Nomadic Theory

The Portable Rosi Braidotti

Rosi Braidotti

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231525428
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Rosi Braidotti's nomadic theory outlines a sustainable modern subjectivity as one in flux, never opposed to a dominant hierarchy yet intrinsically other, always in the process of becoming, and perpetually engaged in dynamic power relations both creative and restrictive. Nomadic theory offers an original and powerful alternative for scholars working in cultural and social criticism and has, over the past decade, crept into continental philosophy, queer theory, and feminist, postcolonial, techno-science, media, and race studies, as well as into architecture, history, and anthropology. This collection provides a core introduction to Braidotti's nomadic theory and its innovative formulations, which playfully engage with Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, and a host of political and cultural issues.

Arranged thematically, essays begin with such concepts as sexual difference and embodied subjectivity and follow with explorations in technoscience, feminism, postsecular citizenship, and the politics of affirmation. Braidotti develops a distinctly positive critical theory that rejuvenates the experience of political scholarship. Inspired yet not confined by Deleuzian vitalism, with its commitment to the ontology of flows, networks, and dynamic transformations, she emphasizes affects, imagination, and creativity and the politics of radical immanence. Incorporating ideas from Nietzsche and Spinoza as well, Braidotti establishes a critical-theoretical framework equal parts critique and creation. Ever mindful of the perils of defining difference in terms of denigration and the related tendency to subordinate sexualized, racialized, and naturalized others, she explores the eco-philosophical implications of nomadic theory, feminism, and the irreducibility of sexual difference and sexuality. Her dialogue with technoscience is crucial to nomadic theory, which deterritorializes the established understanding of what counts as human, along with our relationship to animals, the environment, and changing notions of materialism. Keeping her distance from the near-obsessive focus on vulnerability, trauma, and melancholia in contemporary political thought, Braidotti promotes a politics of affirmation that has the potential to become its own generative life force.

METAMORPHOSES

PART ONE

1

TRANSPOSING DIFFERENCES

Advanced capitalism is a difference engine in that it promotes the marketing of pluralistic differences and the commodification of the existence, the culture, the discourses of “others,” for the purpose of consumerism. As a consequence, the global system of the postindustrial world produces scattered and polycentered, profit-oriented power relations. In our post–cold war era, power functions not so much by binary oppositions but in a fragmented and all-pervasive manner. This rhizomic or weblike structure of contemporary power and its change of scale, however, do not fundamentally alter its terms of application. If anything, power relations in globalization are more ruthless than ever, as I will show in the course of this and the next three chapters.

Late postindustrial societies have proved far more flexible and adaptable toward the proliferation of differences than the classical left expected. These “differences” have been turned, however, into and constructed as marketable, consumable, and often disposable “others.” Popular culture—from music to cinema, new media, fashion, and gastronomy—is a reliable indicator of this trend, which sells “world music” or a savvy mixture of the exotic and the domestic, often in the mode of neocolonial appropriation of multicultural others.

An important implication of this situation is that advanced capitalism functions as the great nomad, the organizer of the mobility of commodified products. A generalized practice of “free circulation” pertains, however, almost exclusively to the domain of goods and commodities, regardless of their place of origin, provided they guarantee maximum profit. People do not circulate nearly as freely (Virno 2004; Lazzarato 1996). It is therefore crucial to expose the perverse nomadism of a logic of economic exploitation that equates capitalist flows and flux with profit-minded circulation of commodities. Given that technologies—more specifically the convergence of information and biotechnologies—are intrinsic to the social and discursive structures of postindustrial societies, they deserve special attention. The most critical aspect of the technological apparatus is the issue of access and participation. Considering the inequalities in the availability of electricity supplies, let alone telephone lines and modems, well may one wonder about the “democratic” or “revolutionary” potential of the new electronic and biogenetic frontiers. Like all colonial expansion, moreover, frontiers are never free of struggle or violence. Thus, access and participation to the new high-tech world is unevenly distributed worldwide, with gender, age, and ethnicity acting as major axes of negative differentiation (Eisenstein 1998).

Globalization is primarily about structural injustices in “post-industrial/ colonial/communist” societies. It is about the becoming–third world of the first world, while continuing the exploitation of developing countries. It is about the decline of “legal” economies and the rise of structural illegality as a factor in the world economy—also known as “capital as cocaine” (Land 1995). It is about the militarization of the technological and also of the social space. It is also about the globalization of pornography and the trafficking and prostitution of women and children, in a ruthless trade in human life. It is about the feminization of poverty and the rising rates of female illiteracy as well as the structural unemployability of large sectors of the population, especially the youth. This social order is also about the difficulty of the law in coping with phenomena such as the new reproductive rights, ranging from copyright laws in the use of photocopiers, video recorders, and the Internet, to the regulation of surrogate motherhood and artificial procreation. Not to mention the problem of environmental control, this extensive web of microrelations of power is at the heart of what Foucault calls biopower, that is to say, a centerless system of diffuse and hence perniciously effective surveillance and overregulation that takes “life itself” as its target.

