Introduction’, Nigianni and Merl Storr (eds) Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, 7). By re-thinking and re-assessing the position and influence of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler in queer studies, Ruffolo is able to exploit Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology or intensive politics of becoming, and this is a necessary intervention if we want to think about a non-essentialised or non-assertable queer ‘identity’. The decentered theory (it is, after all, theory itself which Ruffolo interferes with) we get in Post-Queer Politics is what we would call a Theory without Organs (TwO), analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs (BwO). By co-assembling the motifs of becoming and the Body without Organs, Ruffolo can dis-assemble bodies of power, desire, and institution as they have been understood in Western formations. This newly sketched ontology of becoming (of post-queer) challenges the concretised homo- and hetero- sexual identities on which some (perhaps most) versions of queer theory have depended. But Ruffolo’s post-queer bodies refuse to be stabilised, fixed, binarised, regulated, disciplined, controlled. And if post-queer theory is critical of theory itself, then it can also be said that post-queer identity is critical of queer identity itself too. Post-queer, on Ruffolo’s terms undoes identity, is an identity without an essence. Post-queer is multiple, fluid, rhizomatic, always in tension with stasis, permanence, and striation. Post-queer theory, then, is a rhizomic Theory without Organs (or organisation), always in the process of becoming, always being opened by the outside. By refocusing the argument on biopower toward questions of immanence, desiring-machines and biovirtualities (the virtual and material productivities of life) Ruffolo effects a swerve away from (or rather a reading through) Foucauldian, Butlerian, and Agambenian frameworks towards a Deleuzoguattarian analysis. It is this turn from the policing of bodies (in all the senses of this term) toward bodily becoming that the practical and theoretical force of queer can really take flight. And Ruffolo calls this, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, a radically democratic post-queer theory, a democracy which is open rather than closed to the world. We might, borrowing from Reza Negarestani in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2008), call this a ‘polytics’ of anomalous or unnatural participation with the outside, a set of ‘schizotrategies’ for openness and insurgency. For Negarestani and Ruffolo ‘the plane of openness’ means being opened by rather than open to, means lodging oneself on the TwO. And, Ruffolo reminds us, this being opened by entails a certain responsibility, what 

Series Editors’ Preface: TwO (Theory without Organs)

Lisa Henderson calls ‘a preserving and consoling receptivity that is hard to find and harder to hold onto in these mean times’ (‘Every Queer Thing We Know’, The Massachusetts Review, xlix 1/2 [Spring/Summer 2008], 79). In the mean times Ruffolo describes in these pages it is possible to make intelligible the Deleuzoguattarian claim that queer is a process (always en process, always tocome), not an object; an active engagement not a rigid and stable (theoretical or sexual) identity; a performative praxis not a fixed (or fixable) category. We might, after Jeffrey Nealon, call Ruffolo’s post-queer politics an ‘alterity politics of response’ (Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity, Duke University Press, 1998, 15). To reiterate: David Ruffolo’s experimental book-machine Post-Queer Politics puts Queer Theory ‘on the line’, the original title for the opening plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, a book which begins with two queer declarations and the opening pages of which need to be re-read alongside the present volume for an incipient theorisation of post-queer politics: First, that ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’. Second, ‘we have made use of everything that came without range’ (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 3). The first announces theirs is to be a theory of multiplicities and if Guattari talks of the way we make love to every author we read and Deleuze talks of how, in a way, he and Guattari loved, when they wrote together, then becoming-imperceptible for them is a queer becoming. That they will make use of everything within range is typical of the queer eclectic approach. We may not ‘know yet what the multiple entails’ (4) but post-queer theory as war machine will arm itself with every available tool for dismantling the arborescent, phallocentric, tree-like logic of Western metaphysics, the ‘weariest kind of thought’ (5). Postqueer theory events, experiments, intervenes like William Burroughs cut-up method, rejects linearity, is anti-genealogical, anti-filiative as it tries to map alternative, denaturalised models of development. Ruffolo’s post-queer theory is opposed to the teleological, the hetero-reproductive; it is rhizomatic, has heterogeneous genealogies: ‘any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (7). It is a schizo-micropolitics, a nomad war machine, smoothing space and evolving ‘by subterranean stems and flows’ (7) like the AIDS activists of ACT–UP and Queer Nation, or the alterglobalisation movements. Postqueer theory decenters the heteronormative logos and exposes ‘arboresecent multiplicities for what they are’ (8), ‘never allows itself to be overcoded’ (9) but relentlessly decodes, scrambles the codes of hetero-logic (but in a way which is productive rather than dyadic or binaristic). Post-queer theory is a war-wachine pitted against the State, a nomad which ‘constantly flees’ (9) down lines of deterritorialisation, destratifies on the Body without Organs. Refusing assimilation, refusing normalisation the ‘Pink Panther’ that is post-queer politics xi

post-queer politics

‘imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing, it paints the world its colour, pink on pink, this is its becoming-world’ (11), its open-ended becoming preferring ‘abominable’ (11), unnatural, sodomitical couplings, transversal connections, lines of flight which ‘scramble the genealogical trees’ (11). Ruffolo’s post-queer theory to-come is a rhizome-map, always revisable, open to new events, new experiments, new becomings. It plugs in everywhere ‘fosters connections between fields’ (12), removes blockages on the BwO, is the ‘maximum opening of the Body without Organs onto a plane of consistency’ (12). The map of post-queer theory is ‘open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (12). It must not, as Ruffolo argues queer studies has, become sedimented, normalised, assimilated, reterritorialised, must not become a tracing rather than a map. It must be rhizomorphous, produce ‘stems and filaments that seem to be roots, or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange new uses’ (15), work in an ‘offbeat’ ‘untimely’ way (16). The tree has even ‘implanted itself in our bodies, rigidifying and stratifying even the sexes’ (18) but the rhizome empties out, dis-organises the body, makes a BwO which refuses to ‘subjugate sexuality to the reproductive model’ (18). The rhizome ‘liberates sexuality’ and desire, allows the body to vibrate. The rhizome is always to-come ‘perpetually in construction’, a process that ‘is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again’ (20). It is open to the incalculable, indeterminable future, has ‘neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills’ (21). For Ruffolo, postqueering is always interbeing, always happens in the middle. The rhizome, the BwO, the post-queer theory to-come are located on a thousand queer plateaus: ‘a continuous self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (22). For Ruffolo there are queer machines and bodily desire is machinic, forms assemblages, effects linkages, and performs temporary combinations of parts. Embracing rhizomatic, involutionary potentialities means being opened by queer ethics and the post-queer theory to-come on/as the plane of consistency. The plane of consistency of post-queer theory can be diagrammed, as it is on the cover of this book in the painting by Masoud Ghaffarian-Shirazi, as a kind of freefloating space that is formless, without subject, without development, without centre or structure, without beginning or end. Post-queer bodies as they are thought here allow us to think the ‘becoming of zones of rarefaction. There must exist virtual rarefactions. We need a non-organic past of bodies—there must exist virtual rarefactions. We need a non-organic past of the living being, an inorganic becoming of bodies. Or further, we need a body without organs’. (Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory’, Collapse III, 2007, 98) Or, further again, we need a theory without organs, a ‘typology of vital becomings’ (Meillassoux, 98), to negotiate an xii

Series Editors’ Preface: TwO (Theory without Organs)

openness by the future, to actualise the virtual; to allow for the emergence of the radically new one must move beyond the forms of disciplinary subjectivity, discursivity and identity, that predetermine one’s relations to the outside. To gloss this new form of relatedness, this proliferation of connection, and the ethical imperatives to readjust or reorient our extensions, to be opened by the outside, we will do well to follow Ruffolo and further trace the suggestive links between queer theory and Deleuze/Guattari. As Guattari himself puts it in Soft Subversions, we desperately need ‘soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions that will eventually change the face of the world’ (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 306). Post-Queer Politics is softly subversive and the imperceptible revolutions its schizoanalytic politics promise can only be found on the BwO or in a TwO, and the work of changing the face of the world, work that is long overdue, will have to take place between the two.   Michael O’Rourke and Noreen Giffney

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Acknowledgments The potential for Post-Queer Politics could not have been actualized without the radical activism and scholarship over the past few decades and so I hope this project humbly expresses my sincere appreciation and gratitude for all the work that endlessly commits itself to equity and social justice. I feel very fortunate to be a part of such an exciting and refreshing series as Queer Interventions. I am very honoured to share the company of those that have already published in this series and I look forward to future publications committed to thinking critical about contemporary queer studies. At the heart of this series is the brilliance of the series editors: Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke. I thank them for supporting this project from the very beginning and for providing such insightful and critical feedback throughout its development. Their excitement and eagerness to engage a post-queer terrain encouraged this project immensely. I also thank everyone at Ashgate who contributed to this project’s fruition and especially Neil Jordan and Pam Bertram for guiding the publishing process with ease, flexibility, and direction. Many people throughout our lives help to shape who we are today and there are certainly too many to thank in this concise acknowledgment. I want to recognize all those that have influenced, encouraged, and supported me over the years as this project in many ways embodies the dialogical-becomings of my life itself. I want to specifically thank my friends, colleagues, and mentors for creating the spaces to be intellectually critical and academically creative. Jamie-Lynn Magnusson, Rinaldo Walcott, and Bobby Noble have greatly influenced the theoretical and philosophical lens that frames my scholarship. Jamie’s backing from the very beginning has guided this project from its conceptual stages to its completion. Her profound commitment to challenge inequities and injustices always inspires me to think spaces otherwise and to push the limits of what it means to radicalize. Jamie’s brilliance always keeps me on my toes and I thank her for this. Rinaldo’s unquestionable support has fueled this project from the start. His keen insight into the complexities of life and acute attention to detail always fascinates me and without a doubt informs my intellectual and political activities. Bobby’s support and advice from the very early days of my academic career have undeniably influenced the person that I am today and I am forever thankful for this unconditional encouragement.

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Heather Sykes’ commitment and genuine interest in the project is greatly appreciated. Heather’s insistence on seeking and exposing the usefulness and limitations of philosophies and theories has informed this book significantly. I also want to thank Bill Pinar for believing in the potential of this work and for his strong recommendations. I thank Kari Dehli for stimulating my interest in Foucault and Maureen Ford for providing the crucial opportunity to think about agency after Foucault. I feel very privileged to learn from and work alongside many of the faculty at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. I also thank Rachel Berman, Judith Bernhard, and Rachel Langford for providing the opportunities to apply the theoretical and philosophical movements of this project. Thank you to all my students in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education at OISE/UT and the School of Early Childhood Education at Ryerson University for making this profession so rewarding. To be able to teach in a multicultural city as Toronto with such diverse colleagues and students is a true privilege. To Nelson Rodriguez for giving me the much-needed spaces to think through many of the ideas presented in this book by inviting me to contribute to his edited collections. I offer similar thanks to Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke for welcoming my post-queer contribution to their queer theory companion. Thank you also to Susan Talburt and Mary Lou Rasmussen for including me on a panel of the American Educational Research Association in the Queer Studies Special Interest Group where we were collectively able to think through the complexities around what we might consider “after-queer.” To my grade eight teacher, Mary Pilla, for instilling in me a desire to learn and to appreciate all that education has to offer. She gave me the necessary foundation to organize my thoughts and put them down on paper in a coherent fashion. Structure can sometimes be a good thing. I feel very fortunate to be surrounded by such caring family and friends. My parents have always encouraged me to define success on my own terms and have instilled in me the confidence to use my imagination at a very young age. To my unofficial editor and dearest friend Alicia, I thank you for your long hours of reading and editing and most importantly your unlimited ability to listen and provide honest and heartfelt feedback. Although DNA never came about, I think we can both agree that things worked out for the best (but let’s keep it on the back burner!) To my friend since childhood, Mathew (C.C.), I thank you for teaching me to take risks and for allowing me to enjoy the spontaneous aspects of life. Our friendship gives me the ability to seek my own potential while learning how to exceed life’s limits. To my Freudian friend Sanjeevan, well, let’s just agree to disagree. Even though our conversations never lead to any resolution, it is this indeterminacy that I love so very much. Hayden, you truly taught me all about dialogical-becomings. Your innocence, curiosity, and sincere spatial-temporality always move life forward. xvi

acknowledgments

I am forever indebt to my partner Behnoud for teaching me the most important lessons of life. Your support from day one encourages me to stay on track and to always explore the unknown. You never shy away from uncertainty and always seem to find new ways to make life exciting by opening my eyes to fresh adventures. Thank you for giving me the time and space to develop this project and for endlessly devoting yourself to me. Your patience, advice, and understanding are unmatched and life is always filled with love, compassion, and happiness when we are together. I hope that one day I can return all that you have done for me.

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PLATEAU 1

Post-Queer Mappings “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”

Queer has reached a political peak. Its theoretical movements have become limited by its incessant investment in identity politics and its political outlook has in many ways attained dormant status due to its narrowed interest in heteronormativity. This is, of course, not to suggest the end of queer but instead a potential deterritorialization of queer as we know it today. Over the past two decades, a significant body of work has contributed to what is referred to as queer studies. Queer theorizations are at the heart of this anti-canonical genre where the intersection of bodies, identities, and cultures continue to be a central focus. Although queer theory informs much of this work vis-à-vis the queering of theory and the theories of queer, important feminist, postcolonial,  Teresa de Lauretis is credited for coining the term queer theory in a conference on lesbian and gay sexualities at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990. In agreement with Judith Butler, “[queer] will not fully describe those it purports to represent” (1993, 230). Consequently, queer theory can not be defined by any particular group of theorists. The following is a list of some sources that contribute to the existing body of literature known as queer theory: for introductory texts on queer theory, see Jagose (1996), Sullivan (2003), Wilchins (2004); Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1978) rethinks body politics and sex/uality; Butler (1990, 1991, 1993) is credited for rethinking the relationship between sex and gender as “natural” categories through her conceptualization of performativity; Sedgwick (1990) offers a critical reading of binary oppositions; Fuss (1991, 1995) explores sexual difference through psychoanalytic identifications; Halberstam (1998, 2005), Namaste (2000, 2005), Prosser (1998), and Wilchins (1997) offer perspectives on trans theories; Stryker and Whittle (2006) also offer a collection of essays in The Transgender Studies Reader; Alexander and Mohanty (1997), Eng (2001), Ferguson (2003), Muñoz (1999), Rodriguez (2003), and Roman (1998) offer critical contributions intersecting race with queer studies; Clare (2001) and McRuer and Wilerson (2003) queer disability studies; for readings linking queer theory and education see Garber (1994), Kumashiro (2001), Pinar (1998), Ristock and Taylor (1998), Rodriguez and Pinar (2007), Ruffolo (2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008a), Talburt and Steinberg (2000); Britzman (1995, 1998, 2000) provides an important psychoanalytic reading of education; David Morton’s edited collection The Material Queer (1996) includes many prominent theorists that provide “a materialist understanding of marginal sexualities”; for an edited collection linking queer theory with cultural criticism, see Morland and Willox’s Queer Theory (2005).

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and ability theorizations have more recently informed the body of queer studies. So while I consider queer studies and theories to be interconnected (and at times interchangeable), the theoretical and philosophical movements of queer studies are certainly not restricted to or by queer theories. What remains consistent amongst these various theorizations, however, is a shared politics embedded in significations, representations, and identifications where language has become somewhat of a unified trajectory for thinking through experience. These important works without question continue to offer many insightful ways to account for the intersection of bodies, institutions, cultural practices, social traditions, political movements, and economic initiatives. Michael Warner’s introduction of heteronormativity in the early 1990s monumentally framed the ways in which we think about how subjects are subjected to the normative discourses of heterosexuality and in doing so created the important spaces to challenge and reimagine these productivities. As a result of this and many other significant contributions, queer theory has become almost exclusively interested in challenging heteronormative ideologies by examining and exposing how subjects come into being through discursive interactions. It offers a critical politics for thinking about how subjects are constituted through heteronormative discourses. Most notable, perhaps, is bringing to light how subjects become intelligible through binary identity categories such as male/ female, masculine/feminine, and straight/gay. It queers—disturbs, disrupts, and centers—what is considered “normal” in order to explore possibilities outside of patriarchal, hierarchical, and heteronormative discursive practices. We see this, for instance, in the works of Butler (1990), Fuss (1995), and Muñoz (1999) as they explore a shift from identities to (dis)identifications. I outline elsewhere (Ruffolo 2006a) how such readings confront binary identities so as to appreciate third spaces: fixed and stable identities are reconfigured as mobile and fluid identifications, where the “I” is no longer determined by the Other but is discursively negotiated through others. Queer theory critically redefines the relationships amongst bodies, identities, and culture through a particular commitment to subjectivity as seen through significations, representations, and identifications. The vigor of queer is its commitment to disrupt ideologies, practices, concepts, values, and assumptions that are essentially normal in order to expose what is normatively essentialized. Having said this, what, you might ask, are my post-queer intentions?   Michael Warner is often credited for coining the term heteronormative, where he claims that “so much privilege lies in heterosexual culture’s exclusive ability to interpret itself as society” (1993, xxi).  I am specifically using the binaries inherent to sex, gender, and sexuality here to reflect the Western and Eurocentric discourses that have pervaded queer studies and theories over the past few decades. 

Post-Queer Mappings

In the Fall-Winter 2005 issue of Social Text, David Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz ask a necessary question of queer studies today: “What’s queer about queer studies now?” In the introduction, Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz provide an overview of queer that sets a foundation for my critique of queer: Around 1990 queer emerged into public consciousness. It was a term that challenged the normalizing mechanisms of state power to name its sexual subjects: male or female, married or single, heterosexual or homosexual, natural or perverse. Given its commitment to interrogating the social processes that not only produced and recognized but also normalized and sustained identity, the political promise of the term resided specifically in its broad critique of multiple social antagonisms, including race, gender, class, nationality, and religion, in addition to sexuality. (1)

By asking the question “what’s queer about queer studies now,” this edition explores the purpose and value of queer in a time of global economics marked by a post-9/11 politics embedded in war and terror. It offers a critical comparison between the “broad social concerns” of queer studies in the past with the more intensely interconnected focus of queer studies in the present—work interested in “theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). PostQueer Politics engages Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz’s call for a “renewed queer studies” by taking into consideration the various interconnections amongst the wide range of contributors of this edition. It is well known that queer theory is interested in challenging binaries through an interrogation of heteronormative practices using queer as a verb (a radical process of disruption) rather than a noun (an umbrella term encompassing multiple identities). My introductory  This edition of Social Text provides an excellent collection of responses to the question what’s queer about queer studies now? The issue critically rethinks queer studies in response to the “global crises that have configured historical relations among political economies, the geopolitics of war and terror, and national manifestations of sexual, racial, and gendered hierarchies.” It offers an interesting comparison between queer studies in the past with queer studies in the present: “While queer studies in the past has rarely addressed such broad social concerns, queer studies in the present offers important insights. In recent years, scholars in the field have produced a significant body of work on theories of race, on problems of transnationalism, on conflicts between global capital and labor, on issues of diaspora and immigration, and on questions of citizenship, national belonging, and necropolitics” (2). Consequently, what is offered in the following plateaus is an engagement with a “renewed queer studies” by creating a new line of flight through a politics of post-queer dialogical-becomings. 

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comments on the peaking of queer are situated in this relationship between queer and heteronormativity. I make the argument here and throughout this book that the queer/heteronormativity dualism is unproductive considering the contemporary complexities of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. PostQueer Politics is primarily interested in challenging the queer/heteronormative dyad that has informed much of the theorizations of queer and the queering of theories over the past few decades. I consider the “peaking” of queer as a plateau that negotiates contemporary queer theories and post-queer theorizations. PostQueer Politics is interested in examining the current politics of queer and the queering of politics through a renewed sense of queer that is differentiated from queer’s current implications in subjectivity. Its vision is twofold: to consider what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. I am interested in the doings of post-queer rather than the beings of it so as to avoid unnecessary binaries that have resulted in the current desire for something post. This project is about the politics around “post-” and “queer” rather than a post-identitarian landscape that would situate “post-” and “queer” as binaries. Despite my explicit intention to avoid a reading of “post-” as a definitive time and space that come after something, I must draw a somewhat stark delineation here: the “post-” of post-queer is in many respects post-subjectivity. I say this not because queer is subjectivity and post-queer is not. This, of course, would produce an unnecessary binary. Rather, as I will argue in the plateaus that follow, notions of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari) and dialogism (Bakhtin) can speak to the creativities and potentialities of contemporary politics that can not be accounted for in the representations, significations, and identifications inherent to subjectivity. I am therefore not suggesting that post-queer comes after subjectivity but that it functions within a creative terrain of potentialities that functions quite differently from subjectivity of which the queer/ heteronormative dyad is a part of. In other words, the current politics of queer, as seen through its relations to subjectivity, are limiting for the future of queer studies because of its unequivocal commitment to the queer/heteronormative binary where the politics of such discourses are restricted by the endless cycle of significations that reposition subjects on fixed planes—bodies that are either resituated in predetermined significations (moving from one identity category/ norm to another) or are represented through differentiated significations (new representations that differ from already emerged significations). My use of bodies extends beyond the ways in which queer theories think about “the body,” embodiment, corporeality, and flesh in terms of subjectivity where, for instance, movement is often accounted for through resignifications. These readings more often than not limit bodies to physical or abstract binary representations. Consequently, my use of “bodies” reaches the virtualities of politics through a consideration of bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, institutional 

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bodies, bodies of thought, systemic bodies, and cultural bodies. I am not so much arguing for the desire to maintain or favor the terms “body” and “bodies,” but instead to challenge how these terms are read through significations, representations, and identifications and therefore the overall privileging of subjectivity. Nomadic Becomings

My response to the question what’s queer about queer studies now is an interrogation of contemporary (queer) politics that is situated in and limited by subjective capacities. I will explore post-queer intensities, creativities, and potentialities of contemporary politics by moving beyond (yet dialogically connected to and therefore never completely after) the centripetal aspects of heteronormativity and the centrifugal dynamics of queer. This necessitates a movement away from thinking about politics as a resignifying practice and instead focuses on a politics of becoming as seen through, for instance, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. Although queer continues to offer a critical politics, in agreement with Bobby Noble, the vulnerability of queer is upheld in its circulation as a centripetal and centrifugal term: “it seems that ‘queer’ is beginning to become an unusable term; it has the potential to be centripetal or stabilizing the space it marks, or centrifugal, that is, destabilizing the spaces it flags” (2006, 9). In addition to the binary relationship between queer and heteronormativity, the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of queer also operate through a similar dualism. The centripetal and centrifugal forces suggested here are limiting because of how this inherent dualism is restricted to subjective capacities that, for instance, represent bodies through unified (centripetal) and differentiated (centrifugal) significations. Movement is therefore always restricted by the embodiment of centripetal and centrifugal forces that are only intelligible in relation to their binary counterparts. Consequently, I am less interested in disrupting queer’s occupation with centripetal and centrifugal forces for this requires us to work  The reference to centripetal and centrifugal forces is informed through Bakhtin (1981). Bakhtin describes centripetal as follows: “Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given (dan) but is always in essence posited (zadan)—and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia” (1981, 270). In contrast, Bakhtin provides the following description of centrifugal forces: “Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward” (1981, 272). I will discuss these terms in more detail in plateau three. 

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within the existing capacities of subjectivity that I argue are limiting from the onset. In contrast, I am more concerned with creating new Bakhtinian and Deleuzo-Guattarian lines of flight that are not restricted by subjectivity and language but are instead stimulated by the potentialities and creativities of an intensive politics of becoming. Although Post-Queer Politics delineates a time and space that diverges from queer, it should not be read in contrast or in opposition to queer. The “post-,” as articulated above, does not imply a definitive mark after queer—one that could potentially leave queer behind. On the contrary, the “post-” is aimed at creating new flows of production with queer—flows that emerge out of the queer/heteronormative dyad, remain in contact with queer, yet uphold distinct differentiations from queer. The “post-” is therefore inevitably connected to queer but is not produced within it. This project emerges out of current frustrations within queer (i.e., the call for a “renewed queer studies”) and it responds to these calls not by working within the traditional realms of subjectivity but in a time and space where politics are conceptualized as becomings that do not refer back to or differ from a priori representations. The vision of Post-Queer Politics is to make an original contribution to queer studies by methodologically plugging into different theoretical and philosophical machines. This framework is schizoanalytic in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense where it functions as a desiringmachine that continuously makes and breaks theoretical and philosophical connections. In effect, my engagement with (predominantly) Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari is fundamentally schizo: it serves as a production of production by making and breaking various connections with queer through the creative processes of becoming. Post-Queer Politics is a nomadic science. It challenges the relationship between queer and subjectivity by rethinking the politics surrounding the transition from bodies to subjects—the process of subjection—that has informed much of the queer theorizing over the past two decades. At the heart of this is a commitment to expose and reframe the body’s (in which ever way we choose to conceptualize it) associations with subjugated subjectivities by making a shift

 In other words, the arguments, ideas, claims, and assertions in this project are productions of productions: the project is schizo because there is no clear beginning or definitive end. It functions as a rhizome that is interested in making and breaking theoretical and philosophical connections to produce flows with other projects.  I am referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology. See Deleuze and Guattari’s plateau 12 in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). I explore nomadology in the latter part of this plateau and more thoroughly in plateau four.  See, for example, Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997b). 

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from subjects-as-beings to dialogical-becomings. This shift from being to becoming is central to a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings. In agreement with Claire Colebrook, the link between subjects and being severely limits the creative politics of becoming: The very concept of the subject is tied to a strategy of being and essence, rather than becoming. And this is because the subject is not just a political category or representation but a movement of grammar. The very notion of a subject in the grammatical sense, as a being capable of prediction, is also tied to a broader notion of grammar whereby political subjects or identities are effected through certain ways of speaking. The concept and logic of the subject as such, then, demands or provokes a movement of thought, a specific temporality and, ultimately, a strategy of reactivism, recognition, and being (rather than becoming). (1999, 118)

Rather than focusing on being (which I consider to be inextricably linked to subjectivity) post-queer attends to the becomings of life that do not reiterate the past but move forward as continuous productions. It is important to note here that becoming is not in opposition to being for, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, everything falls under the category of becoming. Becoming can read as be/coming where the “be” is what makes me different from you while the “coming” is a permanent state of metamorphosis. The distinction I am making here between me and you is explored throughout this project and is one that is most creatively examined using Bakhtinian dialogism and Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming where it does not clearly distinguish one subject from the next. We see this type of distinction in Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) where she uses Levinas to make a critical distinction between the self and the other. According to Butler, “Levinas has claimed that the address of the other constitutes me and that this seizure by the other precedes any formation of the self (le Moi)” (53). It is through Levinas that Butler makes a critical distinction between the self and the other, where the self is always an account of the other: That which persecutes me brings me into being, acts upon me, and so prompts me, animates me into ontology at the moment of persecution. This suggests not only that I am acted upon unilaterally from the outside but that this ‘acting upon’ inaugurates a sense of me that is, from the outset, a sense of the Other. I am acted on as the accusative object of the Other’s action, and my self first takes form within that accusation. (89)  The phrase subjugated subjectivity is derived from John Howard’s Subjectivity and Space (1998). 

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According to Butler (as seen through Levinas), the self is inferior to an Other that can never be fully realized. Post-queer politics departs from this distinction where no superiority is given to the Other (or the self for that matter) by offering a more creative conceptualization of me and you as dialogic relations (Bakhtin) that are always becoming-other (Deleuze and Guattari). The relationship between queer and post-queer, as with me and you, functions as a plateau: Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 25)

This plateauing points to how post-queer does not echo other “post” studies that suggest a clear distinction that is readily identifiable. For example, how poststructuralism indicates an era that follows structuralism. The “post-” of post-queer is always in the state of becoming that is never fully detached from queer or attached to a completely inhabitable space that exists after queer. It is a rhizomatic plateau—a multiplicity of flows that produces creative connections amongst theoretical, material, institutional, social, cultural, political, and economic bodies. My use of “post-queer,” rather than postqueer (as after queer), post/queer (as strictly differentiating queer from that which might follow queer), or (post)queer (placing more of an emphasis on post or queer) speaks to these rhizomatic networks where I consider the multiplicity of flows that can be created when exploring what post might do for queer and what queer might do for post. Post-queer is therefore a plateau between queer and something post. Discursive Inscriptions: From Humans to Subjects

In what ways, then, can we begin to think about the plateauing of queer and post-queer? I have suggested above that queer has largely been read through subjective practices that function through representations, significations, and identifications over the past few decades. This work centering on subjects and subjectivity has predominantly been Foucauldian in nature, where power and discourse are at the heart of subjective productivities. The relationship between queer (theory) and Foucault is clearly immense and so it would be impossible to fully account for these associations here. I want instead to focus on a specific aspect of this relationship that seems to have sparked the most interest since the conception of queer theory in the early 1990s. I am speaking of the intense interest in “the subject.” Naturally, there is no single, unitary, or comprehensive 

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subject that I am referring to here. There are, as we see in the vast works of Foucault, many subjects that emerge through and over time: there is the sovereign subject of the seventeenth century; the disciplined subject of the eighteenth and nineteenth century; and the biopolitical subject of the twentieth century. These phases are certainly not definitively separated by time where, for instance, the sovereign subject of the seventeenth century ends in the eighteenth century and the disciplined subject dissolves at the start of the twentieth century. There are indeed examples of each of these subjects in the twenty-first century. What is important to note is how subjects, whether sovereign, disciplined, or biopolitical, are produced through spatial and temporal discourses. A key focal point for the relationship between queer and Foucault has been, and in many ways continues to be, discursive subjects where acute attention is placed on representations, significations, and identifications—interests that revolve around meaning and the complexities surrounding the signifer and the signified. We see this most notably in the earlier works of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick where links are made between Foucault’s discursive subject and J.L. Austin’s speech act theory as seen in How to Do Things with Words (1962). I am, in essence, calling for a rethinking of Foucault’s position and influence in queer studies. I argue here and throughout this project that Foucauldian discursive subjectivities are unable to account for the complexities of contemporary neoliberal and global politics. Consequently, Post-Queer Politics intends to interrupt not only queer theory but theory in general where there is a critical need to move beyond language as a means for conceptualizing all experience. In what follows, I do not intend to establish an opposition to Foucault (as this would create another unnecessary binary) but to reconsider Foucault’s role in relation to queer and politics. This inevitably entails a rereading of Butler and the monumental role that performativity has played and continues to play in contemporary queer studies and politics. The purpose of reimagining queer’s relationship to Foucault and Butler is to create the spaces to engage a post-queer politics of dialogicalbecomings rather than subjugated subjectivities. Foucault and subsequently Butler are interested in examining how subjects are constituted through discursive practices. Queer theorizations have largely been concerned with Foucauldian notions of language and power and Butler’s performativity to highlight how bodies are produced as subjects. These readings more often than not claim that bodies become subjects as they are inscribed by discursive practices. This, in effect, situates materiality and corporeality as a priori aspects of subjugation. In agreement with Elizabeth Grosz, Foucault is “committed in some sense to a ‘natural given,’ something outside of or before the processes of inscription, a preinscriptive surface…[I]n Foucault, it is bodies and pleasures that either preexist the sociopolitical deployments of power or resist them” (1994, 156). I shall return to the impact of Foucauldian inscription on queer theory later. Let us at this point notice a critical distinction here. As 

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Foucault sees it, the transition from bodies to subjects is facilitated through inscriptive techniques and technologies that assume a preexisting surface that can be inscribed. While this model has successfully served queer studies, it is limiting because of its reliance on discourse and thus discursive significations and representations. I am interested in using Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari to examine how life is produced dialogically as becomings that are rhizomatically connected rather than discursively inscribed. In plateaus two and three I explore the critical difference between subjects and dialogical-becomings more thoroughly. For now I want to account for in more detail how Foucault and subsequently Butler make the theoretical shift from bodies to subjects. Foucault is clear on his primary interest in the transformation from human beings to subjects and how processes of subjection constitute and discipline bodies. As a form of subjectivity, subjection suggests that a subject is “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (Foucault 2000a, 331). Subjection is not a “topdown” approach to power but is instead a productive force that is less of a relationship between subjects and more of a modifier of actions: power is “an action upon an action.” (340). Subjugation is clearly in opposition to a repressive reading of power that strictly relies on prohibition. There is a difference, then, between power and domination: whereas power relations are mobile and come in many different and complex forms, domination is the immobilization of specific power relations. With this in mind, Foucault outlines three types of struggles in relation to the process of subjection: i) “against forms of domination (ethnic, social, and religious)”; ii) “against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce”; and iii) “against that which ties the individual to himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission” (2000a, 331). Power can therefore only circulate amongst free subjects where there is always a possibility for resistance.10 If resistance is not possible, power relations do not exist.11 A struggle is therefore not a longing to escape power relations, but a need to rework power relations. I want to return to my earlier comment on how power is less of a relationship between subjects and more of a modifier of actions. The focus on “an action upon an action” reinforces how discourse functions as a form of power where significations and representations act upon subjects. The production of discursive subjects as delineated here restricts a creative engagement with the 10  “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized” (Foucault 2000a, 342). 11  Foucault 1987, 12. 10

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potentialities of life because actions are discursively conceptualized through significations and representations. So while “an action upon an action” suggests the doings of bodies, it inevitably speaks to the meanings of subjects as they are connected to discursive power relations. I am not setting up a binary between doings and meanings but instead directing us to dialogical-becomings where becoming is all there is. Becomings, as I will explain throughout this project, are not restricted by the meanings of significations and representations but are instead negotiated amongst dialogic relations. The productive forms of power mixed with the struggle to rework power relations raises questions of governance: how subjects are governed and how subjects govern themselves. Governance is a relation between the state and its subjects: subjects are not produced by the state but are discursively formed through power relations that refer to the state. The state becomes a reference that depends on the intelligibility of subjects for its existence. There is no state that commands power; power relations constantly refer to the idea of a state in order to uphold their existence: power relations are not constituted by the state but are under the control of the state (Foucault 2000a, 345). The state is a reference that governs: “To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of other people” (341). Power is not located in the state, but in the actions of subjects that continuously refer to the state. Power is always local. This suggests that change is not a direct result of a change in the functioning of the state. If power relations are local, then change is local.12 The state is therefore not an abstract idea but a complex system that functions through local power relations. Although the state is not “real” per se, its functioning as a reference of power relations is because the effects of power are profoundly detected on material subjects. In the seventeenth century, to adopt Foucault’s example, the King’s body is not a symbol of power but a required component of power: its existence is essential for the role of the monarchy. It was not until the nineteenth century that a social body was developed—a body that, according to Foucault, is a fantasy since it creates the illusion of a collective will: “the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (1980a, 55). The associations between power as a productive force, the state as a reference, and the social body as a fantasy create the need for bodies to be aware of themselves as subjects and as a result, produce a desire to master themselves:

12 In “Body/Power,” Foucault suggests that “one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn’t localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute and everyday level, are not also changed” (1980a, 60). 11

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Mastery and awareness of one’s own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, musclebuilding, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one’s own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter attack in that same body. (56)

The result of the subject’s desire to master itself and to be fully aware of its existence is the material effect of power: it is here that the relationship between power and the body is most intense. This is why Foucault suggests that capitalism in contemporary societies no longer demands a class but a body.13 Genealogically Queer: Governmentality, Panopticism, Confessions

The circulation of power is dependent on subjects being able to govern themselves through processes of subjection that define, monitor, and police bodies. In addition to Foucault’s examinations of discourse as a form of power, which have, as I have suggested, consolidated the relationship between queer and Foucault, his later works on biopolitics speak to the more intricate workings of power as they relate to the transition from humans to subjects. Biopolitics, or the creation and management of populations, makes available numerous ways to discipline the social body. For example, illness is tracked through health records, statistics are specifically linked to race, and births are counted (Foucault 1997b, 73). This rationalization brings forth a critical question posed by Foucault: “Why must one govern?” (75). The biopolitical demands placed on the social body establish populations that support and reproduce the technologies of government that instill the desire for subjects to govern themselves—for bodies to be aware of themselves as subjects. It is through these techniques (procedures) and technologies (reflections) that bodies are governed as subjects.14 Foucault explores these techniques and 13  “But whereas today political and economic demands are coming to be made more on behalf of the wage-earner’s body than of the wage-earning class” (Foucault 1980a, 58). 14 The techniques of the self are the “procedures…suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms 12

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technologies of the self by analyzing various social divisions: delinquency in Discipline and Punish (1977); sexuality in the three volumes of The History of Sexuality (1978; 1985; 1986); and madness in Madness and Civilization (1965). The subjugated techniques and technologies of the self create the possibility for subjects to construct themselves as social beings and result in the normalization and abnormalization of bodies (healthy and ill subjects; model and delinquent citizens). Foucault specifically describes the emergence of three “abnormals” that are the result of social divisions upheld by techniques and technologies of the self: i) the human monster in the Middle Ages;15 ii) the individual to be corrected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;16 and iii) the onanist in the eighteenth century.17 Assujetissement (subjectivation), as it is seen through the effects of social divisions and the knowledge-power apparatuses described by Foucault, is not a metaphor but a material governing. Foucault’s inquiry into governmentality is tied to his fundamental interest in the transition from bodies to subjects.18 The relationship between queer and Foucault is woven through this transition where subjects are conceptualized through the representations and significations of governmentality. It is through a lens of governmentality—“the totality of practices, by which one can of a certain number of ends, through relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge” (Foucault 1997c, 87); the technology of the self is the “reflection on modes of living, on choices of existence, on the way to regulate one’s behavior, to attach oneself to ends and means” (89). 15  “[T]he monster’s field of appearance is a juridico-biological domain. The figures of the half-human, half-animal being (valorized especially in the Middle Ages), of double individualities (valorized in the Renaissance), of hermaphrodites (who occasioned so many problems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) in turn represented that double violation; what makes a human monster a monster is not just its exceptionality relative to the species form; it is the disturbance it brings to juridical regularities (whether it is a question of marriage laws, canon of baptism, or rules of inheritance” (Foucault 1997a, 51). 16  “The emergence of the ‘incorrigible’ is contemporaneous with the putting into place of disciplinary techniques during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the army, the schools, the workshops, then, a little later, in families themselves. The new procedures for training the body, behavior, and aptitudes open up the problem of those who escape that normativity which is no longer the sovereignty of the law” (Foucault 1997a, 52). 17  “A completely new figure in the eighteenth century. It appears in connection with the new relations between sexuality and family organization, with the new position of the child at the center of the parental group, with the new importance given to the body and to health. The appearance of the sexual body of the child” (Foucault, 1997a, 53). 18  “[The] encounter between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self I call ‘governmentality’” (Foucault 1997d, 225). 13

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constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other” (Foucault 1987, 19)—that queer theory reads bodies as discursive productions. For example, queer theory’s keen interest in identity politics maintains a discursive evaluation of subjects where the significations and representations of identities and identifications function as forms of governmentality. These discursive considerations are frequently explored using two technologies of governmentality that discipline bodies as subjects through social divisions: panopticism and confession. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains how Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is a disciplinary technique that organizes bodies (inmates) by transforming collective bodies into alienated individualities through architecture and self-awareness.19 The goal of the Panopticon is to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (1977, 201). Inmates are subjugated by the visible and unverifiable aspects of the watchtower and consequently produce themselves.20 Similar to how the disciplined body is not confined to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, panopticism also extends beyond its era of conception as it disperses over the social body: It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. (205)

Panopticism requires, produces, and maintains docile bodies by implanting a gaze of self-surveillance that organizes and polices social bodies. We see this in queer theory’s work on identity and body politics that exposes disciplinary practices that individualize bodies as subjects of fixed and stable identity 19  “The crown, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities” (Foucault 1977, 201). Foucault also suggests that “architecture begins at the end of the eighteenth century to become involved in problems of population, health and the urban question” (1980b, 148). 20 Visible in the sense that “the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon”; and unverifiable where “the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (Foucault 1977, 201). 14

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categories. These readings of discursive subjects, although important and provocative at the time, have resulted in queer theory’s stagnation where bodies can only be conceptualized through the representations and significations of identity norms that inscribe bodies. The emphasis on being here maintains an unproductive commitment to meaning. Post-queer’s interest in the creative and rhizomatic functioning of becoming is not in opposition to being, meaning, representations, and significations but asks different questions around what bodies can do as they are dialogically negotiated through creative relations that do not refer back to the inscriptive limitations of subjectivity. The confession also upholds a dedication to being and meaning as a technology of power that produces discursive subjects—a technology incorporated into queer theorizations that seek to uncover how identities are created and maintained by identifying “truths” through disclosures and recognitions. Like panopticism, the confession extends beyond its emergence through Christianity (self-examination discloses a truth of the self, where sinners are able to search for a penance)21 as it evolves into various aspects of life: health system; education system; personal relationships; and criminal justice.22 Queer theory’s interest in identity politics has focused on the ways in which the confession is able to conceal itself as a productive form of power that governs bodies. Heteronormativity, for example, creates the illusion of inner truths that can and must be signified through norms and represented in social interactions in order for subjects to be considered intelligible. Think of the requirement to place a check in a box marked by an “M” or “F” on medical forms. Subjects are asked to account for themselves through the reproduction of manufactured truths that come in the form of a priori significations and representations. These procedures allow subjects to believe in the possibility that the self can be fully knowable. Queer theory has been interested in demonstrating how, for instance, identity confessions do not articulate essential truths to the self, but reproduce heteronormative power relations that govern bodies. This is, again, not to take away from the importance of this work but to critically think about the role that such discursive readings have in relation to contemporary politics where identity politics are in many respects inapplicable beyond the study of fixed identity categories. I question, then, Foucault’s assertion to work towards a new politics of truth where we do not focus on altering the “consciousness” of subjects but challenging the productions of truths.23 If significations and representations infest all aspects of the social body, then perhaps the task is 21 See Foucault’s “Technologies of the Self ” (1997d, 242-249). 22 In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault differentiates origins from emergences opting for a genealogy of the past (1998). 23 In other words, troubling the “political, economic, institutional régime of the production of truth” (2000b, 133). 15

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not to “refuse what we are.”24 This would simply maintain and reinforce the existing social order where discourse is the dominant means by which we come to understand what subjects are. Perhaps the task is to confront the social order: not by reconceptualizing what we are but by considering the potentialities of what we can do. It would be irresponsible at this stage to fully dive into post-queer dialogicalbecomings without firmly situating the relationship between queer and subjectivity. I have suggested thus far how this relationship upholds an acute interest in the transition from humans to subjects through productive forms of power. Queer theory has been concerned with exposing the conditions and consequences of such technologies of power that generate, sustain, and defend heteronormative truths. The result of such an interest is the queer/ heteronormative dyad. Foucault’s genealogical investigation into sexuality has had the most significant impact on the evolution of this dualism.25 In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Foucault’s negation of the repressive hypothesis (that the state’s power suppresses the sexual desires of subjects) shows how bio-power emerges as a political technology that governs bodies. By the eighteenth century, sex became increasingly involved in every aspect of political and economic life. It had become a discourse through the emergence of bio-power: At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was sex: it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile and sterile, the effects of unmarried life or the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive practices. (1978, 25-26)

Sex had become a significant concern for the state and was in many ways public property. It was increasingly monitored through social divisions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including but not restricted to medicine, psychiatry, and criminal justice. The difference between power and pleasure became blurred: pleasure can be found in power and power in pleasure. We see 24  “The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state” (Foucault 2000a, 336). The vision, according to Foucault, is to “refuse what we are.” 25  Genealogy refers to the need “to identify the accidents, the minute deviations— or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things which continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being lies not at the root of what we know and what we are but the exteriority of accidents” (Foucault 1998, 374). 16

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here the emergence of scientia sexualis and the requirement for subjects to confess identity truths that are the outcomes of their own discursive reiterations. Queer theory’s opposition to heteronormative practices is deeply rooted in these truths that ultimately require subjects to, as Butler claims (2005), give an account of themselves—accounts that are motivated by social and linguistic conditions that situate a clear binary between self and other. A post-queer politics of becoming does not have or maintain such a distinction. This is not only unnecessary and unproductive but an oppositional framework such as this is incapable of accounting for the creative ways in which bodies are negotiated and produced—not within the limiting languages of significations, representations, and identifications but through the rhizomatic networks of dialogical-becomings. Performative Materializatons

To further elucidate the wedding of the queer/heteronormative dyad it is necessary to consider more closely the role that performativity plays in the transition from humans to subjects and how it is implicated in subjective capacities. Butler builds on Foucauldian subjection to further situate the body as a discursive construction. Butler claims subjection to be: the making of a subject, the principle of regulation according to which a subject is formulated or produced. Such subjection is a kind of power that not only unilaterally acts on a given individual as a form of domination, but also activates or forms the subjects. (1997b, 84)

Butler’s framing of subjects is mediated through her understanding of materialization, declaring that nothing comes before culture since everything is materialized through culture. It is here that we clearly see the connection between subjectivity, discourse, and language. Butler asserts that bodies and language are inseparable because materiality is (only) realized through the processes of signification: “To return to matter requires that we return to matter as a sign” (1993, 49). Butler is not suggesting that the body is language, but that the body is contingent on language for its intelligibility. Concurrently, Butler is not implying that the body is constructed in the constructionist sense.26 Rather than 26  Pheng Cheah (1996), for example, explains how Butler, along with Grosz, challenges constructionist debates over the body: “Grosz’s and Butler’s return to the body can be understood as a reaction to the inadequacies of social constructionism as a paradigm for feminist theory. Simply put, social constructionism espouses the primacy of the social or discourse as constructive form over preexisting matter which is said to be presignificative or nonintelligible” (109). 17

