The Ethical Question(ing) of Individuality

The ethical question I want to pose - or as I want to pose it, if we can think of the ethical question - is concerned with the way in which we are ourselves composed, with what makes us up, our composition or constitution. When I say 'ourselves', I mean our individuality, but this notion must immediately be rescued from the liberal-humanist interpretation which would understand us as essentially persons, and our mode of individuation as only individual persons. So we must, in posing the question of composition, implicate not only our own individuality but also individuality itself; that is, we must ask not only how is this individual here composed, but how any individuality might be composed.

Yet this does not mean we are seeking the conditions of possible individuation, as if there was an ultimate form to which any individual whatsoever must conform. In this way, we would already have delimited the modes of composition open to individuals, losing sight of the primacy of the question: how are individuals composed, and how might they be composed? When we ask after 'the individual' in the abstract, it is not in order to discover the general form or essence, but rather to destroy any possibility of generality or universality, and insodoing to make of 'the individual' nothing more than a diagram (work in progress!) of the various processes involved in composition of concrete individuals as such. There is no totalization of all possible individuals, because the diagram is always caught in the process of being drawn, never content with a given formulation.

So we must think the question in terms of reality, and conditions in terms of singularity: what are the limits and thresholds immanent in a given real individual? And following that, what thresholds can be crossed while maintaining this individual's consistency, and what limits are absolute, that is, constitutive of the 'extreme' form of this individual, drawn by the abstract lines of flight that make up the cutting edge of Absolute Deterritorialization? That is, what limits cannot be surpassed without dissolving the individual entirely? Hence, the question is always pragmatic; it always concerns the selection of the components within a given composition, and on the basis of criteria immanent in that composition.

When I spoke of 'ourselves', 'we', I meant explicitly to regard a collective, a collectivity; and again, we must avoid thinking this in liberal-humanist terms of persons who collectively make up a social body of some sort. Of course social bodies are important, as are individual bodies, but thinking exclusively in those terms is detrimentally limiting, excluding bodies of mechanical, semiotic, ecological, and aesthetic types, to name only a few. The notion of individuals as processual individuations (compositions, arrangements) is transversal to this typology, involving composites of components from multiple registers and never confining itself to one or another.

So the collectivity I was addressing would not only be the social amalgam of people reading, but the multiplicity of components amalgamated, reterritorializing on the most deterritorialized flow, which in this case would probably be the circuit of social-discursive-technical components that make up this blog and its audience. In this way, individuals are always composed out of a multiplicitous milieu, which itself might belong to one or several 'higher level' individuals, or might be caught between them, straddling their borders or evading their capture. The point is that individuals are always composed as such through their lines of flight, their most deterritorialized components or connections, which constitute the minimum of consistency ensuring a relatively stable complex entity or 'machine'.

It is through the selective action of the lines of flight, on the basis of the immanent criteria for that minimum consistency and stability, that 'something happens' - in a living creature, life thereby happens. By seizing on one's own lines of flight, and thus the thresholds of one's own transformative potentials, one constructs one's ethos, and then ethics can begin. Again, I must emphasize that the 'one' in question is not necessarily an individual person, and could in fact include several people as well as non-personological elements, such as the economic, political, ecological, religious, aesthetic, mechanical, or libidinal components or connections that make up the milieu in which these persons are immersed and individuated in whatever way.

The criteria for the composition of such individuals must be constructed in the very process of their existence as such, and are never preexistent, presupposed, or given. An ethos, and hence ethics, must always be made, produced, constructed, within a heterogeneous composition that questions itself, 'discovers' (which is to say, engenders) its own singularities - critical points, thresholds, attractors and bifurcators - and seizes on them, whether to extend to its limits and attain Absolute Deterritorialization, thereby selecting those components that will return, or to surpass them and cross the threshold of bifurcation, abolishing the weaknesses and burdens and opening onto new arrangements, connections, and evaluations, following the lines of flight.

The Possibility of Politics

A convergence of several different lines of thought has led me to contemplate a question: what makes politics possible at all?

One line was drawn from my international trade class, in which we've been working on a fictive declaration for a non-oppressive and non-detrimental approach to trade and international relations in general. The first thing we discussed, and this ended up taking so much time that we had to cut it short and move on, was the unit of analysis in economics. The major dichotomy in economic theory and political science on this issue is between individual persons and nation-states. As you might expect, no one in our group found either of these alternatives adequate, but that begs the question: where does analysis begin, and following from that, what becomes of the person and the state?