Brian Massumi, in his political analysis of the historical condition of postmodernity (1998), describes global capitalism as a profit-oriented mix-and-match system that vampirizes everything. Contemporary capitalism functions by “circulatory stratification”: “It sucks value from pre-existing formations but in killing them endows them with eternal after-life” (Massumi 1998:53). The media industry is an integral part of this circular and spectral logic of commodification. Images constitute a serious, never-ending, forever-dead source of capital: a spectral economy of the eternal return. To be a recognizable icon—the kind of face that launches a thousand identifications—is capital value in our economic system. I would argue that in terms of power this system rests on the paradox of the simultaneous occurrence of contradictory trends. On the one hand, the globalization of economic and cultural processes: this engenders increasing conformity in lifestyle, telecommunications, and consumerism. On the other hand, the fragmentation of these processes, with the concomitant effects of increased structural injustices, marginalization of large sections of the population, and resurgence of regional, local, ethnic, and cultural differences not only between geopolitical blocks but also within them (Eisenstein 1998).

Given that the political economy of global capitalism consists in multiplying and distributing differences for the sake of profit, it produces ever-shifting waves of genderization and sexualization, racialization and naturalization of multiple “others.” It has thus effectively disrupted the traditional dialectical relationship between the empirical referents of Otherness—women, natives, and animal or earth’s others—and the processes of discursive formation of genderization/racialization/naturalization. Once this dialectical bond is unhinged, advanced capitalism looks like a system that promotes feminism without women, racism without races, natural laws without nature, reproduction without sex, sexuality without genders, multiculturalism without ending racism, economic growth without development, and cash flow without money. Late capitalism also produces fat-free ice creams and alcohol-free beer next to genetically modified health food, companion species alongside computer viruses, new animal and human immunity breakdowns and deficiencies, and the increased longevity of these who inhabit the advanced world. Welcome to capitalism as schizophrenia! (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 1980).

The spasmodic concurrence of these phenomena is the distinctive trait of our age. The commodification of differences turned the “others” into objects of consumption, alternately granting them a familiar and threatening quality that bypasses the dialectics’ revolving door. We have entered instead into a zigzagging pattern of dissonant nomadic subjects. Expressing the positivity of difference in the age of its commodified proliferation is a conceptual task that, however, keeps on bumping against the walls of dialectical habits of thought. How to overcome the dualistic mode that has become so entrenched to our way of thinking remains the main challenge.

On a conceptual level, our historical moment marks the decline of some of the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment, namely, the ideal of the progress of mankind through a self-regulatory and teleologically ordained use of scientific rationality aimed at the “perfectibility” of Man. The emancipatory project of modernity entails a view of “the knowing subject” (Lloyd 1985), which excludes several “boundary markers” also known as “constitutive others.” These are sexualized others, also known as women, ethnic or racialized others, and the natural environment. They constitute the three interconnected facets of structural otherness or difference as pejoration, which simultaneously construct and are excluded in modernity (Beauvoir 1973; Irigaray 1974; Deleuze and Guattari 1980). As such, they play an important—albeit specular—role in the definition of the norm, the normal, the normative view of the subject. More specifically, they have been instrumental to the institution of masculine self-assertion (Woolf 1938).

The dominant power structures in our system work by organizing differences according to a hierarchical scale that is governed by the standardized mainstream subject. Deleuze calls it “The Majority subject” or the Molar center of Being; Derrida calls it “phallologocentrism”; Irigaray opts for “the hyperinflated, falsely universal logic of the Same.” In such a scheme normality, as Canguilhem presciently put it, equals the zero degree of deviancy or monstrosity. Deleuze echoes this in stating that racism functions by assigning the Norm to White Man and distributing differences negatively across a multitude of marginalized others (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). Difference as pejoration is the term that indexes power according to the metaphysical arrogance of a subject that feeds structurally upon the bodies of devalorized others. Also known as “metaphysical cannibalism” (Atkinson 1974) this dualistic use of violence helps us illuminate the complex and dissymmetrical power relations at work within the dominant subject position.