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viewing the body as a site of inscription, as with the disciplined subject of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Butler is concerned with the materialization of subjects: What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter. That matter is always materialized has, I think, to be thought in relation to the productive and, indeed, materializing effects of regulatory power in the Foucaultian sense. (9-10)

Materialization implies that matter does not exist prior to culture but is produced through culture. There is a paralleled comparison being made here between culture/language and matter/sign—dualisms that have informed and have been central to queer’s interest in discursive bodies and consequently the queer/heteronormative dyad. Foucault and Butler conceptualize the materialization of bodies quite differently. What they share, however, is an intense loyalty to materialization being read through subjectivity and discourse. For the most part, Foucault considers materialization to be a component of and necessity for discourse as a form of power. Butler extends this by penetrating materialization to expose the (im)possibilities of it where discursive power becomes a deconstruction. As a result, Butler positions Foucauldian materiality as a paradox: ‘the body,’ which is the object or surface on which construction occurs, is itself prior to construction. In other words, ‘the body’ would not be constructed, strictly considered, but would be the occasion, the site, or the condition of a process of construction only externally related to the body that is its object. (1989, 601)

The key to this paradox is the notion of inscription: on the one hand, Foucault suggests that the body is culturally constructed, where the body can not exist without this construction; on the other hand, to suggest that the body is culturally inscribed implies that there is a material body that can be distinct from discursive power. Although Foucault argues for a body that can not exist outside of the circulation of discursive power, the forces of inscription advise otherwise: the body is constructed by external forces that are inscribed on the body. In agreement with Butler, Foucault’s genealogical lens maintains a constructed body that is inscribed by external forces.27 In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 27  “I shall argue in the following that, whereas Foucault wants to argue—and does claim—that bodies are constituted within the specific nexus of culture or discourse/ 18

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Foucault describes this important correlation between genealogy and the body: The body is the surface of the inscription of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of the dissociation of the Me (to which it tries to impart the chimera of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body. (Foucault in Butler 1989, 375-376)

Genealogy points to the ways in which bodies emerge in culture through inscription. For example, the prisoner is mobilized through its inscription as an inmate.28 Foucault attributes this process to an ongoing relation between the soul and the body as it is mediated through power. An ongoing tension exists between what is visible and what is not: the inscription on the body is written on the soul that then surfaces on the body. We see here how subjugation operates through representations, significations, and identifications as the soul is inscribed by and the body then functions through discursive measures.29 David Dudrick (2005) offers an interesting critique of Butler’s take on the Foucauldian body as being (solely) inscribed by culture. He suggests that the Foucauldian body does in fact make a clear distinction: it is a physiological body (a body that works within a political field) and a soul (a body of intention). Dudrick argues that the Foucauldian body is a corporeality of life and death and power regimes, and that there is no materiality or ontological independence of the body outside of any one of those specific regimes, his theory nevertheless relies on a notion of genealogy, appropriated from Nietzsche, which conceives the body as a surface and a set of subterranean ‘forces’ that are, indeed, repressed and transmuted by a mechanism of cultural construction external to the body. Further, this mechanism of cultural construction is understood as ‘history,’ and the specific operation of ‘history’ is understood, and understood problematically, as inscription” (Butler 1989, 602-603). 28  Butler uses the example of values to explain how bodies are inscribed by culture— how the Foucauldian body, as a constructed body, exists prior to its inscription: “If the creation of values, that signifying practice of history, requires the destruction of the body…then there must be a body prior to that inscription, stable and self-identical, subject to and capable of that sacrificial destruction. In a sense, for Foucault, as for Nietzsche, cultural values emerge as the result of an inscription on the body, where the body is understood as a medium, indeed, a blank page, an unusual one, to be sure, for it appears to bleed and suffer under the pressure of a writing instrument” (1989, 604). 29 According to Butler, “the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually conceals itself as such” (1989, 606). 19

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a body that is constructed. We see this in Foucault’s treatment of the discursive and nondiscursive in Discipline and Punish. Dudrick suggests that the Foucauldian body is a “double body” comprised of body and soul.30 It seems that the primary consensus between Butler and Dudrick is that they recognize that this body does not work (completely) in the discursive field: the “double body” insists on one aspect that is nondiscursive (the physiological body) and another that is discursive (the soul). Although I can appreciate Dudrick’s claim to a “double body,” I understand Butler to be approaching the body from a very different, more radical perspective, where the theoretical friction between Butler and Dudrick is similar to that of Butler and Foucault: the tension arises because of different conceptions of materiality/materialization. The distinction between the physiological body and the soul that Dudrick supports uses a notion of materiality that bases itself in an essentialized view of materiality. Materialization for Butler, and largely that of the queer corpus, is contrastingly performative: the body is not essentially normal, but normatively essentialized as it comes into existence through the circulation of identity norms. There is therefore nothing essential about the body. This compliments Butler’s central thesis in Gender Trouble that sex does not lead to gender, but that gender, as performative, informs the idea of sex. Sex, then, is not determined by an essentialized view of the body: it does not precede the body as a natural category. Dudrick and Butler are approaching Foucault from very different angles. Performativity opens the spaces to think about how the materialization of the “physiological body,” as Dudrick frames it, is discursive. Butler’s assessment of discourse is facilitated through a consideration of power as a strategy—not as an appropriation or possession. In “Bodies and Power, Revisited” (2002), Butler puts forth the notion that the body is not limited to the human subject per se. Although Foucault does identify both the prisoner and the prison as forms of materiality, Butler further develops this position by demonstrating how the prison is dependent on the material body of the subject (i.e., prisoner) for its meaning. To put it another way, the materiality of the prison is defined as a relation. Butler is thus not rejecting Foucault but is redefining materiality: the body is not a substance, not a thing, not a set of drives, not a cauldron of resistant impulse, but precisely the site of transfer for power itself. Power happens to this body, but this body is also the occasion in which something unpredictable…happens to power; it is one site of its redirection, profusion, and transvaluation. (15)

30  Dudrick is referring to Foucault’s discussion of “The King’s Body” in Discipline and Punish (1977, 28). 20

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The discursive body, if you will, produces itself: the body is not a “double” body that is subjected in one instance and productive in another. The body simultaneously negotiates its existence through both of these forms. We see here, once again, the dominance of discourse and subjectivity where the self attaches to itself through norms in order to be intelligible. This clarifies why the self is produced in culture and outlines how it is continuously in a state of self-recognition or the desire to fully know oneself. More important, however, is how the self must detach from itself in order to attach itself to (new) norms. The connections between queer/heteronormative and subjectivity frequently draw on Foucault’s take on discourse as a productive form of power vis-à-vis Butler. For instance, how identity norms subordinate subjects while creating possibilities for intelligibilities. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), Butler is interested in the intersections of individuals and subjects, where an individual is unable to become a subject before undergoing a process of subjectivation and an individual cannot be accounted for without reference to the individual’s preceding intelligibility as a subject.31 Butler’s evaluation of individuality and subjectivity raises important questions for queer theorists around the constitution and conceptualization of “individuals” and “subjects”: What is a subject? What does it mean to call oneself an individual? When does one become a subject? Can individuality exist without a prior reference to subjectivity? The common denominator amongst all of these questions is the defining factor that both informs and forms these questions: discourse as a productive form of power. I am less concerned with Butler’s differentiation between individuals/subjects and subjects/psyche and more interested in how Butler challenges the notion that power is a condition that circulates amongst subjects.32 Butler embodies Foucault’s understanding of power here by claiming it as a condition that conceals its function as a force that “acts on” and “enacts” the subject. Butler, through psychoanalysis, attributes power to a psychic form by (re)inserting the subject’s interior space into Foucault’s notion of subjection. In doing so, she bridges the gap between the social and the psyche: 31  “No individual becomes a subject without first becoming subjected or undergoing ‘subjectivation’…It makes little sense to treat ‘the individual’ as an intelligible term if individuals are said to acquire their intelligibility by becoming subjects. Paradoxically, no intelligible reference to individuals or their becoming can take place without prior reference to their status as subjects” (Butler 1997b, 11). 32 It is important to note that in The Psychic Life of Power, Butler exercises a “psychoanalytic criticism of Foucault,” where she works with the psyche instead of the subject. According to Butler, the psyche includes the unconscious, whereas the subject’s constitution does not (1997b, 83-105). In working towards a Bakhtinian and Deleuzo-Guattarian political philosophy, this project resists Butler’s inclusion of the psychoanalytic “unconscious.” It instead works towards exploring dialogical-becomings not through lack (psychoanalysis) but production (schizoanalysis). 21

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In claiming that social norms are internalized, we have not yet explained what incorporation or, more generally, internalization, what it means for a norm to become internalized or what happens to the norm in the process of internalization. Is the norm first ‘outside,’ and does it then enter into a pregiven psychic space, understood as an interior theater of some kind? Or does the internalization of the norm contribute to the production of internality? Does the norm, having become psychic, involve not only the interiorization of the norm, but the interiorization of the psyche? I argue that this process of internalization fabricates the distinction between interior and exterior life, offering us a distinction between the psychic and the social that differs significantly from an account of the psychic internalization of norms. (19)

Butler’s engagement with the psyche further situates the role that power plays in informing the subject’s interior space. She strengthens the relationship amongst queer, discourse, and subjectivity here by making a distinction between the subject (the materialization of bodies) and the psyche (the interiority of the body). In doing so, she is able to think through agency in relation to the psyche and subsequently through the performative reiteration of norms. Post-Queer Politics explicitly diverts from this relationship between queer and subjectivity. Rather than consolidating these associations through discourse, language, and signs where bodies are conceptualized through lack (we see this mostly in psychoanalysis), a post-queer reading offers a schizoanalytic look at the relationship between bodies and politics where desire is based on production. Take, for instance, the politicized subject that Butler contends with in “Contingent Foundations” (1992). She considers the deconstructed subject to be a “permanent possibility” that can “suspend all commitment to that to which the term, ‘the subject,’ refers” and has the possibility to “open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized” (15). To deconstruct is not to reject the subject, but to reassess the subject in a way that can challenge, for instance, heteronormative ideologies by realizing possibilities that were once not there. The possibility for resignification is central to this conceptualization and consequently the link between queer and performativity. Despite the calls to queer heteronormativity through resignification, these practices actually reinforce the queer/heteronormative dyad by upholding the relationship between bodies and subjectivity. As I argue here and throughout this project, resignification as a form of discursive power actually limits bodies to the possibilities within the strict realm of subjectivity. I argue that this prohibits the potentialities of life. Dialogical-becomings entail a consideration of desire as a productive force rather than something that is based on lack. Post-queer desire shares the movements that Patricia MacCormack makes in Cinesexuality (2008): 22

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While queer is a subjective performance of desire, desire in the work of these theorists is what precedes subjectivity as a kind of forceful chaos which makes the subject reel and dissipate into molecular arrangements with other molecules. Political strategies come from a schematic but not fixed mapping of this chaos, and as elements change so too must the map. Rudimentarily queer uses the body to perform discourse to show it is arbitrary and malleable. Desire sees discourse itself as corporeally enfleshed. Where in the first instance the world is discourse and the body (emergent through discourse but still, especially for Butler, something somehow before discourse) a challenge, in the second the world is flesh and the binary is itself a discursive construct. (7)

Post-queer desire moves away from the aforementioned binary that maintains the body’s relationship to subjectivity where change is orchestrated through resignifications. I will expand on post-queer desire in plateau two. For now, let us focus more on how the queer/heteronormative dyad operates through subjectivity and how Foucault and Butler’s readings of bodies are framed in discourse. Matrix of Un/Intelligibility

Foucault’s question why must one govern is central to Butler’s earlier work that troubles discourses on bodies and bodies of discourse in relation to (predominantly) gender and sex (1990, 1993). Butler revises Foucault’s inquiry into governance not by exploring how bodies govern identities but how identities govern bodies. This particular reading of governance is adopted by many queer theories that link bodies to subjectivity. The implications of this suggest that bodies are not essentially gendered (nature debate) nor are they constructed by identities (social construction debate). On the contrary, identities govern bodies. The performative functioning of gender extends to a reconsideration of sex: Butler claims that gender does not follow sex, but that sex is a consequence of gender performativity. In agreement with Cheah’s reading of Butler, the “theory of sex [is] a dynamic process of materialization rather than a substance (1996, 111).33 Butler’s sex/gender reconfiguration sets the tone for queer’s interest in discursive subjects and it also exposes the severe limitations of discourse and subjectivity that I am working against: it uncovers the discursive restrictions of subjects when they do not have “a signifiable 33 According to Cheah (1996), “Butler’s theory of materialization thus has the advantage of rendering the material category of sex into a site of permanent contestation. On the one hand, it alerts us to the fact that the body, not just consciousness, is a crucial link in the circuit of social production and reproduction, both constituted by and also constituting a given social order (110-111). 23

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existence prior to the mark of their gender” (Butler 1990, 13). Subjects, as discursive productions rather than “instruments” or “mediums,” are limited by, for instance, the significations and representations associated with gender.34 The discursive subject cannot exist outside of subjectivity because movement relies on its relationships with signification and representation. For example, gendered norms constitute gendered subjects and these subjects reinforce the representations of gendered identities through their significations as gendered bodies. It is important to consider that “intelligible”35 subjects are not only produced through the reproduction of, for example, gendered norms, but are also made intelligible through the “incoherent” and “discontinuous” subjects who fail to reproduce norms: subjects that are unable or perhaps unwilling to reproduce the gendered norms that constitute what is un/intelligible.36 Queer theory fruitfully shows how these “failures,” however, can also create spaces to show the limitations of identity norms: in addition to constituting “normal” genders, identity failures can also show how collective identity categories are unable to account for the various differences amongst subjects. Queer theory’s desire to expose and disrupt what Butler refers to as the “matrix of intelligibility” positions performativity at the core of the queer/heteronormative dyad where although subjects cannot exist outside of the discursive reproductions of identity norms they can reposition themselves and therefore the matrix through their reiterations. This discursive inescapability is not a consequence of subjects themselves per se but is predominantly the result of queer working within the realms of subjectivity and discourse that are limited to the language of representations, significations, and identifications. In other words, the positions can change but the discursive matrix remains.

34  “The limits of the discursive analysis of gender presuppose and preempt the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture…These limits are always set within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality” (Butler 1990, 13). 35  “‘Intelligible’ genders are those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire” (Butler 1990, 23). 36  Butler’s abject beings refer to how subordinated others produce privileged subjects: “The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject. This zone of uninhabitability will constitute the defining limit of the subject’s domain…In this sense, then, the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection” (Butler 1993, 3). 24

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Dragging Identities

Performativity continues to play an essential role in contemporary queer theorizing. At its inception in the early 1990s, it helped to frame queer theory’s interest in bodies, subjectivity, and discourse. It offered a way to account for how subjects become un/intelligible through the circulation of identity norms. Performative significations, representations, and identifications quickly encapsulated identity politics and ultimately the queer/heteronormative dyad that is upheld today. Performativity suggests that there can be no subject that exists prior to identity norms. The simulacrum37 inherent to identity categories (for example, “gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but rather, as copy is to copy” (Butler 1990, 41))38 ensures the “natural” and “normal” functioning of identities. Yet even when queer disrupts these heteronormative reiterations the discursive matrix is upheld because of their overall reliance on subjectivity for their intelligibilities. Butler’s performative theory clearly contributes to the solidification of queer, subjectivity, and discourse. We can philosophically see this by returning to the Foucauldian soul as a form of inscription. The soul attempts to explain how subjects are inscribed by identity discourses that are then expressed on the surface of the body. As outlined above, Butler concludes that this “appears to assume a materiality prior to signification and form” (1990, 166). In other words, this inscriptive formation implies a materiality that exists prior to meaning (yet, I might add, still in relation to meaning). The result of this is a signifying lack, where the body is in a constant state of attempting to attain complete coherence through ongoing interactions between body and soul. I agree with Butler that this conceptualization inaccurately views

37 See Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1994): “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory” (1). 38 In this example, Butler is suggesting that there can be no reference to an original identity. All identities are copies of copies: “the ‘unity’ of gender is the effect of a regulatory practice that seeks to render gender identity uniform through a compulsory heterosexuality. The force of this practice is, through an exclusionary apparatus of production, to restrict the relative meanings of ‘heterosexuality,’ ‘homosexuality,’ and ‘bisexuality’ as well as the subversive sites of their convergence and resignification” (1990, 42). 25

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the body as a lack.39 While performative bodies do not function within the realm of inscription they are produced alongside signification: acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (173)

Identity norms are not produced on the body but are materialized through the body and so there is no natural or essential inner core. I want to be clear that Butler is not rejecting the Foucauldian soul but reconsiders, specifically in Bodies that Matter, the materializations of bodies and the illusive production of the soul. Butler’s example of drag performances is particularly useful here. Drag performances have the ability to visibly express the invisible workings of gender. Drag disrupts the inner and outer cores of the body by intensifying these processes through performance: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (1990, 175). This is not to suggest that drag is a performance distinct from performativity (a common misreading of Butler’s interpretation of drag in Gender Trouble).40 Drag performances highlight how bodies are discursively produced as subjects implicated in the reproduction of gendered norms. Butler’s comments on drag have become central to queer theory’s denaturalization of identity categories because they expose the illusion of an interior gendered core.41 Drag is a notable example of how identity is a 39  “The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack…[T]he soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such” (Butler 1990, 172). 40  Butler clarifies this position further when she is interviewed by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal in an issue of Radical Philosophy: “The problem with drag is that I offered it as an example of performativity, but it has been taken up as the paradigm for performativity…I don’t think that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of gender. I don’t think that if we were all more dragged out gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive. There are restrictions in drag. In fact, I argued toward the end of the book that drag has its own melancholia” (1994). Therefore, Butler makes a clear distinction between performance and performativity, where “the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject.” 41 This is not to suggest that drag in itself can denaturalize identities. On the contrary, it exposes how all subjects are implicated in gendered performatives: “drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic 26

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parody: it is not a copy of an original, but a copy of the illusion of an original; drag is a copy of a copy. This leads queer theory to its most infamous statement that identities are not fixed or essential but rather mobile and fluid. Identities hide their functions as discursive productions through the performative reiteration of norms. This, again, fuels queer’s discursive reading of bodies that leads to the queer/heteronormative dyad: it concretizes the relationship between bodies and subjectivity by highlighting the processes in which bodies become subjects through the significations, representations, and identifications of norms where the body only becomes intelligible as a subject in relation to what precedes its production. Furthermore, despite Butler’s departure from Foucault, her take on materialization is restricted by its commitment to subjectivity where the body is limited to, for instance, the subjective reiterations of identity norms. Although the matrix of intelligibility is continuously reworked and redefined through queer’s relationship to heteronormativity, it always precedes the subject and therefore limits its potential to be thought otherwise. Post-Queering Queer

In the preceding sections I have situated post-queer as a consideration of what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. This dialogism, which explicitly functions not as a binary but as a Bakhtinian negotiation, rethinks the genealogy of queer bodies. In doing so, Post-Queer Politics not only interferes with queer theory but with theory itself as it tackles the limitations of politics concerned with significations, representations, and identifications. Following Claire Colebrook, it is critical to “not simply challenge the norms that dominate…but [to] contest just what it means to theorise” (2008, 22). Colebrook offers an important critique of queer that I see contributing to a post-queer politics: rather than queer being a critical lens that disrupts norms (which I argue results in and reinforces the queer/ heteronormative dyad) Colebrook examines queer’s potential to challenge subjectivism (23). Poststructuralist theories throughout the second half of the twentieth century have largely considered the subjectivities surrounding body and identity politics. There is, once again, no such thing as “the body.” However, we can question the prevalence of a consistent “body” when thinking about how language has predominantly served as the primary means to account for all human experience in poststructural theorizations. Queer theory is certainly very much a part of these conversations and has in many respects led the way for radical reconsiderations of identity and body politics. It is widely known gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Butler 1993, 125). 27

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that the theoretical ambitions of queer are not divorced from the everyday but in fact emerge out of these experiences. With that said, queer’s dormant status is situated in the queer/heteronormative dyad’s narrow concern with (re)significations and representations that always refer back to a prior system of identification. One way out of this staleness is to reconsider how we think about the experiences that drive the theoretical. This entails, I argue, a shift in how we theoretically account for experience. I am not privileging theory over experience here because this would situate the argument in an unproductive binary. The dialogic relation between experience and theory that I am speaking of here refers to the “politics” in Post-Queer Politics where we do not simply need to change the players of the game but how we think about and play the game itself. Post-queer therefore works towards a politics of becoming where experience and theory are dialogically connected without reducing experience to theory and theory to experience. I locate the desire for a post-queer politics in relation to contemporary control mechanisms that cannot be accounted for using subjectivity as the dominant lens of analysis. This speaks to how Western societies are becoming less disciplinary (Foucault) and more controlled (Deleuze). I am referring to how neoliberal and global initiatives are increasingly concerned with the economization of everyday life where knowledge, information, and communication are redefining life itself. The ongoing shift from discipline to control changes how we theoretically think about life. Before we can explore these movements and the politics that inform and are formed by them, let us return to queer theory’s interests in “the body” and its influence on poststructural theorizations over the past two decades. I have explored thus far how queer theory makes use of subjectivity to think about the transition from bodies to subject. Although Butler differentiates herself from Foucault by advancing a theory of performativity that explains how social norms are internalized and reproduced through subjects, a separation between bodies and culture is preserved because of her paralleled comparison between culture/language and matter/sign.42 Language maintains its status as the essential way to conceptualize experience. Colebrook outlines this position quite succinctly: Butler acknowledges that we cannot think of language or sociality as imposed upon life, for ‘life’ exists only as always already split from itself. Here she follows a post-structuralist notion of the signifier: not as a sign that orders reality, but as that aspect of matter which (in presenting itself as partial) creates a gap, absence, or prior real which is always given after the fact. In terms of politics, 42 This becomes more visible when reading Butler through Bakhtin, where Bakhtin explores language in its material form. This will be discussed more thoroughly in plateau three. 28

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then, we are always already within subjection and mourning: at once human or recognizable only through given systems, while never fully coinciding with such systems. Queerness in Butler’s terms…can only be the effect of an explicit theorization of the conditions for recognition: it is because one becomes human or a subject only through processes or iteration that there is also, necessarily, a failure or ‘queering’ of identity. (2008, 29)

Colebrook’s analysis here points to the limitations of queer’s commitment to subjectivity where political movement is only possible in relation to normative structures. I want to emphasize that Butler’s work on performativity, while being highly influential, is not the only subjective paradigm contributing to the queer/ heteronormative dyad. For instance, Eve Sedgwick’s shift from essentialism/ constructivism to minoritizing/universalizing places the body in an immediate association with the significations of identity categories (1990); Diana Fuss represents the body using identifications through her psychoanalytic take on sexual difference (1991; 1995); Judith Halberstam’s “female masculinity” resignifies the body in relation to identity norms that precede the body (1998); José Muñoz’s “disidentifications” relies on the identification of conventional norms to differentiate bodies from these representations (1999). These theorizations quite often position bodies as effects of power and as a result they attempt to find ways of challenging the discursive practices that police bodies as ab/normal or un/intelligible. These contributions disrupt readings of the body as fixed, stable, and essentially normal and work to decenter bodies outside of patriarchal and hierarchical ideals. This is perhaps where we most vividly see the queer/heteronormative dyad: queer theories challenge heteronormative practices that attempt to maintain collective identity groups that are unable to account for a multiplicity of differences. I want to be clear that this project is not concerned with rejecting these noteworthy contributions for they continue to offer insightful ways to explore identity and body politics. I am, however, interested in creating new spaces to think about politics that are not limited to, by, or within subjectivity. This requires, as I suggest above, a rethinking of queer and theory where post-queer is not a post-identity politics but a plateau of queer and something post: For Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax leading to a state of rest. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. (Massumi 1992, 7)

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Becoming post-queer, as a plateau, creates a new flow of production with the existing queer corpus through the potentialities of a time and space that might come after queer. I want to avoid a reading of post-queer as a post-identity project similar to that of Lennard Davis’ work on “dismodernism.” According to Davis: the concept of identity, which served us well for the past twenty years, has been played out. So, while I began by wanting to include disability in the multicultural arena, I’ve ended by seeing it, along with most identities, as inherently unstable. But rather than jettison disability, I now think that its very difference from traditional identities—its malleable and shaky foundation—can be the beginning of an entirely new way of thinking about identity categories. (2002, 5)

Post-queer is not to be considered the way out of queer. This could potentially position post-queer as a neocolonial body of work that is capable of accounting for all difference. We can turn to Robert McRuer’s critique of Davis’ work that claims disability studies as the post-identity project. In agreement with McRuer, this positions disability studies as “a global (or globalizing) body” (2006, 202). Post-queer, like McRuer’s crip theory, recognizes “a postidentity politics of sorts, but a postidentity politics that allows us to work together, one that acknowledges the complex and contradictory histories rather than transcending them.” Becoming post-queer is therefore a reading through, rather than an outright rejection, of subjectivity, discourse, and identity politics’ place in queer theorizing. Post-queer is clearly not an abandonment of queer but a new way to think about the future of queer using concepts that have not emerged out of or through queer. Post-queer is a deterritorialization of queer as a politics of dialogical-becomings: the discursive spaces of queer are deterritorialized using Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari by creating post-queer lines of flight that are forever becoming-other. The notion “dialogical-becomings” is explored in the plateaus throughout Post-Queer Politics. It is a creative concept distinct from the relationship amongst queer, subjectivity, and discourse because post-queer politics are not directed towards the past (significations and representations) but the future (virtualities and actualities). Deleuze and Guattari’s “Treatise of Nomadology” (1987) informs the methodology used in Post-Queer Politics. Nomadology addresses a fundamental tension between the state apparatus and the war machine.43 I consider the queer/ heteronormative dyad to function as the state apparatus that conceptualizes politics through subjectivities and discourses. I see queer as functioning within the realm of the state apparatus, rather than outside and against it, because of its binary nature that explicitly exposes and challenges heteronormativity: queer 43 I discuss this relationship in full detail in plateau four. 30

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maintains its binary status within the state apparatus because its disruptive politics and differentiated movements rely on heteronormativity. The war machine, while in tension with the state apparatus, is not its binary: “In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 352). In other words, post-queer is a war machine because it is not in direct opposition to heteronormativity (which would result in another binary) but in tension with the queer/heteronormative dyad. So while it rejects the appropriations of the state apparatus it does not rely on it for its intelligibility because it opts for a more open politics that are highly contextualized and produced through dialogic relations. Although the nomad exists outside of the official it maintains a relation with it because it emerges through the tensions of the state apparatus and the war machine. The war machine can be characterized by two poles: the first assumes war with the state apparatus and the second upholds an ambition to create new lines of flight. The first pole is concerned with the indefinite deterritorialization of the state apparatus: it seeks the limits of the state apparatus by exposing the conditions attempting to reconstitute the war machine (i.e., challenging the queer/ heteronormative dyad). The second pole functions to create smooth spaces for the nomad to roam (i.e., the potential to articulate bodies in ways that are not possible within the queer/heteronormative dyad). Noble’s Sons of the Movement is an excellent example of this where, as Rinaldo Walcott reviews on the back cover, “[t]his move away from the medicalized discourse of trans communities to the social, political, and cultural context is a crucial and important one and opens up new terrain in trans studies.” The roaming nomad does not move out of choice but out of necessity. Nomadology is a science of becoming that challenges dominant and oppressive knowledges through direct associations with space: the nomad does not simply move from one space to the next nor does it follow specific routes created by the state apparatus that predate its movement. So while post-queer emerges out of and remains in conversation with the queer/heteronormative dyad it does not rely on it for its intelligibility. In contrast, it moves across open spaces that overlap, contradict, and resist the paths of the state apparatus. The necessity to think spaces otherwise comes from the tension between the state apparatus and the war machine that ultimately requires ethical choices to be made. For example, the nomad emerges as a result of encountering racism, sexism, ableism, and classism and so it does not come out of nowhere but surfaces through conflicting tensions by envisioning alternatives to universalizations. The post-queer nomad considers the queer/heteronormative dyad to be one of these universalizations. To be clear, the nomad does not constitute the tension between the state apparatus and the war machine but it is the tensions that activate the nomad. The choices that the nomad makes are strategic political movements that are of great necessity. The tension created between the state apparatus and the war machine is intended to 31

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create new opportunities to think spaces otherwise: “they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 423). The ethical choices made by the nomad—for instance, the theoretical and philosophical movements of post-queer dialogical-becomings—are not made from deeply within or completely outside the state apparatus. For example, activism is not produced by the mechanisms that activists resist and it does not arise from spaces outside of oppressive processes. The choices that activists make result from the conflicting tensions between the state (i.e., oppressive processes) and the war machine (i.e., activist initiatives). The nomad and the spaces it encounters are produced simultaneously as dialogic relations where the tension between the state apparatus and the war machine create new ideas through nomadic becomings. My use of nomadology is intended to challenge the functioning of queer as a subjugated subjectivity that reinforces heteronormativity as its binary. Nomadology creates open and smooth spaces that function similar to the game Go where the strategy is to territorialize new spaces (without reinforcing and supporting them) in order to subsequently deterritorialize them: “make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, by going elsewhere” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 353). Deterritorializations always take us elsewhere and produce something new. Post-queer dialogical-becomings intend to create a “war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy.” As Deleuze and Guattari state, “[a]ll by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically” (353). I am therefore less interested in creating “battles” with contemporary queer studies and more concerned with the production of intersecting points where all the “game pieces” work together in order to create new deterritorialized lines of flight. The theoretical and philosophical encounters in the plateaus that follow result from a nomadic necessity to create new political movements that are not limited by the relationship between official knowledges and decentering practices but are more creative and open as dialogical processes of becoming. The Plateaus

Post-Queer Politics explores the plateau of queer and post-queer by examining what I refer to as dialogical-becomings. In plateaus two and three I will locate this term in the philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin; in the subsequent plateaus I will examine how it plays out in relation to neoliberal capitalism, globalization, citizenship, radical democracies, higher education, knowledge economics, and biotechnological innovations. 32

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In Plateau two, I situate Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy of becoming at the heart of post-queer politics. I use a schizoanalytic lens that affirms production rather than regression so as to avoid a reading of desire based on lack. Post-queer desire is not based on possession but on the production of flows where there is no distinction between production and its product because producing is a “grafting onto” a product. Desire is a production of production: a system of interruptions where a break in a flow actually constitutes the flow rather than stopping the continuity of production. I offer this important rereading of life itself—one that is clearly differentiated from subjectivity and discourse—to show how predominantly Western societies function through productions of production: “culture is not the movement of ideology: on the contrary, it forcibly injects production into desire, and conversely, it forcibly inserts desire into social production and reproduction” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 145). Let me be clear that I am not speaking of culture in any abstract sense and I do not intend to establish or sustain a binary between what may be considered “social” and “physical.” I am more interested in creating smooth spaces rather than polarizations or hierarchies. I embody a similar Deleuzian framework to that which Elizabeth Grosz outlines in Volatile Bodies (1994) that seeks to consider the relations amongst bodies as flows of production rather than the either/or significations and representations of subjects as meaning.44 I am therefore referring both to culture and bodies as becoming forces of desire. I also share Dorothea Olkowski’s use of bodies as outlined here:

44 Elizabeth Grosz’s Volatile Bodies (1994) uses Deleuze and Guattari to rethink corporeality in relation to feminist politics. Grosz uses Deleuze and Guattari to suggest that: i) “The social is not privileged over the psychical”; ii) “a Deleuzian framework refuses to duplicate the world, to create a world and its reflection, whether that reflection appears on the psychical interior in the form of ideas, wishes, and hopes or on the social and signifying exterior as meanings, latencies, representations”; iii) “rather than the either-or choice imposed by binarisms, they posit a both-and relation”; iv) “[a] Deleuzian framework de-massifies the entities that binary thought counterposes against each other…Through Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, the body, bodies, flows in bodies rather than ‘subjects,’ psychic beings, are what produce”; v) “[a] Deleuzian framework refuses to seek, as psychoanalysis tends to, a single explanatory paradigm, a single regime of explanation”; vi) “[they can] provide explanatory frameworks and models which enable femininity, female subjectivity and corporeality, to be understood as positivity” (180-182). In the final chapter of Volatile Bodies, Grosz specifically focuses on exposing the “sexual differences” of bodies (not sexed bodies) through an exploration of male seminal fluids and women’s corporeal flows: Grosz explores the “corporeal styles, the ontological structure, and the lived realities of sexually different bodies” (191-208). 33

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The body is not a medium, and body does not designate substance; but it does express the relationship between forces. It is precisely because the relationship between forces is not constituted out of some kind of preexisting medium or preexisting reality that, while forces are available for interpretation, they are never known. With the term body, then, Deleuze is referring not simply to the psychophysiological bodies of human beings but to body in its broadest sense. Bodies may be chemical, biological, social, or political; and the distinction between these modes are not, as Deleuze argues in Difference and Repetition, ontological. If anything, it becomes, for Deleuze (with Felix Guattari), semiological, a function of different regimes, different organizations of life. (Olkowski 1999, 98-99)

A significant portion of this plateau is dedicated to explaining how I use the term bodies in a post-queer sense to mean desiring-machines: bodies as desiring the production of production, where desire is immanent (production for the sake of production). Post-queer bodies as desiring-machines do not circulate as autonomous entities: they are always connected to other desiring-machines through breaks and flows. Following Deleuze and Guattari, post-queer desire is not based in ideology (Marx) or the unconscious (Freud): there is no class difference because everyone is a slave; respectively, the (phallic) Oedipus complex is a sociopolitical construction. As stated above, desire does not lack anything. Rather than the object joining the subject, the desire is for the subject to join the object. There are no fixed or definitive subjects and objects like we see in subjectivity. Desiring-machines only run when they are not working properly: in order for a desiring-machine to function, it has to break a connection (leave a flow) to create a new connection with another desiring-machine (enter a flow). Postqueer bodies, as desiring-machines, can never be completely coherent because they are complex machines engaged in desiring productions. I will also focus on how desiring-machines are ongoing attempts of becoming a Body without Organs (BwO). The purpose of this is not to reject biology but to show how the schizo of post-queer politics is produced through this tension. As Dorothy Smith explains: Schizophrenics experience their organs in a nonorganic manner, that is, as elements of singularities that are connected to other elements in the complex functioning of a ‘machinic assemblage’ (connective synthesis). But the breakdown of these organ-machines reveals a second theme—that of the body without organs, a non productive surface upon which the anorganic functioning of the organs is stopped dead in a kind of catatonic stupor (disjunctive synthesis). These two poles—the vital anorganic functioning of the organs and their frozen catatonic stasis, with all the variations of attraction and repulsion that exist 34

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between them—can be said to translate the entire anguish of the schizophrenic. (2004, 644-645)

The tension between the desiring-machine and the BwO is one of productions and anti-productions, respectively. This offers a creative means to think about politics as becomings rather than subjective capacities. Post-queer politics function rhizomatically in comparison to the highly structured nature of arborescence: whereas in arborescence the value of an element is dependent on its association with the entire structure, the rhizome is not a sum of many parts; nor is the rhizome reducible to the singular or the multiple. It is not a structure but a constitution of linear multiplicities that connects any point of a rhizome to any other point. The rhizome creates the much-needed spaces to think about politics as permanent states of transformation rather than the effects of subjective discourses. Rhizomatic bodies are always linked to other rhizomes and can be continuously recreated because unlike subjects that are traced (think of performative reiterations as copies without any original) rhizomatic bodies are mapped and so are “entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12). Like the plateau of queer and post-queer, rhizomatic bodies as post-queer becomings are interbeings that are always in the middle—they are motions that act as a “threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (249). Plateau two is therefore less interested in what bodies are (being) and more involved in what bodies can do (becoming) as affects rather than effects. I continue to open up the potentialities for thinking about politics as dialogicalbecomings in the third plateau. I extend the becomings of the second plateau using such Bakhtinan concepts as dialogism, speech genres, utterances, and heteroglossia to plateau subjugated subjectivities. Much of the plateau takes on dialogism as a means to account for highly contextualized negotiations that are distinct from, say, the reiterative politics of performativity that have infused queer theories. This entails a consideration of dialogical bodies using utterances that, unlike performativity, do not make a distinction between materiality and the soul. The rhizomatic mappings of the previous plateau are applied to the chains of utterances in this plateau. Together they constitute the dialogical-becomings that are central to post-queer politics. The intersection of Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin is intended to add new energy to contemporary queer theorizing by focusing on the creative aspects of life itself. I draw on Bakhtin to develop a new language for thinking about experience without using language as the primary or sole means of conceptualizing experience. For instance, I will differentiate performative bodies as copies from dialogical bodies as quotes where the body is not something exclusively given—it does not strictly reiterate existing norms—but is instead always something given and something created: something new is always produced through dialogical-becomings as creative potentials. 35

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The emergence of queer theory in the 1990s coincides quite fittingly with the exponential growth of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. Lisa Duggan’s (2002, 2003) identification of “the new homonormativity” is a clear example of this where identity politics supports rather than challenges heteronormative practices and ideologies. Privatization, domesticity, and consumption are all aspects of homonormativity that in many ways exclude queer from whitemiddle-class-gay-male cultures. I consider these associations not by reinforcing a binary between queer and hetero/homo-normativity but by reconsidering politics itself using a post-queer framework of dialogical-becomings. Plateau four offers new ways to think about contemporary politics by intersecting neoliberal capitalism and globalization with the ongoing shift from Foucauldian disciplinary societies to Deleuzian control societies. I consider Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) along with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985) to think through what a post-queer politics might be in an age marked by privatization and free market economies. I question what agency might be in relation to what a “radical and plural democracy” might look like. This entails a critique of citizenship discourses and disciplinary measures that are seen as effects of capitalism’s ongoing production of individualized subjects. I revitalize this unproductive and somewhat outdated take on contemporary politics by accounting for Deleuzian control societies that are concerned with dividualizations (rather than disciplinary individualizations) where bodies are controlled through access and information (in comparison to, say, the confinement strategies characterizing disciplinary societies). I consider these ongoing shifts in order to develop new ways for thinking about agency, citizenship, and democracy on a popular level that is distinct from individualizing practices. Agency, citizenship, and democracy are explored as dialogical-becomings that are negotiated in highly contextualized moments. For instance, I integrate Bakhtin’s interpretation of François Rabelais’ work on the grotesque to argue that agency, in its popular form, is not strictly biological or psychic but is instead a body of continuous renewal and regeneration: a popular sense of agency that is open rather than closed to the world. Plateau five applies the post-queer politics explored in previous plateaus to contemporary higher educational practices through an examination of academic bodies. I consider how the research, teaching, and service aspects of academic life function masochistically by reading academic citizenship through neoliberal capitalism and globalization. For example, I consider how the bodies occupying academic spaces are becoming increasingly intensified as consumers and producers of mass higher education: academic bodies are worn down as they produce more in order to purchase the products they produce. I integrate Deleuze and Guattari’s “civilized capitalist machine” to show how the privatization and marketization of higher education limit the processes of desiring production. For instance, how the civilized capitalist machine and its uncivilized vision isolates academic bodies 36

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from any notion of community. My use of masochism is in the Deleuzian sense that is not in opposition to sadism. This analysis is therefore not Marxian: I am not suggesting that the industrial capitalist dominates (sadist) and the proletariat are dominated (masochists). Deleuzian masochistic bodies are implicated in both sides of the flow: the workers produce products in order to gain purchasing power to purchase the products that they produce (the production of surplus to acquire purchasing power). Consequently, I explore how academic bodies engage in highly masochistic negotiations where surplus value is obtained through intensifications that ultimately wear down the body. This inevitably shows how academic bodies are always in a state of suspense (not acceleration) and continue to wear themselves down by purchasing products in order to gain more purchasing power. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “this whole story is profoundly schizo” (1983, 238). Dialogical-becomings are considered in this plateau to challenge the privatization and marketization of higher education by taking into account the grotesque and carnivalesque potentialities of academic bodies. Plateau six brings together the politics of post-queer examined in the previous plateaus to situate dialogical-becomings as affects engaging virtualities and actualities. I differentiate the creative potentialities of the virtual/actual from the gridlock of real/possible significations and representations. I locate the relationship between queer and subjectivity in the real/possible that precedes the body as a “back-formation” that either solidifies a predetermined plan or embodies a program set in place.45 This is most visible in the performative reiterations of identity norms, as I explain in earlier plateaus, where the performative body is a back-formation that reiterates what has already emerged. Post-queer politics as affect, in contrast, engage the virtual/actual where the body spatially exists in the actual but is always directed towards the unexpected virtual. This plateau offers an important critique of queer by exposing how queer is only capable of resignifying the possible when it is opposed to heteronormativity. We see this, for example, in the desire to destabilize normative identities, ideologies, and discourses that are read through a performative lens. In other words, the disruptive vision of queer in contemporary queer studies is always a possibility, and not a potential, because it only engages the real/possible that functions on a grid that works through positionality—even if there is an intention to challenge the grid. This ultimately limits the potential of politics. I uncover how post-queer politics is not limited to the possible/real. It is instead a virtuality that is actualized through the immanent processes of dialogicalbecomings where the virtual is an idea, not a representation. I bring these ideas together by making a new flow of production linking queer studies with knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations. I examine post-queer politics and the materialities of life itself in relation to 45  My use of “back-formation” here is derived from Massumi (2002). 37

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biomedicine, knowledge economics, and control societies. I investigate how this relationship is not representing life but producing new life forms. For example, how biotechnological research creates new controlling mechanisms where biology is no longer a limit of life but a limitless potential. Bioethics is at the forefront of this discussion and I argue for the need to be concerned with these new ways of conceptualizing life because new forms of social control are established in this age of info-material citizenship. Post-Queer Politics calls for a plateauing of queer and post-queer by rethinking queer’s relationship to subjectivity and discourse as seen through the queer/ heteronormative dyad. Equity and social justice are at the heart of this project and so agency is central to this discussion. The dialogical-becomings of postqueer politics offer new ways to think about agency outside of that which is given or predetermined. Agency will be considered a creative potential that is continuously becoming-other through highly contextualized utterances: An utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the truth, the good, the beautiful, and so forth). But something created is always created out of something given (language, an observed phenomenon of reality, an experienced feeling, the speaking subject himself, something finalized in his world view, and so forth). What is given is completely transformed in what is created. (Bakhtin 1986, 119-120)

Consequently, post-queer considers what is given and what is created by calling on theorists, philosophers, educators, and activists to reevaluate politics in “the living present.”46

46  Bakhtin 1984a, 108. 38

PLATEAU 2

A Critical Politics of Becoming Schizoanalytic Assemblages

Deleuze and Guattari’s examination of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus frames the schizoanalytic politics of post-queer. The political philosophy outlined in these texts offers new ways to think about the materialities of life without reducing experience to language. Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy moves beyond the confinements of representations and significations as seen in subjectivity. I outline these limitations in plateau one and so I do not want to repeat myself here. Instead I want to explore a critical politics of becoming in relation to the doings rather than beings of life. This entails an account of experience through multiplicities, connections, and assemblages where life itself is not represented or articulated in the form of whole subjects. A politics of becoming is not necessarily opposed to subjectivity but works within a different realm distinct from subjective capacities that, I argue, limit life to preceding discourses. In what follows, I examine a critical politics of becoming through such Deleuzo-Guattarian notions as desiringmachines, rhizomes, and Body without Organs. The purpose of this plateau is to situate what I am referring to as post-queer dialogical-becomings in the materialist philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. The “becomings” of postqueer dialogical-becomings refers to the ways in which life is a creative and productive system that indefinitely makes and breaks connections. Life itself is movement yet, as Deleuze and Guattari caution: Movement of the infinite does not refer to spatiotemporal coordinates that define the successive positions of a moving object and the fixed reference points in relation to which these positions vary. ‘To orientate oneself in thought’ implies neither objective reference point nor moving object that experiences itself as a subject and that, as such, strives for or needs the infinite. Movement takes in everything, and there is no place for a subject and an object that can only be concepts. It is the horizon itself that is in movement: the relative horizon recedes when the subject advances, but on the plane of immanence we are always and already on the absolute horizon. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 37-38)

Movement is therefore always a becoming-other where, as I will explain more thoroughly in the forthcoming sections, something new is always created

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through the desiring-productions of life. In plateau three, I will extend Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy to Bakhtinian theorizations. This involves a critical consideration of Bakhtinian dialogism so as to fully articulate my intention for post-queer dialogical-becomings. In order to get there, it is imperative that we account for a critical politics of becoming so as to avoid unnecessary and unproductive readings of Bakhtin through intersubjectivity. The movements in plateaus two and three are therefore very much dialogically connected. Together they produce a new dialogical-becoming that can offer a new language for thinking about life without reducing life to language. The relationship between individuals and societies has been at the forefront of poststructural subjective discourses. Questions such as “does society produce individuals” or “do individuals produce society” have informed many of these theorizations. There is, of course, no definitive answer to these questions because life’s complexities do not afford such simplifications. The relationship between “individuals” and “societies” is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. With that said, individuals and societies are not thought of in the traditional sense of individualized subjects and collective bodies of people. Deleuze and Guattari radically reconstruct these concepts: unlike many other political theorizations, they do not restructure social fields while maintaining the same social participants. In other words, their interest is not in redefining what individuals and societies are or how they can be reconfigured while maintaining a commitment to representations and significations. Their intention is to quite simply get rid of such simplifications as individuals and societies by moving beyond subjectivity and discourse (a movement that, as I have been arguing, is central to a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings). As Massumi explains: “They don’t add yet another synthesis of the individual and society, with still more mediations. They abolish both terms and all mediations in one simple move: by saying that the individual is a group” (2001, 814). The “abolishment” of the individual and society opens new spaces to think of life through becomings where, for example, the “body,” in whichever way we want to conceptualize that, is a potentiality and a production of ongoing tensions rather than a position or point that can be placed on a subjective grid: life always moves forward rather than being stuck in the past; it is productive rather than regressive. There is therefore no single subject or fixed positionality in a critical politics of becoming because everything is creatively connected through the machines of life. Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic interest in the materialities of life is overtly distinct from psychoanalysis and Lacanian conceptions of bodies as subjects. Their anti-Oedipal framework challenges the family triangle—father, mother, child—as a constituting component of the subject because, as Deleuze states, psychoanalysis “never gets through to anyone’s desiring machines, because it’s stuck in oedipal figures or structures; it never gets through to the social investments of the libido, because it’s stuck in its domestic investments” 40

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(1995b, 20). Schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis offer different treatments of the unconscious: whereas the subject’s unconscious (psychoanalysis) is a structure that can be traced, the desiring-machine’s unconscious (schizoanalysis) is forward moving—a production of future mappings. A schizoanalytic reading of the unconscious as a factory challenges how we traditionally think about and approach politics where desire is based on production rather than lack. In other words, schizoanalysis is based on a politics not defined by subjects and subjective capacities but productive flows of desire that are creatively and indefinitely becoming-other. The unconscious, as Deleuze and Parnet explain, “is a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing—a social and political space to be conquered” (2002, 78). Contrary to psychoanalytic theorizations, the schizoanalytic unconscious is not something to be discovered but is an ongoing production. So unlike the psychoanalytic subject, the schizoanalytic machine can not be defined in and of itself because it is always creating and breaking flows with other desiring-machines. A schizoanalytic politics is key to postqueer theorizations because it relishes incoherence whereas psychoanalysis supports rationality. Post-queer follows the schizoanalytics of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy as an assemblage itself that functions with other machines. Postqueer desire is such assemblages that produce infinite connections. I am not only speaking of how post-queer itself functions but how, and perhaps more importantly, it connects with other political philosophies as well. To rephrase this, Post-Queer Politics seeks not only to plateau the queer/heteronormative dyad but to also produce new flows of production that connect multiple political philosophies without reducing these movements to the limitations of subjective capacities. One such assemblage is a reconceptualization of life itself through dialogical-becomings where materialities are not restricted to significations, representations, and identifications. Rather than focusing on subjects and their capacities to move within a predefined matrix, it can be more productive to consider life through the flows of machinic assemblages:

 According to Deleuze and Parnet, “you haven’t got hold of the unconscious, you never get hold of it, it is not an ‘it was’ in place of which the ‘I’ must come…You have to produce the unconscious…The unconscious is a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing—a social and political space to be conquered” (2002, 78).   “There is no subject of desire, any more than there is an object. There is no subject of enunciation. Fluxes are the only objectivity of desire itself. Desire is a system of a-signifying signs with which fluxes of the unconscious are produced in a social field…Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and assemblages” (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 78-79). 41

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What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows. (Deleuze 1971a)

In what follows, I demonstrate how a post-queer politics of dialogicalbecomings is less interested in, for example, what bodies are (what seems to have consumed poststructural theorizations over the past few decades) and more concerned with what they can do. I am referring to the critical and necessary shift from being to becoming—one that offers an important political philosophy for contemporary queer studies to consider the flows and connections of life rather than how life is represented in and through meaning structures such as language. As Claire Colebrook explains, Deleuze’s political philosophy is different from many poststructuralists because it is not intended to explain “how systems such as language both come into being and how they mutate through time” but to instead think about “a difference and becoming that would not be the becoming of some being” (2002, 3). The creativity of dialogicalbecomings is this potential to understand difference as pure becoming rather than a subjective process. Consequently, the movements of this project operate as desiring-machines that make and break connections. These potentialities desire not to produce meaning (as we see in subjectivity) but to produce for the sake of pure difference. In other words, dialogical-becomings are productions of productions that simultaneously produce desire and a desire for production. In agreement with Patricia MacCormack: Desire can be a project of experimentation, but like metamorphoses of desire— becomings—it cannot be turned on and off. Desire is a continuity that changes trajectories of relations and saturations. Desire is redistribution of self and world, self in the world, the world in self, and self as world” (2008, 1).