We talked about possible candidates for a proposed new unit, ranging from communities and affinity groups to institutions in general. Eventually, it came up that perhaps this issue, while not unimportant, was excessively academic for a document whose intended audience would be average everyday people, be they in 'North' or 'South' countries. We ended up including some brief comment on focusing on institutions, but dropped the question for the most part. Yet I couldn't help but wonder whether this approach was presumptuous, perhaps even condescending.

To be fair, this was just a class exercise with a limited scope and length of time, and it was probably for the best that we moved on. Yet if we had been working on some real project, say, for an activist group of some kind, I suspect a similar tendency would take over. "We're talking to real people, we should talk about concrete issues, not intellectual squabbles." Why is there this dominant assumption that discussing theoretical issues, such as the unit of analysis, will alienate the majority of 'average' people? We all agreed that the issue was important, but there seemed to be an unspoken sentiment that it was best kept confined to academic circles. I find this to be an extremely condescending position: don't worry about that, don't think to hard, we'll take care of these things, you just go about your everyday life.

Perhaps it is the case that average people don't care, can't be bothered, or wouldn't understand such 'high and mighty' discourse, but I don't think it is. In fact, this notion of the 'average person' itself already assumes a standard unit of analysis, doesn't it? For that matter, so does democracy; insofar as democracy depends upon a demos, that is, a population taken together as an entity, it thereby depends upon a standard unit it can apply to the group, and thereby 'count' the population. This strips the individual of all singularity, all possibility of producing a difference that would exceed or escape the collective entity (the political system), substituting a regularity, a normality, an identity. The problem isn't that existing democracies are corrupt or have been co-opted by illegitimate power; on the contrary, as Zizek so often says in his political articles, what we have now is democracy tried and true. We shouldn't be looking for a more original or authentic form of democracy, but thinking otherwise, toward another possible politics.

What does all this mean? To return to my original question, I've been suspecting that looking at possibility and the conditions for possibility is the wrong approach. In a sense, any possible politics depends upon a difference, a specifically political difference, but this is not enough, it begs the question of this difference and leaves our real orientation with a vague formal shell. Instead, if we are to take hold of the rich potentialities open to this orientation, we must ask what are the conditions of the reality of politics. It is not enough to recognize political difference as an empty form of possibility - political difference must be made, it must be realized, and this can only be achieved through an experimental engagement with the real. Every orientation, every politic, every political actor or unit, is unstrippably unique, and its conditions must likewise be approached as such. There is no general politics, no general subject of politics, no 'average person', and hence every politic and every subject is singular, composed of singular points and passions.

Approaching 'depoliticized' orientations, groups, actors, would thereby necessitate an experimental approach to constructing a politics; not the imposition of values the group is presumed to understand, and to take or leave, but the creation of immanent evaluations between them, and that means between the group and the 'activists' who engage them in the first place. This entails a constant problematization of encounters and engagements, a constant openness to new connections, prerogatives, and catalysts, and a constant negotiation and navigation of complex arrangements or territories. This whole approach that criticizes 'liberal' or 'leftist' or 'radical' groupthink misses the point entirely: we shouldn't be trying to 'think for ourselves' any more than we should 'think for the cause'; we should rather be focused on making thought think in the first place, producing a unique way of thinking within every arrangement or orientation. It is the navigation of the space between these complex arrangements that becomes the objective of politics, a navigation that necessitates a cautious and creative engagement with unstrippably singular problems.

This points to an approach to the question of the unit of analysis: analysis should begin with the singular arrangements constellated by the problem or problems being analyzed - processual arrangements that underlie every concrete individual, be they persons, states, institutions, ecosystems, markets, communities, or even particular transactions, interactions, or conversations. This is the renewed sense of methodological individualism DeLanda proposes in A New Philosophy of Society: 'individual' must be taken in the sense of individuation, a process of individuation bound up in a concrete machinic arrangement, a self-consistent and autopoietic agglomeration.