To say that the structural others of the modern subject reemerge in post-modernity amounts to making them into a paradoxical and polyvalent site. They are simultaneously the symptom of the crisis of the subject, and for conservatives even its “cause,” but they also express positive, i.e., nonreactive alternatives. It is a historical fact that the great emancipatory movements of postmodernity are driven and fueled by the resurgent “others”: the women’s and gay rights movement, the antiracism and decolonization movements, the antinuclear and pro-environment movements are the voices of the structural Others of modernity. They also inevitably mark the crisis of the former “center” or dominant subject position. In the language of philosophical nomadology, they express both the crisis of the majority and the patterns of becoming of the minorities. In this section and in the next three chapters I will analyze this phenomenon in terms of the displacement of the main axes of “becoming.” The process of becoming-woman refers to the differential axis of sexualization: the becoming-other of racialization and the becoming-animal/insect/earth of naturalization. The whole point about a critical theory of becoming consists in providing both the methodological navigational tools and an ethical compass to allow us to tell the difference between these different flows of mutation. More specifically, we need normative distinctions between reactive, profit-oriented differences, on the one hand, and affirmative empowerment of alternative differences, on the other. The criterion by which such difference can be established is ethical and its implications political and cultural, as I will argue in chapter 11.

I BECOME, THEREFORE I WILL HAVE BEEN

Nomadic theory’s central figuration expresses a process ontology that privileges change and motion over stability. This is also rendered in terms of a general becoming-minority or becoming-nomad or becoming-molecular/ woman/animal, etc. The minority is the dynamic or intensive principle of change in nomadic theory, whereas the heart of the (phallogocentric) Majority is dead. Insofar as man represents the majority, there is no creative or affirmative “becoming-man”: the dominant subject is stuck with the burden of self-perpetuating Being and the flat repetition of existing patterns. As I argued at the start of this chapter, this logic of quantitative proliferation of multiples of One constitutes the core of the political economy of advanced capitalism. Nomadic thought opposes to this an ethics of qualitative transformation and a politics of complexity and affirmation (see also chapters 11 and 12).

By extension, this scheme also implies that the various empirical minorities (women, children, blacks, natives, animals, plants, seeds, and molecules, etc.) are the privileged starting point for active and empowering processes of becoming. In my own terms, this means that the multiple locations of devalued difference are also, though not at the same time, positive sites for the redefinition of subjectivity. All becoming takes place in a space of affinity and in symbiosis with positive forces and dynamic relations of proximity. This transversal interconnection frames the space of common actualization of alternative modes of relations and affective connection. Boundas (1994:99–118) suggests that the most effective way to think about Deleuze’s becoming is as a serialized notion, removed from the dualistic scheme of transcendental philosophy, which inevitably indexes the process of becoming onto a notion of the self, the individual, or the ego.

The process of becoming, which aims at decolonizing the thinking subject from the dualistic grip, also requires the dissolution of all sexed identities based on gendered opposition. Thus the becoming-woman is the necessary starting point for the deconstruction of phallogocentric identities precisely because sexuality as an institution structured around sexual dualism and its corollary—the positioning of women and sexual “deviants” as figure of otherness—are constitutive of Western thought. In a feminist twist, however, Deleuze, just like Derrida and other poststructuralists, opposes to the “majority/sedentary/molar” vision of woman as a structural operator of the phallogocentric system the affirmative or transformative vision of woman as “becoming/minority/molecular/nomadic.”

Thus an asymmetrical starting position between minority and majority—center and margins—needs to be strongly emphasized here, whether this is in keeping with orthodox readings of Deleuze or not (Braidotti 2011). This means that the process of deterritorialization is dual and the quantitative minorities can undergo the process of becoming only by disengaging themselves from a unitary identity as others, which is imposed by their opposition to the majority. It is in this sense that Woman (as “the second sex” or “the other of the Same,” as Luce Irigaray put it) needs to “become-woman” in the molecular sense of the process (or “the other of the Other,” as Irigaray put it). This is an internally differentiated movement that overthrows the oppositional dialectics in a parallel yet asymmetrical move: “There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:292).