In what follows, I will explore post-queer dialogical-becomings by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as a tension between desiring-machines and Body without Organs (BwO). The abolishment of the individual and society, as outlined above, is realized in this relationship between desiring-machines and Body without Organs where life is no longer a subjective capacity but a creative process that continuously becomes-other. As MacCormack correctly identifies, “Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge is that we make ourselves a Body without Organs, a body which reorganizes the flesh, refusing its emergence only through pre-ordained signifiers which make it legible” (102). Desiringmachines and Body without Organs account for the reterritorializations and 42

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deterritorializations of life, respectively, and it is through these tensions that the potentialities of dialogical-becomings can be actualized. Desiring-Production

A political philosophy of becoming is one that functions through flows of desiring-machines: “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1). Unlike in subjectivity where desire is based on lack (such as subjects desiring objects), schizoanalytic desire is the flow itself rather than how such flows can be represented in a priori systems of language. It is, as Paul Patton explains, “precisely the force which welds together those singular, disparate elements to form a machine, and conversely, desire does not exist outside of such machineassemblages” (2001b, 1091). Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the flow connecting a breast-machine and a mouth-machine: an organ-machine (breastmachine) is always connected to an energy-machine (mouth-machine) creating times, flows, and interruptions. This moves us away from the limitations of subject positions that must refer back to a central core such as the self in order to be intelligible. Whereas subjectivity sees two coherent subjects—one producing milk (the mother) and the other acquiring milk (the baby)—becoming refers to the flows that are produced through the connections that are made between desiring-machines. Becoming is a multiplicity of intersecting desiring-machines that constitute creative assemblages that are always becoming-other. Each flow is constituted by the connection of two desiring-machines and is only possible when an interruption occurs: the moment the breast-machine and the mouthmachine create a flow, the breast-machine and the mouth-machine detach from other desiring-machines. Everything is desiring-production: This is because there is always a flow-producing machine, and another machine connected to it that interrupts or draws off part of this flow (the breast—the mouth). And because the first machine is in turn connected to another whose flow it interrupts or partially drains off, the binary series is linear in every direction. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 5)

Desire is organized along the flows of desiring-machines and in order to create a new flow an existing flow must be broken. Unlike self/other binaries  Other examples of machines include: eating-machine, anal-machine, talkingmachine, breathing machine (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1). 43

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that make a distinction between production and the product, these grafting processes do not make such a differentiation because everything is a production of production. It is the productive flows of life and not the representations of subject positions that inform a critical politics of becoming and more specifically post-queer dialogical-becomings. A politics based on flows rather than subject positions considers everything to be a desiring-machine that is connected with another desiring-machine through a system of interruptions. What differentiates a system of interruption (becoming) from a system of meaning (subjectivity) is that interruptions do not destruct flows but constitute them; for the latter, a signifying departure differentiates itself from an existing representation in order to establish a new resignification. As MacCormack states: “There is power in the reiteration of signification. Semiotic structures do not subject people to meaning. They allow them to become meaningful within systems established before their existence” (2008, 23-25). For example, queer distinguishes itself from heteronormativity by disrupting heteronormative practices through the creation of new queer spaces. A break within a system of interruptions, however, produces the flow itself where, for instance, post-queer emerges out of the limitations of the queer/ heteronormative dyad. In other words, post-queer does not function within the queer/heteronormative dyad but emerges as a result of the necessity to break away from it. Consequently, post-queer does not simply break away from the queer/heteronormative dyad and leave it behind. In contrast, the break itself constitutes the flow from queer to post-queer. Every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production. That is why, at the limit point of all the transverse or transfinite connections, the partial object and the continuous flux, the interruption and the connection, fuse into one: everywhere there are breaks-flows out of which desire wells up, thereby constituting its productivity and continually grafting the process of production onto the product. (36-37)

I am therefore not suggesting, as I explain in plateau one, that we replace queer with post-queer but to reconsider how we account for the flows of life itself. Desiring-machines function when they are not working properly. We see this clearly in the queer/heteronormative dyad that has reached its political peak: it is currently in a dormant status because it is limited by subjective capacities. Post-queer is able to function because queer is unable to politically move forward since it is stuck in the endless cycle of being. I assert that a political philosophy of becoming can create the critical spaces to move forward without being limited by the past. 44

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Rhizomatic Multiplicities

To restate an argument outlined above, post-queer dialogical-becomings have the potential to create new political connections that are indefinitely becomingother. Dialogical-becomings are highly complex networks that are connected systemically rather than structurally. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s botanical example, post-queer politics is not arborescence (a tree) but rhizomatic (grass). Queer has in many respects become a sum of multiple parts through its relationship to heteronormativity; it functions hierarchically where the political movements of queer have almost exclusively been in relation to the queer/heteronormative structure (arborescence). In contrast to this, I see postqueer as a system of intersecting linear multiplicities because it embodies the characteristics of the rhizome: Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any points to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. It is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n + 1). It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n – 1). When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

A rhizome can not be defined upon its entrance into a multiplicity. We see this more often than not when queer as a political project is defined by its disruption of heteronormative practices. There is a vast amount of literature on this topic and so it would be inappropriate and impossible to account for all of these projects here. I outline some of these movements in plateau one and so I do not want to repeat myself. I want to instead focus on a few common elements that characterize these disruptive projects. Movement within arborescence always refers back to a fixed core: it is highly referential. Although queer prides itself on being mobile and fluid, these movements are always and only possibilities that are more often than not in relation to heteronormative structures. I am thinking of concerns that arise around a politics that must continuously ask  See plateau six for an important discussion around the differences between possibilities and potentialities. 45

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itself “how queer can queer go?” (i.e., how far can queer move away from heteronormativity and how radical can queer be as a disruptive politics). This leads to a second element of ordered progression where to be the queerest of queers implies a linear structure that moves further and further away from heteronormativity. This movement, while radically redefining heteronormative structures, is always and only in relation to heteronormativity. Lastly, duality is central to arborescence. Although queer appropriately disturbs the binary organization of identity politics (male/female; masculine/feminine; gay straight) its own politics relies on an explicit opposition to heteronormative structures. Having said all of that, it is obvious that not all queer projects work to reject heteronormativity outright and I certainly do not want to suggest that there is such a thing as a universal queer. Think of, for instance, the exceptional movements that Muñoz makes regarding disidentification as a strategy to challenge dominant ideology: Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tried to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (1999, 11-12)

The politics of “working on and against” has certainly redefined the possibilities for queer to rethink normative practices. I argue, however, that while disidentification does not strictly refute heteronormativity—its strategy to work on and against—it can only engage a sense of politics by entering into the multiplicity of dominant ideology. Rhizomatic networks, in contrast, are defined when a line of flight is subtracted from a multiplicity: n – 1. So rather than entering the queer/heteronormative dyad, post-queer politics emerge by subtracting from the impossibilities of this relationship. In other words, a rhizomatic politics does not assimilate, oppose, or work on and against a preexisting framework because this supports binary structures even if the intent is to disrupt such oppositions. Post-queer rhizomatic politics plateau the aforementioned binaries through deterritorialized lines of flight that do not  I specifically reference the dualities of sex, gender, and sexuality here and leave out other important identities such as race, class, and ability to reflect the dominant Eurocentric/Western ideologies of queer that have largely neglected such intersections until recently. 46

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require, reinforce, or work within hierarchical structures. Dialogical-becomings are nonhierarchical systems that are in constant metamorphosis: “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exists and its own lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). Dialogicalbecomings are multiplicities constituted by lines of flight that occur the moment a rhizome is cut: in comparison to a politics based primarily on preceding discourses where movement always refers to back to a central root, rhizomatic politics are always becoming-other through the infinite connections that are made and broken. The deterritorializations inherent to dialogical-becomings are so productive because they not only reorganize preceding connections (even though they are, of course, not determined by them) but they more importantly refigure the new rhizomes that they become attached to. The rhizome is schizophrenic because it does not have any “pretraced destiny” (13) because movement does not rely on predetermined structures. The difference between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis’ treatment of the unconscious clearly marks the distinction that I am drawing here. Unlike the arboreal model of psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis considers the unconscious to be a rhizomatic “acentered system.” Let us consider the relationship that is currently underway as you read this book. A relationship is being formed amongst the book, the author, and the world as its context. An arborescent reading of this would see the world as reality, the book as a representation of such a reality, and the author as the subjective voice of this relationship: what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the field of reality (the world), the field of representation (the book), the field of subjectivity (the author). In arborescence, meaning is produced through these associations where the book serves as a constant referential structure. Rhizomatics are conversely concerned with the assemblages of such interactions where these “fields” are not considered independent entities that together create meaning: “an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no   Deleuze and Guattari are comparing schizoanalysis with psychoanalysis: “[psychoanalysis] confines every desire and statement to a genetic axis of overcoding structure, and makes infinite, monotonous tracings of the stages on that axis or the constituents of that structure” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 13).   “[Psychoanalysis] subjects the unconscious to arborescent structures, hierarchical graphs, recapitulatory memories, central organs, the phallus, the phallus tree—not only in its theory but also in its practice of calculation and treatment. Psychoanalysis cannot change its method in this regard: it bases its own dictatorial power upon a dictatorial conception of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis’s margin of maneuverability is therefore very limited. In both psychoanalysis and its object, there is always a general, always a leader (General Freud)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 17-18). 47

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sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject” (23). Post-Queer Politics, the book itself, is not to be considered a central reference for the meaning of post-queer: the intention of this project is not to provide a definitive account of what post-queer is. It is instead part of a much larger assemblage that we can potentially consider post-queer where this project is but one line of flight that I hope continues to become-other as it makes and breaks multiple theoretical, philosophical, and practical connections. Deterritorialized Becomings

Dialogical-becomings are at the core of post-queer politics. They are not static references and do not operate as subjective relationships. They are rhizomatic networks concerned with production rather than representation. Dialogicalbecomings are intended to move us away from a politics that differentiates A from B which reinforces unnecessary and unproductive binaries. This is exemplified in how queer differentiates from heteronormativity. The creativity of dialogical-becomings is the potential to move from A to x: from queer to post-queer, for example. I want to explore a politics of becomings more thoroughly and how dialogical-becomings can engage the doings rather than beings of life. The becomings in dialogical-becomings refers to Deleuze’s conception of difference that is not limited to, by, or within discourse, language, and meaning. Difference, as becoming, is always a new production that, unlike, for instance, performativity, does not require a priori materializations for its intelligibility. This is because dialogical-becomings are not a series that is defined in a sequence of resemblances (“a resembles b, b resembles c, etc.”)10 and they are not structures because they are not comparisons (“a is to b as c is to d”).11 Dialogical-becomings are not rational in that they do not follow prescribed rules of association. For example, we see this in the subjective capacities of   “The assemblage has two poles or vectors: one vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the absolute of the earth” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 145).   “Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A and B), not in terms of production (from A to x)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 234). 10  “all of these terms conform in varying degrees to a single, eminent term, perfection, or quality as the principle behind the series” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 234). 11  “each of these relationships realizes after its fashion the perfection under consideration: gills are to breathing under water as lungs are to breathing air; or the heart is to gills as the absence of a heart is to tracheas [in insects]…This is an analogy of proportionality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 234). 48

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self/other binaries and identity categories where subjects become intelligible through meaning structures such as language.12 Dialogical-becomings are involutions not evolutions: A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification…To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or dynamic level…They are perfectly real…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. (237-238)

Arboreal politics interested in what something is follow an evolutionary series or structure that can only speak to the possibilities of life that have already emerged or the possibilities that can come out of that which has already emerged (i.e., the reiteration of identity norms or the variations on such reiterations, respectively). Rhizomatic politics, of which I consider post-queer to be a part, is concerned with the doings of life and the potentiality to become-other. With dialogical-becomings, unlike subjects, there is no central point of reference that all points refer to such as the self. This is because difference is all there is in rhizomatics: A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, not by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms on symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors. (249)

Dialogical-becomings are the thresholds that connect multiplicities: they are indefinitely becoming-other through various connections that do not rely on a priori structures for their intelligibility. 12  Deleuze and Guattari compare the notion of becoming—specifically becomingsanimal—to a structuralist reading of the body that considers becoming to be a “phenomen[on] of degradation representing a deviation from the true order” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 237). They expand this comparison with the following example: “A man can never say: ‘I am a bull, a wolf…’ But he can say: ‘I am to a woman what the bull is to a cow, I am to another man what the wolf is to the sheep.’ Structuralism represents a great revolution; the whole world becomes more rational.” 49

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As outlined above, the difference between being and becoming is central to post-queer rhizomatic politics and it is this tension that we have arrived at once again. Within representations, significations, and identifications, there is a certain level of reiteration required in order for subjects to circulate through social fields (i.e., subjects must reiterate specific identity norms in order to be read as intelligible). Moreover, subjectivity largely relies on language as the predominant way for understanding life. Becoming, on the other hand, does not require reiterations or language structures to account for experience: “Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressingprogressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation” (239). Becoming is the plateau of multiplicities: it cannot be characterized by a sum of its parts where each movement refers back to an original core; nor can it be accounted for through preceding discourses that are concretized through ongoing reiterations. This, as I explain above, is an arboreal structuring of life. Becoming is pure affect. It is defined by its potentialities as seen through the doings of life rather than the beings of life: We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body. (257)

Unlike subjects that are constituted through various subjugations that refer back to coherent wholes, dialogical-becomings are potentialities themselves that are marked by movements and intensities. Having said that, it is imperative that we avoid a positivistic reading of Deleuze and Guattari. In the following plateau, I will explain more thoroughly how Bakhtin offers an important lens for Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. This intersection involves an important consideration of Bakhtin’s social heteroglossia where the doings of life become less positivistic and more contextual. This is critical for a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings because equity and social justice are at the heart of such a politics and so it would be inappropriate and unjustified to offer a political philosophy that can not account for the chronotopic complexities of life itself. Body without Organs

Post-queer rhizomatic politics is one that is directed outwards rather than inwards. The continuous flows of dialogical-becomings—the indefinite breaks and connections—are always moving forward where something new is always 50

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created out of something given. Unlike the arborescent-subject that is directed inwards, rhizomatic dialogical-becomings are always deterritorialized as they maintain an ongoing state of becoming a body without organs (BwO). The complex flows of desiring-machines described above persistently strive to become a BwO as their connections try to reach pure deterritorialization. In this section, I want to consider how the BwO is a virtual affect of dialogical-becomings. It does not encapsulate desiring-machines but is an additional (anti-)production together with desiring-machines. The BwO is a fundamental aspect of postqueer politics because it speaks to the production of intensities that emerge when the flows of desiring-machines stop. Deterritorializations are not finalized states or binary oppositions. They offer an important strategy for contemporary politics because they do not directly oppose a structure (such as the queer/ heteronormative dyad) but instead remap a system through creative lines of flight (the plateauing of queer and post-queer). We can think of the BwO as a limit that continuously seeks to deterritorialize without ever reterritorializing (even though, as you will see below, reterritorializations are often coupled with deterritorializations). As Brian Massumi writes: Think of the body without organs as the body outside any determinate state, poised for any action in its repertory; this is the body from the point of view of its potential, or virtuality. Now freeze it as it passes through a threshold state on the way from one determinate state to another. This is a degree of intensity of the body without organs. It is still the body as virtuality, but a lower level of virtuality, because only the potential states involved in the bifurification from the preceding state to the next are effectively superposed in the threshold state. (1992, 70)

The BwO is therefore not opposed to desiring-machines but is instead in a constant tension with them. The term itself—Body without Organs—is not in opposition to the organism. It is against what the organism stands for: organization. We can think of the subject as such an organization where all meaning refers back to a central core and all movement corresponds with a central tendency. The BwO not only challenges the arboreal structures of life but also works within a different realm as that of the rhizome where it does not break flows (rhizomatic breaks and connections) but desires continuous flows. Unlike the subject that requires external agencies for meaning such as language structures or discursive realms, the BwO is pure intensity: The body without organs is nonproductive; nonetheless it is produced, at a certain place and a certain time in the connective synthesis, as the identity of producing and the product: the schizophrenic table is a body without organs. The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it 51

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what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without an image. This imageless, organless body, the nonproductive, exists right there where it is produced, in the third stage of the binary-linear series. It is perpetually reinserted into the process of production. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 8)

We can think of the BwO as a plane of immanence rather than stratification.13 It may seem as if desiring-machines and BwO are a part of two different systems. They are in fact two forms of the same principle: desiring-machines and BwO are both a part of the productions of productions of life. It is through the tension that they share that every production becomes an anti-production because dialogical-becomings, for instance, can not maintain a multiplicity of desiring-machines and are unable to fully become a BwO. Dialogical-becomings are schizo. Capital is perhaps the most widely referenced example of a BwO. It is the becoming-BwO of capitalism that creates the illusion that everything is produced through it. Although capital can be transformed into something concrete (i.e., money can purchase goods) it can not do anything on its own. Capital is a miraculating machine that creates the desire for a BwO to overcome the flows of desiring-machines: the BwO deterritorializes the organization of capitalism by opting for flows and smooth spaces. The capitalist machine transforms desiringmachines into BwO by creating the ultimate schizophrenic that “plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (35). The capitalist-schizo becomes the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks the limits of capitalism itself. Although the BwO is unachievable, it becomes a seemingly preferred state: “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 150). It is not a heightened awareness of the self, nor is it a fully embodied self. Unlike in significations, representations, and identifications, the BwO is no self at all. In fact, the BwO is prior to such a subjective capacity. The tension between desiring-machines (reterritorializations) and BwO (deterritorializations) works within a different realm than, say, the subjective limits of identities categories 13  “Immanence is not related to Some Thing as a unity superior to all things or to a Subject as an act that brings about a synthesis of things: it is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can speak of a plane of immanence....We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss” (Deleuze 2005, 27). 52

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where subjects become intelligible through their associations with identity norms. Everything for desiring-machines and BwO is pure difference. The intensities involved in such a relationship are before the coding structures of subjectivity that stratify subjects. It is the abovementioned intensities that make post-queer politics so creative because they challenge the structured organization of organs and biologically defined bodies. Desiring-machines and BwO offer a new language for thinking about life itself without reducing the experiences of such relationships to the stratification of language. The creativity of post-queer dialogical-becomings rests in the potential to deterritorialize stratified structures that limit life to predetermined organizations. Despite the BwO existing prior to the subjective capacities of, say, psychoanalysis and discursive norms, this certainly does not imply that deterritorializations can not offer strategies for rethinking life as it is accounted for through representations, significations, and identifications. We can, for example, think of the various codings of subjectivity that have permeated identity politics and subsequently the queer/heteronormative dyad as territorialized stratifications that are in concert with BwO. Stratifications, or strata, take hold of intensities by territorializing them. For instance, they appropriate the BwO’s flows of pure difference by organizing dialogical-becomings as subjects of reiterative norms. The strata codes and territorializes such becomings but the BwO constantly attempts to deterritorialize these territorializations. Despite queer’s interest in a politics of identity that seeks to consider bodies as mobile and fluid, these movements can never escape the territorializations of identity norms because they are always in relation to heteronormative coding and the overall arboreal organization of bodies that are directed inwards. Deleuze and Guattari describe three types of strata that help to think through the territorializations of the queer/heteronormative dyad: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you’re just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you’re just a deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise you’re just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulation) as the property of the plane of consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159)

This call to dismantle the organism does not imply that we just get rid of the subject or cut the body from stratification. We recall from above that the 53

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BwO and all its intensities comes before the subject and the organization of the body as an organism and so a politics of becoming calls for a return to these productive flows of desire: “opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor” (160). Post-queer dialogical-becomings seek to deterritorialize the three great strata that territorialize life through significations, representations, and identifications. This project is but one line of flight that can plateau subjugated subjectivities. Its intent is to map various intensities so as to smooth these assemblages by moving towards a plane of immanence. The first step is to identify the strata involved and then consider the assemblages that constitute such strata. For example, the organism codes an aboreal life by creating various assemblages that define what it means to be “human”; signifiance codes meaning through discourse where language has become the primary means for thinking about experience; and subjectification creates subjects by coding them through social norms. The purpose of this is to locate flows of intensities—not by discovering a BwO but by creating one in the process of deterritorializing the strata. The queer/heteronormativity dyad has resulted in an arboreal dyad. The extensions of an arboreal tree go through its central root that supports the whole tree. The queer/heteronormative dyad is such a root where all politics emerge from it. Post-queer rhizomatic politics, in contrast, do not strictly move or extend from a main root such as the queer/heteronormative dyad. With that said, dialogical-becomings can engage this binary by plateauing it through its rhizomatic connections that can spout from any point. The arboreal organization of queer/heteronormativity prohibits a politics of becoming because movement stops when there is a need to refer back to this dyad. In other words, the queer/heteronormative dyad halts queer politics when the politics of queer is predominantly concerned with disrupting heteronormative structures. Post-queer rhizomatic politics is about deterritorializing politics itself rather than opposing an a priori structure. This project is one line of flight amongst many that can remap contemporary politics as we know it today. Despite queer’s keen investment in a conceptualization of identity through mobilities and fluidities, its politics can only go so far because of its arboreal references to heteronormativity. Let me be clear that I am not demanding an outright rejection of the queer/heteronormative strata for, as we recall from above, this can result in further territorializations. I am also not suggesting an absolute denunciation of this relationship nor am I disputing the important developments that queer politics have made. I am instead calling for the production of different lines of flight and new assemblages that can smoothen the strata so as to not be limited by structural organizations.

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Not So Happily Ever After-Queer

Post-queer, as it is articulated in this project, is therefore not after queer. It is a process of becoming as one line of flight that can smooth out the arboreal structures of contemporary queer politics. There is certainly a buzz right now about what the future of queer studies might, should, or can look like. In 2008, for example, I was invited to be on a panel discussion for the Queer Studies Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. I was very fortunate to be a part of such a dynamic panel alongside Claire Charles, Cris Mayo, Kathleen Anne Quinlivan, Mary Louise Rasmussen, and Susan Talburt. The panel, titled “‘After Queer’: Pedagogies and Popular Culture,” focused primarily on differentiating queer theory from lgbt bodies/ subjects and considering what might be “after-queer” in relation to challenging normalizing discourses as they relate to sex, sexuality, gender, age, responsibility, race, consent, the school, and the nation. The purpose of the panel was for the panelists to articulate what something “after” means to them and what this can do for contemporary queer studies. The panel was well received with a few welcomed criticisms that constructively troubled the need for something “after.” Each panelist offered their own opinion on what this “after” might look like yet there was a common interest in recognizing and appreciating the importance of considering something after queer. My contribution focused on an after-queer that, as can probably be imagined, was really concerned with queer’s relationship to subjectivity. My use and understanding of after-queer was closely coupled with after-subjectivity. Post-Queer Politics explores the “afterqueer” of queer studies but I consider the “post-” of post-queer to offer a unique politics that is different from something after: I see after as maintaining perhaps too close a connection with queer where subjectivity, the desire to disrupt normative discourses, and the overall queer/heteronormative dyad remain intact.14 As I argue in plateau one, post-queer can plateau the subjugated subjectivities of queer by considering what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. I am by no means suggesting that “post-queer” is the future of queer but one potentiality that can emerge out of contemporary queer studies. This is surely not an exhaustive list of those interested in thinking about what might be after or post-queer. In addition to the Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz special issue of Social Text that asks “What’s queer about queer studies 14  My comments on “after-queer” do not necessarily reflect the views of my fellow panelists. The purpose of the seminar was for each of the panelists to consider what “after-queer” means to them. My critique of “after” is therefore not a critique of my colleagues but a critique of my interpretation of what something after might mean for contemporary queer studies. 55

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now?,” Janet Halley and Andrew Parker’s issue of South Atlantic Quarterly also examines the contemporary politics of queer by consideration of that which might be “after sex.” Halley and Parker’s issue titled “After Sex: On Writing Since Queer Theory” asks contributors to think about “what in their work isn’t queer.” This, according to the editors, stems out of talk that “queer theory, if not already passé, was rapidly approaching its expiration date” (2007, 421). Their interest here is embedded in the departures that Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have made from their pioneering contributions to queer theory. Carla Freccero’s contribution, “Queer Times,” calls for a “return to questions of subjectivity and desire” (2007, 491). In agreement with Freccero, it is critical that we begin to rethink queer’s relationship to subjectivity. I am somewhat hesitant, however, in accepting a “postqueer theoretical critical analysis of subjectivity” if it ultimately functions within an (inter)subjective realm that, as I have argued, territorializes rather than deterritorializes. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird’s Queering the Non/Human (2008) offers an important collection for thinking about the deterritorializations of queer alongside that of the “human.” The essays that comprise this collection challenge the strata of “human” and “nonhuman” by offering an important queering of queer theory. Giffney and Hird describe this postqueering not as an after or beyond, but, following Sedgwick in Touching Feeling (2003), as a beside: “‘Post’ also bears a critical relation to that which it is attached, a tactility in which queer is interrogated as an ontology in itself, scrutinized for the exclusions through which it comes into being as a discursive field” (6). Giffney and Hird’s post-queer, although a term not explicitly used in the collection, emphasizes the connections between queer and other critical lenses such as “feminism, psychoanalysis, critical race studies, postcolonial theory, posthumanism, deconstruction, disability studies, [and] crip theory.” Post-Queer Politics reflects the besides outlined by Giffney and Hird where post-queer is not a new umbrella term that encompasses all critical lenses. In agreement with Sedgwick: Beside is an interesting preposition also because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them. Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking: noncontradiction or the law of the excluded middle, cause versus effect, subject versus object. (2003, 8)

With that said, post-queer is distinct in that the hyphen is meant to articulate a line of flight from queer and other critical approaches embedded in subjectivity. It offers a politics of becoming that seeks to deterritorialize the “besides.” Post-queer embodies the schizoanalytics of contemporary politics that negotiates the various deterritorializations and reterritorializations of life. It challenges the territorializations of stratification by offering a politics 56

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of becoming that is not hierarchically structured but is instead a complex multiplicity of flows. These important movements coincide with a desire to move away from a politics based on arborescence so as to explore the creative complexities of a rhizomatic politics that is indefinitely becoming-other. Postqueer is one line of flight that engages the potentialities of life rather than the possibilities that have already emerged.

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PLATEAU 3

Dialogic Creativities “The Problem of Agency in Foucault”

Power is, according to Foucault, everywhere. Whether it be sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical, power circulates as a productive force that works through actions. There is certainly no lack of readings and applications of power that explore it as a relational force rather than a “top-down” domination. Considerations of power as such have influenced much of the poststructural theorizations over the past few decades. In addition to power encompassing all aspects of life, we subsequently learn through Foucault that resistance is all over the place as well. Although power and resistance are not binaries, the notion of resistance and the politics surrounding it suggest otherwise when resistance is seen as something against power—even though power is not a dominating and totalizing force. I want to begin this plateau by considering this relationship between power and resistance—one that has been greatly influential to the development of queer, feminist, anti-racist, and ability politics. Resistance implies that there is something to resist. More often than not, these politics have resisted forms of power that majoritize and minoritize subjects and are frequently situated in binaries: gay/straight; female/male; femininity/ masculinity; black/white; poor/rich; disabled/able. Without taking away from the important politics of these movements and without reducing them to binary ideologies, we need, however, to point out that their politics of resistance are positioned against power. Despite Foucauldian influences here, it is very difficult not to think of resistance as being against power when faced with sexism, abelism, racism, and homophobia. I am not suggesting that Foucault’s reading of power and resistance is inaccurate and I am surely not implying that queer, feminist, anti-racist, and ability studies have gotten their politics wrong. I am instead raising the important concern with agency in Foucauldian politics: how power and resistance are all over the place. Jeffrey Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault (2008) appropriately addresses “the problem of agency in Foucault”—not by definitively uncovering which comes first, power or resistance, but by speaking to the problems associated with the question itself: It took me quite a while to figure this out, but it finally became clear to me that the ‘problem of agency’ in Foucault is perhaps better stated as the problem of

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how to measure, predict, incite, or guarantee subjective resistance in the face of interpellating social norms. Agency, in short, is not simply action or the emergence of something that wasn’t there before, a happening: rather, agency is a code word for a subject performing an action that matters, something that changes one’s own life or the lives of others. Agency is doing something freely, subversively, not as a mere effect programmed or sanctioned by constraining social norms. (102)

Nealon is in essence articulating Foucault’s assertion that resistance is the precursor of power because power relations stem from antagonisms—relations and forces rather than “power-on-body; body-on-body; or even power-onpower” (103). It can be said then that power works on the possibilities of resistance. Consequently, in agreement with Nealon, it is necessary to focus less on resisting against (which upholds a binary between resistance and power, even though the ideology behind the politics suggests otherwise) and pay more attention to intensifying the politics of resistance: The difficulty surrounding the question of resistance for Foucaultian social theory is not how to refine techniques for mining this scarce thing called resistance from underneath the encrusted surface of totalized power…but rather the question concerns ways to mobilize, focus, or intensify practices of resistance, insofar as they’re already all over the place. (105)

Resistance is to be thought of not as a binary to power but as an intensification of relations that, following a post-queer politics of becoming, do not function through binaries such as self/other, nature/culture, and mind/body. This plateau will therefore explore the intensities of a politics of resistance through the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. It considers “the problem with agency in Foucault” but accounting for resistance and power through Bakhtinian dialogism that moves away from binaries. I will intensify the politics of resistance by accounting for agency through dialogical negotiations. This plateau builds on the politics of becoming in plateau two by inserting dialogism into post-queer politics. The dialogical-becomings are fully mapped in this plateau through such Bakhtinian concepts as heteroglossia, speech genre, utterance, carnival, and grotesque. It is through a consideration of dialogicalbecomings rather than subjugated subjectivities that we can begin to account for a politics that critically considers the materialities of life rather than how life is materialized through language and discourse. Although Bakhtin uses the term intersubjective to describe the relationships amongst dialogic participants, it is imperative that we do not reduce these relations to subjectivity. This is, in essence, why the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is so central to a rereading of Bakhtin where life is not limited by or within the realm of 60

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subjectivity. The political project of dialogical-becomings is vastly distinct from more recent readings of Bakhtin that focus on the subjectivity of intersubjectivity. For example, despite Esther Peeren’s desire to consider “Bakhtin and beyond,” the beyond that she traces in Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture (2008) is from the onset limited by the discursive parameters of subjectivity. With that said, I am not suggesting a ridding of subjectivity in politics per se but a reexamination of how language and discourse can be read through the materialities of life without reducing materiality to representations, significations, and identifications. For example, Bakhtinian dialogism creates the important spaces to see bodies and culture not as binaries but as dialogic relations that are negotiated in highly contextualized moments. We see through Bakhtin that “one cannot draw an absolute distinction between body and meaning in the area of culture: culture is not made of dead elements” (1986, 6). The strict view of bodies as corporeal and culture as ideological or discursive is incompatible with dialogism. In what follows, I will consider dialogical-becomings as creative potentialities that are directed towards the future rather than the past. This requires and begins with a reassessment of how we understand and make use of the relationship amongst culture, bodies, and language. A Problem with Language

Whether or not Vološinov is actually Bakhtin or Vološinov is simply Vološinov, his important critique of ideology and consciousness in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1986) offers a key account of the materialities of life that are central to post-queer politics. Vološinov supports my evaluation of a politics based in subjugated subjectivities that tend to differentiate materiality from ideological or discursive culture. Vološinov’s claim that ideology is a sign that upholds meaning—“Without signs there is no ideology” (9)—suggests that ideology is not situated in consciousness because the sign is always something external. The study of ideology is therefore not a study of consciousness because consciousness is informed through ideology. If ideology is a sign and if ideology is not situated in consciousness, then signs are sociological. Consciousness is therefore a product of the social and can not be understood outside of social relations. I need to be clear that I am not reducing all experience to ideology, signs, and language through Vološinov for you recall from plateau one that this is my fundamental criticism of a politics situated in subjective capacities. Vološinov is contrastingly used to think about ideology, signs, and language not

  For a discussion of whether or not Bakhtin is Vološinov or if Vološinov is actually Vološinov see chapter six of Clark and Holquist’s Mikhail Bakhtin (1984). 61

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through their ability to materialize the social but as materialities themselves. The sign is therefore not something that inscribes or produces life—the process of materialization—but is instead negotiated as life itself. This sets up an important contrast to subjugated subjectivities where subjects are represented in signs and are signified through ideological associations with signs. This is most notably experienced in subjectivity’s claim that the psyche is purely individual and that ideology is purely social. We can adopt Vološinov’s interpretation of the psyche to blur subjectivity’s distinction between the individual and the social so as to avoid any misreading of the psyche as individual and ideology as social. The individual-psyche and social-ideology are highly unproductive because that which comes before the body (significations) always determines movement (representations). We can instead think of the psyche and ideology as dialogical relations so as to consider the materialities of life itself rather than the materializations of social subjectivities. In other words, as I explain in plateau two through Deleuze and Guattari, everything is a production of production rather than a representation of meaning. To view the psyche and ideology as dialogic relations involves a reading of language as materiality itself. We need to first turn to the functioning of language in subjectivity and how it is tied to significations and representations. Language, within subjectivity, follows two trends: individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism. According to Vološinov, individualistic subjectivism “considers the basis of language to be the individual creative act of speech. The source of language is the individual psyche” (48). Abstract objectivism, on the contrary, is “the linguistic system as a system of the phonetic, grammatical, and lexical forms of language” (52). These two philosophies of language, albeit polarized, maintain  Vološinov outlines three key points linking signs and the social: i) “Ideology may not be divorced from the material reality of sign (i.e., by locating it in the ‘consciousness’ or other vague and elusive regions)”; ii) “The sign may not be divorced from the concrete forms of social intercourse (seeing that the sign is part of organized social intercourse and cannot exist, as such, outside it, reverting to a mere physical artifact)”; iii) “Communication and the forms of communication may not be divorced from the material basis” (21).  The following points are made by Vološinov to describe individualistic subjectivism: i) Language is activity, an unceasing process of creating (energeia) realized in individual speech acts; ii) The laws of language creativity are the laws of individual psychology; iii) Creativity of language is meaningful creativity, analogous to creative art; iv) Language as a ready-made product (ergon), as a stable system (lexicon, grammar, phonetics), is, so to speak, the inert crust, the hardened lava of language creativity, of which linguistics makes an abstract construct in the interests of the practical teaching of language as a ready-made instrument (1986, 48).  The following points are made by Vološinov to describe abstract objectivism: i) Language is a stable, immutable system of normatively identical linguistic forms which the individual consciousness finds ready-made and which is incontestable for that consciousness; ii) The laws of language are the specifically linguistic laws of connection 62

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a strong cohesion between subjects and subjectivity: the first presents subjects at the center of language production while the second suggests that language is a system utilized by subjects. This upholds an unproductive distinction between materiality (subjects) and language (signification/representation): in individualistic subjectivism, the speech act of the speaker is purely monologic and (falsely) creates a clear distinction between the inner and outer cores of the body when the speaker only includes the individual consciousness and nothing external to the body (84); in abstract objectivism, the speaker does not have access to the system of language and as a consequence, language becomes significantly displaced from the materialities of life (71, 82). In other words, abstract objectivism is limiting because it does not consider individual speech acts and individualistic subjectivism is constrained because it relies solely on individual speech acts. We can turn to Vološinov and/or Bakhtin’s utterance to tamper with subjectivity’s take on culture, bodies, and language. Utterances are commonly agreeable forms (that which makes them understandable amongst participants) yet are distinctly unique because of their highly contextualized nature (that which makes them extremely creative). In contrast to the aforementioned limitations of language within subjectivity, utterances are not part of a fixed system of language and are not completely determined by individual subjects. between linguistic signs within a given, closed linguistic system. These laws are objective with respect to any subjective consciousness; iii) Specifically linguistic connections have nothing in common with ideological values (artistic, cognitive, or other). Language phenomena are not grounded in ideological motives. No connection of a kind natural and comprehensible to the consciousness or of an artistic kind obtains between the word and its meaning; iv) Individual acts of speaking are, from the viewpoint of language, merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms; but precisely these acts of individual discourse explain this historical changeability of linguistic forms, a changeability that in itself, from the standpoint of the language system, is irrational and senseless. There is no connection, no sharing of motives, between the system of language and its history. They are alien to one another (1986, 57).  According to Vološinov, “the speaker’s focus of attention is brought about in line with the particular, concrete utterance he is making. What matters to him is applying a normatively identical form (let us grant there is such a thing for the time being) in some particular, concrete context. For him, the center of gravity lies not in the identity of the form but in that new concrete meaning it acquires in the particular context. What the speaker values is not that aspect of the form which is invariably identical in all instances of its usage, despite the nature of those instances, but that aspect of the linguistic form because of which it can figure in the given, concrete context, because of which it becomes a sign adequate to the conditions of the given, concrete situation” (1986, 67-68). 63

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They are contextual negotiations that obviate the gap between the “inner” and “outer” cores of the self that are taken up in subjectivity because they are not solely produced by individuals and can not exist in an abstract system. Whereas in individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism, language is determined by individual consciousnesses or abstract systems—from within or without, respectively—utterances are mediated in the spatial-temporalities of the “social milieu.” We can say the following about utterances: i) they determine the language that is used in a particular context; ii) they are constituted in the social and not by the speaker’s psyche that is expressed to the outer world; and iii) they are ideological in the sense that they are not formed in the individual psyche. The dialogical-becomings inherent to this material philosophy of language suggest that a division can not be made between “bodies” and “culture” because everything is negotiated, produced, and settled through the utterance. I will return to the relationship between utterances and dialogism in the latter part of this plateau. For now, it is important to expand on the utterance’s place in the material philosophy of language that I am distinguishing from individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism. The utterance is a social act. As Bakhtin and Medvedev suggest, in addition to the utterance being “an individual material complex, a phonetic, articulatory, visual complex, the utterance is also a part of social reality” (1978, 120). It is not a part of an abstract language system that is divorced from subjects and it is not a form for which subjects reiterate language. We see this quite often when identities are conceptualized through the representations and significations of norms that are either part of an abstract system where subjects become intelligible through significations that precede the body or are differentially produced in relation to identity significations that come before the subject’s representation. The dialogical-becomings of utterances are productive and highly contextualized. Even though they are informed by prior usages, their meanings change based on the contemporary context. Bakhtin and Medvedev refer to this as social evaluation, where utterances enter through the social, are produced through social interactions, and are implicated in the highly

  “The immediate social situation and the broader social milieu wholly determine—and determine from within, so to speak—the structure of an utterance” (Vološinov 1986, 86).   “Thus each of the distinguishable significative elements of an utterance and the entire utterance as a whole entity are translated in our minds into another, active and responsive, context. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature” (Vološinov 1986, 102).   “To understand an utterance means to understand it in its contemporary context and our own, if they do not coincide. It is necessary to understand the meaning of the utterance, the content of the act, and its historical reality, and to do so, moreover, in their concrete inner unity” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, 121-122). 64

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contextualized nature of social engagements. The utterance has the potential to radically reimagine the politics of bodies, language, and culture because they are not directly confined to significations and representations. Everything is connected to the materialities of life where, for example, the body’s relationship to language is not thought of in terms of words but utterances: the materialities of life are not (simply) connected through the significations and representations of words but are negotiated through the dialogical-becomings of utterances in contextualized moments. The utterance is not a purely linguistic form. It is a dialogism of social intercourse. Dialogism, Speech Genres, and Utterances

Dialogism is central to Bakhtin’s interpretation of utterances and so I want to explain how their potentialities can inform the creativity of post-queer dialogical-becomings. Bakhtin accounts for the social reality of utterances in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986). Utterances are categorized through speech genres where different spheres of utterances constitute various speech genres. They are not produced by individual bodies (like the individualizing practices of subjugated subjectivity) but are instead dialogically negotiated amongst becoming-bodies. The whole of an utterance is always in reference to a larger sphere of utterances known as a speech genre: “Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres” (60). Speech genres, however, are not reserved for verbal interactions but all spheres of communication: for example, everyday conversations, legal documentation, and medical terminology. Furthermore, there are two different types of speech genres: primary and secondary.10 Primary, or simple speech genres, are absorbed by secondary, complex speech genres. Bakhtin gives the example of the   “In the utterance, every element of the language-material implements the demands of social evaluation. A language element is only able to enter the utterance if it is capable of satisfying these demands. It is only to express the social evaluation that a word becomes the material of an utterance. Therefore, the word does not enter the utterance from a dictionary, but from life, from utterance to utterance. The word passes from one unity to another without losing its way. It enters the utterance as a word of intercourse, permeated with the concrete immediate and historical aims of this communication” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, 122). 10  “Secondary (complex) speech genres—novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth—arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication (primarily written) that is artistic, scientific, sociopolitical, and so on. During the process of their formation, they absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form 65