Deleuze and Guattari Quotes

Just a few forceful, affecting quotes from Chaosmosis and Difference and Repetition (by the way, I'm using the Continuum version of D&R, which has different page numbers than the standard, Columbia version):

"Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion." Chs 21

"There is an ethical choice in favor of the richness of the possible, an ethics and politics of the virtual that decorporealises and deterritorializes contingency, linear causality and the pressure of circumstances and significations which besiege us. It is a choice for processuality, irreversibility and resingularisation." Chs 29

"There are singular incorporeal constellations which belong to natural and human history and at the same time escape them by a thousand lines of flight." Chs 27

"So we are proposing to decentre the question of the subject onto the question of subjectivity. Traditionally, the subject was conceived as the ultimate essence of individuation, as a pure, empty, prereflexive apprehension of the world, a nucleus of sensibility, of expressivity - the unifier of states of consciousness. With subjectivity we place the emphasis instead on the founding instance of intentionality. This involves taking the relation between subject and object by the middle and foregrounding the expressive instance..." Chs 22

"...when we say that univocal being is related immediately and essentially to individuating factors, we certainly do not mean by the latter individuals constituted in experience, but that which acts in them as a transcendental principle: as a plastic, anarchic and nomadic principle, contemporaneous with the process of individuation, no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them temporarily; intrinsic modalities of being, passing from one 'individual' to another, circulating and communicating underneath matters and forms. The individuating is not the simple individual." D&R 47-8

"Only the extreme forms return - those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another." D&R 51

Subjectivation and Economic Theory: A Brief Survey

For mainstream economists, subjectivity is understood as a given. (And who can blame them? It is the same for most of the human and social sciences, most of academia.) The tradition of moral philosophy from which economics was born provided the substance – a pre-Kantian subject overdetermined by uncritical conceptualizations of the time – which has been modified, supplemented, and articulated throughout the centuries by a whole host of theorists, but which has also maintained the same stiflingly orthodoxical makeup all along. Raising the matter of subjectivity is not a 'postmodern' conceit, nor is this matter epiphenomenal to the true science of economy. Rather, subjectivity is the very ground on which any foundation of the science and philosophy of economy must be built, and as such, the problem of its production, distribution, and consumption should be raised and negotiated wherever possible.

The reason I ascribe such an import to subjectivity and its production is precisely because it is only in and through these processes of production that we are able to act, that we are 'produced' as actors or agents. Thus a subjective production or 'subjectivation' is the condition of our reality as actors; it is the 'mode' of acting in which we become agents; it is agency. A production of subjectivity is simultaneously a production of agency, and agency is the cornerstone of economics. There is a fundamental subjective presupposition, an opinion (orthodoxy = “right opinion”), at the heart of the orthodox account of economic agency which ensures the consistency of economic theory as we know it: we all know what it is to have agency, to choose and decide, to desire and prefer, to think and act. Economists are therefore unwilling to question how these characteristics are produced, how they imply heterogeneous compositions of elements, be they individual and personal, familial, social, politico-legal, religious, linguistic, ecological, machinic, aesthetic, ethical, customary...

The orthodox account is content to homogenize subjectivity (capitalism produces a 'subjectivity of generalized equivalence', as Félix Guattari says), to disregard the heterogeneity of the factors and processes of its production, of its internal components and external connections. Yet we can see trends within economic theory that, while not directly challenging the subjective presuppositions, may lead us to engage the rich problematic of multifarious productions of subjectivity and agency, and the multiplicity of unique, singular subjectivations, as they relate to and indeed ground economic activity. We can already see such trends in the history of economic theory in the work of Marx and the institutionalist movement, and it seems that they are reemerging, in perhaps a less radical form, in the mainstream reappropriation of the latter movement known as 'neoinstitutionalism' (Marxian thought has itself suffered from an unfortunate 'orthodoxication', although the last few decades have also witnessed creative and aberrant appropriations thereof).

Douglass North, a neo-institutionalist, expresses such a trend in reviving the problem of incentive structures and their composition, against the assumption of perfect rationality, in his article “Economic Performance Through Time”. The processes of learning and development that produce individual subjects feed into the evolution and transformation of the social institutions in which they are involved and invested, and these institutions in turn react back on these subjects, shaping their own processes of change through limitation and facilitation. This reciprocal relation of production underlies the performance of economies, as it endows subjectivated persons and groups with the unique ensemble of habits, tools, and investments (of 'irrational' desires as much as 'rational' interests) that define its agency and hence its actions and decisions. Thus, North is able to raise the problem of transaction and information costs as primary in economic interactions, and to challenge the tendency in neoclassical theory to disregard them.

