Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 01:09:33 +0200
From: douglas edric stanley <destanley-AT-teaser.fr>
Subject: Alliances


There are a lot of things to discuss in the following comments:

>Another thing is that I have come to think D&G are stuck in annihilating the
>borders of between Self and Other, even though I might agree that that is
>opposite
>of their intention.

Not really opposite. Just not the point. The point is the becoming. The way
in which one thing becomes, bends itself TOWARDS another, without FUSING
with that thing. In fact, you're right in the heart of their proposition,
only you don't see the shift that they're offering. Usually we think of
becoming in terms of something-becoming-something-else. As if entity no.1
were in itself whole and entity no.2 were in itself whole, and then
"poof!": entity no.1 "becomes" entity no.2, i.e. we jump from one whole to
another whole. As if it simply "took it's place", in it's wholeness or
entirety. An example could be, to play with psychology, myself and my wife.
If I say: there's my wife and then there's me, and I'm slowly "becoming" my
wife; well, we can all see how rediculous this sounds. I'm not going to
grow breasts, change my voice, and menstrate once a month. It's not that in
some Science Fiction story this wouldn't be possible, but rather that it's
just a rediculous idea. Now, what if I look at reality (since you like
reality) and I try to understand why it is that I have taken on so many of
my wife's mannerisms, and vice versa? Why is it that I've come to hate
Paris on Saturdays, for example, whereas before it was mostly Sundays? I
haven't really had any bad experiences on Saturdays, it's just because I've
taken on that personality trait. Or, why have I started to become cranky
and frustrated around her periods, as women do who live together in the
same house? So I would say that it is a process of becoming, with the
emphasis being on "process". And I think I'm right: in many ways, a
long-lasting couple is in a process of becoming. However, and this is
important: when my wife is in a process of becoming-Douglas and I'm in a
process of becoming-Colette, obviously myself and the Douglas that she's
becoming are not the same thing. My wife's becoming-Douglas is not the same
thing as taking-Douglas'-place. It's rather a process of taking traits of
my own and squeezing herself into them, just as if she were squeezing into
a jacket that wasn't her size (actually it's the opposite as she's smaller
than me, only you get the point). The process of becoming is the process of
trying to squeeze into a piece of clothing that doesn't fit: you feel the
play between the two sizes, the difference is still there, only each
hetergeneous being has radically transformed its being. This for me is the
process of becoming. It's not "A becomes B", as in "A takes B's place".
Rather, "A squeezes into B's place". It's almost as if (and this would be
my psychological portrait) my wife tried to fit into my clothes and I into
hers. Obviously the fit isn't right, to begin with I don't really have
breasts. However, the transformation is not only visible, it's effective:
whether I fit or not, or she fits or not, something's still "going on". She
and I are radically changing our being, respectively, while remaining who
we are. We remain "ourselves", while we "ourselves" have been radically
transformed. Hence, again, no symbiosis. Rather a touching Romeo and Juliet
love play.

>How I believe this to happen is that if borders can only
>remain when there is "alliance", and alliance can only exist in conflict,
>it seems
>that in terms of human relationships there is no way to maintain that
>border.  It
>collapses when real, as opposed to theoretical, human beings come in contact.

I do not think that Deleuze and Guattari make such a distinction. As for
myself, I cannot imagine what a being such as a "theoretical human being"
would be. Sounds monsterous.

>Takeo Doi's _The Anatomy of Dependence_ (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1981) discusses
>how such
>a singularity is maintained only by a fantasy, whereby one and only one
>gets to be
>truly singular, for the other/Other is used, fused, into the fantasy of the
>formers singularity and thus loses his or her own singularity.  This point has
>been made by others in regards to the masculine fantasy of the autonomous
>self,
>which can only be perpetuated by ignoring the existence of the feminine.  To
>achieve singularity through conflict reduces a human problem of
>relationship to a
>metaphysical problem of the "nature of things" as abstract entities, such
>as these
>things which are being referred to as "Selves".

Not a fantasy. Again, get married. You'll see. Be it a fantasy or not,
you're changing nevertheless. And to repeat myself, to enter "into" another
singularity is not to remain "autonomous", for one is obviously "affected"
even "afflicted" with the other. Without, though, "taking the other's
place".

>
>The problem, in developmental terms, seems to me to be the issue of how to
>have
>borders and connections at the same time.  How to be singular and be
>connected.

Exactly. I've just given you an example.

>How to be a Self and at the same time be in relation to other Selves who
>are also
>allowed to be singular.

This is why Stern suggests that the infant is 1. fundamentally
heterogeneous and 2. fundamentally a being-towards-the-Other.