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relationship between dialogue in a novel (primary speech genre) and the novel itself (secondary speech genre)—both considered to be utterances. Meaning is produced through the dialogism of the novel and the characters. Primary and secondary speech genres are not arboreal. We recall Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between arborescence and rhizome in plateau two: in an arboreal structure every extension refers back to a central root whereas a rhizomatic system continuously makes and breaks connections without reference to a center. Following Deleuze and Guattari, an arboreal examination would be interested in the field of reality (the world), the field of representation (the book), and the field of subjectivity (the author). Although it is quite convenient to consider the novel as a root and everything else as its branches, the dialogism here is much more complicated than that. When the secondary speech genre (the novel) engulfs the primary speech genre (dialogue in the novel) it is critical that we do not consider this to be an arboreal absorption. Primary and secondary speech genres are both desiring-machines and so the “meaning” produced here is not the same system of meaning that is linked to representations and significations. This system of meaning operates as a system of interruptions where every desiring-machine (primary and secondary speech genres alike) creates a series of flows. The absorption of the primary speech genre is therefore a constituting aspect of that particular flow rather than its destruction. Although utterances are not strictly limited to communicative forms such as oral conversations, let us follow this example for a moment. When rereading dialogue using utterances and speech genres it becomes evident that there is a fiction of communication: there is no individual speaker and an individual listener, where one speaks and the other listens as an independent subject. This is a production of subjectivity that subjugates subjects through individualizing techniques and totalizing procedures. Dialogical-becomings are produced dialogically, rather than individually, through the negotiations of utterances and speech genres. The dialogic participants of utterances are not individualized subjects (or what Bakhtin refers to as the “speaker’s individual discourse”): the speaker and the listener are not distinct components of speech communication. This is problematic because it upholds a speaker and an object of speech. Dialogical-becomings are live acts and are produced dialogically rather than subjectively or objectively. For example, there is always a critical level of responsiveness where the “listener” is always responsive to the “speaker”—not as an object of speech because the listener is in many ways also the speaker (68). At the same time, the speaker becomes the listener because it anticipates a response from the listener. For instance, the speaker “expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth” (69). Utterances are in unmediated speech communion. These primary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones” (Bakhtin 1986, 62). 66

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produced through the dialogic relations of speakers and listeners. Unlike the arboreal structuring of representations and significations that require a constant reference (the individualized subject), the participants of dialogism can not be reduced to their contributions because utterances are rhizomatically connected. In other words, significations and representations rely on and refer back to individualized subjects; post-queer dialogical-becomings are not reducible to any singular body because meaning is produced dialogically through a system of interruptions: utterances are part of a chain of utterances. Although speech genres inform utterances (understanding is created by referencing a sphere of utterances), the dialogic production of bodies always produces something new through the utterance because meaning is not reserved to that which precedes the contextualized negotiations of utterances. The utterance is a real unit of speech: not one that is materialized through language but is materiality itself. They are rhizomatic because there is a definitive beginning and ending to them: beginning because they follow past utterances and ending because there is always a response in the form of other utterances. For example, the utterance is marked by a change in speakers who are not reducible to the status of individualized subjects. The speaker is always anticipating the response of the listener and so the listener is inadvertently a speaker. This is why the utterance is not a unit of language but a unit of speech communication. For example, whereas sentences do not change based on different speakers (unit of language), utterances change with a shift in speakers (unit of speech communication).11 Furthermore, the sentence exists only within the individual as an isolated unit that does not require an active listener.12 They are units of language in that they are grammatical. Although sentences construct utterances, they do not constitute them.13 Utterances are units of speech communication that are not simply linguistic but highly material negotiations. In addition to a change in speaking subjects, the second feature of an utterance that I want to highlight here is its finalization. An utterance is completed when there is nothing more a participant chooses, can, or wants to say. The speaker always assumes a “responsive attitude” because it is part 11  Bakhtin 1986, 73. 12  “The sentence as a language unit lacks all of these properties; it is not demarcated on either side by a change of speaking subjects; it has neither direct contact with reality (with an extraverbal situation) nor a direct relation to others’ utterances; it does not have semantic fullness of value; and it has no capacity to determine directly the responsive position of the other speaker, that is, it cannot evoke a response. The sentence as a language unit is grammatical in nature” (Bakhtin 1986, 74). 13  “One exchanges utterances that are constructed from language units: words, phrases, and sentences. And an utterance can be constructed both from one sentence and from one word, so to speak, from one speech unit…but this does not transform a language unit into a unit of speech communication” (Bakhtin 1986, 75). 67

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of a system of interruptions where the finalization of the utterance is a break in communication flow. Not in the sense that communication is over but that the responsive attitude constitutes the rhizomatic break in order to create the possibility for a response. Think of the phrase that has consumed queer theory since its conception: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” A finalization, or break in the system of interruption, must be made in order for re/action to follow. Performativity, for example, insists that this pronouncement is an individual act that is situated up against a system of performative norms. The utterance, in contrast, accounts for multiple rhizomatic connections and so the speaker here can not be reduced to its pronouncement because of the dialogic relations at play. Moreover, this is why I consider the Bakhtinian utterance to be different from Saussure’s parole: Saussure’s utterance is an individual act up against a system of language that is socially produced. The Saussurean utterance maintains a direct correlation between subjects and subjectivity because the body can be separated from language systems. I find the Bakhtinian utterance to make no clear differentiation between a “system of language” and “individual speech” because it collapses these as separate elements of speech communication through its rhizomatic functioning as a system of interruptions.14 Bakhtinian utterances are highly productive, rather than regressive, and they account for the materialities of life that are negotiated through dialogical-becomings in highly contextualized moments. The following summarizes my intentions for thinking about dialogicalbecomings through Bakhtinian utterances: i) they are not individualized through reiterated representations and signification but are dialogically negotiated through rhizomatic chains of utterances; ii) they do not function on their own but are dialogically connected to other becomings through utterances; iii) since each utterance is part of a chain of utterances, they constantly refer to speech genres and other utterances that inform dialogic relations; iv) they are not reduced to the references they make to speech genres and other utterances; v) utterances are determined amongst dialogical-becomings by a change in speakers and distinct finalizations; vi) they are always connected to other dialogical-becomings through utterances (rather than being directed towards a definitive object); vii) they anticipate a reaction through the dialogic nature of utterances and so the “listener” is actively involved in the “speaker’s” formation of an utterance; viii) the utterance has a level of “addressivity”15; the 14  Bakhtin 1986, 81. 15  “This addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, like-minded people, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower, higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can also be an indefinite, 68

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addressee, however, is not restricted to a fixed participant in a dialogic relation, but can be an “indefinite, unconcretized other” (95).16 Dialogical-becomings as utterances offer a creative and productive politics for a post-queer time and space because they are not purely constructed by individual subjects; they are not linguistic references of a language system; they are not subjected to norms that individualize subjects; and they are not materialized through language or discourse. Dialogical-becomings as utterances are rhizomatically produced through relations that do not refer back to a center or core root because they are directed outwards rather than inwards. The Heteroglossia of Political Theorizations

Dialogism speaks to highly complex negotiations that do not reduce bodies to their “individual” contributions (like we see in the subjects of subjugated subjectivities) because all utterances are rhizomatically connected. Dialogism is central to post-queer politics because something new is always created out of something given. Bakhtinian heteroglossia describes this creative potentiality as a foundational characteristic of utterances: it is key to post-queer politics because it helps to avoid positivistic readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy (see plateau two). Emerson and Holquist, in the glossary of Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, describe heteroglossia as: [t]he base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. (428)

Heteroglossia provides a necessary framework for considering the contexts rather than contents of dialogical-becomings. For example, rather than focusing on multiple subjectivities or intersubjectivies that continue to operate within subjectivity, the heteroglossia inherent to all utterances speaks to intertextualities. This is why Bakhtin has such an acute interest in the novel because of its unconcretized other (with various kinds of monological utterances of an emotional type)” (Bakhtin 1986, 95). 16  Bakhtin refers to this as a double-voiced discourse: “discourse in them has a twofold direction—it is directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinary discourse, and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech” (1984a, 185). 69

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investment in heteroglossia: the novel is intertextual in that multiple utterances are present at any given time. We recall from above that the utterances of a novel function rhizomatically where although they refer to the novel to produce meaning the novel itself is not arboreal. Heteroglossia keeps the novel open to the world rather than being closed to it. So although Bakhtin uses heteroglossia to talk about the functioning of words in the utterance—specifically how language is constructed in the novel17—I am not reserving our discussion of utterances here to language. This involves the need for Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy. I am instead arguing that a new line of flight can be created to consider dialogical-becomings as material languages that are negotiated and implicated in social heteroglossia. Let us explore this Deleuzian line of flight more closely. I want to expand on this by first introducing internal dialogism to what I have termed dialogicalbecomings. Internal dialogism implies that every utterance is directed towards other utterances and in doing so anticipates an answer. Dialogical-becomings as utterances require an addressee and always anticipate a response where the intentions of such relations go through the subjective belief systems of other dialogic participants. This “plurality of consciousnesses” allows for new styles to be created through the “speaker’s” interrogations of the “listener’s” subjective belief system: “The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background” (Bakhtin 1981, 282). Contrary to subjectivity, these are not interactions of independent subjects but complex engagements of rhizomatic networks. Dialogical-becoming bodies, so to speak, are therefore always another’s body because the languages involved are “living impulses” that are deeply connected with the material world.18 The relationships between dialogical-becomings raise a very important issue regarding Bakhtinian theory. The participants in dialogic relations can not be thought of in terms of “self ” and “other” as we see in, for example, Lacan. To do so would miss the entire creativity and productivity of Bakhtinian theory. Bakhtinian dialogic participants do not lack anything. Consequently, I must contend with Nealon’s reading of Bakhtin in Alterity Politics where he 17 According to Bakhtin, “one can say that any word exists for the speaker in three aspects: as a neutral world of language, belonging to nobody; as an other’s word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other’s utterance; and, finally, as my word, for, since I am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my express” (1986, 88). 18  “Discourse lives, as it were, beyond itself, in a living impulse…toward the object; if we detach ourselves completely from this impulse all we have left is the naked corpse of the word, from which we can learn nothing at all about the social situation or the fate of a given word in life” (Bakhtin 1981, 292). 70

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associates Bakhtin with Lacan by insisting that the “self ” needs the “other” for its intelligibility: “As in Lacanian theories of expropriation from the real into the symbolic, intersubjective identity theories like Bakhtin’s maintain a notion of excess that is subtended by a prior notion of lack” (1998, 7). I disagree with Nealon’s reading of Bakhtin as an intersubjective theory based on notions of lack. So while I agree that a “subjectivity thought as lack seems inexorably to separate the subject from what it can do,” (11) I have grave difficulty considering Bakhtin’s “intersubjectivity” as a subjectivity at all (let alone a subjectivity based on lack). I therefore have sincere reservations with Nealon’s argument that “Bakhtin’s discourse remains a symptom rather than a critical intervention” (48). This is because I consider Bakhtin’s intersubjectivity to be an inter(con)textuality where dialogism does not maintain a self/other binary. Nealon’s insistence that Bakhtin is interested in the self (and subsequently Levinas in the Other) is from the start problematic because of how he links Bakhtin to subjugated subjectivities: Perhaps what we require is not an identity politics of who we are, but an alterity politics of how we’ve come to be who we are: not the answerability of Bakhtinian subjective privilege, but the Levinasian responsibility engendered by the other. (51)

Nealon has no choice but to consider Bakhtin as a symptom when he reads him through an intersubjective lens that privileges the self. In the end, Nealon, perhaps inadvertently, equates Butlerian politics with that of Bakhtin by situating performativity and intersubjectivity, respectively, as symptoms based on lack. Although I share many concerns with Nealon’s take on Butler’s performativity, I see Bakhtinian dialogism as being antagonistic to this type of reading by challenging self/other politics altogether. So although Nealon draws on Deleuze to move away from a subjectivity based on lack, he ultimately falls short by limiting Bakhtin to Levinas and the self/other relationship. For example, he argues through Deleuze “when difference is thematized as a ‘concept in general,’ it loses its ‘deterritorializing’ power of becoming” (199). This is precisely what Nealon does with Bakhtin when he conceptualizes the “self ” and “other.” Rather than using Bakhtinian intersubjectivity to get to Deleuze (which is the route that Nealon’s alterity politics takes), post-queer politics uses Deleuze’s political philosophy to get to Bakhtin. Consequently, I do not consider Nealon’s use of Bakhtin to be unjustified but I do see it as unproductive considering the important politics that he sets out to address. Bakhtinian dialogism is dialogically connected to Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy of becoming that, as MacCormack writes:

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does not form a unity but a contagion. Any self ’s becoming both exploits that self ’s specificity and dissipates its quality through its relation to the specificities of the other becoming term, changing the organization and powers of both, through unique patternings forming mobile hybrids. (2008, 34)

With that said, the use of Deleuze to get to Bakhtin is certainly not unidirectional. I see the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin as dialogical because Bakhtin is just as important to Deleuze as Deleuze is to Bakhtin. I am specifically speaking to recent critiques of Deleuzian and subsequently Massumian affectivity studies as being oriented through a heteronormative and patriarchal lens. Bakhtinian theory offers Deleuze and affective theory a language for thinking through the majoritizations and minoritizations of life without, of course, reducing life to language. Deleuze’s political philosophy risks becoming too positivistic if social heteroglossia is not accounted for. I am thinking along the lines of Robert McRuer’s critique of able-bodied assumptions that pervade many political theorizations. My intention is therefore not to privilege Bakhtin over other critical theorists but to consider his political project as one line of flight that can account for the heteroglossia of life itself. Taking into consideration the aforementioned arguments, I do not consider Bakhtin’s subjective belief system to fall under the self/other binary that Nealon places on Bakhtin. The subjective belief system is implicated in dialogism and is connected to the materialities of life through utterances. As I explain above, dialogical-becomings are directed outwards and open to the world rather than directed inwards and individualized through processes of subjugation. This does not mean that there is nothing that differentiates dialogical-becomings: they are not limited to physical, material, and corporeal realms but extend to bodies of theoretical work, bodies of knowledge, knowledge of bodies, institutional bodies, bodies of thought, systemic bodies, cultural bodies and so forth. Bakhtinian stylistics can be used to describe the characteristics that differentiate dialogical-becoming “bodies.” The uniqueness of every utterance and the creative potential for producing something new through dialogic relations is a consequence of stylistics. Style refers to the ways in which dialogic relations are negotiated differently based on highly contextualized moments. Bakhtin identifies two predominant conditions of style: i) artistic literature (most favourable condition) and ii) speech genres requiring standard form (least favourable condition). In artistic literature, one’s specific style is a core component of a particular situation: “the individual style enters directly into the very task of the utterance, and this is one of its main goals” (Bakhtin 1986, 63). In these situations, dialogical-becomings have a greater ability to insert their distinct styles into an utterance. For example, when considering the dialogic relation between a painter and an artistic body of 72

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work, the specific style of the painter can be expressed through the artist’s body of work. Or, the particular style of a writer is accounted for in a piece of literature. Speech genres requiring standard form, however, do not have the same level of stylistics as those of artistic literature. For example, legal documents, health forms, educational curricula, anatomy textbooks, assembly line productions, and government legislations are all examples where creativity is limited. So, while the painter expresses a significant amount of creative stylistics through the dialogism with an artistic body of work, the same painter encounters stylistic restriction when dialogically connected to the business aspects of selling art. The painter is produced and stylistically differentiated through the dialogical negotiations with artistic bodies of work and bodies of legal knowledge (business documents). As Bakhtin notes, most bodies are dialogically connected through speech genres requiring standard form where the body’s style is a “by-product” of an utterance: style becomes more of a component rather than a constituting element. Utterances are therefore not completely determined by nor do they definitively constitute dialogical-becomings. This is because the utterance is not a strict reiteration of existing utterances and it is not an autonomous articulation divorced of any socio-historic meaning: there is no “unity of language” and a “unity of an individual person realizing himself in this language” (1981, 264). Traditional stylistics, like individualistic subjectivism and abstract objectivism (as discussed above), can not account for the complexity and creativity of dialogical-becomings.19 For instance, Saussure views language as a closed system where bodies are separate from its functioning. Stylization is unique because everything is negotiated through dialogic relations that take the past into consideration while being directed towards the potentialities of the open future.20

19  Bakhtin specifically critiques Saussure’s interpretation of language as a system and the individual’s distinction from this system (1981, 264). Bakhtin further suggests that poetic language, individuality of language, image, symbol, and epic style are also “equally oriented toward the single-languaged and single-styled genres…are too narrow and cramped, and cannot accommodate the artistic prose of novelistic discourse” (266). 20  Bakhtin claims that his understanding of stylistics is able to account for the important complexities “in skaz, in parodies and in various forms of verbal masquerade, ‘not talking straight,’” etc. (1981, 274-275). This is why Bakhtin, for example, approaches the work of Rabelais in Rabelais and his World (1984b). 73

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In addition to stylistics, Bakhtin’s materialist philosophy of language also centers on the simultaneous centripetal 21 and centrifugal 22 forces of utterances: whereas centripetal forces provide a common understandings (stabilize), centrifugal forces decenter the stabilities of utterances (destabilize). Consequently, in response to Noble’s claim that “‘queer’ is beginning to become an unusable term [because] it has the potential to be centripetal or stabilizing the space it makes, or centrifugal, that is, destabilizing the spaces it flags” (2006, 9), I consider post-queer dialogical-becomings as the plateauing of these forces through the creative potentiality of utterances. Utterances do not reiterate past utterances and they can not be replicated in the future. The utterance is something given and something created: “What is given is completely transformed in what is created” (Bakhtin 1986, 120). It is important then to distinguish between dialogic relations and dialogic speech: dialogic relations, unlike dialogic speech that requires two speaking subjects, can be monologic because they are defined by context and not content. Dialogic relations are not necessarily directed towards an object (like the self/other relations of subjectivity). It is the superaddressee that informs the whole in any utterance and provides understanding in dialogical relations: it acts as a third aspect involved in the formation of an utterance. The superaddressee constitutes the utterances produced in dialogic relations and serves as a constant reference for these negotiations. Bakhtin offers the following examples of superaddressees: God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, and science. We can also think of identities, ethics, biology, nature, and innovation. Every dialogic relation is founded by and circulates within the boundaries of a superaddressee and it is through the negotiations within these boundaries that it becomes possible to realize the superaddressee of the whole utterance. The superaddressee is therefore not an inscriptive force that can be fully realized prior to a dialogic relation but comes to life through dialogical negotiations by creating opportunities for understanding.

21  “Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces of language. A unitary language is not something given (dan) but is always in essence posited (zadan)—and at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia” (Bakhtin 1981, 270). 22  “Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward” (Bakhtin 1981, 272). 74

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Post-Queer Quotes

Recall from plateau one that post-queer politics is not strictly situated in or directly against queer theory but is instead a part of a much greater conversation with critical theories in general. In this next section, I want to center our attention on how dialogical-becomings can offer a more creative and productive politics for contemporary theorizations by distinguishing them from Derridian iteration and Butlerian performativity. Derrida’s philosophy of language centers on existing discourses and the possibility for resignification. For both Derrida and Butler, agency is always in relation to that which precedes the body and so movement is always a possibility rather than a potentiality that is virtually directed.23 Although Derrida emphasizes context and the importance of multiple meanings, his philosophy is limiting because of its emphasis on iterations that, like performativity, are based in the possibility to differ from preceding discourses. Meaning is therefore only produced through différance. This is not to suggest that the subject is strictly confined to these preceding discourses but that agency is only possible within them. Butler builds on Derrida by linking iteration to identity politics. According to Butler, there is no natural body that exists prior to cultural inscription because bodies are materialized as subjects through the reiteration of cultural norms. For example, bodies are materialized as gendered subjects through the reiteration of gendered norms. The notion of an essential gender is therefore culturally manufactured and bodies become gendered subjects through a series of repeated acts that produce gendered identities. Butler’s performative theorization of, predominantly, gender, sex, and sexuality offers an important politics for thinking about how subjects are stylized through specific cultural codes that are concretized over time through their reiteration. This is why Butler claims gender to be something that the body does rather than something that the body is. With that said, the countless performative theorizations that have followed Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) have examined these doings in relation to being rather than becoming. I make this claim because of performativity’s functioning within subjectivity where representations, signification, and identifications direct the body inwards. We see this especially in performativity’s insistence that there is no identity outside of language and discourse. For example, the body’s capacity to be read as intelligible is only possible through a priori identity norms where agency becomes the possibility for resignification. Although utterances are a part of Derridian iteration and Butlerian performativity, they have a different and more creative function within 23 I am specifically referring to Deleuze’s distinction, following Bergson, between the potentialities of the virtual/actual and the possibilities of the real/possible. I discuss this relationship in detail in plateau six. 75

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Bakhtinian dialogism. The utterances of dialogical-becomings do not reiterate the past in order to become intelligible because they are directed towards the open future: what is settled through the utterance can not be determined by what precedes dialogical negotiations. Agency for Bakhtinian dialogism, unlike iteration and performativity, is not limited to resignifications because movement is not determined within preceding discourses. Although dialogical-becomings reference existing utterances and speech genres, they do not determine their intelligibilities. Utterances within dialogism can not be duplicated or reproduced because their highly contextualized nature always produces something new. Dialogical-becomings are open to the creativity of the future and are never fully complete because rather than being subjected to the significations and representations of the past they are in a constant state of becoming—not being. To resignify or represent the body through performatives requires a body that can, for example, be positioned on an identity grid that precedes the body. This type of movement, in agreement with Massumi, is a “backformation” where the body in many respects never gets anywhere because it is endlessly recirculated in the realms of significations and representations that come before the body.24 So although dialogical-becomings reference past utterances (something given), they are never reduced to them (something created). In performativity, the body remains stable while movement is achieved through resignifications and representations. For dialogism, the body itself changes through each dialogic encounter because movement is inherent to the dialogical process and creativity is the defining characteristic of utterances. The body in one dialogic relation is not the same in the next because as it encounters various dialogic relations it is stylized differently based on contemporary contexts. Rather than a body that remains the same and only moves through significations, representations, and identifications, the dialogical-becoming body itself continuously changes because it is a chain of utterances. There is therefore no definitive differentiation between bodies and culture because dialogical-becomings are not signified or represented through cultural norms but are negotiated as culture through utterances that are inseparable from the materialities of life. Bakhtinian dialogism challenges performative theorizations that have consumed identity politics over the past couple of decades. I see performative reiterations as copies and dialogic relations as quotes.25 The “quoted” utterance is different from a reiterated performative in that the utterance is not solely determined by preceding norms but quotes existing utterances in speech genres and superaddressees. Although these quotes give way to common understandings 24 I discuss this in greater detail in plateau six. 25  “Units of speech communication—whole utterances—cannot be reproduced (although they can be quoted) and they are related to one another dialogically” (Bakhtin 1986, 128). 76

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amongst dialogic participants, they only inform part of the dialogic relation and as a result immediately change upon their entrance into the negotiations. The something given built into quotations offers utterances a social heteroglossia and the something created allows for the potentiality to become-other: a potentiality that does not rely on preceding discourses. Let us take the notion of “identity” as a means to further conceptualize the difference between performative copies and dialogical quotes. We see through performativity that identities are not essential categories but are cultural norms that circulate amongst subjects. In order for subjects to be intelligible, they must successfully reproduce these norms through specific acts, gestures, signs, and positions. Rather than reiterating existing identity norms, utterances quote the speech genres of particular identities and create new utterances in the process—a productive approach for thinking about identities. I am not suggesting that performativity does not produce anything because it is clear that identities are concretized over time and subjects are materialized through the reiteration of performatives. I am suggesting, however, that speech genres and utterances offer a more complex and creative way for thinking about how identities are negotiated, produced, and circulated amongst dialogical-becomings that are not individualized through subjugating practices. For example, heteroglossia can account for the socio-historic productions of racialized utterances where they can be mapped and accounted for by looking at the complexities of speech genres and superaddressees attributed to patriarchy and whiteness. As a result, “race” becomes less of an identity category that is circulated through cultural norms and instead becomes a complicated interaction of utterances, speech genres, and superaddressees that are closely connected to the materialities of life (rather than the discursive ideologies of representations and significations). Post-queer dialogical-becomings offer new and important ways for thinking about the production of bodies as culture rather than exploring the inscriptive techniques or performative reiterations that transform bodies into subjects through the resignifications and representations of cultural norms. Dialogisms are potentialities that are open to the future. They quote the past without being reduced to the past or differentiated within the past. “Everything is visible, everything is concrete, everything is corporeal, and everything is material in this world, and at the same time everything is intensive, interpreted, and creatively necessary” (Bakhtin 1986, 42-23). Carnival Regenerations

I began this plateau by critically engaging the “problem with agency” in Foucault. I have responded to this by considering the creative potentialities of agency through Bakhtinian dialogism. In this next section, I extend these 77

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assertions by examining Bakhtin’s reading of popular humor and folk culture in the works of François Rabelais. Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival embodies the creativity and radical ambitions of a post-queer politics by engaging dialogicalbecomings on a popular level. Rabelais’ depiction of carnival in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance serves as yet another line of flight that can plateau the individualizing discourses of subjugated subjectivities. The carnival is a unique time and space because it involves the participation of everyone. It is a meshing of folks from all walks of life that radically reverses the social order: what is official becomes unofficial. It is an energizing environment that brings the world and its people together through the creation of popular negotiations. The carnivalesque is not limited to predetermined representations and significations. For instance, rather than occupying specific and prearranged spaces, carnivals occur in “streets, taverns, roads, bathhouses, decks of ships, and so on” (1984a, 128). Carnival is not determined by what comes before the carnivalesque. It is a pure dialogical-becoming because it “belongs to the whole people, it is universal, everyone must participate in its familiar contact.” The dialogical-becomings of carnival refer to the potential for regeneration on a popular rather than individual level. There are no individual bodies because there is no differentiation between actors and spectators: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it” (Bakhtin 1984b, 7). It is a time to immobilize hierarchies and offer new ways for bodies to interact as culture rather than in culture. I say this because of the popular negotiations that make up carnival: dialogic relations that do not individualize but popularize bodies. I see carnival as a plateauing of subjugated subjectivities and dialogical-becomings. For example, it disrupts class barriers by creating a space that is not marked by hierarchy and patriarchy. In comparison to official feasts where rank is important—“everyone was expected to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position” (1984b, 10)—carnivals do not materialize bodies through individualizing discourses because everyone has an equal role to play in producing the carnivalesque. Subjugating subjectivities such as the hierarchical structure of life are suspended in carnival.26 For example, profanation is used to challenge the officialdom of language, style, and etiquette. In doing so, new forms of communication that were once not possible outside of carnival are created. Profanation speaks to the potentiality of transforming life:

26 Carnival became a parody of official culture. For example, “the jester was proclaimed king, a clownish abbot, bishop, or archbishop was elected at the ‘feast of fools,’ and in the churches directly under the pope’s jurisdiction a mock pontiff was even chosen” (Bakhtin 1984b, 81). 78

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The familiar language of the marketplace became a reservoir in which various speech patterns excluded from official intercourse could freely accumulate… all these genres were filled with the carnival spirit, transformed their primitive verbal functions, acquired a general tone of laughter, and became, as it were, so many sparks of the carnival bonfire which renews the world. (17)

I want to be clear that carnival is not just a mockery of officialdom. It is politically motivated by a desire to see life “inside out”—a productive desire that is not based on lack but one that desires to become-other. As Stuart Hall suggests: In fact, what is striking and original about Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’ as a metaphor of cultural and symbolic transformation is that it is not simply a metaphor of inversion—setting the ‘low’ in the place of the ‘high’, while preserving the binary structure of the division between them. In Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’, it is precisely the purity of this binary distinction which is transgressed. The low invades the high, blurring the hierarchical imposition of order; creating, not simply the triumph of one aesthetic over another, but those impure and hybrid forms of the ‘grotesque’; revealing the interdependency of the low on the high and vice versa, the inextricably mixed and ambivalent nature of all cultural life, the reversibility of cultural form, symbols, language and meaning; and exposing the arbitrary exercise of cultural power, simplification, and exclusion which are the mechanisms upon which the construction of every limit, tradition and canonical formation, and the operation of every hierarchical principle of cultural closure, is founded. (1996, 292)

So rather than simply rejecting the officialdoms of life, carnivalesque regenerates life itself. A primary example of this is the crowning and decrowning of a carnival king that simultaneously symbolizes both birth and death. The purpose of this event is not to represent or signify the king through birth and death. The focus is on the indivisibility of the crowning and decrowning: the process of transformation and the potential to transform in carnival. All carnival images and symbols follow a similar dualistic (yet not binary) formula in order to emphasize the radical potentialities for change: for example, death/birth; blessing/curse; praise/abuse; youth/old age; and stupidity/wisdom. The goal here is not to resignify or represent the body through images. Dualistic humor is intended to debase official culture through the indivisibility of popular transformations. Carnival laughter is not an individualizing practice. It is a creative potential inherent to the dialogical-becomings of carnival. By comparing carnival laughter in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance with laughter in the seventeenth century, we can explicate the differences between the dialogical-becomings of carnival and the individualized subjects of subjugated subjectivities. In the seventeenth century, laughter is reserved for the “lower genres”—subjugated bodies that are 79

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individualized through hierarchical practices—and subsequently discriminates subjects through specific cultural trends. Carnival laughter, in comparison, produces new cultures through the relational negotiations of popular bodies. This is why Bakhtin considers carnival laughter to be a “social consciousness of all the people” (92). It is a universal language—one that does not universalize— that creates spaces of freedom that can renew life outside of officialdom. The language of carnival is deeply connected to the materialities of life. Carnival participants are dialogically negotiated through utterances where every image, gesture, and act is always a part of a greater whole: “Each image is subject to the meaning of the whole; each reflects a single concept of a contradictory world of becoming, even though the image may be separately presented” (149). In order to challenge the officialdoms of life, the speech genres and utterances of carnival are read through the realities of life outside of the festival. Although carnivalesque engages the individualizing techniques of official culture in order to subvert them, their carnivalesque intelligibility, if you will, is not limited to or within these subjugating practices. These dialogic relations are modes of production and creation rather than representations and resignifications. They are, in the words of Stuart Hall, “the ‘spatialization’ of moments of conflict and antagonism” rather than pure transcendence (299). Carnival is a time of life, death, and revival of popular bodies: a death of discursive materializations and subjugating individualizations—a revitalizing death that simultaneously brings about a birth. The carnival mask is an example of this transformation and renewal because it “grant[s] the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right to not be taken literally, not ‘to be oneself ’” (Bakhtin 1981, 163).27 It is through life, death, and revival that dialogical-becomings overcome the individualizing practices of subjugation. Consequently, carnival regeneration differs from the subversive strategies of subjectivity because it does not focus on individual change or change through varying degrees of individualization. For example, when it is the responsibility of subjects to find means of transformation within themselves. This is seen most notably in calls for internal self-realizations and confessions that in the end merely resignify the subject using different ideological or discursive representations. The dialogical-becomings of carnival are renewed through the materialities of life that are negotiated at a popular rather than individual level.

27  Bakhtin considers the mask to be “the most complex theme of folk culture” (Bakhtin 1984b, 39-40). 80

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Now That’s Grotesque

We can turn to Rabelais’ writings on the carnival and Bakhtin’s reading of them to further understand the popular negotiations of dialogicalbecomings. The grotesque aspects of carnival are not limited to preceding representations and significations as they are always open to the world through exaggerations, hyperbolisms, and excessivenesses. The grotesque takes something deemed unacceptable and transforms it into something spectacular: “The object transgresses its own confines, ceases to be itself. The limits between the body and the world are erased, leading to the fusion of the one with the other and with surrounding objects” (310).28 The grotesque is in a constant state of becoming as it negotiates the materialities of life rather than being materialized through life’s discourses: “It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (317). Grotesque dialogical-becomings, as depicted in Rabelais’ carnival, engage the world through convexities and orifices—bowels, genital organs, mouth, anus, nose, etc.—and it is through these openings that the distinction between the body and the world is dismantled.29 The convexities and orifices are always open to the world and they as a result disregard individualized subjects that are closed off. Movements rather than signified or represented meanings characterize grotesque dialogicalbecomings. They are comprised of “outward” (nose, ears, mouth, genitals, etc.) and “inward” (blood, bowels, organs, etc.) features that interact with the open world: “In the endless chain of bodily life it retains the parts in which one life joins the other, in which the life of one body is born from the death of the preceding, older one” (318). Grotesque movement is very Deleuzo-Guattarian in a desiring-production sense that continuously makes and breaks flows. It is rhizomatic rather than arboreal because its movements do not refer back to a central reference. Grotesque dialogical-becomings are therefore not individual materializations but intersections of interchanging materialities that interact with the open world

28  Bakhtin provides an illustrative example of this using Rabelais’ Book 2, Chapter 15, where there is a “proposal to build walls from genital organs of women” (1984b, 312). In this example, the separation between the material body and the world is removed: the material body becomes the world. 29  “Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body—all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body” (Bakhtin 1984b, 317). 81

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as popular negotiations rather than biological or psychological individualities.30 A fundamental and creative aspect of the material bodily principle is degradation: the “lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (19-20). Political regeneration can be facilitated through the degradation of all that is abstract—bringing the ideological down to a material level. In traditional political struggles, change is in relation to the ability or inability for subjects to move within and through abstract levels of significations and representations. Think of the contemporary politics surrounding gay marriage. It could be argued that Canada’s “legalization” of gay marriage in 2005 shows how Canadian societies are in some respects beyond queer politics. This, of course, would not be a very successful argument considering the homophobia and heterosexism that persists throughout the country. It could also be argued that the United States is before queer politics if we consider how Proposition 8—a proposal to alter the state’s constitution to restrict marriage between a “man and a woman”—passed in California on November 4, 2008. This would also be an unsuccessful argument because it inappropriately confines queer politics to legal structures. With that said, these examples share a common politics in that movement is strictly accounted for through significations, representations, and identifications. These examples speak to the series of questions raised by Michael Warner in “Normal and Normaller: Beyond Gay Marriage”: Do gay people yearn to be normal in a way that might be satisfied by marriage? Or is the idea of normal gays oxymoronic? If so, is it because the repetition or performativity of norms renders them unstable, as some queer theory suggests? Or is it because there are historical contradictions among sexual norms that cannot be resolved by broader access to matrimony? Is sex normal? Is it normal to want to be normal? Or is there a deepening rift between those who in some important sense aspire to be normal and those who either aspire otherwise or have no choice—that is between normal gays and queers? Does an institution like marriage change the people to whom it is extended, or is it that the entry of gay people into marriage would change the meaning of marriage? (1999, 119)

Warner’s exposition here raises many important questions for theorists and activists that to this day require investigation. Warner shows us here that we are neither before nor beyond queer politics. Post-Queer Politics is very much a part of this conversation and, as I explain in plateau one, is not to be seen as 30  “The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, and people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” (Bakhtin 1984b, 19). 82

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a politics definitively “beyond” something queer. So without taking anything away from the important political movements that queer theorists and activists have been working on for quite some time, a post-queer politics can offer a new line of flight for thinking about how these current inequities are framed. Rather than conceptualizing a politics around how subjects can or can not move in relation to abstract levels of significations and representations, grotesque transformations can occur at a “lower” level that is closer to the materialities of life. For example, all that is abstract about gay marriage—think of the questions posed by Warner above—can be lowered by revitalizing its politics through grotesque degradation that “digs a bodily grave for a new birth” (21). Destruction, production, and regeneration are all aspects of degradation and contribute to the inversion of life that I am calling for here. This process of negation destructs something old and seemingly unusable by turning it inside out in order to give way to something new. This movement does not call for resignifications but creative transformations. I am thinking, for instance, of how marriage can be considered through questions of what it means to be human in relation to what Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird refer to as “non/human” (2008). For example, in the opening sentences of a chapter titled Animal Trans, Hird introduces us to Punky and Elvira—female macaques that have jointly raised three monkeys over a fifteen-year period. Hird comments: discussions of animal behaviour often move quickly to moral debates about topics such as gay marriage, the nuclear family and gender relations…Punky and Elvira incite debate because they are nonhuman animals (natural) who are engaged in homosexual behaviour (unnatural and therefore morally inferior), thus disrupting the historic Judaeo-Christian association between nature and moral superiority. (2008, 228)

Hird brings the abstract representations of Punky and Elvira—gay marriage, the nuclear family, and gender relations—down to a more material level that creates a new politics of transformation rather than resignification. She offers an important grotesque reading on the non/human by taking queer down from an abstract ideology by interrogating the materialities of queer itself. This is reflected in Hird’s reconsideration of her 2006 publication titled “The Evolution of Sex Diversity: Trying to Get Beyond the Study of the Evolution of Homosexuality”: I argued that the morphologies and behaviours of many living organisms are queer in that they challenge heteronormativity. The problem with my argument, it seems to me now, is that I read nonhuman living organisms through the lens of queer, rather than critically reflecting upon how we socio-culturally constitute queer and how we might read queer through a nonhuman lens. (242) 83

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Hird’s engagement with queer and the non/human moves away from a politics embedded in the queer/heteronormative dyad and moves closer to a postqueer politics of becoming by bringing all that is abstract down to the open materialities of life. Time and ambivalence are key characteristics of grotesque dialogicalbecomings: they change with time and remain ambivalent as a constant contradiction. Because of this, they are never complete and they always surpass their own possibilities through their potential to transform. Because of their dialogical nature, grotesque becomings are always two bodies in one: when one body dies another body is born. They are bodies of progress, not repetition: the grotesque, like the utterance, does not repeat that which precedes the body but is characterized through future progressions that were once not possible. I want to contrast dialogical-becomings with what Bakhtin calls the new bodily canon that supports individualizations that are closed off from the world. I consider the new bodily canon to be the bodies of knowledge and knowledge of bodies that emerge in the centuries following the Medieval Ages and the Renaissance—specifically those that individualize bodies through subjugated subjectivities. It is through processes of individualization that the body becomes a “strictly limited mass” and an “impenetrable façade;” it becomes a closed materiality that is uninterested and unable to “merge with other bodies and with the world” (Bakhtin 1984b, 320). The subjugated subject is limited because it is restricted to individualizing techniques and practices: In the modern image of the individual body, sexual life, eating, drinking, and defecation have radically changed their meaning: they have been transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole. (321)

We see this in Foucault’s genealogical investigations into the discursive productions of subjects (see plateau one). The new bodily canon is closed to the world and is unable to breach the separation between bodies and culture. Think of Foucault’s accounts of bodily inscription where the body with all its orifices and convexities is now closed. Everything becomes an individual act and a singular event: for example, death is no longer connected to birth; eating is separated from defecation.31 The body is no longer a site of regeneration but of reiteration. Think of performativity: every action and event is “enclosed within 31 The grotesque body, in contrast, is open to the world: “death brings nothing to an end, for it does not concern the ancestral body, which is renewed in the next generation. The events of the grotesque sphere are always developed on the boundary dividing one body from the other and, as it were, at their points of intersection. One 84

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the limits of the same body, limits that are the absolute beginning and end and can never meet” (322). Bakhtin attributes this to a decline of the carnivalesque where the Renaissance is considered the peak of carnival life. After this era, the carnival encounters a significant decay. This decline is a result of the increasing emphasis on masquerade that develops into a festival of decorations and entertainment. The shift from carnival to masquerade displaces the breathing element of carnival. For instance, a distinction is made between the event as a whole and its people where the people become individualized participants of masquerade. This, I argue, moves the body away from its dialogical creativities and brings it closer to the significations and representations of all that is abstract and ideal in the images of masquerade. These individualizing practices, in effect, lead to the destruction of dialogism. Creative Potentialities

In summary, a Bakhtinian engagement with dialogical-becomings has the potential to reconsider the relationships amongst culture, language, and materiality. More specifically, Bakhtinian utterances, in comparison to performative utterances, offer a more complex language to think about how dialogical-becomings are produced and negotiated as culture in highly contextualized moments that are heteroglot. The dualistic functioning of the utterance allows for a common understanding and a particularized contextualization. It is not part of a language system and it is not completely determined by an individual: I have compared this to abstract objectivism and individualistic subjectivism, respectively. Conceptualizing politics through the aforesaid language systems concretizes an unproductive and limiting association between bodies and subjectivities. A politics of dialogical-becomings, when read through dialogism, speech genres, carnivalesque, and grotesque, has the potential to continuously change through time-specific utterances that are not restricted to or within a priori significations and representations. Dialogical-becomings are not stable constants that move easily through different speech genres but are continuously reworked and redefined as utterances through different speech genres. They are live acts that become-other through stylistics yet are not reducible to these forms because of their inherent dialogism. Post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings are potentialities rather than possibilities. This is because they are not completely autonomous or entirely determined and their transformations can not be decided prior to dialogic encounters. It is the relations themselves, rather than what came before them, that foster creative potentialities. This is why dialogicalbody offers its death, the other its birth, but they are merged in a two-bodied image” (Bakhtin 1984b, 322). 85

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becomings are quotes, rather than copies, because their potentialities are always negotiated through something given and something created. I offer grotesque dialogical-becomings as one example of how post-queer can radically rethink contemporary politics by making no differentiation between bodies and culture. Carnival creates opportunities to challenge the official and engage the popular by disrupting hierarchies and debasing officialdom. Carnival is a site of regeneration because the grotesque body is always two bodies in one. The grotesque body is a becoming: “Becoming is always double, and it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 109). The carnivalesque removes the distinction between subjects and the materialities of life by collapsing them into each other through the grotesque’s openness to the world. The dialogical-becomings of this plateau can be seen as progressions (potentialities) rather than regressions (reiterations). They are not inscribed by culture and they are not constituted alongside culture. They are dialogically negotiated and produced as culture. Bakhtin shows us how the deterioration of the popular has resulted in an intensified flourishing of individual materializations. We see this specifically through subjugated subjectivities and the individualization of bodies through disciplinary techniques and practices. The individualized subject is considered to be whole and complete; it strives to articulate itself perfectly and to be fully known. As a result of this, subjects become categorized and separated and so the distances between subjects and the materialities of life are widened. The body is no longer open to the world but becomes a closed entity that is selfsufficient. In this plateau, I hope to have created the important spaces to begin to think about how we can reconsider the ways in which bodies are negotiated, constituted, produced, and defined. The intersection of dialogism, utterances, speech genres, and the grotesque serves to engage a new post-queer politics embedded in potentialities that are constantly becoming-other.

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PLATEAU 4

The Materialities of Life Itself Disciplining Life

I want to return for a moment to “the problem of agency in Foucault” that I addressed in the opening paragraphs of the previous plateau. Recall from these introductory statements that the “problem” is not that there is no agency in Foucault but that agency is all over the place in Foucault. Foucault’s engagement with power and discourse provides an important language to consider agency through actions—how power relations enact the subject by acting on their actions. Poststructural theorizations have largely embodied Foucauldian notions of power as an active rather than reactive force in order to think through the ways in which bodies become subjects of discourse. We see this, for instance, in feminist politics’ interest in the patriarchal productions of gender and sexuality; ability politics’ interest in the discursive production of normative able-bodiedness; queer politics’ interest in the binary construction of heteronormative identities. Without universalizing these important works through Foucauldian analyses and without reducing Foucault to the poststructural theorizations of feminist, ability, and queer politics, these albeit oversimplified examples speak to how the intersection of agency, identity, and subjectivity has informed politics throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Foucault’s influence on feminist, ability, and queer theorizations has created many important spaces to explore the complexities around how bodies become discursive subjects through power relations. Despite the numerous and diverse directions that these Foucauldian analyses take, they are predominantly read through a universal lens marked by discipline. I outline how Foucault’s work on discipline has considerably influenced identity and body politics in plateau one and so I will not get into this in detail here. I want to instead focus more generally on what Foucault refers to as disciplinary societies and how the notion of discipline has to a great extent informed how we come to understand and approach current day politics. Foucault first introduces us to the notion of discipline in Discipline and Punish (1977). It is here where Foucault explains how disciplinary practices individualize bodies as subjects of discourse: “Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise” (170). I want to focus specifically on three techniques of disciplinary power in order to highlight how contemporary

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politics are read through individualized notions of the subject. I am referring to hierarchical observations, normalizing judgments, and examinations. Let us begin with hierarchical observations. This is by and large a strategy that conditions subjects through uninterrupted observations that provide continuous surveillance. Foucault uses the example of the military camp as an “artificial city” maintained through hierarchical observation: “In the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation; each gaze would form a part of the overall functioning of power” (171). It maintains order through a disciplinary gaze that ranges from, for instance, the visible and unverifiable aspects of panopticism to the counting of products that a worker produces on an assembly line. Hierarchical observation instills structural discipline through the self-disciplining of subjects. It provides the organization to execute normalizing judgements that are created through what Foucault terms “micro-penalties” of time, activity, behaviour, speech, body, and sexuality: The workshop, the school, the army were subject to a whole micro-penalty of time (lateness, absences, interruptions of tasks), of activity (inattention, negligence, lack of zeal), of behaviour (impoliteness, disobedience), of speech (idle chatter, insolence), of the body (‘incorrect’ attitudes, irregular gestures, lack of cleanliness), of sexuality (impurity, indecency). (178)

These micro-penalties produce responsible (i.e., obedient) subjects because hierarchical observations ensure that normalizing judgements are carried out. Although collective identities are produced categorically—the worker-subject; the student-subject; the soldier-subject—hierarchical observations and normalizing judgements ensure the individualization of subjects through, for instance, levels of production, academic achievement, and personnel ranking. The individualizing practices of disciplinary societies result in subjects being compared to each other and the overall production of what it means to be normal. Examinations become necessary to maintain the production of “normal” subjects through the justified corrections of “abnormal” subjects. We see this in the student who fails a test, the patient who receives a ‘positive’ diagnosis, and the prisoner who disobeys an order. The examination is an exercise of power where subjects are a part of a field of documentation: schools record academic achievements; hospitals track diseases; and the military records the positions of bodies. The individualizing practices of hierarchical observations, normalizing judgements, and examinations discipline subjects through the production of “normal” and “abnormal” discourses. Foucault’s earlier work on disciplinary societies centers around these notions of subjection and how bodies become  An important discussion of techniques and technologies of the self can be found in Foucault’s “Subjectivity and Truth” (1997c). 88

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subjects through such relations of power. We see this clearly in the first volume of History of Sexuality (1978) where he argues that sexuality is not repressed (repressive hypothesis) but is a science (scientia sexualis). Subjection implies that subjects are inscribed by discourse and are required to reproduce norms in order to be read as intelligible. For example, the process of attaining a driver’s license requires a subject to follow specific discursive practices that translate into the issuance of a driver’s license: age requirement, driving test, cost of issuance, retaining the physical license, etc. These normalizing practices that translate into a valid license create a normal subject: the insured and qualified driver. At the same time that subjects are produced through these discourses, they learn to rely on them to give them access to specific modes of transportation. As Butler states, “power imposes itself on us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms…‘we’ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependent on those for ‘our’ existence” (1997b, 2). Queer politics has certainly concerned itself with such disciplinary practices over the past couple of decades where it has challenged the hierarchical observations, normalizing judgements, and examinations of heteronormative ideologies: the hierarchical observations of the government that discipline the institution of marriage between a man and a woman; the normalizing judgements that determine the appropriate level of public versus private sexual acts; and the medicalization of trans through physical and mental examinations. Politics concerning the normalization and subsequent abnormalization of subjects is certainly not an emerging field yet there is still more work required to think through the various ways in which bodies are disciplined through individualized practices. Judith Butler is onto something when she states that “social transformation occurs not merely by rallying mass numbers in favour of a cause, but precisely through the ways in which daily social relations are rearticulated, and new conceptual horizons opened up by anomalous or subversive practices” (2000, 14). With that said, I question how radical and relevant a politics is if “daily social relations” are strictly conceptualized through disciplinary mechanisms? I wonder what a politics might look like if we actually “rearticulated” our “daily social relations” in a post-queer sense that is not limited to, by, or within the realm of subjectivity? What can we say about agency if we think of politics outside of the subjective realms of disciplinary practices? I want to consider these questions throughout this plateau by creating a new line of flight for contemporary politics. From Discipline to Control: What Can Bodies Do?