This impels us to think of markets in terms of the cost structures that they rest upon, which entails that truly 'efficient' markets are not the norm, but an exceptional case. Neoclassical theory tells us that information and the models in which we employ it may initially be imperfect, leading to significant cost structures, but that these will self-correct over time and tend towards perfection, thereby leading to negligible transaction costs. North rejects this: “Individuals typically act on incomplete information and with subjectively derived models that are frequently erroneous; the information feedback is typically insufficient to correct these models. Institutions are not necessarily or even usually created to be socially efficient; rather they, or at least the formal rules, are created to serve the interests of those with the bargaining power to create new rules.” [North, 359-60] This presents 'socially inefficient' institutions, and the detrimental power relations that breed them, as an obstacle to be overcome. Of course, this begs the question of whether 'correct models' are at all possible, at least in the traditional sense; perhaps if our information is always incomplete, our models always necessitating assumptions and chance, our desires and investments always confused and complicated, then we should think of models not in terms of an objective validity, but a functional efficacy and ethical consistency in relation to the subjectivations that engender them and whose processes of production they react upon.

Elsewhere, we can find the problem of the production of subjectivity raised in literature on geographic factors in economic composition [“Geography and Development” by Henderson, Shalizi, and Venables]. This article engages the question of unequal distributions of economic activity throughout the world, and subsequently investigates the forces and arrangements that produce dense, highly active clusters in some areas while neglecting and excluding other areas. “Why do so many economic decision takers choose to locate close to each other? And, for those who cannot locate in an economic center, what are the consequences of being outside, and possibly remote from, existing centers?” [Henderson et al, 81-2] Although they pose these questions in a geographic context, one should not take this as implying a 'geographical determinism'. Rather, they are investigating the geographic factors that are involved in certain processes of subjectivation, particularly urban and rural subjectivations. It is not that the actors do not 'choose for themselves', but that the decision that selects a choice is produced by the conjunction of many heterogeneous forces, components, and connections, a conjunction that is coextensive with the production of the 'agency' of the actors themselves; hence the emphasis on forces of agglomeration and dispersion and connections to the ‘outside’ – external markets, other regions, etc. – that condition the development of urban centers of subjectivation.

A third instance of this trend can be found in literature on international relations. Alexander Wendt gives us a promising formulation of the nature of State agency in his article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It". Rather than ascribing self-interested and self-serving egoism to some fundamental, eternal, primordial human nature, and hence reducing such attributes on the part of States to this nature (as the realist school is wont to do), Wendt rejects such easy answers. This is not to deny that egoistic structures of agency exist, but rather than ascribing these to a primordial nature, Wendt is interested in inquiring into how they are produced and constructed as such. Thus, rather than defining international anarchy (i.e. the fact that no central authority completely constrains the actions of States) negatively, as a default condition in which self-interested actors find themselves, he follows a positive definition that construes it as productive, possessing a 'causal power'. To understand the sense of this power, one must understand Wendt's constructivism. This prerogative sees knowledge as constructed by the ensemble of social forces, conditions, and customs in which it is situated, and this includes an actor's own self-knowledge, and hence his or her identity and interests. Knowledge does not relate to an objective, external reality, but rather only to a contingent and relative production of structures of agency.

Despite the emphasis on production, Wendt's constructivism seems to fall short of the potential force of the constructivist prerogative, insofar as it remains epistemological, that is, concerned with knowledge and its conditions. It does not call into question the construction of the subject of knowledge and the production of subjectivity itself; it begins with the subject presupposed, and with subjects as involved in social relationships through which meaning is constructed. This suffers from a relativism in which reality and the knowledge thereof are reduced to social conventions, and it thereby seems impotent as the basis for positive interventions into reality. We would prefer an ontological constructivism, one in which not only meaning and knowledge, but subjectivity itself, is constructed through converging productive processes. Reality is no longer reducible to or irrecoverable from socially relative conventions and meanings; rather, sociality and meaning are themselves results of the processes of production that make up reality. The emphasis is thereby no longer on knowledge and meaning as relative to the social conditions of a subject, but on functional connections and capacities as relative to the real conditions of subjective production or subjectivation. Meaning is only one (or several) field(s) constructed through such processes and implicated in subjectivations, but it is by no means the be-all end-all of the inquiry.