>Stern's motherhood constellation, I think, assumes to be
>the case which ought to be seen as the outcome of successful development.  If
>Stern's constellation were the case as a given there ought to be no
>problem with
>boundaries, fusion,  singularity, or heterogeny.  That there are such
>problems,
>and that they seem to be so pervasive, suggests to me that the kind of
>development
>which is going on is trapped into a metaphysics of boundaries or fusions.  The
>boundaries of the self have to be strong enough to resist fusion, if there
>is to
>remain any singularity, but if they are then there is the problem with
>being able
>to bring about human connection.  Connection comes about at the breakdown of
>boundaries.  I just do not see anything positive about alliance--in terms of
>conflict--being proposed as the solution.

In Stern's cosmology, there is such a thing as fusion, only it takes place
around age 2, with the acquiring of the symbolic (to speak like Lacan).
I.e., sure, there is symbiosis (clinically you cannot deny it), only it's a
language problem, and not a problem with the desiring machine itself. Of
course Stern doesn't put it in these terms, but you'll find this in his
"Interpersonal World of the Infant". There is a kernel or core subject,
even if this kernel is undefined, open, and fluctuating. Nevertheless there
is a core. However, this core never ceases to be "opened onto" the other.
This is very "post-structuralist".

>At the same time, just in the way that the fantasy of masculine
>singularity has
>been constructed (Klaus Theweleit, _Male Fantasies_, Minneapolis:
>University of
>Minnesota Press, 1989), heterogeny within such a singularity can easily
>"smoothed
>out".  For such a fantasized singularity--existing only when all else is
>used as
>an Other for support--can mistake heterogeny for homogenization.  Fascism, as
>Theweleit describes in developmental terms, results from a fantasy of pure
>smoothness (pure fusion) and clear distinction (boundaries).  But neither are
>tolerated.  Psychodynamically there is a jolting back and forth.  In the
>process,
>both the boundaries which would allow singularity and heterogeny are
>destroyed as
>well as the possibility of carrying out "humane" alliances.  In regards to
>all of
>this, I wonder what a feminist reading would come up with.

Exactly. Neither are tolerated. And in order to enter into debate with a
feminist analysis, I would like to share a discussion I had some time ago
with a collegue around male/female personas.

For a little background: I'm collaborating with a canadian choreographer on
a very complex piece working with computers and choreography. Ok. But
what's important for you is that we're also dealing with the figure of one
woman + one man, and their interrelations. So, often, we come back to the
issues of representations of "woman", representations of "man", etc., etc.
Finally, someone asked, in no uncertain terms, "why" I was constructing a
woman's character, or, more precisely, "how could I". (This was an
anglo-saxon speaking, as here in France no one bothers with these kind of
questions). I was a bit amazed, even if I saw the question coming a mile
away. And I guess my response was even more insolent: if a so-called "male
writer" invents a woman's character in order to understand something of her
experience, he is only doing it in relation to his own experience. I.e. if
I, for example, am trying to understand a woman's experience, it is only to
better understand my own. (Here, you can see all the lights lighting up,
the battle guns pointed, etc.). To be more precise, my response was that by
"entering into" a woman's experience, I was in no way "living a woman's
experience", but rather living a man's experience of a woman's experience.
And as my collaborator is a woman, well, the old vice-versa comment got
thrown in there as well...

So, it's quite the opposite, and perhaps even more dangerous. It's a bit
like Deleuze's comment on Kurosawa's filming of Dostoyevski's "The Idiot":
Kurosawa doesn't "adapt" Dostoyevski's novel, he in fact finds a
cinematographic response. He has an "idea" in cinema that relates to an
"idea" he found in the book. But the two ideas are different, incompatible,
even if they communicate. An idea in cinema responds to an idea in
literature. For me, it's the same situation: if I "construct" a female
persona, I can only do so from a male point of view (old hat), but what I
will "discover" in the female experience is nothing less than an "idea" in
male experience that resonantes with the female experience. There is
resonance rather than appropriation. I see poorly how any appropriation
could honestly take place. So the Jungian idea of every many having a
"female side" and vice versa just doesn't work for me. The female side is
only a male response to a male problem, and that problem is: what is a man?
This is a question men (unfortunately perhaps) are constantly asking
themselves, no matter how macho or misogynist they are. And although this
questioning that the female offers is something of an "interruption" of the
male persona, this interrupting takes place "within" masculinity, and not
as the "borrowing" or "appropriation" or "sharing" of comon traits. A man's
"female side" has nothing to do with women, even if, obviously, all men
have a "female side".

I suppose this confuses the issue more than it clarifies it. I'll see if I
can't somehow simplify it in the next few days.


Douglas Edric Stanley
destanley-AT-Teaser.fr