We see from above that disciplinary societies offer a particular reading of what bodies are in relation to subjugating norms. What if, following the movements in the previous plateaus, we take a post-queer approach for thinking about 89

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contemporary politics where we focus less on what bodies are and more on what bodies can do? Much of the poststructural theorization over the past few decades has explored varying degrees of politics in relation to disciplinary societies. The political strategies inherent to these theorizations change frequently whereas the ways in which bodies, identities, and culture are conceptualized for the most part remain the same. In other words, the notion of democracy and what it means to be democratic is continuously reinvented while the way we think about the participants of such revolutions has remained within the realm of subjectivity. We have, in essence, been concerned with disciplinary societies and disciplined subjects. In what follows, I am not following this trend: I am not offering a new strategy or new way for thinking about democracy. In contrast, the post-queer theorizations of this plateau rethink the doings rather than beings of politics by changing how we think about the participants of political movements. It is, as Hardt and Negri explain, not a question of “What is the multitude” but “What can the multitude become” (2004, 105, emphasis added). A rethinking of the materialities of life rather than how life is materialized can provide more radical strategies for thinking about democracy itself. Let us begin this exploration of rethinking the materialities of life itself by first considering an important shift in how we think about Western societies. Following the works of Foucault and Deleuze, it is clear that we are becoming less disciplinary and more controlled. The shift from disciplinary societies to control societies is continuous and so it would be inappropriate and inaccurate to offer a time when disciplinary societies ended and when control societies began. In fact, current day politics are still infused with both disciplinary and control mechanisms. The arguments that follow explain how contemporary politics do not need to leave disciplinary practices behind but that we need to critically consider how control mechanisms both inform and form the materialities of life. In Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population lectures at the Collège de France, he begins to map out the ways in which societies are becoming less disciplinary. Although he identities a somewhat progressive transition of power from juridical-to-disciplinary-to-security, he is very clear in stating that this is not a linear development. I want to focus on the interactions of discipline and security because of their contemporary applicability. In comparison to discipline that individualizes bodies through confined tasks, security controls through the movements and flows of population. Discipline brings everything inwards whereas security directs outwards. We see a connection between Foucault and Bakhtin here where Foucault considers the centripetal and centrifugal forces of discipline and security respectively. The following albeit lengthy quotation describes these forces through two key differences: Discipline is essentially centripetal. I mean that discipline functions to the extent that it isolates a space, that it determines a segment. Discipline concentrates, 90

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focuses, and encloses. The first action of discipline is in fact to circumscribe a space in which its power and the mechanisms of its power will function fully and without limit…In contrast, you can see that the apparatuses of security, as I have tried to reconstruct them, have the constant tendency to expand; they are centrifugal. New elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology, behavior, the ways of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, and exporters, and the world market. Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway allowing the development of ever-wider circuits. There is a second major difference. By definition, discipline regulates everything. Discipline allows nothing to escape. Not only does it not allow things to run their course, its principle is that things, the smallest things, must not be abandoned to themselves. The smallest infraction of discipline must be taken up with all the more care for it being small. The apparatus of security, by contrast, as you have seen, ‘lets things happen.’ (Foucault 2007, 44-45)

Foucault continues on to explain how discipline largely removes detail whereas it is through details that security functions. Disciplinary societies produce what is considered normal and abnormal by allowing and prohibiting certain actions. Security, on the other hand, has a different way of producing society in that it regulates bodies through movements and flows. Both discipline and security operate through the production of what it means to be normal yet there is a key difference in how norms function: in disciplinary societies the norm is produced first and then everyone and everything is produced in relation to that standard norm; with security, the movements and flows of bodies produce what it means to be normal and consequently abnormal and it is through these negotiations that norms solidify. Foucault sees discipline as training the norm and security plotting the norm. For example, whereas panopticism establishes a norm and ensures the production of normal subjects through continuous surveillance, security does not work on the subjects themselves but controls them through the management of populations. We begin to see from these distinctions how bodies are becoming less subjected to specific spaces and tasks. It is their movements rather than their confinements that produce life itself. Foucault states in his lecture on February 1, 1978 that in retrospect he would have titled the lectures for this year “governmentality” rather than “security, territory, population.” Governmentality refers to the administration of populations rather than the confinement of individuals. Since the state does not produce a government but governmentality produces a state, a certain level of freedom is required in order to ensure the movements and flows of populations that governmentally produce the state. Foucault continues his discussion that moves away from disciplinary societies in the lectures on biopolitics in the following academic year. Recall from plateau one that biopolitics refers to the governing of populations through measures, statistics, and indices 91

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such as the recording of death and birth rates. Throughout his lectures at the Collège de France in 1978-79, Foucault reads biopolitics through liberalism and neoliberalism—a transition that I consider to be central to the shift from discipline to control. Economics are at the core of this transition—not in the strict sense of abstract numbers and dollars but concrete materialities. To put it simply without trying to simplify the argument, liberal markets are driven by exchange and neoliberal markets by competition: an “enterprise society” rather than a “supermarket society” that operates through free markets and what Foucault refers to as “state phobia.” Foucault offers an extensive look at liberalism and the transition to neoliberalism in “The Birth of Biopolitics” (2008) and so I do not intend to summarize his arguments here. I want to continue where Foucault left off by situating post-queer politics in the contemporary Western context of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. Neoliberalism does not follow the traditional supply and demand models of liberalism that are based on consumption. It is very Deleuzo-Guattarian in that everything is a production of production where there is no difference between those that consume and those that produce. The vision of neoliberalism is to improve human capital through the economization of non-economic sectors such as the home, work places, educational institutions, and medical services. The economization of everyday life is deeply implicated in identity politics and many poststructural theorizations have relied on a politics of identity to combat neoliberal calls for privatization and marketization. Identity politics, however, are faced with a real challenge when confronting neoliberalism because neoliberalism itself relies on identity categories to function. We see this clearly in Lisa Duggan’s comments on homonormativity: “it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (2003, 50). The connection Duggan makes between homonormativity and neoliberalism speaks to how identity politics are meshed within the fabric of democratic life where largely white, middleclass, gay men contribute to rather than destabilize the inequities inherent to neoliberal politics. As Duggan advocates, contemporary political struggles need to seriously consider the complexity of neoliberalism and how identities produce and support rather than result from neoliberal democracies: Because neoliberalism is not a unitary ‘system,’ but a complex, contradictory cultural and political project created within specific institutions, with an agenda for reshaping the everyday life of contemporary global capitalism, analyses of its recent history and hopefully future demise must be diverse, contingent, flexibly attuned to historical change, and open to constant debate and revision. (70) 92

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Post-queer politics situates itself within the complexities of neoliberalism that Duggan describes. It considers, through Deleuze and Guattari, how neoliberal capitalism and globalization do not function through arborescence where movement always refers back to a fixed core such as the state. In contrast, it shows how politics flow through rhizomatic networks by continuously making and breaking material connections. Post-queer politics grasps the divergences, contingencies, flexibilities, and openness that Duggan calls for by reading contemporary democratic politics through dialogical-becomings using Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin. To recite an argument mapped out above, we do not need a new democratic strategy to challenge neoliberal capitalism and globalization where the players, if you will, stay the same. For example, a politics based on identities where the identities remain the same while political strategies change. On the contrary, it is critical that we reimagine life itself and the materialities inherent to it so as to come across more creative and equitable ways for thinking about democracy. I see the latter in the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. Although they do not explicitly tackle the notion of democracy per se, their collaborative collections clearly map a political philosophy that is useful in rethinking life itself. As I outline in plateau two, Deleuze and Guattari are fundamentally concerned with capitalist production. Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus expose the rhizomatic networks of production that flow through deterritorializations and reterritorializations. Deleuze and Guattari offer an important political philosophy in these works that views life as a creative process. Democracy, for Deleuze and Guattari, is embedded in what they refer to as becoming-minoritarian where the strategy is to “trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority” (1987, 106). The only shared commonality in their political philosophy is that everything is becoming: There is a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness as the becoming of everybody, and that becoming is creation. One does not attain it by acquiring the majority. The figure to which we are referring is continuous variation, as an amplitude that continually oversteps the representative threshold of the majoritarian standard, by excess of default. In erecting the figure of a universal minoritarian consciousness, one addresses powers (puissances) of becoming that belong to a different realm from that of Power (Pouvoir) and Domination. Continuous variation constitutes the becoming-minoritarian of everybody, as opposed to the majoritarian Fact of Nobody. (106)

Poststructural political philosophies based in subjectivity have largely worked within Pouvoir where political movements are largely based on the creation of new democratic strategies. For example, contemporary notions of queer embody a politics of mobility and fluidity. Queer is in essence a politics of 93

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becoming-majoritarian because it assumes what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a “majoritarian fact” as it seeks to expose and destabilize heteronormative practices. Post-queer politics recognize that there is no majoritarian fact by engaging puissances through the becoming-minoritarian of dialogicalbecomings. Rather than opposing heteronormativity or seeing queer as different from heteronormativity, post-queer assumes from the onset that everything is becoming-minoritarian. Understanding the difference in how majoritarian and minoritarian politics conceptualize “difference” is key here. As Paul Patton writes: The difference in kind between majority and minority is fundamental to Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of minoritarian becoming. However, difference is not the same as opposition and it is important not to overstate the consequences of this difference. In political terms, it amounts to the difference between the constitution or reconfiguration of the majoritarian standard, which is often achieved through democratic and legal means, and the fact and ongoing process of non-coincidence with the standard, however reconfigured. The emptiness of the majoritarian standard corresponds to the emptiness of human rights in the abstract: it represents no one. The emptiness of the majoritarian fact implies a critique of representation that applies to the identity of minorities as much as it does to that of the majority. To the extent that Deleuzian micropolitics refers to a different order of political activity, it represents a departure from representative politics tout court. It is not that it proposes an alternative to the politics of majority will formation, but rather that it operates alongside or below the realm of democratic deliberation. (2005, 407)

Patton is describing a politics of becoming that is not based on lack—a micropolitics that does not need to fulfill an empty desire by resolving differences. Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy is therefore not a politics of recognition—even when, as we see within the queer/heteronormative dyad, recognition operates through disidentifications and/or re-representations. Post-queer dialogical-becomings are potentialities of differences that are not up against a majoritarian fact such as heteronormativity; they function within a realm distinct from the becoming-majoritarian politics of the queer/ heteronormative dyad. The becoming-minoritarian of dialogical-becomings offers an important politics for rethinking democracy in an age of control societies—not by developing democratic strategies first but by rethinking life itself so as to subsequently create new democratic lines of flight.

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From Individual Production to Dividual Metaproduction

Let us return now to the shift from disciplinary societies to control societies— one that I have been reading through neoliberalism. Control societies no longer individualize bodies through disciplinary mechanisms that confine bodies to specific spaces and tasks but they instead dividualize bodies through control mechanisms such as information and communication. Deleuze begins to map out the intricacies of control societies in “Control and Becoming” (1995a) and “Postscript on Control Societies” (1995b). Deleuze explains how “nothing’s left alone for long” in control societies: how the institutions of life such as prisons, schools, hospitals, and factories are deterritorialized through the speed of contemporary politics. Take the education example: One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it’s really its dismantling. (Deleuze 1995a, 175)

In addition to destructing the distinction between the worker and student where workers are involved in ongoing training, education itself is becoming deterritorialized: education is no longer restricted to fixed buildings that confine students to classrooms but is deterritorialized through distance education, correspondence courses, and online degrees. There is a deterritorialization of all the institutions that confine bodies in disciplinary societies: “In disciplinary societies you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything” (Deleuze 1995c, 178). The aforementioned lectures by Foucault—“Security, Territory, Population” and “The Birth of Biopolitics”—contribute to this transition from discipline to control where bodies are no longer divided amongst each other (individualization) but are divided within themselves (dividualization). Governmentality facilitates this transition by deterritorializing fixed spaces that confine bodies through the administration and management of populations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000) offers a similar take on contemporary politics by following the shift from disciplinary to control. Hardt and Negri appropriately situate control societies as a more “democratic” plane of politics that moves beyond institutions, confinement, and ab/normal: control societies are “an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks” 95

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(23). Following Hardt and Negri, Foucauldian biopolitics is in many ways unable to grasp the materialities of life in the same way as Deleuze and Guattari because Foucault is concerned more with pleasure (reactive) than desire (productive). Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy engages life itself by considering the complex productions of life through networks that are forever becoming-other. Hardt and Negri also offer an important critique of Deleuze and Guattari that we need to consider: “Deleuze and Guattari discover the productivity of social reproduction (creative production, production of values, social relations, affects, becoming), but manage to articulate it only superficially and ephemerally, as a chaotic, indeterminate horizon marked by the ungraspable event” (28). I certainly concur with their critique for as I outline in the previous two plateaus, the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari has the potential of becoming too positivistic if we do not pay close enough attention to the social heteroglossia (Bakhtin) of life. It is this specific critique of Deleuze and Guattari that explains and justifies the need for Bakhtinian theory in post-queer politics—a creative line of flight not offered by Hardt and Negri. Bakhtinian dialogism along with Deleuzo-Guattarian becomings can account for the social heteroglossia of life and not (simply) the positivistic affectivities of materiality. I will return to post-queer dialogical-becomings and Bakhtinian theory in the latter part of this plateau. For now, I want to continue our consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy along with Hardt and Negri. Unlike disciplinary societies that are concerned primarily with production (i.e., the production of cars on the Ford assembly line), control societies are interested in what Deleuze refers to as metaproduction: it no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells finished products: it buys finished products or assembles them from parts. What it seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities. It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets. (1995c, 181)

We see a clear connection here between Deleuze and Foucault where populations become a key ingredient in the metaproductions of control societies: they establish the much needed markets for capitalism to circulate products. Disciplinary societies are arborescent because production is directed inwards; control societies function rhizomatically as connections are continuously made and broken through global networks that are directed outwards. For instance, the disciplinary functioning of Ford’s assembly line and Taylor’s scientific management see production through supply and demand: the ongoing assessing, documenting, and tracking of scientific management and the orchestrated flows of assembly work increase productivity levels through higher degrees of efficiency. The metaproductions of control societies work quite differently. As Hardt and Negri explain, “the assembly line has been 96

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replaced by the network as the organizational model of production, transforming the forms of cooperation and communication within each productive site and among productive sites” (295). Immaterial labor—what Hardt and Negri refer to as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (290)—is key to the metaproductions of control societies. Let us not be misled with the use of “immaterial” here. This certainly does not imply, as Hardt and Negri explain through affective labor, that corporeality is not a part of the new “service sectors” of control societies. It suggests instead that labor is no longer the limit of production because metaproductions do not depend on labor in the same way as the disciplinary productions of Fordism and Taylorism. I want to step back for a moment and consider more thoroughly how materiality is very much a part of the metaproductions of control societies. The Underbelly

Gargi Bhattacharyya’s Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things (2005) takes a look at the “underbelly of globalisation” by offering a critical reading of contemporary global politics. Her account of organized crimes, drugs, arms, and sex trades is acutely aware of the role that the underbelly plays in the metaproductions of global networks that center on the material productivities of neoliberal capitalism. The underbelly refers to the various “nontraditional” ways to enter the global economy where illicit movements give rise to economic and political prosperity: Here we see the illicit traffic in drugs and arms, the trafficking of illegal immigrants, the trafficking of women and children for sex work and other forms of bonded labour, the trade in body parts and the laundering of money, all variations of the trade in despair somehow made respectable. However, what distinguishes this global criminal economy is not its criminality as such but its ability to connect this illicit trade to the formal networks of the global economy proper. (32)

Bhattacharyya offers a unique reading of contemporary political economies that extends beyond the traditional core and periphery models. Rather than the core exploiting the periphery, Bhattacharyya identifies how the underbelly is a productive and implicated force in global politics rather than a reactive and/or subjugated entity. We learn, for example, how transnational organized crime challenges globalization by “latching on to the infrastructures of the formal economy” like a parasite (77). The underbelly of organized crime prays on the weak—such as poorly constructed states or governments in transition—so 97

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as to gain greater access to global markets. Bhattacharyya concerns herself with the illicit ways in which people enter the global economy and how these practices become accepted. I want to focus on the slave trade not because it is more exploitative than organized crimes or drugs and arms trades, but because its exploitation explicitly exposes the material metaproductions of control societies. Recall from above that disciplinary societies are directed towards productions and control societies towards metaproductions. The slave trade is a clear example of the networks inherent to metaproductions because, unlike Fordism and Taylorism, it does not produce fixed and limited commodities that are restricted by the capacity of human production. The metaproductions of slave trades, as Bhattacharyya explains, are unique in that they produce the limitless capacity of human services: Unlike other commodities, human beings once enslaved can continue to produce more and more value—the transformative capacity of their labour really is the trading equivalent of the goose that lays the golden eggs…I want to suggest that forced labour has continued to play a lubricating role in a certain form of global capitalist development. This is not an argument about the necessity of stealing people’s labour and freedom, but it is to suggest that some spaces continue to offer relatively unregulated routes into the global economy and that this lack of regulation might be tied to the possibility of making a great deal of money. (169)

Bhattacharyya identifies the necessity for human trafficking and transnational migration for the global economy to function. She remarks on how the sex trade has become a fundamental means by which Thailand enters the global economy and how “the revenue gained from (only thinly disguised) sex tourism has allowed Thailand to gain the approval of international financial institutions” (177). The underbelly of globalization and the illicit movement of people and things provide a glimpse into the complexities of control societies that are rhizomatically networked—immaterial connections that are highly material. The examples listed above speak to what Hardt and Negri refer to as “the non-place of exploitation”: not in the sense that exploitation does not occur but that it occurs everywhere in order for neoliberal capitalism to function. In comparison to the more traditional conceptualizations of capitalism (for instance, Hardt and Negri’s reading of Marx and my consideration of disciplinary societies), the non-place of control societies produces rhizomatic networks rather than arboreal productions that translate into capitalist development: In the contemporary world this spatial configuration has changed. On the one hand, the relations of capitalist exploitation are expanding everywhere, not limited to the factory but tending to occupy the entire social terrain. On the other hand, social relations completely invest the relations of production, making 98

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impossible any externality between social production and economic production. The dialectic between productive forces and the system of domination no longer has a determinate place. The very qualities of labor power (difference, measure, and determination) can no longer be grasped, and similarly, exploitation can no longer be localized and quantified. In effect, the object of exploitation and domination tend not to be specific productive activities but the universal capacity to produce, that is, abstract social activity and its comprehensive power. This abstract labor is an activity without place, and yet it is very powerful. (2000, 209)

Hardt and Negri are speaking to the role that labor currently plays in capitalist production. Whereas in disciplinary societies production was determined by fixed labor, in control societies, the product is labor itself that exponentially grows. We see through Hardt, Negri, and Bhattacharyya that contemporary neoliberal and global politics are deeply implicated in the non-places of exploitations and the illicit movement of people and things. Traditional supply and demand models of economics along with fixed labor forces that confine bodies to specific spaces and tasks are deterritorialized as life becomes increasingly connected through the rhizomatic networks of metaproductions. The shift from disciplinary societies to control societies is ongoing. Control societies mark the deterritorialization of institutions and the movement away from fixed tasks and confined spaces. We see from the above discussion regarding the underbelly of globalization that new forms of access emerge through the rhizomatic connections of capital that function through the materialities of life itself. In the following plateaus I will explore more thoroughly how the rhizomatics of control societies function through higher education (plateau five) and how knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations produce new life forms (plateau six). Before we get to these metaproductions, I want to return to the question of agency and how it can and in many ways must be reimagined in light of the shift from discipline to control. This conversation is inevitably linked to questions of democracy and citizenship yet it will not follow the disciplinary framework that has imbued many poststructural theorizations over the past few decades. Again, this is not to in any way discredit these important contributions but is intended to offer new lines of flight for taking into account the complexities of contemporary control societies. Recall from above that I do not intend to simply offer new strategies for thinking about democracy and therefore new ways for thinking about agency. Post-queer politics begins with a reconceptualization of life itself and so any democratic strategies for thinking about agency that surface in this plateau emerge from the politics of dialogicalbecomings that are introduced in plateaus two and three.

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What’s so Radical about a Plural Democracy?

The political philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin offer creative lines of flight for thinking about life itself. I want to explain in more detail what I mean by dialogical-becomings and how they relate to questions of democracy, agency, and citizenship. More specifically, how post-queer rhizomatic politics can build on the important work of political theorists working within the realm of subjectivity. Recall from plateau one that post-queer plateaus queer rather than explicitly departing from queer. Instead of leaving these important works behind, I intend to build on their projects by first differentiating post-queer dialogical-becomings from representations, significations, and identifications (see plateaus two and three) and then by developing new ways to conceptualize political struggles and strategies in relation to rhizomatics, control societies, and dividualities. To begin this discussion, let us turn Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Laclau and Mouffe revolutionized leftist politics by introducing the notion radical and plural democracy. Their “post-Marxist terrain” challenges the economic determinations in traditional Marxist theory by arguing that contemporary politics in the left do not develop radical initiatives that can challenge inequities. Laclau and Mouffe make the critical shift from universal subjects to multiple subject positions by redefining the notion of hegemony. Rather than seeing hegemony as an imposition of dominant class ideologies on subordinate classes, they build on Gramsci’s hegemonic principle to work towards a more democratic form of hegemony described as the “articulation of demands coming from different groups” (Mouffe 1988, 103). According to Laclau and Mouffe, “‘hegemony’   Nathan Widder offers a clear summary of Laclau and Mouffe’s project: “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy…was one of the first texts on the Anglo-American scene which not only deconstructed the essentialisms residing within prevailing Marxist discourses, but also put forward an alternative political vision to counter the common charges of deconstructive philosophy being apolitical and nihilistic. Calling into question the need for a politics based on objective class interests, self-transparency, and depictions of ideology as a false consciousness concealing an underlying reality, Laclau and Mouffe presented their version of hegemony as a necessary process of articulation that could enable a radical redefinition of the democratic imperative, stretching it into new areas of personal and social life while providing opportunities for a more cohesive and coalitional politics among a diverse range of emancipatory movements” (2000, 118).   Jacob Torfing provides two meanings for radical in relation to plural democracy: i) “It might indicate that democracy should be radically pluralist in the sense that the plurality of different identities is not grounded in any transcendent or underlying positive ground”; ii) “The other possible meaning of radical plural democracy is that plural democracy, and the struggles for freedom and equality it engenders, should be deepened and extended to all areas of society” (1999, 256). 100

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will emerge precisely in a context dominated by the experience of fragmentation and by the indeterminacy of the articulations between different struggles and subject positions” (1985, 13). Radical and plural democracy challenges binary understandings of repression as the domination of one group over another so as to expose how all subjects are continuously renegotiated. Hegemony in radical and plural democracy is therefore always relational. Discourse and subjectivity are at the heart of Laclau and Mouffe’s project that centers around “‘subject positions’ within a discursive structure” (115). They consider subjects to be articulations of ongoing discursive productions with no definitive origins (sites where hegemonic discourses circulate) rather than outcomes of hegemonic social relations. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy builds on Gramsci’s collective politics by offering a strategic project for rethinking the relationship between the individual and the collective. This is realized by differentiating a collective will from plurality: democratic projects should not be based on essential articulations of agreeable subjects but should be based in social antagonisms, respectively. Democracy, for Laclau and Mouffe, is more about struggles than subjects—struggles that locate individual subjectivities within radical pluralities of varying hegemonic discourses: Only if it is accepted that the subject positions cannot be led back to a positive and unitary founding principle—only then can pluralism be considered radical. Pluralism is radical only to the extent that each term of this plurality of identities finds within itself the principle of its own validity, without this having to be sought in a transcendent or underlying positive ground for the hierarchy of meaning of them all and the source and guarantee of their legitimacy. And this radical pluralism is democratic to the extent that the autoconstitutivity of each one of its terms is the result of displacements of the egalitarian imaginary. Hence, the project for radical and plural democracy, in a primary sense, is nothing other than the struggle for a maximum autonomization of spheres on the basis of the generalization of the equivalential-egalitarian logic. (167)

The desire for ongoing reconstitution and renegotiation not only rejects universal subjectivities but leads Laclau and Mouffe to distinguish between diversification and diversity: whereas diversification focuses on “the management of the social as positivity, and every diversification takes place, in consequence, within a rationality which dominates the whole set of spheres and functions,” diversity exposes a society that “constructs the image and the management of its own impossibility.” There is therefore no single or unified subject because diversity implies a multiplicity of subject positions: Whenever we use the category of ‘subject’ in this text, we will do so in the sense of ‘subject positions’ within a discursive structure. Subjects cannot, therefore, be 101

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the origin of social relations—not even in the limited sense of being endowed with powers that render an experience possible—as all ‘experience’ depends on precise discursive conditions of possibility…As every subject position is a discursive position, it partakes of the open character of every discourse; consequently, the various positions cannot be totally fixed in a closed system of differences. (115)

Subjects are consequently negotiated through antagonisms that can never be definitively resolved. It is because of continuously renegotiated and redefined antagonisms that society is never stable but an indefinite impossibility. Hegemony is only possible through antagonisms and so individual rights are not “individual” in the sense that they are “defined in isolation” (184-185). In contrast, they are defined “in the context of social relations which define determinate subject positions” and are “exercised collectively.” Antagonisms function through chains of equivalences that link multiple struggles without privileging one subject position over another. Laclau and Mouffe develop this political strategy using Lacan by equating signifiers to hegemony: The impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations—otherwise, the very flow of differences would be impossible.   Widder makes a critical point on the radical potential of antagonisms: “It is not a positive identity itself but rather the pure threat to the positivity of any discursive system…Antagonism is therefore not a simple excess but a ‘constitutive outside,’ providing the conditions of possibility and impossibility for any discursive system by both empowering and disrupting its claim to totality” (2000, 120).   “Antagonism, far from being an objective relation, is a relation wherein the limits of every objectivity are shown—in the sense in which Wittgenstein used to say that what cannot be said can be shown. But if, as we have demonstrated, the social only exists as a partial effort for constructing society—that is, an objective and closed system of differences—antagonism, as a witness of the impossibility of a final suture, is the ‘experience’ of the limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself ” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 125).   “The logic of equivalence, then, taken to its ultimate consequences, would imply the dissolution of the autonomy of the spaces in which each one of these struggles is constituted; not necessarily because any of them become subordinated to others, but because they have all become, strictly speaking, equivalent symbols of a unique and indivisible struggle. The antagonism would thus have achieved the conditions of total transparency, to the extent that all unevenness had been eliminated, and the differential specificity of the spaces in which each of the democratic struggles was constituted had been dissolved” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 182). 102

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Even in order to differ, to subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning. If the social does not manage to fix itself in the intelligible and instituted forms of a society, the society only exists, however, as an effort to construct that impossible object. Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points. (112)

The nodal points that Laclau and Mouffe refer to are the empty signifiers that constitute a chain of equivalence through the process of naming. What does Laclau mean then by “the name becoming the ground of the thing” (2005, 101)? Laclau explains this through a critical distinction between descriptivist and antidescriptivist approaches to naming. In referencing Saul Kripke, Laclau explains that “words refer to things not through their shared descriptive features, but through a ‘primal baptism’ which does away with description entirely” (102). Kripke’s classic example is how gold would maintain its name even if the properties of gold—its goldness—changed. In other words, the way we understood the object (gold) would change but the name itself would not. Laclau is disassociating the immediate link between the “signifier” and the “signified” by challenging a Saussurean approach to meaning (descriptivism). In response to this, Laclau explores an anti-descriptivist approach that is essential to the constitution of popular identities in radical and plural democracy. He uses Žižek to explore “what is it that exactly remains the same; what is the ‘X’ which receives the successive descriptive attributions.” Žižek also engages the descriptivist and anti-descriptivist debate by asking the question “how do names refer to the objects they denote?” (1989, 89). He outlines the critical differences between descriptivism and anti-descriptivism as follows: “descriptivists emphasize the immanent, internal ‘intentional contents’ of a word, while antidescriptivists regard as decisive the external causal link, the way a word has been transmitted from subject to subject in a chain of tradition” (90). Anti-descriptivism can be considered a materialist approach to naming. Žižek’s concern with antidescriptivism is that it does not take into critical consideration the importance of naming: “The basic problem of antidescriptivism is to determine what constitutes the identity of the designated object beyond the ever-changing cluster of descriptive features—what makes an object identical-to-itself even if  Laclau and Mouffe continue: “Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain” (1985, 112).  Empty signifiers articulate an empty fullness. An example of an empty signifier is nation. Torfing explains: “The aim of a nationalistic movement is to hegemonize the content of the empty signifier of ‘the nation’ by attaching it to a transcendental signified able once and for all to arrest the play of meaning” (1999, 202). 103

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all its properties have changed” (94). Žižek considers all ideological elements to be part of a series—a series of equivalences—where elements are connected to each other through their surpluses. This surplus is only possible if, as Žižek states, “a certain signifier…‘quilts’ the whole field and, by embodying it, effectuates its identity.”10 In other words, Žižek refers to the X as a quilting point: a “knot of meaning” that refers to an object constituted as a primal baptism, where the word is sustained even if its “descriptive feature which initially determined the meaning of the word changes completely” (90). The quilting point is the name of constant referral: If we maintain that the point de capiton is a ‘nodal point’, a kind of knot of meanings, this does not imply that it is simply the ‘richest’ word, the word in which is condensed all the richness of meaning of the field it ‘quilts’: the point de capiton is rather the word which, as a word, on the level of the signifier itself, unifies a given field, constitutes its identity: it is, so speak, the word to which ‘things’ themselves refer to recognize themselves in their unity. (95-96)

The quilting point is therefore, as Laclau states, the name that “brings about the unity of a discursive formation” (2005, 103). Žižek considers this the “retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object. That ‘surplus’ in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds is ‘something in it more than itself ’” (1989, 95). The quilting point is an inversion: the name does not describe an object; instead, the object is defined through its association with the name. An example of this by Žižek is Marlboro   Žižek’s references to a series of equivalences refer to Laclau and Mouffe’s project of radical and plural democracy in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: “the multitude of ‘floating signifiers’, of proto-ideological elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de capiton) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning” (1989, 87). Although I am engaging Žižek’s reworking of anti-descriptivism vis-à-vis Laclau’s emphasis on naming, it should be no surprise to learn that Post-Queer Politics is distinct from Žižek’s: whereas Žižek is building from Lacan, I am rereading a radical and plural democracy from a Bakhtinian and Deleuzo-Guattarin lens. See Daniel Smith’s “The Inverse Side of the Structure” (2004) for a comprehensive overview of the relationships amongst Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek. Smith boldly asserts that “[t]he best place we have to go, still, for a Lacanian appreciation of Deleuze is not Žižek, but rather…Lacan himself ” (648). See also Žižek’s response to Smith’s criticisms in “Notes on a Debate ‘From Within the People’” (2004) as well as Eleanor Kaufman’s “Betraying Well” (2004) for a greater appreciation for the complexities amongst Deleuze, Lacan, and Žižek. 10  Žižek refers to this signifier as “the Lacanian ‘One.’” My conceptualization is clearly differentiated from Žižek’s: whereas Žižek builds his conception of surplus from Lacan (lack), I build it from Deleuze and Guattari (production). 104

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advertisements that do not reflect an image of America but rather America begins to see itself in the Marlboro advertisements. Another example offered by Žižek is Coca-Cola advertisements: “the point is not that Coca-Cola ‘connotes’ a certain ideological experience-vision of America (the freshness of its sharp, cold taste…); the point is that this vision of America itself achieves its identity by identifying itself with the signifier ‘Coke.’” Marlboro cigarettes and Coke are the X: the quilting point that “receives the successive descriptive attributions.” This X is Žižek’s surplus (“surplus-X”): a surplus object that is never attainable because it is the “object-cause of desire.” It is no surprise that Žižek builds his conception of surplus on lack: the “impossible-real kernel” that is a leftover. I also hope that it is not a revelation at this point that Post-Queer Politics approaches surplus and desire not as lack but as production. Quilting points speak to how naming discursively constructs objects. This is why Laclau claims that the name becomes the ground of the thing. This is pivotal for Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy: as Laclau explains, “without the quilting point of an equivalential identification, democratic equivalences would remain merely virtual” (2005, 105). This is precisely where I find Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy to be unproductive for contemporary politics because popular identities can only be conceptualized through empty signifiers: “there is a place, within the system of signification, which is constitutively irrepresentable; in that sense it remains empty, but this is an emptiness which I can signify, because we are dealing with a void within signification.” The popular identity is constituted as a chain of equivalence—“a plurality of unfulfilled demands” (106). Popular identities, according to Laclau, are only possible through naming. He offers the following important conclusion that links these two variables to radical and plural democracy: If the construction of the ‘people’ is a radical one—one which constitutes social agency as such, and does not express a previously given unity of the group—the heterogeneity of the demands that the popular identity brings to a precarious unity has to be irreducible. This does not necessarily mean that these demands are not analogous, or at least comparable at some level; it does, however, mean that they cannot be inscribed in a structural system of differences which would provide them with an infrastructural ground. This point is crucial: heterogeneity does not mean differentiality. There cannot be a priori system unity, precisely because the unfulfilled demands are the expression of systemic dislocation… From this we can deduce that the language of a populist discourse…is always going to be imprecise and fluctuating: not because of any cognitive failure, but because it tried to operate performatively within a social reality which is to a large extent heterogeneous and fluctuating. (118)

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Every empty signifier signifies a chain of equivalence that constitutes popular identities. In the latter part of this plateau I draw on Bakhtin to offer a more creative and productive understanding of the popular that is not limited to, by, or within subjectivity. My conception of the popular is vastly different from Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek’s because I see desire as not being based on lack but production. Laclau’s notion of populist reason examines “the universality of the partial and the partiality of the universal” (225). In doing so, he considers popular identities to be “not a part of a whole, but a part that is the whole” (225). His intentions for a plurality of social demands are well intended but I find them to be unequivocally unproductive because they are situated in a politics that not only functions within the limitations of discourse but a desire based on lack. Jacob Torfing offers a clear explanation of how subjects of radical and plural democracy are constructed through a politics based on lack: This subject is characterized by a constitutive lack. In Lacanian terms we might say that the subject is a bearer of signification which is desperately searching for a signifier that can express its identity within the symbolic order…The result is that the subject cannot find a signifier which is really its own…The subject before its subjectivation is penetrated by a constitutive lack, and the process of subjectivation (that is, of becoming somebody) takes the form of an attempt to fill the empty space of the lack through identification. (1999, 149-150)

In other words, a politics based on lack implies that a subject’s being is entirely focused on fulfilling or, as Torfing describes, overcoming that which is lacked. The subjects of radical and plural democracy are always in a state of trying to fulfill a lack as they politically align through chains of equivalence. It is through lack and the antagonistic struggles that go with it that Laclau and Mouffe claim that multiple meanings can emerge. It should be no surprise that I have reservations with such politics based on lack. With that said, radical and plural democracy offers important strategies for post-queer politics. My concern with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is not with the strategies per se but with the way in which Laclau and Mouffe conceptualize life itself. Radical and plural democracy offers creative strategies for challenging social inequities but it becomes limiting when it functions within discourse. As a result, the political strategies they develop are only able to function within the strict domain of significations and representations. For example, their motivation to challenge normative, dominant, patriarchal, and hierarchical relations is significant yet their deconstructive strategy ultimately results in the very binary categorizations that it intends to disrupt. Following my critique of discourse and subjectivity in the preceding plateaus, Laclau and Mouffe similarly maintain language as the primary way for conceptualizing experience where meaning is produced through discourse. In other words, the openness of radical and 106

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plural democracy is shared with post-queer politics, yet the location of this creativity in discourse is problematic. This is similar to my critique of the queer/ heteronormative dyad where Laclau and Mouffe are only able to challenge normative discourses and as a consequence movement is always and only in relation to normativity. Radical and plural democracy is interested in creating new discourses through antagonistic struggles that are always in relation to preceding discourses. Post-queer dialogical-becomings are concerned with the deterritorialization of spaces through creative lines of flight rather than the resignifications of meaning. Post-queer politics is not situated against radical and plural democracy. I want to instead approach hegemony, antagonisms, and chain of equivalences through the creativities of dialogical-becomings. Rather than developing new political strategies while maintaining Laclau and Mouffe’s “impossible objects,” it can be more productive to first reconsider life itself and then explore the necessary deterritorialized lines of flight. Merely Subjective

I want to weigh in on Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser’s important exchange in the late 1990s in order to further substantiate my argument that post-queer politics can be more productive when it focuses on rethinking life itself rather than strictly developing new political strategies with the same “subjects” intact. Butler and Fraser’s articles in Social Text (“Merely Cultural” and “Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism: A Response to Judith Butler”, respectively) offer different views on the relationship between capitalism and heterosexism. Butler charges Fraser for setting up an unnecessary binary between culture and the economy when she situates lesbian and gay struggles more on the side of culture than economics. Butler claims that queer politics becomes “merely cultural” when the focus is strictly on recognition. This inevitably leads Butler to consider more closely the connection between culture and materiality by insisting on a politics that focuses on “equality throughout the political economic sphere” and the “end to material oppression” (1997a, 271). Fraser responds to Butler’s oversimplification by emphasizing how her concern with the inequities of redistribution and recognition are not, as Butler contends, “merely cultural” but are highly material. According to Butler, Fraser’s “material/cultural” binary is too simplistic and dismisses cultural materialities. In response to this, Fraser corrects Butler’s imposed “material/cultural” binary by situating her materialist philosophy in an “economic/cultural” differentiation. Butler and Fraser seem to be restricted by the very discourses they seek to disrupt. The issue here is not whether Fraser is “merely cultural” or that Butler’s “destabilization” theory is inaccurate. My concern is that their take on capitalism and heterosexism is limited at the onset of their exchange because their arguments are deeply rooted 107

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in subjectivity. Butler and Fraser’s political philosophies become stagnant when materiality is thought of in terms of significations and representations. Although Fraser removes herself from the “abstract transhistorical property of language, such as ‘resignification’ or ‘performativity’” (1997, 287) and although Butler steers clear of “merely cultural” accounts of life, I wonder how productive these projects can be if they remain merely subjective. Butler and Fraser, along with Laclau and Mouffe, offer critical approaches for thinking about democracy and so I do not want to dismiss these important conversations. I want to offer new lines of flight that can plateau the subjective politics of the aforementioned theories with the dialogical-becomings of postqueer politics. In Rethinking the Public Sphere (1994), Fraser challenges Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere by exposing how it is in many respects “an instrument of domination” and a “utopian ideal.”11 Fraser makes clear how the accessibility of Habermas’ public sphere functions as a “masculinist ideological notion” that brackets rather than displaces classism and sexism. She then discusses the importance of multiple publics and subaltern counterpublics that can oppose dominant and oppressive publics: “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (84). Michael Warner also explores counterpublics that focus on continual change. Warner asserts that “the idea of a public has a metacultural dimension; it gives form to a tension between general and particular that makes it difficult to analyze from either perspective alone” (2002, 11). The relationship between particular and general runs throughout both Warner and Fraser’s counterpublics that seek to challenge normative, hierarchical, and patriarchal discourses. Post-queer politics shares the desire for ongoing negotiations, critical tensions, and creative openness here yet I remain skeptical of a politics that is more reactive than productive—a politics based primarily on what needs to be countered. I am thinking once again of the queer/heteronormative dyad and how movement is always in relation to normative discourses. It is necessary to then consider not what multiple publics are or what counterpublics stand for 11  “It designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive production. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it a [sic] site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state. The public sphere in Habermas’s sense is also conceptually distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling. Thus, this concept of the public sphere permits us to keep in view the distinctions between state apparatuses, economic markets, and democratic associations, distinctions that are essential to democratic theory.” (Fraser 1994, 75) 108

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but what political tensions can do. Butler raises an important point with respect to this in her conversation with Fraser: The only possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but will be a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive ways, a practice of contestation that demands that these movements articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other. (1997a, 269)

Fraser’s subaltern counterpublics, Warner’s counterpublics, and Laclau and Mouffe’s chain of equivalence certainly “sustain conflict” through antagonisms but I argue that we need to seriously rethink what is meant by “politically productive ways” in an age of control societies. Dialogical-becomings, I believe, give us these tools where movement is not limited by or within the subjective realm. The dialogical-becomings of post-queer politics provide a new framework for thinking about democracy: not by developing new political strategies but by revisioning the “politically productive ways” of life through Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin so as to subsequently produce creative and open politics that are indefinitely becoming-other. Citizenship and public spaces are at the heart of Fraser, Warner, and Butler’s political theorizations. Like Fraser, Warner, and Butler, Mouffe also explores this relationship by challenging capitalist notions of citizenship that are founded on legal principles. Mouffe’s assertion that citizenship is “intimately linked to the kind of society and political community we want” is clearly situated in discourse when the focus is on the creation of a “common political identity.” Following her work with Laclau in Hegemony and Social Strategy, Mouffe explains that this common political identity is a chain of equivalence determined by a link of democratic struggles.12 The purpose of such strategy is to create new subject positions through democratic equivalences: If the task of radical democracy is indeed to deepen the democratic revolution and to link diverse democratic struggles, such a task requires the creation of new subject positions that would allow the common articulation, for example, of antiracism, antisexism and anticapitalism. These struggles do not spontaneously converge, and in order to establish democratic equivalences a new ‘common sense’ is necessary, which would transform the identity of different groups so that the demands of each group could be articulated with those of others 12  “It must be stressed that such a relation of equivalence does not eliminate difference—that would be simple identity. It is only in so far as democratic differences are opposed to forces or discourses which negate all of them that these differences can be substituted for each other” (Mouffe 2005b, 84). 109

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according to the principle of democratic equivalence. For it is not a matter of establishing a mere alliance between given interests but of actually modifying the very identity of these forces. (Mouffe 2005b, 18-19)

Mouffe certainly offers an inspiring and refreshing look at the relationship between citizenship and public spaces—one that works against a single common good because it realizes that every subject position is constituted by a multiplicity of equivalences. As stated above, my concern is not with the strategy per se but with the way Mouffe and the like conceptualize life itself. For example, although radical democratic citizenship is not defined by a single subject position but by ongoing intersections of continuously redefined subject positions, a commitment to subjectivity, discourse, and language limits political strategies from the start because while there are multiple subject positions there is always an individualized subject that remains constant while it moves through varying politics spaces.13 I therefore have reservations with Mouffe’s claim that although democratic rights belong to the individual, they only become a part of society when they are exercised collectively. This is problematic because it maintains discourse as the primary way for conceptualizing citizenship where meaning can only be produced through the exercised collectivity’s engagement with significations and representations. For instance, Mouffe proposes a “discarding of the essentialist idea of an identity of women as women,” where she claims that feminist politics can focus on “the pursuit of feminist goals and aims within the context of a wider articulation of demands” (2005a, 87). Although the political strategy here removes essentialist readings of identity by focusing on a “common bond,” the subjects themselves are inevitably restricted because political movement is always and only in relation to discursive measures. Radical and plural democracy considers citizenship and public spaces through notions of lack where politics emerge as a result of exclusionary discourses. Despite radical and plural democracy’s resisting of essentialist politics, it unavoidably essentializes subjects when political movement is conceptualized through antagonistic struggles that seek common bonds. Judith Butler, Ernest Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek debate these politics in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left by addressing the following concerns: i) “the status and formation of the subject”; ii) “the implications of a theory of the subject for thinking of democracy”; and iii) “the articulation of ‘universality’ within a theory of hegemony” (2000, 11). Although Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 13 According to Mouffe, “we are in fact always multiple and contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities (as many, really, as the social relations in which we participate and the subject positions they define), constructed by a variety of discourses, and precariously and temporarily sutured at the intersection of those subject positions” (2005b, 20-21). 110