Shortcomings aside, Wendt does provide salient insights regarding the construction of State agency. Rather than deriving from an essence or nature of humanity, the dispositions, interests, and tendencies of States result from the processes of production with which they are involved: both the internal processes of their own constituencies, and the international processes of war, alliance, trade, and so on. States may often be disposed to self-interest, but we must explain how this disposition is produced, through what encounters, connections, and processes. In this sense, the anarchy of international relations is not a neutral default in which States express their essential nature, but a 'causal power' endowing States implicated in international encounters and relationships with a capacity to mutate, to produce new dispositions and interests, to alter the structures of agency involved, on the basis of the undetermined and open-ended nature of such relations.

In the literature on international relations, the trend can also be found in Kenneth Oye's article "The Conditions for Cooperation in World Politics". Oye's problem is basically how we might produce cooperation between States, and hence, States with an agency disposed toward cooperation rather than aggression, competition, or isolation. He isolates three different aspects of the process through which States become disposed toward each other, and hence in which their agency is produced. These are the payoff structure, which conditions the formation and prioritization of interests of parties involved in a cooperative relationship; the repeatability of a 'game' or encounter, and thus the duration of the relationship of the parties; and the number of parties involved in a game or encounter. Through these variables, he analyzes the conditions that facilitate or deter enduring cooperative relationships. These variables are aspects of the dispositions, that is, the structures of agency (what Wendt refers to as 'structures of identity and interest') that makeup State subjectivity. These structures should be understood as being engendered by, but also reacting back upon, the processes of production that we have called 'subjectivation': processes from which subjectivity, and hence the power to act, to decide, result. Oye's understanding is very limited, and certainly contains presuppositions regarding agency and interest that we could do without, but overall he adequately expresses an approach to these through production and construction, rather than essences and natures.

These trends beg the question: how can a focus on the production of subjectivity reorient economic theory, and what are the potential trajectories for invention it draws within, and on the edges of, that field?

Becoming-Woman with Virginia Woolf

[This is rather personal, as it was written as a letter to a friend, but since the dominant theme is one of depersonalization and impersonal affects, it seems appropriate. The refrain of the impersonal should manage to exceed and transform the personal aspects. I'm going to expand my engagement with the concept of becoming-woman soon, including its inheritance from Lacan (affirming feminine jouissance, denying the once-and-for-all fixity of unconscious sexuation), and the oft perplexing claim that there is no 'becoming-man'.]

I've always had a rather distant relationship with feminism, feminist theory, and the like. To be honest, I've maintained a safe distance from most everything until only very recently, and so this instance is not peculiar. My forays into metaphysics over the last few years have given me new impetus and passion for intellectual exploration, and this has led inevitably to the rich field of feminist theory, the feminine in philosophy, etc. And yet, while the problematic of feminism has become far more important to me, and far more resonant or interconnected with my own, I must admit there remains a distance between myself and the field that I have yet to traverse.

Perhaps it has to do with the difficulty – indeed, the pain, the misery – that has always abided between myself and the women I have loved. And yet this difficulty, this distance, is to an extent inconsequential, as it hasn't prevented on my part encounters with the feminine that attain a consistency and force unlike that of theory, of history, of lust or love. Such encounters are definitive of my very soul, my ownmost, unstrippable passion. These have come and gone, more often than not with a haste that I regret, and they extend beyond those with femininity, reaching into musicality, animality, machination, schizophrenia, childishness, the cosmos...

What I'm referring to is becoming – a Nietzschean, Bergsonian, Deleuzo-Guattarian, and staunchly anti-Hegelian concept of becoming – that is, a becoming that is not bound by the being that becomes, nor by that which is 'coming-to-be'. The encounters I speak of are certainly not worldly, and never depended on any woman, 'real' or imaginary, whom I fantasized about becoming, any more than they depended on my own being a man. They are secret encounters, molecular, often imperceptible encounters, in which 'I' have become no less impersonal than 'a woman' I happen upon. Such encounters will have nothing of beings, of stable, fixed (id)entities: this molecular woman and this molecular man are swept away by a mutual becoming; they are no more than the singular forces unleashed, the irreducibly unique compositions drawn; a becoming whose 'origin' or 'goal' is unthinkable, as the man and the woman have become indiscernible in this singular constellation of force, motion, affect – a dance. This dance is not yours, not mine, nor is it reducible to the two of us as individuals, as it escapes our individuality, our definite attributes and identities, and carries us away.