Thus, the suggestion is of a block of common, albeit asymmetrical becoming, which turns the former dialectical opponents (men and women, old and young, white and black, human and animal or machine, etc., etc.) into allies in a process of becoming that aims at undoing the common grounds for their former unitarian—and dualistically opposed—identity. In this respect, as Burger pointed out, “an argumentational strategy characteristic of rhizome-thinking is: that it again and again reproduces the categories that it negates” (1985:33–44). I would like to add, however, that this repetition of the very terms one takes one’s departure from, far from being the reiteration of a system of domination, constitutes the necessary anchoring point for the cartography of becoming Deleuze and Guattari are sketching. Whereas in Derridean deconstruction this structural pattern of repetition of the very terms one is rejecting results in a productive relationship to the aporetic and the recognition of a fundamental double bind that ties the self to the radical alterity of others, nomadic theory takes another path. This path moves toward a politics of affirmation, which aims at “active counter-actualization of the current state of affairs” (Boundas 2007a:187) through the project of transforming negative into positive relations, encounters, and passions (I will explore this more fully in chapter 11).

One must indeed start from somewhere specific: a grounded and accountable location and the process of becoming is a time bomb placed at the very heart of the social and symbolic system that has welded together being, subjectivity, masculinity, compulsory heterosexuality, and (western) ethnocentrism. The different becomings are lines cutting open this space and demanding from us constant remapping: it is a question, every time, of finding new coordinates. This is not only a spatial but also a temporal phenomenon. Crucial to this entire process of becoming-molecular is the question of memory (la mémoire). The Majority: white, heterosexual, property-owning, and male—is a huge data bank of centralized knowledge, which is relayed through every aspect of his activities. The Majority Subject holds the keys to the central memory of the system and has reduced to the rank of insignificant practices, the alternative or subjugated memories of the many minorities. The line of becoming for the majority is consequently an anti-memory, which, instead of bringing back in a linear order specific memories (les souvenirs), functions as a deterritorializing agency that dislodges the subject from his/her sense of unified and consolidated identity.

A nomadic, nonlinear philosophy of time as a zigzagging line of internally fractured coalitions of dynamic subjects-in-becoming supports a very creative reading of memory and of its close relationship to the imagination. This is especially important in the case of negative or traumatic memories of pain, wound or abuse. This sort of negative capital is an integral component of the consciousness of historically marginalized or oppressed subjects. The pain and negativity that structure the oppositional consciousness of the “minorities” are a crucial concern for nomadic political theory and practice. While acknowledging this particular location—as a wounded memory of pain as well as a historically grounded space—nomadic political subjectivity defines the political as the gesture that aims at transcending the present state of affairs and empowering creative “counteractualizations” or transformative alternatives.

The corollary of this notion of time and of the political is that the specifically grounded memories of the minorities are not just static splinters of negativity forever inscribed in the flesh of the victims of history. Molecular or nomadic memories are also, and more especially, a creative force that gives the “wretched of the earth,” as Fanon put it, a head start toward the world-historical task of envisaging alternative world orders and more humane and sustainable social systems. It comes down to a double consciousness of both the multiple axes of oppression, and hence of hurt, humiliation, and pain, as well as the creative force they can generate as motors of transversal and collective transformation. (I shall return to this in chapters 11 and 12.)

Please note, however, that, whereas in classical dialectics empirical minorities are automatically positioned as the motor of historical developments and the guiding principle of revolutionary action and ethical agency, in nomadic politics this is not the case. The negative capital of oppression is just a privileged starting point for a process of the transmutation of values—to use Nietzsche’s rather more heroic rendition of the same idea—that encompasses the minorities themselves: they have to become-minoritarian as well. The essentialized vision of identities is challenged all the way by nomadic theory—and it does not leave unscathed the minorities: they also need to activate their memories against the black hole of counteridentity claims as well as against the grain of the dominant vision of the subject.

So what does one do when one remembers nomadically, and what kind of temporal allocation is a nomadic memory? Molecular, minoritarian, or nomadic memories are affirmative, destabilizing forces that propel subjects actively toward change. They are the kind of memories that are linked to ethical and political consciousness and concern events one simply forgot to forget. In Deleuze’s language, these memories pertain to the realm of the virtual and hence are abstract in the positive sense of leaning toward actualization. They are just as “real,” however, as anything else in our memory data banks—both the majority-bound one indexing on the dominant time line of Chronos and the minoritarian one that orbits around Aion—the time of becoming.

What matters ultimately about the job of remembering is the capacity to engender the kind of conditions and relations that can empower creative alternatives. The process of actualization is like a composition of passions, intensities, and visions that coalesce in an adequate frame of composition. What is “adequate” about it is a purely pragmatic matter, not a normative measure or an ideological injunction. It is whatever works to create sustainable lines and productive planes of transversal interconnection among entities and subjects that are related by empathy and affective affinity, not by some generic moral model or idealized paradigm.

This type of remembrance is not identity bound or ego indexed, but rather impersonal or postidentitarian. It is linked to a radical process of defamiliarization or disidentification from dominant representational and even ...