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offer different ways to think about the role of universalities and particularities in relation to hegemony, their arguments share a fundamental interest in the “incompletion of the subject-position.” I raise this point not to engage the discursive politics in Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, but to differentiate post-queer politics from the abovementioned politics based on lack. Post-queer dialogical-becomings offer creative and productive means to think about agency, citizenship, and democracy because they are not limited to or by, for instance, inscriptive techniques and/or performative reiterations as outlined by Foucault and Butler, respectively. They move away from the tripartite of power, language, and discourse that has infused poststructural politics over the latter part of the twentieth century. Life is indefinitely becoming-other where materiality, for instance, is dialogic as it becomes through desiring-machines that connect to produce flows. Recall from plateaus two and three that Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy risks becoming too positivistic and so it is necessary to couple these movements with Bakhtin. Dialogical-becomings, while embedded in the political philosophy of productivities, flows, lines of flight, and potentialities, recognizes that every movement is deeply entrenched in social heteroglossia and it is through dialogic relations that we can account for these complexities. Speech genres and utterances offer a new language to consider agency, citizenship, and democracy—one that is not confined to discourse (as we see in Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy) but is intensely connected to the materialities of life. When we conceptualize agency through dialogism, citizenship becomes something that can not be represented in culture but as culture itself. This is a result of agency’s embodiment of internal dialogism where movement is a mode of address and is directed towards an answer—not in the sense of fulfilling a lack but of creating a relationship that is negotiated through speech genres and utterances. Citizenship is a permanent state of becoming as it operates through chains of utterances that have a “direct relationship to reality and to the living, speaking person (subject)” (Bakhtin 1986, 122). As a consequence, democracy becomes a creative potential. For example, grotesque realism—movements marked by exaggerations and excessiveness—does not view life through biological and/or psychic representations and significations but instead considers it to be a body of the people that is continuously renewed and regenerated. Democracy as a creative potential flows through degradation: “that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (Bakhtin 1984b, 19-20). Agency and citizenship can not be thought of in terms of individualities but as regenerative popular movements that are open to the world. Dialogical-becomings are in contrast to the private and psychological subjects of subjectivity because they are always two bodies in one: “the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born” (26). 111

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Deterritorializing Democracy

As I outline in previous plateaus, Bakhtinian theory must be infused with Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalytic project so as to avoid a reading of dialogism through lack. Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy frames dialogism, carnivalesque, and grotesque as becomings. The continuous struggle amongst desiring-machines and BwOs and reterritorializations and deterritorializations, respectively, offers an important lens for thinking about democracy, citizenship, and agency as plateaus rather than representations, significations, or identifications: “Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressingprogressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 239). The metaproductions of control societies that no longer confine bodies to fixed spaces and tasks but control them through access and information produce new ways for thinking about agency where bodies are deterritorialized and reterritorialized in relation to the coding practices of dividualization. In essence, citizens of control societies attain value when they are commodified through the deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the civilized capitalist machine. The result of these tensions is a surplus value that is produced as a “nonexchangeable element” of excess. The schizophrenic is the surplus product of capitalism as it seeks its limits by consuming and producing surplus value. Citizenship in control societies functions similarly as it is something that is forever deterritorializing but never completely deterritorialized: dividuals seek the limits of neoliberal capitalism and globalization by consuming and producing their own surplus value. Citizenship in control societies is a form of schizo-capital that is always in process. The evolution of the barbarian despotic machine, imperial representation, and the civilized capitalist machine analyzed by Deleuze and Guattari offers an important interrogation of race, class, and citizenship. The despotic barbarian marks the establishment of an empire that is in contrast to primitive territorial machines: “the subject leaps outside the intersections of alliance-filiation, installs himself at the limit, at the horizon, in the desert, the subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that links him directly to God and connects him to the people” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 194). The despotic barbarian becomes “a detached object [that] has jumped outside the chain” and establishes a body without organs. The result of this detachment is a change in the system where the State, as a “megamachine,” is solely interested in appropriation. The result of the despotic barbarian’s appropriation is an overcoding of the system: “The objects, the organs, the persons, and the groups retain at least a part of their intrinsic coding, but these coded flows of the former régime find themselves overcoded by the transcendent unity that appropriates surplus value” (196). We see here that although citizens maintain (some) prior coding, they become 112

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implicated in the new system through the megamachine’s overcoding. For example, Deleuze and Guattari explain the State’s abolishment of debt is in actuality creating new mechanisms of control by minimizing the capability of new territorial machines to form. As a result, “the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves” (197). We can therefore think of coding as always an overcoding: What is produced on the body of the despot is a connective synthesis of the old alliances with the new, and a disjunctive synthesis that entails an overflowing of the old filiations into the direct filiation, gathering all the subjects into the new machine. The essential action of the State, therefore, is the creation of a second inscription by which the new full body—immobile, monumental, immutable— appropriates all the forces and agents of production; but this inscription of the State allows the old territorial inscriptions to subsist, as ‘bricks’ on the new surface. (198)

The primitive territorial machines, what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “subaggregates,” become the “bricks” that uphold the despotic barbarian and the system itself. Consequently, bodies are not in relation to each other, but to themselves and the State as both producers and products. The subaggregates are continuously overcoded in order for the State to flourish: while the minoritized bodies become classed, the majoritized bodies fuse with the State apparatus. The majoritized and minoritized bodies are all part of the system. The majoritized, however, benefit from the “bricks” of the minoritized: “It is overcoding that impoverishes the earth for the benefit of the deterritorialized full body” (199). Whiteness is an excellent example of overcoding. Empowerment, then, is not liberatory but becomes an overcoding tool. Deleuze and Guattari’s differentiation between primitive oral societies and barbarian written civilizations explains this occurrence where “the graphic system has lost its independence and its particular dimension” (202). Empowering bodies to write is therefore not a liberatory tool but an overcoding mechanism. The despotic barbarian writes the social and so every production becomes an anti-production. Citizenship results from its detachment from the despotic machine when bodies become privatized and individualized. With this comes an ongoing fear that “a single organ might flow outside the despotic body, that it might break away or escape…each organ is a possible protest” (211). The outcome of the transition from primitive coding to despotic barbarian overcoding is the decoding of private citizens and so the State eventually becomes a state: “The State was first this abstract unity that integrated subaggregates functioning separately; it is now subordinated to a field of forces whose flows it co-ordinates and whose autonomous relations of domination and subordination it expresses” (221). The state no longer decodes 113

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primitive territorial machines but invents new codes that deterritorialize the social: It no longer produces an overcoding unity; it is itself produced inside the field of decoded flows. As a machine it no longer determines a social system; it is itself determined by the social system into which it is incorporated in the exercise of its functions. In brief, it does not cease being artificial, but it becomes concrete, it ‘tends to concretization’ while subordinating itself to the dominant forces. (221)

The state no longer forms classes but is produced by classed bodies. The civilized capitalist machine deterritorializes the socius through the intensification of bodies in the periphery to benefit the center. Although Deleuze and Guattari are largely referring to developed (center) and underdeveloped (periphery) countries, we see through post-colonial theorizations such as Bhattacharyya that a clear distinction between the center and the periphery can not be made: the underbelly of neoliberal capitalism and globalization has many internal peripheries within the center and many internal centers within the periphery. The illicit movement of people and things provides new means for encountering the “center” through an engagement with surplus values. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “a veritable ‘development of underdevelopment’ on the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center” (231). Keeping in mind, however, that there are no explicit centers and peripheries but instead a multiplicity of schizophrenic networks. Citizenship is therefore highly masochistic in the Deleuzian sense because citizens are on both sides of the flow of production: the worker produces surplus in order to attain purchasing power. Life is a production of production where citizenship becomes less of a legal status in relation to a State and instead becomes an ability to purchase the exchanged products that one produces through the rhizomatic networks of states. The contractual alliances inherent to neoliberal capitalism and globalization maintain a permanent state of suspense where citizenship is “an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain” (Deleuze 1989, 71). The multiplicity of intensities that come with masochistic citizenship ultimately wear the body down because surplus values can only be produced through the body’s growing intensification. Having said that, we see a different network of citizenship in the sexualizing of human capital that Bhattacharyya speaks of. The sex trade workers of Thailand are not masochistically negotiated as productions of productions. It is true that sex trafficking engages global networks through the increasing intensification of life. However, unlike masochistic negotiations, the underbelly of sexual capital is a product of the “center” (United States and the World Bank) vis-à-vis Thailand’s development as a nation of tourism. The 114

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sexualizing of human capital is more exploitative than masochistic. As Grace Chang explains in Disposable Domestics (2000): Since the 1980s, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other international financial institutions (IFIs) based in the First World have routinely prescribed structural adjustment policies to the governments of indebted countries as preconditions for loans. These prescriptions have included cutting government expenditures on social programs, slashing wages, liberalizing imports, opening markets to foreign investment, expanding exports, devaluing local currency, and privatizing state enterprises. While SAPs [structural adjustment policies] are ostensibly intended to promote efficiency and sustained economic growth in the ‘adjusting’ country, in reality they function to open up developing nations’ economies and people to imperialist exploitation. (2000, 123-124)

The exploitation of global economic practices is drastically different from the masochistic productions of productions discussed above. This distinction will be made clear in the following plateau where I thoroughly consider the masochistic negotiations of academic bodies as seen through the productions of productions of academic life. Becoming Radically Nomadic

Post-queer politics challenges the relationship between states and citizens by rethinking democracy, citizenship, and agency itself through a critical engagement with the materialities of life that are rhizomatically connected and dialogically negotiated. Deleuze and Guattari’s “Treatise of Nomadology” (Plateau 12 in A Thousand Plateaus) offers an important political project by introducing the war machine as a way to trouble the state through territorializations and deterritorializations. I want to consider the relationship between the war machine and the State apparatus through dialogical-becomings so as to develop new political strategies that engage life itself. The war machine is clearly differentiated from the State apparatus. The State apparatus functions as a stratum: it is a “double articulation” that functions either through a police force and a correctional system or operates militarily, where violence is not managed through war. The war machine does not occupy either of these spaces. It functions in a third space outside of this dualism: [The war machine] is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pack. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity 115

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against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus…he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between ‘states’…In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 352)

The war machine is therefore not a variation of the State apparatus but a completely different entity; whereas the State apparatus functions through representations, significations, and identifications (think of laws, orders, and regulations), the war machine is pure becoming. The war machine is a dialogicalbecoming that engages the world through indefinite deterritorializations. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate the difference between the State apparatus and the war machine using a theory of games: the State apparatus is the game of chess and the war machine is the game of Go. The game of chess is structured hierarchically: the various pieces serve different functions based on status. Each piece has its specific function in relation to the other pieces and the entirety of the game. Chess is a game of war: it is “an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles” (353). In contrast, Go is considered a “war without battle lines”: it is a game of strategy where the pieces are not hierarchically structured but are all the same—one piece can not be differentiated from the next. The pieces function as a collective, where the “pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones.” The critical difference between the two game theories is how space is utilized. Chess is a game of coding and decoding: “it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces.” Go is a game of territorialization and deterritorialization: “it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point.” Whereas the pieces in chess move from one square to the next, the pieces in Go are placed on the intersecting lines of the game board. When placing a certain chess piece on a square it acts on its own in relation to the opponent’s pieces; on the other hand, Go pieces function in relation to the pieces of the same team. In other words, one Go piece has no meaning outside of its relation with other pieces. Chess pieces function autonomously and hierarchically; Go pieces function dialogically and are continuously becoming-other through their connections. Consequently, the State apparatus (as represented in chess) functions differently than the war machine (the dialogical-becomings of Go). The war machine is not a part of the State apparatus but is external to it. As Paul Patton writes: Thought as a war-machine means a nomadic thought, since it was the nomads who invented war-machines and deployed them against the apparatuses of the 116

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State. This opposition between the State and nomads allows the difference between these two modes of thought to be expressed in terms of a kind of mental space occupied or described by concepts. The classical image, or Stateform of thought, involves a striated mental space which is traditionally delimited by a dual pretention to universality: “In effect, it operates with two ‘universals,’ the Totality as the ultimate foundation of being or the enfolding horizon, and the Subject as the principle which converts being into being-for us” [Thousand Plateaus] (469). In these terms, the alternative is therefore a thought which refuses any universal subject, attributing itself instead to a particular multiplicity, race, or tribe and which does not locate itself within some englobing totality, but is rather deployed in a milieu without horizon, occupying a smooth space in the manner in which nomads occupy a steppe. (2001a, 1278-1279)

The war machine’s occupation of smooth spaces through territorializations and deterritorializations engages a radical sense of citizenship that is forever becoming-other without being limited by or within the predetermined movements of significations, representations, and identifications. The roaming nomad is a war machine and serves as an excellent example for thinking about post-queer politics through creative deterritorializations. Although nomadic movement is “another species” all together, it maintains important potentialities to challenge the civilized capitalist machine. There are, of course, many adaptations of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology. Most notably, perhaps, is Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects (1994) that offers a feminist reading of nomadology by arguing for multiple identities. Braidotti offers an important critique of Deleuze’s becoming-woman by suggesting that “Deleuze gets caught in the contradiction of postulating a general ‘becoming-woman’ that fails to take into account the historical and epistemological specificity of the female feminist standpoint” (117). I concur with Braidotti’s critique of Deleuze (and concurrently Guattari) here yet we fundamentally differ in how we think about this positivism. Braidotti’s nomadology deconstructs fixed subjects through an intersection of subjectivity, identity, and differences. The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectivity, and of differences among women. These different requirements correspond to different moments, that is to say, different locations in space, that is to say, different practices. This multiplicity is contained in a multilayered temporal sequence, whereby discontinuities and even contradictions can find a place. (171)

Rather than working within and towards multiple subjectivities, I argue here as I have in previous plateaus that Deleuze and Guattari’s positivistic philosophy is best coupled with Bakhtinian theory that creatively engages the materialities of 117

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life through ongoing dialogic relations that are filled with social heteroglossia. Braidotti’s nomadic subjects are situated within deconstruction and are therefore at the onset limited by the possibilities of representations, significations, and identifications. The political philosophy of post-queer nomadology seeks not to deconstruct the subject but to consider life itself through the potentialities of dialogical-becomings.14 Post-queer nomadology functions like the pieces of the game Go. They are not hierarchically structured but function dialogically as they become-other. Movement, for nomadic dialogical-becomings, is not like that of chess because it is a deterritorialization of space through a “fascination for the pack.” Rather than focusing on fixed squares and predetermined possibilities of movement (chess), the emphasis for the nomad is on the path itself between the points: “The life of the nomad is the intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 380). The nomad is therefore distinct from the migrant because “the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized.” Although nomads are continuously moving through smooth spaces these movements do not define them.15 As Deleuze and Guattari state, the nomad is “he who does not move” (381). This is because the nomad does not choose to move but moves because of consequence and necessity. Because of this, movement is always a deterritorialization and never a reterritorialization like we see with the migrant. Rather than being defined by specialized functions that are predetermined (the hierarchically structured chess pieces) nomadic dialogical-becomings flow through deterritorializations. These lines of flight challenge the State apparatus by producing new lines of

six.

14 I discuss the important difference between possibilities and potentialities in plateau

15  “The phrase ‘nomadic war-machine’ is therefore a pleonasm, and the detailed account of the conditions of nomadic existence amounts to a specification of the essential traits of the war-machine. Foremost among these is the nomads’ relation to space. It is not simply that the nomad travels from one place to another…Nomadic life is essentially en route, and the routes followed serve a different purpose to the roads and highways which enable communication between the parts of sedentary societies: they distribute beings across an open, indefinite space…Nomads are essentially deterritorialized, which is not to say that they have no territory. They do have a territory which they are traditionally disinclined to quit unless driven by force. But it is a special relationship to that territory which renders the nomad deterritorialized: it is a pure surface for mobile existence, without enclosure or fixed patterns of distribution. Movement across it is open-ended and fluid, comprising alternately movement and rest. This is the primary characteristic of the nomad…It should not be thought that the nomad is simply a product of such space. The relationship between the two is active in both directions, a matter of assemblage, each working on the other. The nomad not only inhabits a smooth space, but develops and extends it” (Patton 2001a, 1288-1289). 118

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flight. The nomad does not constitute the war machine but in contrast, the war machine creates spaces for nomadic potentialities. We can rethink Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy through the game Go. Like the chain of equivalence, the pieces in Go function together yet, unlike Laclau and Mouffe, nomadic dialogical-becomings do not function within discourse. They do not seek resignifications but indefinite becomings through their dialogic relations. Dialogical-becomings are not structured like the game chess where pieces (struggles) are individually based and hierarchically organized. Recall from above that the political philosophy of post-queer dialogical-becomings rethinks life itself so as to then produce new democratic strategies. To develop new democratic strategies without rethinking life itself (Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy) simply redefines what each chess piece can do while maintaining the overall structure of chess. The queer/heteronormative dyad functions in this way where although new political strategies emerge, movement is always subjected to the parameters of signification, representation, and identification. Post-queer dialogical-becomings are therefore not concerned with changing the players’ roles through, for instance, resignifications where movement is always in relation to hierarchical structures. It is interested in playing a different game altogether where movement is never reterritorialized but is indefinitely deterritorialized through nomadic relations. The project is consequently not to develop new strategies for engaging democracy, conceptualizing citizenship, and determining agency but to rethink life itself through nomadic deterritorializations that subsequently lead to new ways for thinking about the relationship amongst democracy, citizenship, and agency. To reorganize political struggles without revisioning the materialities of life will simply uphold heteronormative, patriarchal, and hierarchical structures. I am not suggesting a ridding of antagonistic struggles for they can be very productive. I am calling for the need to function differently than the civilized capitalist machine as a roaming nomad that never reterritorializes because space is always deterritorialized. Nomadic dialogical-becomings are unique because the spaces they inhabit or the movements that they make do not define them. Post-queer nomadic movement is of grave consequence and necessity because queer is only capable of moving in relation to the striated spaces of heteronormativity. Rather than migrating to new spaces for the purpose of reterritorialization, post-queer politics seeks indefinite deterritorialization. Agency as Schizo

Over the past few decades, identity politics has largely been concerned with reterritorializations that function within the civilized capitalist machine. Butler’s performativity has played a key role in the political theorizations of queer where 119

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agency is conceptualized through reiterations: “all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; ‘agency,’ then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition” (1990, 185). These variations, whether they are within the matrix of intelligibility (first and second wave feminism) or against the matrix itself (third wave feminism and queer theory), essentially operate through resignifications because of their overarching implications in subjectivity. Agency in this way can only be negotiated within the discursive realm and through circulating norms that constitute subjects— even when the intent is to disturb, disrupt, and decenter the norms inherent to subjugated subjectivities. For instance, performative theorizations are only capable of engaging the limits of performativity itself. Post-queer dialogicalbecomings, far from being restricted by the limitations of discourse, have the potential to indefinitely become-other because they seek not to reiterate existing norms or establish variations from these norms but to always produce new lines of flight through the dialogic relations of nomadology. Agency is never something completely given and it is not something that can be reiterated. Agency, for dialogical-becomings, is forever a potential that is contextually negotiated. With that said, citizenship is not a capacity to reiterate norms and it is not an effect of capitalism’s ongoing production of individualized subjects. Citizenship is pure becoming. Agency is therefore not housed in notions of lack but is based on productive notions of desire as production of production. Agency is schizo in that it is an ongoing tension between BwOs and desiring-machines. Citizenship is about intensities rather than significations where democratic strategies emerge out of the dividualized processes that wear the body down. Because the capitalist worker is involved in every aspect of production, where it produces surplus in order to achieve purchasing power to purchase the products it produces, it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge a system that rhizomatically rather than arborescently produces life. Nomadic dialogical-becomings offer a politics that is productive rather than reactive where it is capable of engaging the rhizomatic functionings of neoliberal capitalism and globalization through strategic deterritorializations rather than reiterative variations. Laclau and Mouffe conceptualize democracy, citizenship, and agency through subject positions, hegemonic discourses, and empty signifiers. By starting with a reconsideration of life itself through dialogical-becomings, postqueer nomadic politics employs democracy, citizenship, and agency as incorporeal transformations rather than significations and representations: [Incorporeal transformations] are the expressed of statements but are attributed to bodies. The purpose is not to describe or represent bodies…In expressing the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or referring but intervening in a way. The independence of the two kinds of forms, forms of expression and forms of content, is not contradicted 120

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but confirmed by the fact that the expressions or expresseds are inserted into or intervene in contents, not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 86)16

Incorporeal transformations, as events, challenge inequities because, as John Protevi explains, they have the potential to repattern a system. (2006, 23). Movement is therefore not based on lack—as we see in, for instance, Laclau (2005) and Žižek (1989)—but is highly productive. Manuel DeLanda’s work on assemblage theory, for instance, embodies the productive movements mentioned above by accounting for Deleuzian relations of exteriority: These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate, or as Deleuze puts it, it implies that “a relation may change without the terms changing”. Relations of exteriority also imply that the properties of the component parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole, that is, “relations do not have as their causes the properties of the [component parts] between which they are established …” although they may be caused by the exercise of a component’s capacity. (2006, 10-11)

DeLanda offers a rhizomatic way of thinking about life that is central to dialogical-becomings where meaning is produced through connections rather than in relation to arboreal cores. This is starkly different from the empty signifiers of Laclau and Žižek where every empty signifier signifies a chain of equivalence—“a plurality of unfulfilled demands” (Laclau 2005, 106)— that constitutes popular identities. Meaning is, as Massumi explains, always a contextualized encounter marked by speeds.17 Post-queer politics is one of 16 The following are two of Deleuze and Guattari’s examples of incorporeal transformations: i) “Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies” (1987, 81); ii) “In an airplane hijacking, the threat of a hijacker brandishing a revolver is obviously an action; so is the execution of the hostages, if it occurs. But the transformation of the passengers into hostages, and of the plane-body into a prison-body, is an instantaneous incorporeal transformation.” 17  “Every meaning encounter, as we have seen, is a groundless becoming, not an assertion of being. What becomes of a meaning encounter is attributable to its unique and contingent ‘context,’ the nondiscursive network of forces within which particular speaking bodies are positioned and which ordains what those bodies say-do and thus where-how they subsequently go. ‘Context’ is an infinitely complex concertation of forces, the logical unity of which can only be conceived as one of movement: the 121

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becoming, not being; rhizomes, not arborescence; dialogism, not dialectics; assemblages, not totalizations. Dialogical-becomings offer creative ways for thinking about life itself and it is through these material considerations that democracy, citizenship, and agency can become potentialities that are open to the world.

direction in which a speech-driven body is impelled. Impulsion is a general function of language. Unity-in-movement is the only unity language knows” (Massumi 1992, 30-31). 122

PLATEAU 5

Schizo-Academia Disciplining the Academy

The ongoing shift from disciplinary societies to control societies creates new ways to think about the materialities of life. In the previous plateau I examined how this move is facilitated through neoliberal and global processes that no longer confine bodies to specific spaces and tasks but seek to control life through rhizomatic networks, flows, and connections. In this plateau, I want to consider the role that higher education plays in the production of dividualities and how academic bodies, specifically, become implicated in the rhizomatic politics of neoliberal capitalism and globalization: not as subjects of such discourses but as indefinite tensions between desiring-machines and Body without Organs (BwO). The post-queer politics of higher education that will be explored in this plateau follow the developments in the preceding plateaus that plateau subjugated subjectivities through a consideration of dialogical-becomings. Let us first account for the subjugated subjectivities that have predominantly consumed higher education as a field of study. Recall from plateau one that Foucault is fundamentally concerned with how human beings develop into subjects. Subjection is central to this transition where power is a productive force that acts on the actions of subjects. Foucault offers an important lens to consider how, for instance, human beings become academic-subjects (teacher-subject; student-subject; administrator-subject) that are “subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to [their] own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge” (Foucault 2000a, 331). In other words, academic subjects are disciplined by the discursive parameters of higher education such as research initiatives, teaching loads, and service work—all of which results in academic subjects becoming dependent on these practices for their intelligibility. Academic subjects are as a result tied to these discursive practices that create, support, and maintain individualized identities. These identities operate through, for example, research, teaching, and service practices that require subjects to reproduce the techniques and technologies of academic discourse. For instance, faculty-subjects are individualized through classroom teaching, research projects, committee work, publications, tenure review processes, advising and mentoring, and conference presentations. These productive forces of power continuously refer to the idea of a larger academic body—what can be considered the academy—that functions through

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the complexity of local power relations that reproduce academic discourse so that academic subjects can govern themselves. A Foucualdian reading of academic life uncovers the processes that discipline subjects through educational discourses. Take, as a clear example, how academic subjects are produced through panopticism and the confession: two technologies of power that have been widely adopted in poststructural theorizations of higher education. To recap arguments outlined in plateau one, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish investigates how Bentham’s Panopticon emerges as a technology of surveillance through the birth of the prison. Torture, punishment, and discipline are accounted for throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to make a shift from disciplining prisoners’ bodies to disciplining their souls. Panopticism becomes a tool to ensure the continuous discipline of the soul by individualizing prisoners: it is intended to “induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 1977, 201). The academy, like the prison, maintains a panoptic gaze that is both visible and unverifiable: it is visible through the overall functioning of institutional spaces (offices, classrooms, lectures, buildings, meetings, and conferences) and unverifiable because academic subjects never know when they are being watched (publication reviews, tenure processes, teaching evaluations). The visible and unverifiable aspects of academia ensure the self-disciplining of academic subjects. In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Foucault explores how the confession emerges in the Middle Ages as a custom to produce truths. Confessions extend well beyond religion by infiltrating all aspects of life where individuals learn to account for themselves: the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone else, the things people write books about. One confesses—or is forced to confess...Western man has become a confessing animal. (1978, 59)

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The confession has become so ingrained in day-to-day operations that it gets more and more difficult to identify it as a form of disciplinary power. The confession is by no means void in academic life. Higher education is in essence founded on the principle of confession. Academic subjects produce truths by disclosing themselves through research, teaching, and service practices. This creates the illusion that academic subjects have inner truths that must be confessed in order to be an intelligible citizen of the academy. We see this through various disciplinary mechanisms such as research interests, departmental affiliations, course content, conference memberships, and publications. Panopticism upholds the idea of an overarching academic body where subjects are continually asked to produce truths vis-à-vis confessions in order to function “successfully” in academic spaces. Panopticism and confessions are technologies that discipline academic subjects: panopticism disciplines the souls of individuals while confessions ensure the production of discursive truths. These disciplinary practices produce identities that are policed through regulatory norms that constitute academic life. Scholarly Performatives

Judith Butler builds on Foucault’s notion of subjection using speech act theory to offer a psychic reading of subjects as performative. Butler challenges power as a condition that circulates amongst subjects through a consideration of power as “an acting that is an enacting” (1997b, 15). She creates the spaces to move away   “The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation” (Foucault 1978, 60).   “According to the formulation of subjection as both the subordination and becoming of the subject, power is, as subordination, a set of conditions that precedes the subject, effecting and subordinating the subject from the outside. This formulation falters, however, when considering that there is no subject prior to this effect. Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being. As a condition, power precedes the subject. Power loses its appearance of priority, however, when it is wielded by the subject, a situation that gives rise to the reverse perspective that power is the effect of the subject, and that power is what subjects effect. A condition does not enable or enact without becoming present. Because Power is not intact prior to the subject, the appearance of its priority disappears as power acts on the subject, and the subject is inaugurated (and derived) through this temporal reversal in the horizon of power” (Butler 1997b, 13-14). 125

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from the inscriptive techniques of disciplinary societies by demonstrating how subjects are materialized through discourse. We can easily make connections between performativity and higher education by identifying how academic subjects are implicated in performative reiterations as the reproduction of higher educational norms. Think of the norms associated with scholarly publications and how academic subjects must “successfully” reiterate these norms in order to be read as intelligible in scholarly communities: conducting research (researching existing literature in a particular field; identifying research gaps; creating research proposals; undergoing the ethical review processes; gathering and interpreting data); writing a manuscript (organizing research findings; determining the format of the manuscript; structuring ideas; modifying the manuscript in relation to journal specifications); submitting a manuscript (preparing manuscript for submissions as per journal guidelines; sending manuscript to specific geographical or virtual locations); review process (double-blind reviews; critiques, comments, and suggestions are generated; manuscript is accepted, accepted with modifications, or rejected); modifications (draft manuscript is reworked to address the concerns outlined by the reviewers; manuscript is polished); terms and conditions of publication rights (publishing agreement is signed; publication rights are determined; compensation—if any—is determined). We see from this example that academic subjects become intelligible as scholars of a particular field through the successful reiteration of certain norms related to scholarly publications. Every journal and every field of study has their own discursive norms and so it is the reiteration of such norms that constitutes what it means to be “an academic.” Performativity not only sheds light on the processes that produce academic subjects through the successful reiteration of norms. It also shows how “incoherent” and “discontinuous” subjects also contribute to what it means to be intelligible. Subjects that fail to reproduce scholarly norms play as much of a role as those that successfully reproduce such norms because they reinforce notions of success through failed reiterations. Unintelligibility is therefore just as much a part of academia as intelligibility. To follow the example above, the publication that does not get accepted into a peer-reviewed journal is just as important to academic discourse as the accepted article: conducting research (the researcher who does not reference the appropriate existing literature in a particular field; the researcher who does not identify a needed research gap; the researcher who does not have the proper tools to create a research proposal; an ethical review is rejected because it does not adhere to the requirements mandated by a university); writing a manuscript (the manuscript is not organized properly in relation to a particular field/discipline; the format of the manuscript does not adhere to the specifications of a particular scholarly journal); submitting a manuscript (the prepared manuscript is unable to adhere to the submission guidelines of a respected journal in the researcher’s field/discipline); review 126

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process (the rejected proposals justify the success of the accepted papers). The successful and unsuccessful reiteration of norms are central to the production and circulation of academic discourse where subjects do not enter academic discourse but are performatively produced through the reiteration of norms that together define academic life. Academic Becomings

Without recounting the arguments outlined in plateau one, let me restate that the inscriptive techniques and performative reiterations above are limiting because of their roots in disciplinary practices. The shift from discipline to control calls for new ways to think about academic life because bodies are no longer confined to specific spaces and tasks but are controlled through such mechanisms as access and information. This shift is continuous and so I am not suggesting that disciplinary practices have ended (or will end anytime soon) and all we have now are control mechanisms. I am more concerned with the limitations of a politics based in representations, significations, and identifications and how such lenses can not account for the complexity of contemporary control mechanisms. Like the preceding plateaus, this one seeks to plateau subjugated subjectivities by accounting for a post-queer politics of higher education that is read through dialogical-becomings rather than subjective inscriptions, reiterations, deviations, or capacities. Consequently, this plateau will explore the dividualities of control societies rather than the individualities of disciplinary societies that materialize subjects through discourse. This entails a consideration of academic life through assemblages of desiring-machines that produce flows. For example, the hand-machine connects to a pen-machine that connects to a paper-machine that produces ideas on paper; the mouth-machine connects to a microphone-machine that connects to a speaker-machine to produce a seminar at a conference. In other words, I am interested in moving away from a consideration of how academic bodies are defined by what they are (representations, significations, identification) so as to think critically about what they can do (dialogical-becomings). This requires that movement does not refer back to a completely whole subject (arborescence) because it is indefinitely changing by creating and breaking flows (rhizomes). The dialogical-becomings of academia are therefore not defined by arborescence where the academic subject is defined by the sum of its multiple parts. In contrast, they are rhizomatic: the “academic body” is a multiplicity of intersecting lines that is not a structure but a system that is “acentered, nonhierarchical, [and] nonsignifying” (Deleuze and Guiattari 1987, 21). When we think of academic bodies through rhizomatics, everything is a production of production. This moves us away from thinking about academic subjects through the production of products: articles, books, 127

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lectures, and conference presentations (even though these productions are still a part of the metaproductions of academic life). Production becomes pure immanence: production for the benefit of production. Rather than thinking about how academic subjects are represented through their un/intelligibilities, scholarly “identities” are conversely networked through flows that are created, interrupted, and created again. The academic “subject” becomes a rhizome that is plugged into an academic machine: The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple…It is composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills...When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoes a metamorphosis. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

The academic body as machine is therefore never completely whole but is a complex milieu as an ongoing metamorphosis. It is, for example, continuously transforming itself through concepts in lectures, conferences, and publications rather than being represented by, in, or through them. As Massumi explains: A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such juncture? All and none of the above…Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture. It is a vector: the point of application of a force moving through a space at a given velocity in a given direction. The concept has no subject or object other than itself. It is an act. (1992, 5-6)

In other words, scholarly identities are never fully achieved with degrees, academic ranks, or number of publications (even though these factors certainly come into play in, for example, job applications, tenure-review processes, and academic promotion). To think of academia through dialogical-becomings is to consider how academic bodies are forever metamorphosizing. Academic dialogical-becomings are not defined by their relationships to something that already exists (institutional affiliations; association memberships) but are produced through concepts not yet in existence (conversations at conferences; responses to publications; interactions with colleagues). The dialogicalbecomings of higher education are always becoming-other as thresholds that connect two multiplicities.

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Schizo-Academia

Schizo-Academia

The dialogical-becomings of higher education are tensions between desiringmachines and Body without Organs (BwO). These reterritorialized and deterritorialized flows, respectively, always produce something new through the creation of lines of flight. Unlike subjugated subjectivities that direct the body inwardss, deterritorializations always direct the body outwards. The result of such intensities is what I refer to as schizo-academia where every production is an antiproduction: academic bodies are always trying to exceed their own potential by trying to surpass the limits of academic life. We see this increasing intensification most often in the academic body’s desire to overcome itself. Higher education is a civilized capitalist machine where an academic “plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 35). Deterritorializations and reterritorializations remove lack from the academic equation: academic bodies do not lack degrees, publications, appointments, reviews, and evaluations because desire—as production of production—is the machine itself. The academic schizo is no longer represented through publications or signified through tenure-review processes (even though these processes remain central to academic life) but is instead defined by intensities. Schizoanalytics does not challenge the organs of the body but the organism itself where the academic body without organs becomes pure intensity. Schizo-academia refers to the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of academic life. It is embedded in control mechanisms that are no longer disciplinary: academic bodies are no longer organized in numbers (individuals in spaces) but are mobilized through codes (bodies are controlled by their in/ability to access information). This implies that academic life is no longer directed towards production but metaproduction: a shift from the production of goods (i.e., publications) to the servicing of products (i.e., managing the flows of specialized cohort programs). This move towards metaproduction strives to transform all academic desiring-machines into BwOs where everything becomes capital: everything is the same until it is given value; everything is defined by its surplus value. Schizo-academia functions through connections and flows where each attachment is ultimately a detachment: in order for a desiring-machine to make a new connection it must detach itself from an existing flow. In these processes of attachments and detachments there is always something extra— something produced in excess. I am speaking of the production of surplus value as a “nonexchangeable element” where the consumer of the surplus value is also  See John Morss’ “The Passional Pedagogy of Gilles Deleuze” (2000) for an excellent overview of Deleuzian concepts that relate to the philosophy of education. 129

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its producer. In the realm of metaproduction, surplus value is what differentiates one academic body from the next. Similar to how the schizophrenic is the surplus product of capitalism, academic bodies become the surplus products of schizo-academia. They are the nonexchangeable elements that result from the deterritorializations and reterritorializations of academic life. Academic bodies are always seeking the limits of academia yet they can never be completely deterritorialized. Like capital, academic bodies are produced when they become relations in and of themselves: when surplus value is differentiated from original value. Academia, like capitalism, functions when surplus values are absorbed: when they are actualized through the process of production of production. Every production is consequently an anti-production: The apparatus of antiproduction is no longer a transcendent instance that opposes production, limits it, or checks it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine and becomes firmly wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize surplus value. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 235)

Let me be clear that anti-production is not opposed to production but is deeply implicated in the processes of production in order for surplus values to be actualized. Academic bodies become a personified capital  through the desire of production of production of production... Deleuze and Guattari are correct in stating that “this whole story is profoundly schizo.” Schizo-academia, when read through the civilized capitalist machine, is therefore distinct from a Marxist version of capitalism where the industrial capitalist is the thief that steals and the proletariat is the victim that suffers. There are no thieves or victims in schizo-academia because desire is immanent where academic bodies are plugged into every aspect of production. A Marxist conceptualization of capitalism is sadomasochistic. In what follows, I argue that the schizoanalytics of higher education are highly masochistic when we intersect control societies with neoliberal capitalism and globalization.

  For example, “the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, and banker” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 232).   “The wage earner’s desire, the capitalist’s desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable exterior limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 239). 130

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Masochistic Intensifications

Desire as production of production is masochistic. A Marxist approach to capitalist societies separates the industrial capitalist from the proletariat because it is sadomasochistic. According to this formula, the industrial capitalist is the sadist (the one who steals) and the proletariat is the masochist (the one who is robbed). Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with surplus values challenges this Marxian binary through the immanence of machinic and human surplus values: Knowledge, information, and specialized education are just as much parts of capital (‘knowledge capital’) as is the most elementary labor of the worker. And just as we found, on the side of human surplus value insofar as it resulted from decoded flows, an incommensurability or a fundamental asymmetry (no assignable exterior limit) between manual labor and capital, or between two forms of money, here too, on the side of the machinic surplus value resulting from scientific and technical flows of code, we find no commensurability or exterior limit between scientific or technical labor—even when highly remunerated— and the profit of capital that inscribes itself with another sort of writing. In this respect the knowledge flow and the labor flow find themselves in the same situation, determined by capitalist decoding and deterritorialization. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 234)

Machinic surplus values are created by capitalism whereas human surplus values influence how capitalism is defined. So although machinic surplus value and human surplus value are contingent, they remain distinct components of the civilized capitalist machine: machinic surplus value assists in economic production while human surplus value influences such productions through consumption or the power to purchase. Thus the importance of human surplus value remains decisive, even at the center and in highly industrialized sectors. What determines the lowering of costs and the elevation of the rate of profit through machinic surplus value is not innovation itself, whose value is no more measurable than that of human surplus value. It is not even profitability of the new technique considered in isolation, but its effects on the over-all profitability of the firm in its relationships with the market and with commercial and financial capital. (233-234)

Capitalist production is always a combination of machinic surplus values, human surplus values, and “the one that absorbs or realizes these two forms of surplus value of flux by guaranteeing the emission of both, and by constantly injecting antiproduction into the producing apparatus” (237). Machinic surplus value and human surplus value can therefore not be defined as isolated terms, where the 131

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first refers to constant capital and the second refers to variable capital. Rather, surplus value is defined by the “incommensurability between two flows that are nonetheless immanent to each other”: machinic surplus value measures economic force while human surplus value measures purchasing power. The common thread between machinic surplus value and human surplus value is the worker: the “body” of surplus value. The schizo articulates how academic bodies are implicated on both sides of the flow: it produces surplus in order to achieve purchasing power. This is highly masochistic where the dualism between the industrial capitalist and the proletariat is disrupted. I want to make it very clear that I am not establishing a binary between masochism and sadism or masochism from sadomasochism. Recall my comments from plateau one that post-queer politics explicitly moves away from unnecessary and unproductive binaries. So although masochism can plateau sadism and/or sadomasochism it functions in a completely different realm that is not limited by dualistic thinking. My use of masochism is aligned with Deleuze’s in Coldness and Cruelty (1989), where the “language” of masochism does not speak to that of sadism. By drawing on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Deleuze returns to masochism’s literary birth that is distinct from sadism. In contrast to a sadistic approach to capitalism concerned with institutions and institutional possession, masochism engages contractual relations and contracted alliances. We can make an immediate association here between the sadistic operations of disciplinary societies that seek to confine subjects to specific spaces and tasks and the masochistic negotiations of control societies that are in a permanent state of suspense: rather than operating through accelerations and condensations (sadism), masochism is a frozen state that always wants more. The fundamental difference between sadism and masochism can be summarized using a joke cited by Deleuze: A popular joke tells of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: ‘Hurt me.’ The sadist replies: ‘No.’ This is a particularly stupid joke, not only because it is unrealistic but because it foolishly claims competence to pass judgement on the world of perversions. It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim…Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. (1989, 40-41)

Masochism and sadism are not binaries because they are incapable of speaking to each other. In masochism, everyone is a “victim” and a “torturer.” Following MacCormack, masochism “is more a form of openness, a sacrifice of signification, not a repetitive pattern of pain” (2008, 37). With that said, it is critical that we intersect Bakhtinian dialogism here because Deleuze finds himself in a limiting space when he claims that sadism is demonstrative and masochism is 132

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dialectical. I differ from Deleuze here in that I consider the contractual relations of masochism dialogical rather than dialectical. To think of masochism through dialectics underestimates the potential of masochistic negotiations: dialogism moves us away from any and all possibilities for definitive resolutions because contractual alliances, specifically when read through control societies, are indefinite negotiations. For instance, academic bodies are implicated in all flows of production where they continue to produce in order to obtain more purchasing power that can purchase the products that they produce. As a result of this, academic bodies produce and consume themselves as they are worn down because surplus values can only be created through increased intensification. In order to avoid severe intensification they must become a BwO. Masochistic academic bodies are always waiting because of the contractual alliances that are produced dialogically. Deleuze offers two elements that encompass this waiting principle: “the first representing what is awaited, something essentially tardy, always late and always postponed, the second representing something that is expected and on which depends the speeding up of the awaited object” (1989, 71). The inseparability of pleasure and pain is grafted onto this waiting principle where, contrary to traditional reading of masochism, pleasure is not achieved by receiving pain. Pleasure and pain are dialogically produced (not binaries) through that which is awaited and expected: For at the same time as pain fulfills what is expected, it becomes possible for pleasure to fulfill what is awaited. The masochist waits for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of pleasure. [The masochist] therefore postpones pleasure in expectation of the pain which will make gratification possible. The anxiety of the masochist divides therefore into an indefinite awaiting of pleasure and an intense expectation of pain. (1989, 71)

The dialogic relations of contractual alliances are pleasure/pain negotiations. For example, in Venus in Furs the “victim” Severin describes his suspended state with an anticipated fear: “I feel like a mouse held captive by a beautiful cat who plays with it daintily, and at any moment is ready to tear it to pieces; What are her plans? What does she intend to do with me?” (202-203). The victim experiences pain through an anticipated pleasure. Severin does not lack anything because pleasure/pain is a productive potentiality. As Severin states to his “torturer” Wanda, “The more you hurt me as you have just done, the more you fire my heart   Deleuze 1989, 25.  The importance of dialogism here also speaks to Patricia MacCormack’s critique of “Deleuze’s entirely reflexive masochism” (2008, 61). 133

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and inflame my senses” (213). These intensities are built into schizo-academia where academic bodies similarly create contracts that are always awaited and expected. Academic citizenship is something that is continuously renegotiated and reproduced through pleasure/pain contracts. For example, postsecondary institutions, at least in the Canadian context, are currently undergoing massive restructuring changes that are becoming increasingly aligned with neoliberal agendas marked by privatization and corporatization. In the Ontario context, the 2005 publication of the Rae Review (Ontario: A Leader in Learning) and the establishment of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario speak to these shifts and the overall desire for decentralized notions of power that can lead to higher degrees of efficiency, productivity, and most of all, competitiveness. One aspect of this expansive movement felt across many university campuses is the shift from tenure-stream to contractually-limited appointments that are clearly financially beneficial for departments seeking to maximize enrollment at the lowest possible costs. To put it simply without simplifying the argument, it is more efficient and cost-effective for faculties and departments to hire contract workers on a course-by-course basis or if one is lucky a term-by-term or year-by-year basis rather than full-time faculty. There are, of course, complex issues that come with these circumstances: health benefits, low wages, increased teaching loads, fewer resources, smaller amounts of support, and travel concerns when a contract worker must be employed by multiple institutions to make a living. Academics are placed in precarious situations as their bodies are quite literally worn down because of the need to engage the metaproductions of academic life. Academic bodies become a servicing issue to ensure increased productivity and efficiency yet this is coupled with highly material consequences where academic bodies produce and consume themselves through increased intensifications: what they produce, whether it is through research, teaching, or service practices, inevitably comes back to them. The result of such contractual alliances is the academic body deferring pleasure indefinitely: pleasure is sought through pain and pain is discovered through the seeking of pleasure. In addition to the four characteristics of masochism offered by Theodore Reik (i) fantasy; ii) suspense; iii) demonstrative; iv) provocative fear), Deleuze adds the contract as a fifth element that establishes the limits of masochistic dialogic relations: “the contract presupposes in principle the free consent of the contracting parties and determines between them a system of reciprocal rights and duties” (1989, 77). This is precisely why, as I explain in the previous plateau, the sexualising of human capital is more exploitative than masochistic negotiations: unlike the sex trade workers of Thailand, masochistic academic bodies are involved in free consent and reciprocal rights and duties that are clearly not present in the exploitations of sex trades. In (academic) masochism, the contracts created between the “victim” and the “torturer” are not sadomasochist, where the torturer determines the rights of the victim, because the victim also plays a part 134

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in determining the conditions of the contract through the victim’s consent, the victim’s ability to persuade, and the victim’s training of the torturer. The dialogic relations of masochism produce laws that determine the rights and duties—the limitations—of all participants. We can think of the role that unions play in representing contract workers in Canadian post-secondary institutions. A dialogic relation is created between unions and university administrators where certain limitations are determined through their negotiations: a few examples being course loads, wages, and enrollment caps. Although unions play a vital role in determining contractual limitations, academic bodies quite often have no choice but to accept the pains that come along with the seeking of pleasures. Enrollment caps are an excellent example of this. Although there are limits to class sizes, contractual workers are usually offered additional funds for every student that exceeds the predetermined limit. In most cases, contract workers openly accept these additions because of the limited wages that they are given at the onset of their negotiations. With that said, York University in Toronto recently experienced a 12-week strike that was ended in February 2009 by the Ontario government. The strike was largely based on the issues outlined above where contract faculty, teaching assistants, and graduate assistants sought job security. Contract workers teach more than half of the teaching load at York University. Like many other postsecondary institutions, the aforementioned contract workers not only have to apply for the positions that they have been teaching for years but they also teach more than their full-time counterparts with less pay and fewer benefits. We see from these examples that although masochistic academic bodies can not be reduced to a receiving site of pain, pain is always experienced through the seeking of pleasure. The academic body, as a dialogical-becoming, is an ongoing deterritorialization that becomes a BwO through masochistic intensities. Rather than conceptualizing academic bodies through representations, significations, and identifications, we can think about the dialogical-becomings of higher education through pain waves. It is incorrect to state that academic bodies suffer because of the pain inflicted by a dominant sadist; it is also false to suggest that they experience pain in order to reach a superior level of pleasure. It is not that masochism leads to becoming but that the dialogical-becomings of academic life translate into masochistic negotiations. Pleasure is not something that can be attained because desire is not based on lack in schizoanalysis. In contrast, masochistic negotiations defer pleasure indefinitely as academic bodies become BwO. Masochism is not a metaphor of academic life. It is being used here to address the complexity of contemporary higher educational politics that in many respects disavow the organism itself. As Mansfield comments, “we are in a world beyond subjectivity, but one that still attempts to imagine an act of selfhood” (1997, 97).   Deleuze 1989, 75. 135

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Managing and Evaluating through Differential Accumulation

The masochistic negotiations that infiltrate academic life are intricately connected to the shift from discipline to control. We are no longer speaking of subjects that are confined to specific spaces such as classrooms, offices, and buildings. Online and correspondence courses, for example, are becoming necessary for postsecondary institutions to keep up with the dividualizations of control societies. Rather than attending classes in university lecture halls, students now engage education by accessing web forums where students retrieve course readings, participate in chat rooms, and submit assignments. As Deleuze states, “school is being replaced by continuing education and exams by continuous assessment. It’s the surest way of turning education into a business” (1995c, 179). It is becoming more and more clear that universities are no longer interested in the production of goods such as faculty producing knowledge for the greater good. They are becoming increasingly concerned instead with the servicing of such goods. We see this clearly in the creation of professional degrees and the servicing of multiple cohorts. Higher education is implicated in significant processes of change that seek to reimagine the ways in which academic bodies are organized, circulated, monitored, and tracked. Its systems of evaluation and measurement are key examples of how academic bodies are produced in and through the rhizomatic networks of academic life. Higher education has always played a unique role in the functioning of societies. Whether it is argued that postsecondary institutions form communities or are informed by them, the relationship between higher education and culture is fundamentally dialogical in nature: what is happening inside the academy is more often than not a reflection of what is happening outside the academy, and vice-versa. Thinking through the relationship between higher education and culture using Bakhtinian dialogism allows for the possibility to see higher education as an active participant in the micro and macro operations of society. This is arguably what has ensured the influential role of higher education in the functioning of societies where it dialogically evolves with the socio-political apparatuses of its time. To say that higher education is a living and breathing organism implies that it does not simply image or determine culture but that it is culture when considering its implication as a dialogic relation. In other words, higher education is becoming less of an ivory tower that is divorced from society and is instead very much dialogically connected to the various political and economic networks of society. The turn of the twentieth century marked a significant shift in the understanding and execution of the term “management.” The emergence of scientific management at the end of the nineteenth century is for the most part the result of Frederick Taylor’s influence. Taylor revolutionized the ways in which management was conceptualized and facilitated in the workplace by 136

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rethinking the flows of production in order to improve productivity. Systems of evaluation quickly became a central tool for determining productivity and efficiency. Taylor’s scientific management reconfigured the circulation of bodies in spaces. For instance, standardization became a celebrated strategy in work environments where bodies trained and worked in specific tasks. As David Noble explains: Taylor and his disciples tried to change the production process itself, in an effort to transfer skills from the hands of the machinist to the handbooks of management. Once this was done, they hoped, management would be in a position to prescribe the details of production tasks, through planning sheets and instruction cards, and thereafter simply supervise and discipline the humbled workers. (1984, 33-34)

The plan was, in essence, to increase productivity through the efficiency of specializations. The distinct abilities and experiences of workers largely determined which tasks they were responsible for in order to ensure the least amount of disruptions during their shifts. Taylor’s model of management acted as the foundation for the functioning of workplaces following the turn of the century. It is the hierarchical structure of management that is of primary interest here. Scientific management involves technical procedures that could be calculated, recorded, and tracked all with the ambition to increase productivity. The hierarchical structure of management ensured that productivity could always be improved because the efficiency of bodies could always be enhanced. The purpose of hierarchical management was to establish routines and because tasks could now be specifically defined, workers could be monitored and their progress could be documented. For instance, workers were released if they did not maintain specific standards or, on the flipside, were given incentives if they could increase their productivity. Hierarchical management guaranteed these disciplinary processes where, for example, junior managers could release frontline workers if they did not perform to specific standards, while at the same time, senior managers could release junior managers if their staff did not perform to prescribed standards. The possibility for improvement made certain that standards were always met if not exceeded. Taylorism operates through disciplinary techniques that reorganize, measure, and evaluate bodies in the workplace through specialized means of production. This hierarchical structure placed high level management at the top of the pyramid and lower level workers producing the products at the bottom levels of the pyramid. Taylorism operates by measuring bodies through market statistics and individual productivities where workers are not only subjugated to the evaluations of efficiency but also to themselves. This is clearly very Foucauldian in nature where bodies become subjects through the confinements of Taylor’s disciplinary model of 137

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management. Like we see with Foucault’s analysis of sexuality and his criticism of the repressive hypothesis, the workers implicated in Taylor’s model are not repressed by the hierarchical structure of organization. Instead, a new discourse of management is produced through the various techniques/technologies of measurement and evaluation that surround Taylorism. Panopticism, as outlined in Discipline and Punish, also shares many qualities with Taylorism: the hierarchical management style, the tracking of workers through productivity statistics, and the self-regulation of workers echo the ambitions of panopticism that seek to increase productivity at the lowest possible cost. Power is not something that comes from above and represses workers (even though the hierarchical organization of management seems to imply an understanding of power as “top-down”). Instead, power functions amongst the workers through selfdisciplinary techniques/technologies. These disciplinary practices inevitably individualize bodies through subjugating processes that transform humans into subjects as workers consume what they produce. These individualities, unlike the dividualities of control societies, uphold multiple subject-positions within the same body: the worker-subject; family-subject; school-subject; healthsubject, etc. There is, however, an inherent devastation to these disciplinary practices: a factor that although produced within Taylorism eventually leads to its ultimate destruction. The high demands for individualized efficiency and productivity resulted in a complete saturation of the system. Too many products were being produced while there were not enough worker-subjects to purchase these productions. In essence, production inevitably surpassed consumption in Taylor’s model of management. The surplus of products and limited amount of subjects to consume these productions resulted in a reconsideration of capital’s circulation. It is global expansion that enabled these surplus productions to be absorbed. This inevitably established new ways to think about the production and exchange of goods. As a result of market saturation, production and purchasing quickly extended to global markets so that such surplus productions could be consumed. These expansions unavoidably reconfigure how bodies are disciplined as worker-subjects. The expanding networks that are created through global territorialization require more mobile and fluid ways to think about the production and circulation of products. Moreover, global expansion resulted in new ways to think about the measurement and evaluation of bodies through flows of production, exchange, and consumption. In Taylor’s model of management bodies are measured and evaluated using hierarchical organizations of power. These evaluations occur in specific spaces and are based on particular tasks. In the new model of management that I am speaking of here, one in which global territorializations redistribute power differentials, bodies are measured and evaluated using a more flat-line understanding of corporate organization. This model insists on everyone being equal and so there is a ridding of tiered 138

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corporate structures. Distinctions between worker/manager and production/ consumption begin to blur as a result of global exchanges. Rather than bodies being confined to specific spaces and particular tasks, this new model sees space and time as mobile and fluid where bodies are continuously shifting. For example, what was traditionally considered a worker-subject is now seen as a worker/student-subject that is required to complete and continuously update his/her skills for a particular job that is not confined to a specific worksite. In other words, the multiple subjectivities of bodies become fused in this new model of corporate organization. It is important to note that this new model of measurement and evaluation emerges out of the disciplinary strategies of production that are discussed above. For instance, new ways of producing come into effect when production is expanded on a global scale. This new space is therefore not distinctively disconnected from disciplinary societies because it emerges out of such practices. I am, of course, referring to the transition from disciplinary societies to control societies. New forms of production have been evolving to service the expansion of production and exchange on a global scale. The shift from discipline to control creates new means of measuring and evaluating so as to manage the more fluid and mobile flows of production and exchange. As outlined in the previous section, production and exchange are becoming less confined to specific spaces as production, consumption, and exchange increasingly expand through global networks. These control networks not only require new forms of measurement and evaluation to continuously improve productivity but they also serve to reinforce and expand the commodification of control systems. In other words, production is no longer limited to specific spaces (i.e., factories) and exchange is no longer determined by the immediate indicators of traditional supply and demand (i.e., market statistics). In contrast, the flexibility, adaptability, and malleability of knowledge, information, and communication mark the fundamental processes of production and exchange in control societies. Control societies are in many ways beyond institutions and spread into the rhizomatic networks of life. So whereas in disciplinary societies workers produce and consume products, in control societies, knowledge, information, and communication, as products themselves, no longer require the fixed positions of bodies for production because of their potential for continuous expansion. The shift from disciplinary to control is therefore deeply embedded in notions of production and exchange and these metaproductions are what Hardt and Negri refer to as the “service sectors”: The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production 139

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as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication. (2000, 290)

The “immaterial labor” of knowledge, information, and communication create new flows of production and exchange that do not necessarily require—or produce for that matter—the fixed subjectivities of worker-subjects. This is vastly different from Taylorism and Ford’s assembly line factory where subjects are confined to specific tasks and spaces. The result of these complex and continuous shifts is the need to create new means of measurement and evaluation that are no longer strictly confined to fixed bodies and spaces but are now capable of accounting for the global complexities of continuous capital expansion. Higher education plays a central role in the production, dissemination, and further expansion of knowledge, information, and communication. I consider higher educational practices to be a fundamental mediator of the in/dividualizing practices of disciplinary/control societies. As mentioned above, the resulting control mechanisms that emerge out of disciplinary societies require new ways to think about improving productivity through the creation of new evaluations and measurements. The structural organization of higher educational systems embodies these transitions where measurement and evaluation procedures are becoming less hierarchical (disciplinary) and therefore more decentralized (control). This is certainly the case in the organization of contemporary higher educational management. Higher education’s leap from disciplinary educational means that confine bodies to specific spaces to more expansive rhizomatic networks that operate through the circulation of knowledge, information, and communication has resulted in the need to create new ways to measure and evaluate the productivity of bodies in educational spaces. Ontario’s higher education system is a current example of such managerial shifts that reflect the present demands for decentralized power systems. In examining the shifts in management style from the preexisting hierarchical organization of power offered by the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies along with Ontario’s Schools of Graduate Studies to the more decentralized functioning of the current Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), I hope to exemplify how the dialogical relationship between higher educational institutions and culture reflects the emergences of control mechanisms out of disciplinary techniques/technologies. Prior to the institution of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario Act in 2005, graduate studies in Ontario universities largely operated through disciplinary measures that organized higher educational management using hierarchical structures. Before 2005, power was located in Ontario’s Schools of Graduate Studies. The larger organizing body of the Ontario Council on Graduate Studies (OCGS) centrally governed the practices of individual Schools of Graduate Studies and significantly determined the 140

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functioning of existing and proposed graduate programming. The following is a list of key responsibilities outlined on the OCGS website: • • • • • •

informing the Ontario government and the universities of the results of the quality reviews; promoting graduate studies and research in Ontario; commenting on government policies regarding graduate studies; advising the Council of Ontario Universities on matters relating to graduate studies; promoting best practices in graduate education. (Ontario Council on Graduate Studies, 2008)

While these responsibilities articulate the current mandate of OCGS, they broadly define the overall ambitions of central power prior to HEQCO’s existence. Before the establishment of HEQCO, OCGS acted as an overarching governing board where every university’s School of Graduate Studies had the authority to determine the future of their graduate programs. For instance, under this management structure, each School of Graduate Studies had the responsibility to decide which courses should be approved in a particular graduate program. So while OCGS formally reviewed specific programs, it was up to each School of Graduate Studies to determine the specific operation of programs in each of their departments. This hierarchical management style reflects the subjugating techniques of disciplinary societies where departments and Schools of Graduate Studies were individualized through specific evaluative measures: each department was responsible to their School of Graduate Studies which was accountable to the overall objectives and regulations of OCGS. As can be predicted, these individualizing techniques became significantly inefficient and unproductive considering the speed at which knowledge, information, and communication are networked on a global scale. The vision for HEQCO was to address this growing situation and to find ways in which postsecondary institutions can function in response to these “speeds.” The mandate for HEQCO, as indicated on their webpage, articulates this immediate need for increased productivity and efficiency: The Council has been asked by the Ontario government to provide leadership in creating a quality framework for the postsecondary education sector; to monitor and report on accessibility to the government and Ontarians; to encourage interinstitutional transfer; and to advise on system planning and interjurisdictional competitiveness.

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We will make recommendations on the steps which should be taken to improve the quality of, and accessibility to, postsecondary education programs. We will advise the government on targets that should be set to improve postsecondary education and the timeframes for achieving those targets. We will also provide the minister with recommendations on performance measures that can be used to evaluate the sector. (Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, 2008)

The establishment of HEQCO was therefore intended to deal with the surplus productions of traditional management styles that proved to be inefficient. In concurrence with the shift from disciplinary to control societies, HEQCO did not emerge and does not function independently. Like control mechanisms, HEQCO emerged out of the disciplinary practices of higher education in order to respond to the surplus productions of inefficient management prior to 2005. The scientific models of management that attempted to be efficient through defining particular spaces and specific tasks (i.e., power that is centrally located in Schools of Graduate Studies) proved to be unproductive in the sense that it could not handle the surplus speeds of higher education. HEQCO is set up to control on a more dispersed (rather than hierarchical) level, where each department within a particular School of Graduate Studies has the responsibility to manage its own operations. I argue that HEQCO marks the decentralization of higher educational management in Ontario. For example, each department now has the authority to control the flow of bodies and curriculum. This decentralization of power offers a more efficient and competitive model of management where it gives more authority to each department while reducing the bottom-line. The differential accumulations of bodies and knowledge result in highly competitive departments through the dispersal of management structures. Consequently, the workers at the bottom of the preexisting management pyramid become the chief executive officers of higher educational programming where they do the same work (without additional pay) as the existing executives at the School of Graduate Studies. This inevitably results in the dividualization of bodies where competition becomes a core element of academic self-management. Moreover, it produces higher degrees of bodily intensification through the increased workload of dividual faculty members. So despite the initial distinction between academics and financials following the massive expansion of higher education in the 1950s—for example, the acquisition of administrators with advanced educational degrees (Bruneau and Savage, 2002)—the HEQCO demonstrates the further decentralization of academic management in response to the shift from discipline to control. The concluding directives of HEQCO are increased productivities with efficient outcomes as minimal costs are acquired through the decentralization of academic management. As knowledge, information, and communication continue to proliferate at increasing speeds, new measurements and evaluations will be produced in order to account for these mechanisms 142

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of control. Higher education is surely at the heart of these expansions and so it is imperative that we take into consideration how bodies of knowledge and knowledgeable bodies are produced and exchanged at the nexus of discipline and control. The accumulation of academic capital is not, as Nitzan and Bichler (2002) explain, an absolute accumulation but a differential accumulation. For example, academic bodies do not strive to accumulate existing knowledges in order to arrive at a definitive wealth. In contrast, they seek to accumulate knowledge to control academic processes: “their capitalised profit represents a claim not for a share of the output, but for a share of control over the social process” (36). Academic life functions through differential accumulation where academic bodies seek to “beat the average”: Although capitalists exert their power over society, they measure it relative to other owners. Under modern conditions, capitalists are impelled not to maximize profit as such, but to ‘beat the average’; they measure their differential accumulation as the difference between the growth rate of their own assets, and that of the average. This differential drive enables us to relate accumulation to the dynamic re-shaping of society: in order to accumulate differentially, leading capitalists have to constantly re-structure the underlying power institutions on which their relative profitability relies. (11)

Differential accumulation highlights the shift from discipline to control by redefining academic spaces (i.e., knowledge canons; organizations; committees) through the control of academic processes. It not only adds to the academic body’s “share of total profit and capitalisation” but it results in the ability to “shape the process of social change” (38). Sabotage, for example, is central to these flows of production where production is strategically limited. Although Nitzan and Bichler largely refer to corporations, connections can easily be made between postsecondary institutions and multinational corporations that support academic sabotage through, for instance, endowments that result in allocating funds to specific departments, research projects, and faculty members. These endowments at the very least require that research and teaching practices reflect the ideologies of the benefactors if not mandate the direction of scholarly activities. Differential accumulation is alive and well in the academy and although Nitzan and Bichler claim that capital “is neither a material entity, nor a productive process” we clearly see the material affects of capital through the intensification of academic bodies. The result of such intensities is that academic bodies are negotiated through their exchange potential: the applicability of research areas to corporate sectors; the marketability of publications; the productivity and efficiency of courses as measured by enrollment numbers. Academic bodies have no choice but to 143

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deterritorialize in order to attain value that can reterritorialize the body that can subsequently be deterritorialized once again through exchange processes. They are no longer coherent organisms but flows of production: a distinction can not be made between what is produced and who produces it. Research becomes pure intensification when there are no limits for academic productivity because academic bodies are involved in every aspect of production. They produce and consume themselves as they produce surplus value in order to attain purchasing power that can purchase the products they produce. This is not to suggest that all academic bodies share the same potential to produce and purchase. Racism, classism, sexism, and ableism are certainly woven through the fabric of higher education. While some bodies have an increased potential to produce and subsequently purchase, other bodies require higher degrees of bodily intensification in order to attain purchasing power. Higher education does not overcode its citizens in the same way as the despotic barbarian (see plateau four). In contrast, the academy is produced through the decoded flows of the academic socius. In other words, the academy does not necessarily overcode its citizens with racism, classism, sexism, and ableism but acts as a force that produces particular inequitable flows. I am arguing that the academy-at-large is produced by racism, classism, and sexism through the intensification of bodies. For example, the increasing trend to hire contractually limited appointments over tenure-stream positions, the fact that research grants are often awarded to the “hard sciences” over the humanities and social sciences, and the reality that untenured faculty often teach more courses with larger class sizes speak to how academic bodies on the “periphery” must produce higher levels of surplus value to benefit the “center.” For instance, a female professor in a male-dominated field may be denied tenure as a result of not being able to access research time because she does not have an external research grant and is therefore required to teach numerous courses at multiple postsecondary institutions with high teacher-to-student ratios. The traditional “core versus periphery” model is deterritorialized in control societies because everyone and everything is a production of production. With that said, those working in minoritized academic fields—quite often critical scholars working within feminist, queer, anti-racist, ability, and post-colonial frameworks—usually experience higher degrees of intensification at the expense of majoritized disciplines because they must produce more in order to attain purchasing power.

 I use the word potential strategically to echo Deleuze’s reading of Bergson that differentiates potentialities from possibilities. I discuss this in plateau six. 144

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Academic Carnivals

Bakhtinian theory offers a means to account for the complexity of contemporary higher educational politics outlined above. Dialogism, speech genres, and utterances offer creative ways for thinking about the materialities of academic life by moving beyond the normative inscriptions and performative reiterations of disciplinary societies. Academic bodies as dialogical-becomings are highly contextualized materialities that are negotiated through the social milieu of academic life. For example, there are speech genres associated with course syllabi, dissertation committees, tenure review processes, and grant proposals. The dialogicalbecomings of academic life are always in the mode of addressivity where academic utterances are defined by a change of speaking subjects. This is noticed in departmental meetings, teacher/student mentorship, responses to lectures, and dialogue amongst publications. We also see the finalization of utterances in the presentation of conference papers that assume a responsive attitude when the presentation is finished: a finalization must be made in order for action to follow such as a response from an audience member, a response in the form of a subsequent presentation, or a response in the form of a publication. Bakhtinian dialogism displaces units of language with units of speech communication that are more complex than those in speech act theory: every participant changes in dialogic relations; every utterance is always a chain of utterances that functions through heteroglossia; and utterances can never be reiterated or reproduced. The dialogical-becomings of academic life are indefinitely renegotiated in contexts where differentiation is achieved through stylistics. Something new is always created through the material contextualization of dialogic relations. The creativity of academic bodies is the potential to engage new zones of contact in an inconclusive present: It is precisely the zone of contact with an inconclusive present (and consequently with the future) that creates the necessity of this congruity of a man with himself. There always remain in him realized potential and unrealized demands. The future exists, and this future ineluctably touches upon the individual, has its roots in him…There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found. (Bakhtin 1981, 37)

Academic bodies are never fully complete but are indefinitely becoming-other through the dialogical-becomings of research, teaching, and service practices. Although dialogism, speech genres, and utterances provide a new language for thinking about the materialities of academic life (without reducing these relations to language itself) the radical creativities of academic life can be fully 145

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realized through carnivalesque potentialities. Academic carnivals can explore “a completely different, nonofficial, extraecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world, of man, and of human relations; they [can build] a second world and a second life outside of officialdom” (Bakhtin 1984b, 5-6). Because carnivals are not restricted to specific spaces—they arose in “streets, taverns, roads, bathhouses, decks of ships, and so on” (128)—they have the potential to transform systemic and institutional boundaries by reimagining learning spaces outside of the ivory tower: learning does not have to take place in squared classrooms or lecture halls but can be open to life itself. Carnival “belongs to the whole people, it is universal, everyone [can] participate in its familiar contact.” Higher education can accordingly extend beyond officially enrolled students, fixed curriculum, teacher/student hierarchies, the acquisition of official knowledges, and the mastery of skills. I am speaking of a shift from the official to unofficial where no division can be made between actors and spectators: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it” (7). In other words, there are no binaries or definitive positions in carnival such as teachers versus students, experts versus amateurs, objective researchers versus subjective participants, and contractually limited appointments versus tenured faculty. The inside-out of academic carnivals and the transition from official to unofficial create new dialogical-becomings that were once not possible. Grotesque realism (exaggeration, hyperbolism, and excessiveness) embodies the carnivalesque by creating spaces for bodies to renew themselves. It is not a representation of strangeness or abnormality but a creative becoming that “liberates the world from all that is dark and terrifying; it takes away all fears and is therefore completely gay and bright. All that was frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities” (Bakhtin 1984b, 47).10 Grotesque realism is not closed off from the world as a subject of discourse or an arboreal organism. It is instead a dialogical-becoming that is forever changing through its engagements with and as the materialities of life. It offers higher education a way to challenge the officialdoms of higher education that individualize bodies as subjects of academic discourse. Grotesque academic bodies are in opposition to what Bakhtin refers to as the new bodily canon that individualizes bodies as a “strictly limited mass” with an “impenetrable façade.”11 We can think of the new bodily canon as the subjugated subjectivities that have constituted poststructural thought over the past few decades. Subjects of discourse are closed off from the world where there is no possibility to 10  Bakhtin critiques Kayser’s reading of the grotesque in “Romantic and modernist forms” where he claims that it is “‘something hostile, alien, and inhuman’” (1984b, 47). 11  Bakhtin 1984b, 320. 146

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“merge with other bodies and with the world.” For example, academic subjects are individualized through tenure review processes where tenure is a direct result of individual achievements based on research, teaching, and service contributions. The popular dialogical-becomings of grotesque realism challenge the individualization of subjects. These movements are unique because they can never be repeated as they exaggerate the officialdoms of academic life. Grotesque realism transgresses binary oppositions because there is no distinction between actors and spectators in carnival: the suspension of hierarchies and officialdoms involves all participants of carnival on a popular rather than individual level. Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalesque life. Because carnivalistic life is life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent ‘life turned inside out,’ ‘the reverse side of the world.’” (Bakhtin 1984a, 122)

Instead of upholding binary oppositions (for example, how queer discursively opposes itself to heteronormative ideologies), grotesque realism transforms them by plateauing what might be considered natural and what might be deemed extravagant. Everything is a life-death-life where the offialdoms of academic life can be plateaued through degradation: “lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (Bakhtin 1984b, 19-20). Contrary to the disciplinary practices of academic life that individualize bodies as subjects of academic discourse through institutions, associations, and scholarly journals, the grotesque academic body is a dialogical-becoming that is open to the world. Educational carnivals have the potential to challenge dominant practices. Not by establishing and reinforcing new binary oppositions but by plateauing education itself. For example, learning spaces can extend beyond the confinements of closed lecture halls, classrooms, walls, desks, and chairs and move through fluid spaces outside of the ivory tower such as recreational areas, communities, and landscapes; professors can participate in courses that they are not instructing; students not officially registered in university programs can participate in “official” courses; students can have more of a say in how syllabi are constructed. I am speaking of the desire for a temporary suspension of academic officialdoms using educational carnivals as a means of plateauing systemic inequities. An example from Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais is the simultaneous crowning and decrowning of kings in carnival:

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Crowning/decrowning is a dualistic ambivalent ritual, expressing the inevitability and at the same time the creative power of the shift-and-renewal, the joyful relativity of all structure and order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) positions. Crowning already contains the idea of immanent decrowning: it is ambivalent from the very start. And he who is crowned is the antipode of a real king, a slave or a jester; this act, as it were, opens and sanctifies the inside-out world of carnival. In the ritual of crowning all aspects of the actual ceremony—the symbols of authority that are handed over to the newly crowned king and the clothing in which he is dressed—all become ambivalent and acquire a veneer of joyful relativity; they become almost stage props (although these are ritual stage props); their symbolic meaning becomes two-leveled (as real symbols of power, that is in the noncarnival world, they are single-leveled, absolute, heavy, and monolithically serious). From the very beginning, a decrowning glimmers through the crowning … Carnival celebrates the shift itself, the very process of replaceability, and not the precise item that is replaced. Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything. (1984a, 124-125)

We see from this example that binaries are not required or utilized to challenge dominance. Educational carnivals can likewise plateau binary oppositions by exposing the “joyful relativity” of academic life: by bringing light to the “single-leveled, absolute, heavy, and monolithically serious” aspects of higher education through dialogic relations that are more concerned with the shift itself rather than the individualized subjectivities at play. For example, a temporary suspension of traditional teacher/student relationships can create opportunities to engage contextualized curricula that account for the social heteroglossia of all participants. This implies that syllabi are not definitive statements but open potentialities that can continuously transform through dialogic relations. Scholarly research can also assume a carnivalesque functioning where there is no differentiation between “actors” (research subjects) and “spectators” (researchers). The distance between the researcher and those being researched is blurred when all research participants become implicated in the research process. For example, researchers themselves can be explicitly accounted for in the findings so as to displace the researcher as an objective observer.12 A shift from monologism to dialogism is critical here: whereas monologism stresses individualized voices that are fixed and often convey single perspectives, dialogism emphasizes polyphony where there is a multiplicity of voices that are open for continuous negotiations in order to create new potentialities and perspectives 12 This is also noted in Semetsky’s references to the work of St. Pierre where she calls for an “[a]wareness of the researcher’s own construction of subjectivity within a research process that focuses on the subjectivities of others” (2006, 92). 148

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that can stimulate equitably focused social change. Scholarly publications in particular can benefit from this shift where articles are not definitive papers but works-in-progress. According to Bakhtin: A dialogue of languages is a dialogue of social forces perceived not only in their static co-existence, but also as a dialogue of different times, epochs and days, a dialogue that is forever dying, living, being born: co-existence and becoming are here fused into an indissoluble concrete unity that is contradictory, multispeeched and heterogeneous. (1981, 365)

A dialogical approach to “published” papers can encourage ongoing revisions and responses so as to disrupt the lines between authors and readers. In other words, authors and readers can dialogically negotiate research findings so as to consider the complexities of social heteroglossia. Immanent Processes

The dialogical-becomings of the aforementioned examples speak to the critical connection between Bakhtin and Deleuze that moves us away from the limitations of subjugated subjectivities. The intersection between Deleuze and education is certainly not new. Although I can not account for this extensive literature here, I want to highlight two contributions that are specifically relevant to the post-queer dialogical-becomings of this project. Erin Manning’s work on the politics of touch accounts for the dialogical-becomings of life by considering the movements of bodies rather than how bodies become subjects of discourse.13 According to Manning, a politics of touch: position[s] the senses relationally as expressions of moving bodies. This presupposes a vastly altered concept of time and space. Whereas in the activepassive commonsense model, time and space are located as stable signifiers into which the body enters, within a relational model, space and time are qualitatively transformed by the movements of the body. The body does not move into space

13  Manning (2007) cleverly explores touch using the Argentine tango as a metaphor throughout Politics of Touch: “Through the tango, I have attempted to make the point that touch is not simply the laying of hands. Touch is the act of reaching toward, of creating space-time through the worlding that occurs when bodies move. Touch, seen this way, is not simply an addendum to an already-stable body. Touch is that which forces us to think bodies alongside notions such as repetition, prosthesis, extension” (xiv). 149

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and time, it creates space and time: there is no space and time before movement. (2007, xiii)

We similarly see in the work of Inna Semetsky how learning can be considered an immanent rather than subjective process: Learning cannot take place in the relation between a representation and an action—which would be the reproduction of the same, denounced by Deleuze…For learning to occur, the meaningful relation between a sign and a response must be established, leading—through encounter with the Other—to the repetition of the different. (2006, 75)

The movements and immanence of education as accounted for by Manning and Semetsky offer creative ways to think about education as a process of becoming rather than a subjective process. When linked with Bakhtin, these theorizations create the necessary spaces to account for the popular negotiations of academic life rather than the limiting individualized subjectivities of academic discourse. The grotesque academic body embedded in carnivalesque atmospheres considers academic life through ongoing regenerations that are intricately connected to social heteroglossia. This has the potential to move academic bodies away from the individualizations of the ivory tower into the creative potentialities of dialogical-becomings that are open to, rather than closed off from, life itself. Because academic bodies are always something given and something created, they have the potential to continuously renew and regenerate themselves through the creative politics of dialogical-becomings.

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PLATEAU 6

Biovirtualities Potentialities versus Possibilities

Post-queer dialogical-becomings offer creative and productive ways to think about the materialities of life itself through a politics that is not limited by or within subjectivity and discourse. In the preceding plateaus, I explore how a politics of dialogical-becomings plateaus subjugated subjectivities and specifically representations, significations, and identifications by considering post-queer desire as a production of production. Dialogical-becomings are not so much interested in “postidentitarian” spaces than a politics that is itself continuously becoming-other. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy, affect is a key ingredient of post-queer politics and so becomingother is not to be the other but is, in concurrence with Semetsky, a becoming that is “always placed between two multiplicities, yet one term does not become the other; the becoming is something between the two” (2006, 6). Although this project has predominantly considered the becoming-other of contemporary queer politics and the plateauing of the queer/heteronormative dyad, Post-Queer Politics offers a larger political project that is committed to social justice and equity studies. I have articulated this much larger project through notions of democracy, citizenship, neoliberal capitalism, globalization, and schizo-academia. In what follows, I connect the theoretical movements of the preceding plateaus by considering how knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations are control mechanisms that produce new life forms. I refer to such productions as biovirtualities when read through Deleuzian affectivity and, more specifically, the virtualities and actualities of post-queer politics. This plateau produces a new line of flight that speaks to the virtual productivities of life itself by examining the politics around biovirtualities in an age of control societies. Deleuze’s thoughts on the virtual, as read through Bergson, make a critical distinction that is at the core of control mechanisms: the real/possible versus the actual/virtual. I consider the real/possible to function within the realm of subjectivity where politics is limited to the reiterated possibilities of the real: how, for instance, movement is always in relation to a priori discourses. We see  Christopher Miller offers an important consideration of “postidentitarian” politics as read through Deleuze and Guttari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2001).   Deleuze 1994; 1999.

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this specifically in the work on identity politics over the past few decades where attention is placed on how subjects are produced through the reiteration of norms that require recognition from the Other. As a result, agency stems from the possibility to create variations on these repetitions. Butler’s performativity is a clear example of this where subjects are constituted through the reiterations, or variations of reiterations, of identity norms. In agreement with Massumi, these signifying subjects are limited because of their fixed relationship to positionality: Signifying subject formation according to the dominant structure was often thought of in terms of ‘coding.’ Coding in turn came to be thought of in terms of positioning on a grid. The grid was conceived as an oppositional framework of culturally constructed significations: male versus female, black versus white, gay versus straight, and so on. A body corresponded to a ‘site’ on the grid defined by an overlapping of one term from each pair. The body came to be defined by its pinning to the grid. (2002, 2)

As I have been arguing throughout this project, signification inevitably results in “gridlock” and a “cultural freeze-frame” because the signifying subject can only move from one position to another: “Movement is entirely subordinated to the positions it connects. These are predefined” (3). Subjectivity and discourse operate through the realm of the possible where differentiation can only be accounted for on the limiting grid of subjectivity. Following Elizabeth Grosz, the signifying subject can only be thought of as a realization: the possible is both more than but also less than the real. It is more in the sense that the real selects from a number of possibles, limiting their ramifying effects; but it is less in the sense that it is the real minus existence. Realization is a process in which creativity, production is no longer conceivable and thus cannot provide an appropriate model for understanding the innovation and invention that marks evolutionary change. Making the possible real is simply giving it existence without adding to or modifying its conception. (2005, 107)

The possible is limiting because the real is always “an image of itself.” This is because possibilities are always determined before the subject in relation to predetermined grids. Performativity functions within the realm of the real for the reason that movement is always in relation to identity grids whether it be a strict reiteration or a variation on such reiterations. It speaks to how bodies are materialized through discourse. This situates a real that, as Grosz explains, always comes before materialization. For reasons that are outlined throughout this project, the signifying subject of the possible/real is closed off from the world since it is strictly confined to preceding intelligibilities such as identity 152

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norms. In contrast to realization that brings the past into the present—“the concretization of a preexistent plan or the realization of a program” (Grosz, 109)—actualization is the embodiment of future potentialities: “the opening up of the virtual to what befalls it.” Post-queer dialogical-becomings can engage the creative potentialities of the virtual because they are open to the world as actualizations rather than realizations. They spatially exist in the actual but are always directed towards the unexpected virtual as they become-other. Let us turn for a moment to Bergson’s analysis of Zeno’s paradoxes of movement as outlined by Massumi. When an arrow is released from a bow it does not encounter pregiven points. In contrast, when an arrow is released from a bow it passes through points and becomes a position when the arrow hits its target. In this case, it is the bull’s-eye. Rather than positionality preceding movement (the first case), we see from the second case that movement comes before positionality. As Massumi explains: It is only after the arrow hits its mark that its real trajectory may be plotted. The points or positions really appear retrospectively, working backward from the movement’s end. It is as if, in our thinking, we put targets along the path. The in-between positions are logical targets: possible endpoints…We stop it in thought when we construe its movement to be divisible into positions. (2002, 6)

Consequently, the possible is the reiteration of processes as a “back-formation” or “re-conditionings of the emerged” (10); the potential is a creative process as the “conditions of emergence.” The performative subject is this backformation   Grosz (1999) also differentiates between realization and actualization in order to further an understanding of the body’s movement as a potential—not a possible: “The process of realization, that ‘movement’ or vector from the possible to the real, is governed by the two principles of resemblance and limitation. The real exists in a relation of resemblance to the possible, functioning as its exact image, to which the category of existence or reality is simply added. In other words, the real and the possible are conceptually identical…Realization also involves the process of limitation, the narrowing down of possibilities, so that some are rejected and others made real. The field of the possible is broader than the real. Implicit in the coupling of limitation and resemblance, Deleuze suggests, is preformism: the real is already preformed in the possible insofar as the real resembles the possible” (25-26). Consequently, Grosz differentiates actualization from realization as follows: “The process of actualization is one of genuine creativity and innovation, the production of singularity or individuation. Where the possible/ real relation is regulated by resemblance and limitation, the virtual/actual relation is governed by the two principles of difference and creation. For the virtual to become actual, it must create the conditions for actualization: the actual in no way resembles the virtual. Rather, the actual is produced through a mode of differentiation from the virtual, a mode of divergence from it which is productive” (27). 153

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that reiterates what has already emerged. It is a sign unable to account for the subject’s potential because it works within the realm of the possible. It is clear that performativity works within the realm of the possible where subjects are confined to a grid and ultimately reach gridlock when Butler claims that “it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible” (1990, 185). This is precisely the reason why signifying subjects are not dialogical-becomings because movement can only be conceptualized through the points of a (discursive) grid. Following Colebrook’s critique of Butler, “matter is only thinkable as matter, and hence as already discursive, effected as discourse’s other” (2000, 78). Rosemary Hennessy’s critique of the subject as purely discursive is also shared here: Throughout her work, Butler’s approach to the problem of identity begins with the premise that identity is only a matter of representation, of the discourses by which subjects come to be established. This notion of the discursively constructed subject is heavily indebted to Foucault, and it is Foucault’s problematic concept of materialism and of discursive practices that troubles Butler’s analysis as well. While Foucault understands the materiality of the social to be comprised of both discursive and nondiscursive practices, he never explains the material connection between them. Furthermore, most of his attention is invariably devoted to discursive practices. This social logic of non-correspondence appears in Butler’s analysis, too, and is most explicit in her explanation of materialism in Bodies That Matter (1993)…This poststructural reading of materiality begins with the premise that matter is never simply given but is materialized. But what constitutes this materializing is one domain of social production only—the regulatory practices, norms, and discourses that constitute ideology. (1995, 148-149)

This important critique of discursive materialization is shared amongst many who are concerned with the materialities of life itself rather than how life is materialized through significations, representations, and identifications. Queer, as it stands against heteronormativity, is only capable of resignifying the possible when the desire is to destabilize normative discourses. The disruptive vision of queer is always a possibility because it is only capable of engaging the real/possible as it functions on a grid of positionality. This is the case even if the intention is to challenge the grid itself. A politics seeking possibilities to decenter norms is limited from the onset because movement is always and only   “The concept of materiality can only be conceptualized through the very material forms of signification (actual linguistic marks or differences). However, the material forms of signification can only be seen as material after the concept of materiality that they constitute” (Colebrook 2000, 80).  See, for example, Nelson (1999), Nussbaum, (1999), and Sedgwick (2003). 154

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in relation to positions on a grid. Post-queer dialogical-becomings are quite different in that their politics rest in potentialities rather than possibilities. As Massumi explains: Possibility is back-formed from potential’s unfolding…Potential is unprescripted. It only feeds forward, unfolding toward the registering of an event: bull’s-eye. Possibility is a variation implicit in what a thing can be said to be when it is on target. Potential is the immanence of a thing to its still indeterminate variation, under way. (2002, 9)

This is not to suggest that possibilities have no place in a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings. It suggests instead, as Massumi writes, that “their sphere of applicability must be recognized as limited to a particular mode of existence, or a particular dimension of the real (the degree to which things coincide with their own arrest” (7). Recall from plateau one that post-queer is not an abandoning of queer but a plateauing of queer in order to consider what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post. Dialogical-becomings are therefore not limited by the possible/real because they are virtualities that are actualized through process of becoming-other. Let me be clear that the virtual I am speaking of here is not a virtual reality because it is not a copy of the real world. It is instead an immanent relationship where actualities result from virtualities and so dialogical-becomings are produced through these immanent relationships. As Deleuze states: A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities. What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its particular reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself. But however inseparable an object and a subject may be from their actualization, the plane of immanence is itself virtual, so long as the events that populate it are virtualities. Events or singularities give to the plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events   Massumi (2002) offers the following description of the relationship between the actual and the virtual: “Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded…The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt—albeit reduced and contained” (30). 155

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their full reality. The event considered as non-actualized (indefinite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants: a transcendental field, a plane of immanence, a life, singularities. (2005, 31)

The virtual is thus a process of duration where the future is unexpected and the actual is the object in space. Bakhtinian carnivalesque embodies this actual/ virtual relationship because the potential to challenge officialdoms arises from unexpected and unpredictable virtualities that are actualized through the popular negotiations of carnival bodies. We see from this example that the virtual is not a separate entity from the actual but is instead deeply implicated in every aspect of carnival life. This is because the virtual is an idea and not a representation: With representation, concepts are like possibilities, but the subject of representation still determines the object as really conforming to the concept, as an essence…The idea makes a virtue of quite different characteristics. The virtuality of the Idea has nothing to do with possibility. Multiplicity tolerates no dependence on the identical in the subject or in the object. The events and singularities of the Idea do not allow any positing of an essence as ‘what the thing is.’ (Deleuze 1994, 191)

Carnivalesque dialogical-becomings are potentialities (not possibilities) where the virtual is the “presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness” (192). The virtual is, as Burlein (2005) suggests, “[o]bjective yet unconscious. Real yet not actually existing in the light of day. Not identical with the empirical yet not supplemental to it. Different in kind from the empirical yet subsisting in and alongside its partial solutions” (28). The virtual is the production of production and so dialogical-becomings are produced through the reality of the virtual and not a virtual reality. For instance, Grosz explores prostheses as the actualization of the virtual: in contrast to prosthetic objects as the “completion” of an “existing body,” Grosz proposes that the prosthetic “can be understood in terms of the unexpected and unplanned-for emergence of new properties and abilities.” (2005, 148). Post-queer politics is   Grosz 2005, 105-111.   “In short, representation and knowledge are modeled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by themselves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instance which engenders them as cases, and which they resolve or conclude. By contrast, the Idea and ‘learning’ express that extrapropositional or subrepresentative problematic instance” (Deleuze 1994, 192).   “But prostheses may also be regarded, not as a confirmation of a pregiven range of possible actions, but as an opening up of actions that may not have been possible before, the creation of new bodily behaviors, qualities, or abilities rather than the 156

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an engagement with what Deleuze refers to as a virtual multiplicity: “The virtual possesses the reality of a task to be performed or a problem to be solved: it is the problem which orientates, conditions and engenders solutions, but these do not resemble the conditions of the problem” (1994, 212). Post-queer dialogicalbecomings are therefore not discursive materializations but are “real-materialbut-incorporeal” becomings that are actualized through virtualities.10 Knowledge Societies

The shift from Foucauldian disciplinary societies to Deleuzian control societies is ongoing. Control mechanisms emerge out of the incapacities and inabilities of disciplinary practices to deal with the desire for more efficient means of production that characterize neoliberal capitalism and globalization. As Deleuze states: The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; control societies function with a third generation of machines, with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination. (1995c, 180)

The relationship between knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations illustrates the new ways in which life itself is being produced through the vast speed of contemporary politics. Knowledge, information, and communication are fundamental to the operations of control societies replacement of or substitute for missing or impaired organs. Rather than understanding prosthetic incorporation as the completion or finalization of an existing body image and the body’s associated and expected practices, that is, instead of regarding the prosthetic as the corporeal completion of a plan already given, an ideal norm, it can be understood in terms of the unexpected and unplanned-for emergence of new properties and abilities…prostheses may actualize virtualities that the natural body may not in itself be able to access or realize, inducing a mutual metamorphosis, transforming both the body supplemented and the body that supplements it” (Grosz 2005, 147-148). 10  “One way of starting to get a grasp on the real-material-but-incorporeal is to say it is to the body, as a positioned thing, as energy is to matter. Energy and matter are mutually convertible modes of the same reality. This would make the incorporeal something like a phase-shift of the body in the usual sense, but not one that comes after it in time. It would be a conversion or unfolding of the body contemporary to its every move. Always accompanying. Fellow-traveling dimension of the same reality” (Massumi 2002, 5). 157

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because they are not limited by space. As I argue elsewhere (Ruffolo 2008b), knowledge societies are unique because they grow exponentially: information and communication do not have to refer back to an original site in order to function (arborescence) because they are connected through continuous breaks and flows (rhizome). Knowledge societies are not limited by traditional supply and demand models of economics that rely on fixed subject positions such as producers and consumers. In contrast, the economics of knowledge societies function rhizomatically where knowledge can be produced, circulated, reproduced, and recirculated. As knowledge circulates, it increases its potential to grow and as it expands its value is enhanced. Fixed spaces (factories) and subjects (workers) are not required in knowledge societies because production is indefinite. Neoliberal agendas marked by privatization and corporatization are certainly not void in higher educational spaces. In fact, postsecondary institutions are deeply entrenched within the rhizomatic operations of knowledge societies. In an overview of her paper, Jamie-Lynn Magnusson highlights how information and communication have become central to the programming of higher education in Ontario: The thesis of this paper is that information and communication technology (ICT) is changing the social organization of higher education in that it is embedded within government policy woven through the knowledge society discourse. The knowledge society discourse supports a neoliberal ‘reform’ of the higher education system, undermining the public framework that has been strong in the Canadian provincial systems, including the province of Ontario. I will show how knowledge society discourse, which argues that a new economics based on digitized knowledge and communications is on the horizon, shifts an understanding of education as a public good to an understanding of education as a privatized global business. Ontario represents an excellent case study of a higher education system undergoing a massive change from a social welfare public system to a system oriented to international market dynamics. (2005, 121)

This shift towards education as a privatized global business is explicitly seen in the internationalization of higher education: postsecondary institutions are marketed to enroll international students who not only pay higher tuition fees than local students but contribute to local economies through, for instance, sales tax and housing costs without benefiting from the social services that are offered to those with “full” citizenship. Moreover, talks are currently underway in some Ontario universities to charge part-time students the same amount of tuition as full-time students even though they may only enroll in a few courses. This is an apparent result of the current “global financial crisis.” Knowledge societies extend well beyond the ivory tower and state policies. Michael Peters 158

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and Tina Besley describe the production of ideas over objects in their notion of “knowledge cultures” that have caught the attention of global networks such as the World Bank (or what Peters and Besley refer to as the “knowledge bank”). In referencing Joseph Stiglitz, an ex-chief economist of the World Bank, Peters and Besley explain how “universities as traditional knowledge institutions have become the leading future service industries and need to be more fully integrated into the prevailing mode of production” (2006, 161). Differential accumulation, as outlined by Nitzan and Bichler (2002), is unavoidably infused in knowledge societies as postsecondary institutions compete in order to gain more control over social processes—competitions that link higher education with corporatized structures and privatized visions. Biotechnological Innovations

The economics of knowledge societies situate information and communication as indefinite commodities that are forever becoming-other as they circulate through global markets. The production of ideas over objects is certainly not divorced from materiality: knowledge is not simply ideological and abstract but is deeply rooted in the materialities of life itself. The virtualities of knowledge societies are deeply connected to the actualities of life. Body and identity politics are no longer conceptualized as subjugated subjectivities in the realm of knowledge societies but are seen through intensities that are virtually directed. We can think about the virtual productivities of life through the intensities that arise out of the intersection of knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations. Biotechnologies are a unique aspect of the life sciences domain in that their mandate extends well beyond the promotion of health and the treatment of diseases: biotechnologies not only engage life by healing and treating life forms but more importantly produce life itself through the biovirtualities of such innovations. Paul Rabinow and Talia Dan-Cohen’s A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (2005) encounters these important productivities through their dialogue with (predominantly) Celera Diagnostics in California. Rabinow and Dan-Cohen specifically focus on the genome and how “the knowledge becoming available about the human genome and its implications for human health can now be turned into a powerful diagnostic apparatus that will continue to produce an incessant proliferation of new details” (2). We need not go beyond the title of their book to comprehend the scale of biotech innovations: the machine to make a future actually refers to Celera Diagnostics’ desire to produce life itself through the virtual productivities of innovative research. There are of course many ethical ramifications of such desires and it would be inappropriate for me to account for their complexity in a 159

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section of a plateau in this book.11 With that said, I want to consider more closely the virtualities of biotechnological innovations and how these productivities are connected to higher education and knowledge societies so as to uncover the insidious practices that produce life itself. I hope that this exploration can lead to new ethical discussions that extend beyond the disciplinary practices of subjectivity: how subjects are subjugated by the discursive parameters of biotechnologies. I am thinking, for example, of Nikolas Rose’s work on “race in the age of genomic medicine” where the concern is with new racial discourses that are being produced through genomic research: In our present configuration of knowledge, power, and subjectivity, what is at stake in these arguments about human genome variations among populations is not the resurgence of racism, the specter of stigmatization, a revived biological reductionism, or the legitimation of discrimination: it is the changing ways in which we are coming to understand individual and collective human identities in the age of genomic medicine and the implications of these for how we, individually and collectively, govern our differences. (2007, 185)

Rose’s concern with knowledge, power, and subjectivity is clearly Foucauldian as it follows the disciplinary practices that produce subjects through biomedical research. Rose’s arguments around “what bodies think they are” are fundamentally limiting because they remain within the realm of materialization: how subjects are materialized through biotechnological discourses. In control societies, the focus is not on what bodies are (what they think they are) but what they can do. The ethical discussions that I hope come out of these arguments should not be concerned with how new discourses are being produced or, to follow the example above, how subjects are racialized through biotechnologies. Examining biotechnological innovations through the actual/virtual (rather than real/possible) involves a consideration of what bodies can do and how, for instance, new racialities are produced through the material productivities of biotechnologies and knowledge economics. The virtualities of biotechnologies and knowledge societies are controlling mechanisms that produce life itself. The economics of such innovations spark new interests in what Kaushik Sunder Rajan refers to as biocapital (2007). Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Sunder Rajan examines genomic research and drug developments in the United States and India throughout the turn of the last century. Sunder Rajan explores how genomic research becomes a commodity

11 See, for example, Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald’s Exploding the Gene Myth (1999). 160

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that can circulate on global markets.12 Knowledge economics are very much a part of these circulations where biological information and biological materiality become key commodities for controlling social processes: Therefore there is biological information, and the biological material (cell or tissue) from which the information is derived, material that subsequently becomes the substrate of experiments that validate the leads suggested by the information. In the process, information is detached from its biological material originator to the extent that it does have a separate social life, but the ‘knowledge’ provided by the information is constantly relating back to the material biological sample. The database plays a key intermediary role in the transition of ‘information’ to ‘knowledge’…It is knowledge that is always relating back to the biological material that is the source of the information; but it is also knowledge that can only be obtained, in the first place, through extracting information from the biological material. (42)

The innovative knowledges produced through biological information and biological materiality function dialogically where biological information stimulates research on biological materiality and the innovative knowledges that come out of this research inform new ways to think about biological information. In other words, something new is always created out of something given in biotechnological research. Nitzan and Bichler’s differential accumulation is very much a part of these advancements where the interest of biotech companies is not to produce the most products but to control the social processes of innovation so as to control global markets. Like Rose, Sunder Rajan relies on Foucauldian biopolitics to comprehend the neoliberal and global processes of biotechnological innovations. As Sunder Rajan explains: The biopolitical, then, does not just refer to the ways in which politics impact everyday life, or in which debates over life…impact politics, but rather points to the ways in which our very ability to comprehend ‘life’ and ‘economy’ in their modernist guises is shaped by particular epistemologies that are simultaneously enabled by, and in turn enable, particular forms of institutional structures. (1314)

12  “Genomics allows the metaphor of life-as-information to become material reality that can be commodified. In other words, one does not just have to conceive of life as information: one can now represent life in informational terms that can be packaged, turned into a commodity, and sold as a database” (Sunder Rajan 2007, 16). 161

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So although Sunder Rajan gets to the politics of life itself by critically engaging the dialogical productions of innovative knowledges through biological information and biological materiality (a step further than Rose), his analysis is limited because of how “life” and the “economy” are discursively produced through epistemological domains. We see this, for example, in Sunder Rajan’s interest in what he refers to as “corporate regimes of governance” that discipline populations in one of two ways: corporations take over the servicing of populations that were once reserved for the welfare state (what is predominantly the case in the United States) or the state itself is becoming more corporatized (the current case in India).13 I am not suggesting that Sunder Rajan’s arguments are in any way misinformed or ill conceived. I am, more generally, concerned with the limitations of such arguments that focus on the individualization of subjects through disciplinary practices that are explicitly linked to institutional apparatuses. I see biotechnologies to be located within the realm of knowledge societies where life itself is produced through the virtualities of biotechnological innovations: how the virtualities of neoliberal capitalism and globalization become actualized through biotechnological innovations and how these knowledges are virtually directed in the future so as to control social processes. The knowledge networks inherent to biocapital function rhizomatically rather than arborescently (referring back to corporations or states) where life is produced in the future. Sunder Rajan recognizes this, however, when he states that this is all a game that is “played in the future in order to generate the present that enables that future” (34). It is critical that we pay close attention to the virtual productivities of biotechnological innovations that seek to control life through the rhizomatic networks of knowledge, information, and communication: how new materialities of life are being produced and how this creates new means to dividualize rather than individualize bodies. Biosecurity and Biovalue: Producing New Life Forms

New life forms are produced through the rhizomatic networks of knowledge economics. Biotechnologies are very much a part of these social and political investments that produce biovirtualities through innovative research. Part of our discussion in a research group out of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto led by Jamie-Lynn Magnusson and Elizabeth Abergel focuses on how biotech companies are, quite directly, producing culture through the financing of educational curricula and artsinformed productions. In one of our sessions we examined the film Strange Culture (2007) written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson. Strange Culture 13 Sunder Rajan 2007, 80. 162

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looks at the circumstances surrounding the accused bioterrorist activities of Steve Kurtz (a professor at the University of Buffalo, SUNY). As documented in the film, Kurtz phoned the police upon learning of his wife’s death during her sleep. When the policed arrived at Kurtz’s residence, they discovered his samples of biocultures that he was planning on using in an upcoming exhibit for “The Critical Art Ensemble”: a group Kurtz belonged to that challenged the ways in which government, military, science, and industry work together to produce culture. FBI, HazMat, and the Terrorism Task Force were immediately called to his house and he was subsequently charged with bioterrorism because of the machines and materials that he temporarily housed for his exhibit. According to government officials, it appeared as if he was housing weapons of mass destruction. It is interesting to note, however, that Kurtz in fact purchased the genetically modified organisms such as mutated flies on the internet himself. Kurtz, along with his colleague Robert Ferrell (former Chair of the Genetics Department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health), exemplify the extreme measures that are taken to instill fear in the public so that individual rights can be forfeited. A recent online article in The Badger, a newspaper of the University of Sussex Students’ Union, uncovers a similar silencing yet from a different perspective. The article, titled “Spies stalk students” and written by Charles Whitehouse, discusses how Pfizer, a major pharmaceutical company, may be spying on students at Harvard University. In the fall of 2008, students protested against the financial influences that such pharmaceutical companies have on university research. According to the article, Pfizer gives $350,000 to Harvard’s medical school, they back two research projects, and supply funds to support 149 faculty. What is more alarming is how an employee of Pfizer was caught photographing students in the protest. Pfizer, as can be expected, claims that the employee was taking personal pictures. These examples raise critical questions around biosecurity and the extreme actions that are taken to control social processes. The ability to virtually produce life through the virtualities of knowledge and information is also encapsulated in synthetic biology and the creation of new “living” systems. For example, the internet-based BioBricks Foundation functions rhizomatically by giving researchers and scientists (or anyone for that matter) the tools to build on each others’ bio-designs. BioBricks, or DNA sequences, challenge traditional sciences that rely on fixed representations and arboreal structures. They construct new biological systems by rhizomatically connecting to other BioBricks. The purpose is, as the website describes on its homepage, to “program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.” Unlike representations and significations that rely on arboreal subjectivities, BioBricks are self-reproducing organisms where production is indefinite. They exemplify the biovirtualities of biotechnologies that produce new life forms by dissolving the binary between humans and machines. As 163

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Donna Haraway describes in her cyborg manifesto: “Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly. In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices” (1991, 164). Haraway describes the cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149). The examples above encompass the organic and technological components that are central to Haraway’s cyborg. The movements of these biotechnological innovations are always rhizomatic without reference to any arboreal structure. They are not necessarily hybrids of machines and organisms because they challenge the organism itself as a de/reterritorialized machine. It is not enough to critique dominant structures such as biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. The urgency lies in a desire to understand and expose the underbelly (Bhattacharyya) of these innovations and how the illicit movement of people and things brings about opportunities to engage global markets. I am thinking of how “illegal” markets can be created to purchase and subsequently sell biological materiality and how this information can become the property of corporations and states. Luciana Parisi, in Abstract Sex (2004), is similarly concerned with such productivities. Parisi considers the commercialization of the virtual (rather than the possible) through what she refers to as “bioinformatic capitalism”: Bio-informatic capitalism, thus, marks the threshold towards a new recombination of information transmission: the engineering of all useless flows at far from equilibrium conditions producing unprecedented forms of capitalization. Rather than repressing the capacity of a body-sex to reproduce, the biodigital order commercializes the unpredictable (the virtual and not the possible) power of mutations marking a new bifurcation between the molecular control of sexual reproduction and the molecular proliferation of bacterial sex. (25)

Bio-informatic capitalism extends well beyond the individualizing and subjugating practices of disciplinary societies. It operates through the flows and intensities of control societies where desire is a productive force. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also consider the capitalization of genetic information and how “what we previously considered part of nature and thus common property, the argument goes, is really the product of human labor and invention, and thus eligible for private ownership” (2004, 182). Hardt and Negri reference the case when in 1981 the University of California medical center patented the T cells and genetic information of one of their patients, John Moore, who was undergoing treatment for hairy-cell leukemia. Moore’s attempt to sue the university was unsuccessful as the Supreme Court granted all rights of this information to the University of California. As Hardt and 164

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Negri explain, “the University of California was the rightful owner of the cell line because a naturally occurring organism…is not patentable, whereas the information scientists derive from it is patentable because it is the result of human ingenuity” (183). Similar circumstances are occurring in Iceland with DeCode Genetics: a company specializing in extracting, recording and storing the genetic information of the Icelandic population. The “seed wars” are another example of such bio-informatic capitalism where, according to Hardt and Negri, many of the “poorest regions of the world” are wealthiest in terms of the vast variety of plant and animal species.14 With that said, it is no surprise to learn that profits can be generated in northern regions because such extractions are deemed “private property” whereas southern regions do not generate such wealth because they are “considered the common heritage of mankind.” Vandana Shiva begins to map out such ideas through the notion of biopiracy in her book that shares this name. Gargi Bhattacharyya, John Gabriel, and Stephen Small offer an important overview of these arguments in their book Race and Power: Global Racism in the Twenty-First Century: Shiva describes the transformation of this process for the purposes of biopiracy. The new era of biopiracy updates this system of retrospective legitimation, so that now the development of biotechnology renders the organic world not only knowable, but, through the trickery of patents, ownable. We are witnessing a corrosion of scholarship which blurs the boundaries between understanding and owning, between describing and inventing. Now corporate science forgets all humility before creation, and instead imagines itself as ultimate creator. From this comes the strange spectacle of the assertion of intellectual property rights over long-used plant remedies, the genetic makeup of coveted basic foodstuff such as basmati rice, or even the DNA of communities under threat. (2002, 120)

14 As Hardt and Negri explain: “One of the most intetersting struggles in agriculture, for example, which we will discuss in more detail later, is over who owns plant germplasm, that is, the genetic information encased in the seed..Seed corporations patent the new plant varieties they create, often today through genetic engineering, but farmers have long discovered, conserved, and improved plant genetic resources without any comparable legal claim to ownership. The food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has thus proposed the concept of Farmers’ Rights to plant genetic resources that is meant to balance the Plant Breeders’ Rights. Our aim here is not to praise or condemn these practices—some scientific interventions in agriculture are beneficial and others detrimental. Our primary point is simply that the process of agricultural change and the struggle over rights are increasingly dependent on the control and production of information, specifically plant genetic information. That is one way in which agriculture is being informationalized” (2004, 112-113). 165

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This commercialization of virtual productivities is live and well and certainly not removed from such organizations as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. These groups clearly function as neocolonial powers that control at a distance. The creation of a “global economy” is one that keeps countries in their “developing” stages through loans with exceptionally high interest rates and unrealistic payment plans, national policies that enforce neoliberal agendas, and trade tariffs that benefit the economics of developed nations. In addition to considering how such international players capitalize on, as Robert McRuer states, disabilities and how their neoliberal agendas are antidisabled—“the imposition of ‘user fees’ and the privatization of health care, water, education, and electricity has had disproportionately negative effects on people with disabilities, people with HIV/AIDS, women, people of color, the elderly, and poor people” (2006, 196)— it is also critical to account for, as these examples above speak to, the creative ways in which the materialities of life are being produced through the virtualities of control mechanisms that no longer confine bodies to specific spaces and tasks but control them through the rhizomatic networks of knowledge, information, and communication. Biotechnological innovations and knowledge economics are productions in the realm of the actual/virtual. They are not real/possible backformations that function through representations and significations: they do not reiterate the past because they are always directed towards the future. The biovirtualities of biotechnologies and knowledge societies raise important questions surrounding how new biovalues are being produced through knowledge, information, and communication: how new ways to think about sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability are produced as life is directed towards the future. The actualities of these virtualities are deeply implicated in inequitable structures that privilege some at the expense of others. Materiality is not a fixed and stable essence that becomes, for instance, racialized through class discourses. Although such readings remain important for equity studies, we see from the examples above that new racialities are produced through the virtualities of biotechnological research and knowledge economics. The rhizomatic networks outlined in this plateau offer new ways to think about the potentiality to control social processes—not by disciplining through the possibilities that have already emerged (real/possible) but by intensifying life through what is to come (actual/virtual).

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Involutionary Matters I began this project by outlining in plateau one how contemporary notions of queer have in many ways reached a political peak because of an interest in identity politics and more specifically heteronormativity. Post-Queer Politics engages the virtual productivities of life by plateauing the queer/heteronormative dyad through the creation of deterritorialized lines of flight. The vision of postqueer is to make new theoretical, philosophical, and practical connections that move away from Western and Eurocentric discourses of queer that are in many respects unable to account for the underbelly of neoliberal and global politics. This is, as I explain in plateau one, not to suggest the end of queer but a plateauing of queer as we know it today: post-queer is not so much an after queer but a new flow of production that emerges out of the limitations of contemporary queer politics. To consider what something post might do for queer and what queer might do for something post is to think critically about queer studies and theories in relation to the complexities of contemporary politics that are becoming less disciplinary and more controlled: how life is becoming less disciplined through specific spaces and tasks and is becoming more controlled through such mechanisms as information and access. The vision of this project is not to challenge, refute, or displace queer; nor does it suggest that we replace queer with post-queer. Much work has been done over the past few decades on identity politics and a politics of identities of which queer studies is a part and so I certainly do not intend to leave these important advancements behind. Post-queer offers new ways to think about life and how life is played out in the realm of control societies that dividualize rather than individualize bodies through virtual productivities that are directed towards the future rather than the past. As I outline in plateau one, the intention here is to plateau the queer/ heteronormative dyad by creating new flows of production for contemporary queer studies. The intersection of queer with Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy and Bakhtin’s material philosophy is but one flow of production that can plateau the queer/heteronormative dyad and should not serve as an exhaustive theoretical framework. Post-Queer Politics is itself a dialogicalbecoming that functions as a nomadic science that continuously makes and breaks connections by deterritorializing the spaces it encounters. For example, post-queer deterritorializes queer through the creation of a new line of flight vis-à-vis Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari

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deterritorialize an intersubjective reading of Bakhtin through their materialist philosophy while Bakhtin’s heteroglossia deterritorializes a positivistic reading of Deleuze and Guattari. At the core of such lines of flight is a desire to deterritorialize subjectivity so as to rethink its role in relation to contemporary political theorizations. An interest in the transition from humans to subjects has largely spread throughout poststructural theorizations during the latter part of the twentieth century. We see this most notably in the production of medicalsubjects, prisoner-subjects, and sexuality-subjects in the works of Foucault. Theorizations based in subjectivity share common concerns with how subjects become intelligible through representations, significations, and identifications. In plateau one, I map out how such concerns are rooted in discourse where language becomes the fundamental means for conceptualizing experience. Although Bakhtin offers a materialist philosophy of language, it is critical to note that life, for Bakhtin, can never be reduced to language or discourse because bodies are moving forward dialogically where something new is always created through something given. More specifically, Bakhtinian language in its material form is further displaced from a subjective reading when intersected with Deleuze and Guattari. Consequently, Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari are not opposed to representations, significations, and identifications even though their projects do not work within such fields of subjectivity. Their political commitments operate within a completely different field where life is open rather than closed to the world as it indefinitely becomes-other. The various plateaus of this project center on what I refer to as dialogicalbecomings. I introduce and explore this term in order to account for the creative potentialities of life that are not restricted by, within, or through discourse. This inevitably entails a closer consideration of the materialities of life rather than how life is materialized through discourse. Unlike subjectivity that positions subjects on predetermined grids, post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings are potentialities that are forever moving forward. As I explain in plateau six, dialogical-becomings function within the realm of the actual/virtual rather than the real/possible. It is through the actual/virtual that we can begin to think about life itself outside of materialization and positionality so as to avoid unnecessary and unproductive gridlocks that have consumed many poststructural politics. The queer/heteronormative dyad is one such gridlock where movement is always and only in relation to a priori structures. So while Post-Queer Politics offers important implications for contemporary queer studies and theories, it has the potential to redefine a broader spectrum of politics that frame life through subjective capacities. A post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings provides a critical lens for thinking about life outside of the limitations of subjectivity through a new language to account for experience without reducing experience to language. These movements are, as I explain above, centrally framed through the theories and philosophies of Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin. This 168

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coupling embodies the creative potentialities of post-queer because Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy offers a particular reading of Bakhtin that does not limit his ideas to intersubjectivity and Bakhtin provides a critical social heteroglossia for Deleuze and Guattari so as to avoid a positivistic reading. The intersection of Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin is one relationship that can plateau queer and post-queer. They are by no means the future of queer but a potential deterritorialization of contemporary queer politics. Dialogicalbecomings speak to the highly contextualized negotiations of life that are deeply connected to life’s materialities. They are therefore not interested in how life is materialized through discourse but are instead concerned with materialities that are always open to the world rather than closed off from it. Although there is no central root or constant reference for post-queer politics, becoming does take precedence over being: this is not because becoming opposes being (they are not binaries) but that becoming works within a different realm than being where, for instance, dialogical-becomings are always moving forward (rather than being directed towards the past) as something new is created out of something given. Post-Queer Politics is itself a dialogical-becoming that is indefinitely becoming-other as it plugs into the rhizomatic networks of critical theories and equity studies. Its creative potential lies in the connections that can be made with other theories, philosophies, and activist movements that are interested in the material productivities of life. The ongoing shift from disciplinary societies (Foucault) to control societies (Deleuze) runs throughout the plateaus of this project and it serves as an important lens to articulate the current climate of neoliberal capitalism and globalization. This shift is central to post-queer politics because it highlights new ways for thinking about the relationship amongst bodies, identities, and culture. At the heart of such a movement are the processes in which life is becoming less individualized and more dividualized where the inefficiencies of disciplinary techniques/technologies turn into control mechanisms: it is not that control societies have replaced disciplinary societies but that they are involved in an ongoing negotiation. As life becomes more and more implicated in virtual productivities that are played out in the future, new control mechanisms must be produced in order to account for life’s metaproductions that no longer individualize bodies amongst each other but dividualize them within themselves. I have examined such virtualities through notions of citizenship, democracy, higher education, knowledge economics, and biotechnological innovations. The applications of dialogical-becomings in plateaus four through six are only a sample of rhizomatic networks that make no differentiation between production and its products because everything is a production of production. There are certainly many other networks that need to be accounted for and so I hope that the interests mapped in these plateaus can serve as a springboard for future analyses of contemporary control mechanisms that no longer confine 169

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bodies to specific spaces and tasks but control them through such measures as knowledge, information, and communication. With that said, it is imperative that we not only consider masochistic productions of productions (such as the intensification of academic bodies in plateau five) but also, and perhaps more importantly, the underbelly of neoliberal capitalism and globalization as outlined by Bhattacharyya. The underbelly of life necessarily assumes, as Bhattacharyya explains, that to be “globalised does not mean the same to all. On the contrary, where and who you are will shape your experience of being globalised to such an extent that it can be hard to chart the continuity between different moments” (2005, 21). This entails, as outlined in plateau four, a grave concern with the illicit movement of people and things and how exploitation increasingly becomes the driving force for Western and Eurocentric productions of productions. All life is therefore not masochistically negotiated: although Deleuzian masochism offers a relevant lens for thinking about the productions of productions of academic life (the schizo-academia as outlined in plateau five), it should not be considered a universal lens for thinking about all experiences in relation to neoliberal capitalism and globalization. As I explain in plateau four, the sex trade workers in Thailand are not afforded the privilege of free consent and reciprocal rights and duties that characterize Deleuzian masochism. Because, as I quote above, to be “globalized does not mean the same to all,” intensification is also not a universal affectivity. The underbelly of neoliberal capitalism and globalization as seen through the illicit movement of people and things speaks to a very different form of intensification where bodies are more exploited than masochistically negotiated. It is critical and of grave importance that a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings pays attention to these complexities without reducing the intensifications of life to any universal experience. As Deleuze states: Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous. A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt. One thing, it’s true, hasn’t changed—capitalism still keeps three quarters of humanity in extreme poverty, too poor to have debts and too numerous to be confined: control will have to deal not only with vanishing frontiers, but with mushrooming shantytowns and ghettos. (1995c, 181)

Post-queer dialogical-becomings represent a schizoanalytic politics that provides a new language for thinking about desire. Unlike psychoanalysis that locates desire through lack, schizoanalysis considers desire to be based on production. There are no self/other binaries in schizoanalysis where, for example, the self desires the other. This is because everything is a production of production where no distinction can be made between products and producers. This 170

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project moves us away from arborescence where movement is always and only in relation to a central root (i.e., life is structurally organized where movement always extends out of a fixed core). Although I have primarily considered such a politics through the queer/heteronormative dyad, there are certainly other politics out there that function similarly. I am specifically thinking of activisms that are seen as a sum of multiple parts where the activists themselves can only be conceptualized through subjugated subjectivities that are clearly arborescent in nature. We see this, for example, in Laclau and Mouffe’s radical and plural democracy where multiple subject positionalities frame their politics. To reiterate an argument made throughout this project, I am not suggesting that a politics based on arborescence is unnecessary and that the important activisms based on such organizations have gone or will go unnoticed. In fact, such politics have proven to be key when combating disciplinary techniques/technologies. I am instead suggesting that post-queer rhizomatic politics—one of indefinite connections that are mapped on smooth spaces—can be more productive and applicable for contemporary control societies that dividualize bodies through such mechanisms as access and information. In other words, considering the contemporary political climate of control societies, it can be more productive to plateau these multiplicities by creating new lines of flight rather than challenging dominant discourses through oppositional strategies that are confined to binary ideologies. For example, new political strategies are required to think about how new biovirtualities are being produced through the controlling mechanisms of knowledge economics and biotechnological innovations (plateau six). A rhizomatic politics can engage such productivities because it is capable of deterritorializing the various connections and multiple networks that comprise such virtualities. Nomadology, as I sketch in plateau four, is one strategy that can create a “war without battle lines” where unlike the hierarchical game pieces of chess that can only move based on predetermined rules, the game pieces of Go function collectively (yet not a sum of multiple parts that refer back to an original root) where all pieces must work together in order to deterritorialize the spaces they encounter. As Deleuze and Guattari describe: Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations within one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or intrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is way without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles 171

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even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The ‘smooth’ spaces of Go, as against the ‘striated’ spaces of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis. The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate that territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorialize the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing, be going elsewhere…). Another justice, another movement, another space-time. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 353)

This albeit lengthy quotation not only speaks to the difference between the game of chess and the game of Go; nor does it restrict itself to Deleuze and Guattari’s treatise of nomadology as outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. I include this extended quotation here to address the complexities and highlight the intricacies of nomadology and to more importantly begin to map out some of the potentialities that can come out of the dialogism between nomadic deterritorializations and a post-queer politics of dialogical-becomings. PostQueer Politics is a deterritorialized line of flight itself that nomadically produces a “war without battle lines” by plateauing the queer/heteronormative through what I refer to as dialogical-becomings. There is certainly no singular or unitary nomadic strategy and so I hope that this project encourages multiple nomadic potentialities that can deterritorialize current inequities and social justices. As Deleuze states: Just as the despot internalizes the nomadic war-machine, capitalist society never stops internalizing a revolutionary war-machine. It’s not on the periphery that the new nomads are being born (because there is no more periphery); I want to find out what sort of nomads, even motionless and stationary if need be, our society is capable of producing. (2004, 261)

Whatever the political strategy, it is of the utmost importance to account for social heteroglossia in these multiplicities so as to avoid positivistic political theorizations. Dialogical-becomings offer such a politics where the dialogic relation between Bakhtin and Deleuze and Guattari can create new potentialities to become-other. 172

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Post-queer dialogical-becomings focus on the creative aspects of life that are moving forward and indefinitely becoming-other. They are not backformations that inevitably result in subjective gridlock because they offer a new language for thinking about contemporary politics without reducing such politics to language. Post-queer does not intend to leave queer behind but to create a new line of flight that can plateau the current limitations of queer that are situated within the queer/heteronormative dyad. It is my hope that the dialogical-becomings of PostQueer Politics can help to reinvigorate contemporary politics and inspire new lines of flight that can account for the complex social heteroglossia of life itself.

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Index Abergel, Elizabeth 162 academia and carnival 146-9 and confession 125 contract, vs tenure 134, 135, 144 control 142, 143 deterritorialization 143-4 dialogical-becomings 127, 128, 135, 145, 150 and masochism 133, 134-5, 170 panopticism 124 and rhizomes 127-8 see also higher education; schizoacademia academic subjects and discipline 123 production of 124 affect, post-queer politics 151 agency in Foucault 59-60, 77, 87 and repetition 120 as schizo 119-22 antagonisms and chains of equivalences 102-3 and hegemony 102 anti-descriptivism, descriptivism, distinction 103-4 arborescence 35, 45 disciplinary societies 96 and duality 46 rhizome, comparison 47-8, 66, 93 assemblage theory, DeLanda 121 Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words 9 Bakhtin, Mikhail

on carnival 79, 147-8, 156 on centrifugal/centripetal forces 5n5 dialogical-becomings 85 intersubjectivity 71, 168 stylistics 72-3 utterances 68-9, 75-6, 85 works Speech Genres and Other Late Essays 65 The Dialogic Imagination 69 barbarian, despotic 112, 113 becoming being difference 50 shift 7, 42 citizenship as 111, 120 and desiring-machines 43, 111 difference as 48 politics of 39 post-queer as state of 8, 15, 28, 55 universality of 93 see also dialogical-becomings being becoming difference 50 shift 7, 42 and subjectivity 7 Bentham, Jeremy, Panopticon 14, 124 Bergson, Henri 153 Besley, Tina 159 Bhattacharyya, Gargi 114 Race and Power 165

Post-Queer Politics

Traffick 97 BioBricks, rhizomes 163 BioBricks Foundation 163 biopiracy 165 biopolitics 12, 91-2 biotechnologies 159-62 bioterrorism 163 biovirtualities 151, 171 Body without Organs (BwO) 50-4 capital as 52 and desiring-machines 34-5, 42-3 body/bodies 4-5 Butler on 20 as desiring-machines 34 discursive, and drag performances 26-7 Foucault on 18-19 Dudrick’s critique 19-20 and genealogy, connection 19 and identities 23 mastery of 12 non-essentiality 20 Olkowski on 33-4 and queer theory 14-15 rhizomatic 35 as site of inscription 18-19 Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects 117 Butler, Judith 8, 89 on the body 20 Fraser, exchanges 107-9 on identity, critique of 154 performativity 71, 75, 119-20, 152 on power 21-2, 125 on subjection 17 works “Bodies and Power, Revisited” 20 Bodies that Matter 26, 75 “Contingent Foundations” 22 Gender Trouble 20, 75 Giving an Account of Oneself 7 186

The Psychic Power of Life 21 capital academic 143 as BwO 52 knowledge 131 capitalism bio-informatic 164 and heterosexism 107-8 and masochism 132 carnival and academia 146-9 Bakhtinian 79, 147-8, 156 characteristics of 78, 147 decline 85 dialogical-becomings of 78, 156 grotesque realism 81, 146 language of 80 laughter 79-80 mask 80 masquerade, shift to 85 Rabelais’ depiction of 78, 81 regeneration potential 78, 79, 86 and virtuality 156 centrifugal/centripetal, Bakhtin on 5n5 Chang, Grace, Disposable Domestics 115 chess game characteristics 116 State apparatus as 116 citizenship as ability to purchase 114 as becoming 111, 120 in control societies 112 as culture 111 Colebrook, Claire 7, 27-8, 42, 154 concept, the, Massumi on 128 confession and academia 125 meaning 15 pervasiveness 125

INDEX

and truth 124 control academia 142, 143 discipline, shift from 90, 92, 95, 99, 139 control societies 36, 38 citizenship in 112 Deleuze on 95, 157, 170 disciplinary societies, shift from 123, 139, 157, 169 metaproduction 96, 96-7, 99, 112 as rhizomes 96, 99, 139 see also disciplinary societies crip theory, McRuer 30, 56 cultural norms, identities as 77 culture 33 citizenship as 111 higher education, relationship 136 and materialization 17-18 cyborg definition 164 manifesto, Haraway 164 Dan-Cohen, Talia see Rabinow, Paul Davis, Lennard, on identity 30 DeCode Genetics 165 DeLanda, Manuel, assemblage theory 121 Deleuze, Gilles on control societies 95, 157, 170 on virtuality 155-6, 157 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari political philosophy 93, 111, 112, 151, 167 critique of 96 works A Thousand Plateaus 39, 93, 115, 172 Anti-Oedipus 39, 93 Coldness and Cruelty 132 democracy 187

as creative potential 111 deterritorialization of 112-15 radical and plural 105-6, 110, 171 and Go game 119 Derrida, Jacques 75 descriptivism, anti-descriptivism, distinction 103-4 desire and desiring-production 43-4 MacCormack on 42 desiring-machines and becoming 43, 111 bodies as 34 and BwO 34-5, 42-3 desiring-production, and desire 43-4 deterritorializations academia 143-4 democracy 112-15 dialogical-becomings 47 education 95 and nomadology 32, 117 dialogic relations, dialogic speech, distinction 74 dialogical-becomings academia 127, 128, 135, 145, 150 Bakhtinian 85 carnivalesque 78, 156 as creative potentialities 61 deterritorializations 47 grotesque realism 81-2, 84, 147 and internal dialogism 70 as involutions 49 and new bodily canon 84-5 post-queer 42, 94, 107, 111, 155, 173 and post-queer politics 48, 50, 60, 85, 109, 121-2, 168 of utterances 64, 66-7, 68-9 war machine 115-16 dialogism, internal, and dialogicalbecomings 70 difference, as becoming 48

Post-Queer Politics

disability studies 30 disciplinary societies arborescence 96 control societies, shift to 123, 139, 157, 169 production 96 discipline and academic subjects 123 control, shift to 90, 92, 95, 99, 139 Foucault on 87-8, 90-1 security, interaction 90-1 discourse, and power 8, 10, 12, 18, 21 disidentification, as challenge to ideology 46 diversity, diversification, distinction 101-2 dividualization 36 individualization, shift 95 production of 123 domination, power, distinction 10 drag performances, and discursive bodies 26-7 duality, and arborescence 46 Dudrick, David, on the Foucauldian body 19-20 Duggan, Lisa, on homonormativity 36, 92

and queer theory 8-10, 13 on subjection 10, 123 works “The Birth of Biopolitics” 92, 95 Discipline and Punish 13, 14, 20, 87, 124, 138 The History of Sexuality 13, 16, 89, 124 Madness and Civilization 13 Security, Territory, Population 90, 95 Fraser, Nancy Butler, exchanges 107-9 Rethinking the Public Sphere 108 Freccero, Carla, “Queer Times” 56 Fuss, Diana 29 gay marriage 82, 83 gender essential, manufacture of 75 and sex 20 genealogy, body, connection 19 genetic information, patenting 164-5 genomic research, commodification 160-1 Giffney, Noreen, and Hird, Myra, Queering the Non/Human 56, 83 global economy, sex trade 98 globalization criminal economy 97 and queer theory 36 underbelly 97-9 Go game characteristics 116, 171-2 and post-queer nomadology 118 and radical and plural democracy 119 war machine as 116 governance, nature of 11 governmentality, Foucault on 13-14, 91-2

education, deterritorialization 95 Eng, David 3 Esteban Muñoz, José 3 exploitation, pervasiveness, and neoliberalism 98 Ferrell, Robert 163 Foucault, Michel agency in 59-60, 77, 87 on the body 18-19 on discipline 87-8, 90-1 on governmentality 13-14, 91-2 power in 87 188

INDEX

Gramsci, Antonio 101 Grosz, Elizabeth 9, 156 on realization 152-3 Volatile Bodies 33 grotesque realism and carnival 81, 146 dialogical-becomings 81-2, 84, 147 Guattari, Félix see Deleuze, Gilles

and performativity 126 post-queer politics of 123, 127 rhizome networks 140 see also academia Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), mandate 140-1 Hird, Myra on queer materialities 83-4 “The Evolution of Sex Diversity” 83 see also Giffney, Noreen homonormativity Duggan on 36, 92 and neoliberalism 92

Halberstam, Judith 3, 29 Hall, Stuart 79, 80 Halley, Janet 56 Haraway, Donna, cyborg manifesto 164 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Empire 36, 95, 164-5 hegemony and antagonisms 102 Laclau/Mouffe on 100-1 relationality of 101 Hennessy, Rosemary 154 Hershman-Leeson, Lynn, Strange Culture 162-3 heteroglossia definition 69 and novels 69-70 social 96, 149, 172 heteronormativity 2, 15 challenges to, by queer theory 16, 17 and neoliberalism 92 queer, dyad 4, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30-1, 54, 108, 167 heterosexism, and capitalism 107-8 hierarchical observations, micropenalties 88 higher education culture, relationship 136 and ICT 158 internationalization 158 and knowledge societies 159

ICT (Information and Communication Technology), and higher education 158 identities and bodies 23 challenges to 2 as cultural norms 77 mobility of 27 non-essentiality of 77 identity common political, Mouffe on 109-10 Davis on 30 and queer theory 15 ideology disidentification as challenge to 46 and signs 61 individualization, dividualization, shift 95 individuals, and societies 40 inscription body as site of 18-19 soul as form of 25 intersubjectivity Bakhtin’s 71, 168 subjectivity of 61 189

Post-Queer Politics

involutions, dialogical-becomings as 49

and academia 133, 134-5, 170 and capitalism 132 sadism, distinction 132-3 Massumi, Brian 40, 51, 76, 121, 152, 153 on concepts 128 on possibilities 155 materiality, language as 62 materialization and culture 17-18 and performativity 20 metaproduction control societies 96-7, 99, 112 and schizo-academia 129 slave trade 98 migrant, nomad, comparison 118 Mouffe, Chantal on common political identity 109-10 see also Laclau, Ernesto Muñoz, José 29

knowledge societies 157-9 economics of 158 and higher education 159 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 9 Kripke, Saul 103 Kurtz, Steve 163 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe on hegemony 100-1 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 36, 100, 101, 109 critique of 106-7 language of carnival 80 and conceptualization of experience 28-9, 168 as materiality 62 philosophies of 62-3 Saussurean 73 in subjectivity 62 laughter, carnival 79-80 learning, immanence of, Semetsky on 150 Levinas, Emmanuel 7

Nealon, Jeffrey 60 Alterity Politics 70-1 Foucault Beyond Foucault 59 Negri, Antonio see Hardt, Michael neoliberalism and homonormativity 92 and pervasive exploitation 98 networks, rhizomatic 46 new bodily canon, and dialogicalbecomings 84-5 Noble, David 137 Noble, J.B., Sons of the Movement 31 nomad emergence 31 ethical choices 32 migrant, comparison 118 war machine as 117 nomadology 6, 30, 31 and deterritorializations 32, 117 feminist reading 117

MacCormack, Patricia 71-2 Cinesexuality 23-4 on desire 42 McRuer, Robert 166 crip theory 30, 56 Magnusson, Jamie-Lynn 158, 162 management hierarchical 137 new model 138-9 scientific 136-7 Manning, Erin, politics of touch 149-50 mask, carnival 80 masochism 37 190

INDEX

see also post-queer nomadology novels, and heteroglossia 69-70 Olkowski, Dorothea, on bodies 33-4 Ontario Council on Graduate Studies (OCGS), role 140-1 other, and self, binary 7-8, 71, 72 panopticism 91 and academia 124 and discipline of the soul 124 pervasiveness 14-15 and Taylorism 138 Panopticon, goal 14, 124 Parisi, Luciana, Abstract Sex 164 Parker, Andrew 56 Patton, Paul 43, 94 on a war machine 116-17 Peeren, Esther, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture 61 performativity Butler’s 71, 75, 119-20, 152 and higher education 126-7 and materialization 20 and possibilities 154 and queer theory 25 Peters, Michael 158 plateaus, post-queer politics 32-8 politics majoritarian/minoritarian 94 schizoanalytic, post-queer 39-43 of touch, Manning 149-50 possibilities Massumi on 155 and performativity 154 vs potentialities 151-7 post-queer 4 dialogical-becomings 42, 94, 107, 111, 155, 173 meaning 56, 167 purpose of designation 6 and queer 30

as rhizomatic plateau 8, 29-30 schizoanalytic politics 39-43 as state of becoming 8, 15, 28, 55 as war machine 31 post-queer desire 23, 33, 34 post-queer nomadology 117, 118 and Go game 118 post-queer politics 28, 94 affect 151 and dialogical-becomings 48, 50, 60, 85, 109, 121-2, 168 of higher education 123, 127 plateaus 32-8 as rhizome 45 potentialities, vs possibilities 151-7 power Butler on 21-2, 125 and discourse 8, 10, 12, 18, 21 domination, distinction 10 in Foucault 87 nature of 10-11, 59 and resistance, relationship 59-60 production as anti-production 130 disciplinary societies 96 see also metaproduction public sphere 108 queer heteronormativity, dyad 4, 18, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30-1, 54, 108, 167 and post-queer 30, 44 as plateau 8 and subjectivity 16, 27 queer spaces, creation of 44 queer studies 1-2 future of 55-6 queer theory and bodies 14-15 and Foucault 8-10, 13 and globalization 36

191

Post-Queer Politics

Touching Feeling 56 self, and other, binary 7-8, 71, 72 Semetsky, Inna 151 on immanence of learning 150 service sectors, immaterial labor production 139-40 sex and gender 20 and gender performativity 23 state monitoring of 16 sex tourism, Thailand 98, 114 sex trade, global economy 98 Shiva, Vandana, Biopiracy 165 signification, limitations of 152 signifier empty 105-6 signified, disassociation 103 signs, and ideology 61 slave trade, metaproduction 98 Smith, Dorothy 34 social acts, utterances as 64-5 Social Text periodical 3, 55, 107 societies, and individuals 40 see also control societies; disciplinary societies; knowledge societies society, as indefinite impossibility 102 soul discipline by panopticism 124 as form of inscription 25 South Atlantic Quarterly 56 speech genres 65-6 State nature of 11 and state 113-14 State apparatus as chess game 116 war machine, distinction 116 Stiglitz, Joseph 159 stylistics, Bakhtinian 72-3 subjection Butler on 17

heteronormativity, challenges to 16, 17 and identity 15 origins 1n1 and performativity 25 use 2, 3 quilting point examples 104-5 meaning 104 Rabelais, François 36 carnival depiction 78, 81 Rabinow, Paul, and Talia Dan-Cohen, A Machine to Make a Future 159 realization, Grosz on 152-3 regeneration, potential, carnival 78, 79, 86 repetitition, and agency 120 resistance, and power, relationship 59-60 rhizome/s and academia 127-8 arborescence, comparison 47-8, 66, 93 BioBricks 163 control societies as 96, 99, 139 networks 46 higher education 140 post-queer politics as 45 utterance as 67, 69 Rose, Nikolas 160 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, Venus in Furs 132, 133-4 sadism, masochism, distinction 1323 schizo-academia 129-30 and metaproduction 129 and pleasure-pain contracts 134 schizoanalysis 47, 112, 129, 170-1 security, discipline, interaction 90-1 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 29 192

INDEX

Foucault on 10, 123 subjectivity and being 7 of intersubjectivity 61 language in 62 and queer 16, 27 Sunder Rajan, Kaushik 162 Biocapital 160-1 superaddressees, Bakhtinian 74 surplus value differentiating role 130 human, machinic, compared 131-2

finalization of 67-8 performative 85 as rhizomes 67, 69 Saussurean 68 as social acts 64-5 virtuality and carnival 156 Deleuze on 155-6, 157 Vološinov, V.N. 62 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language 61 Walcott, Rinaldo 31 war machine as dialogical-becoming 115-16 as Go game 116 nomad as 117 Patton on 116-17 State apparatus, distinction 116 Warner, Michael 108 heteronormativity concept 2 “Normal and Normaller” 82 writing, as overcoding mechanism 113

Taylorism 136-7 characteristics 137 and panopticism 138 Thailand, sex tourism 98, 114 Torfing, Jacob 106 Toronto, York University, strike 135 transformations, incorporeal 120-1 truth, and confession 124 unconscious, the, schizoanalytic 41 utterances 63-4 Bakhtinian 68-9, 75-6, 85 dialogical-becomings of 64, 66-7, 68-9

Žižek, S. 103-5

193