Imagine my excitement, my joy, upon hearing Virginia Woolf express with such clarity the sense of the encounters, the becomings-feminine that have so blessed my meager existence. Please excuse me as I quote at length from A Room of One's Own [available online here; I'm quoting from part six]:

At this moment, as so often happens in London, there was a complete lull and suspension of traffic. Nothing came down the street; nobody passed. A single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell. Somehow it was like a signal falling, a signal pointing to a force in things which one had overlooked. It seemed to point to a river, which flowed past, invisibly, round the corner, down the street, and took people and eddied them along...Now it was bringing from one side of the street to the other diagonally a girl in patent leather boots, and then a young man in a maroon overcoat; it was also bringing a taxicab; and it brought all three together at a point directly beneath my window; where the taxi stopped; and the girl and the young man stopped; and they got into the taxi; and then the cab glided off as if it were swept on by the current elsewhere.

The sight was ordinary enough; what was strange was the rhythmical order with which my imagination had invested it; and the fact that the ordinary sight of two people getting into a cab had the power to communicate something of their own seeming satisfaction. The sight of two people coming down the street and meeting at the corner seems to ease the mind of some strain, I thought, watching the taxi turn and make off. Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind. Now that effort had ceased and that unity had been restored by seeing two people come together and get into a taxicab.

I can not express enough how this passage has affected me, and has given words to something that has escaped my own articulation. For what occurs in this chance encounter if not the very becoming of which I have spoken? It is not that the man 'acts like' a woman, imitates or impersonates a woman, any more than the reverse. It has as little to do with the man's being as such than with the woman's. There is a whole impersonal field of forces at play: a lull in traffic; a falling leaf; a passing taxi, a becoming-machinic; a becoming-river, a force of the river enters into composition with a force of the taxi and with a vague masculinity, a vague femininity, a becoming-feminine and becoming-masculine as forces that escape the persons and that invest and enter into composition with the entire field. There are attractions that have nothing to do with sexuality, or at least not as it is commonly understood.

These encounters, these becomings that escape from being – but not without sweeping the beings involved into a pure dancing – they are so important to Woolf. As she says, “the mind has so great a power of concentrating at any point at any moment that it seems to have no single state of being. It can separate itself from the people in the street, for example, and think of itself as apart from them, at an upper window looking down on them. Or it can think with other people spontaneously, as, for instance, in a crowd...” The greatest power of the mind is that of becoming that emerges like a bloom from a chance encounter. It is this power to alter, to produce alterity, to set free a difference, a force of difference unbound from identity, “a force in things which one had overlooked”: this is what Woolf so profoundly discovers in concluding her discussion of 'women and fiction'. “Nothing is required to be held back.” This discovery impels her to question the stability of the categories of 'man' and 'woman', or the importance thereof, in the mind, that is, in this power of becoming and altering.

Then what, if not the binary opposition of identities? What characterizes gender, if we are not to carelessly disregard it? Her answer here is decisive: rather than an amateurish understanding that would see in every mind a struggle between some masculine and some feminine principle, a suppression of one by the other, she proposes an image of harmony and cooperation (as dancing requires) between the masculine and feminine, exemplified by the androgyne. Harmony does not reduce to either note, but involves a resonance between them, emerging from their encounter, that carries both into a new field of sonic potentiality (dissonance, consonance, the interval, song). Similarly, the power of androgyny is not in a simple imitation of one gender by the other, but rather in a capacity to free the elements, the forces and affects, of each gender, to give them free reign, to allow them to play, to dance, to compose and decompose within singular encounters. She takes Coleridge's claim that the mind is androgynous to mean just this: if the mind cannot free becomings-feminine and becomings-masculine from 'woman' and 'man', if it cannot become-other and affirm the chance of the encounter, it will be too rigid, too brittle, it will surely crack.

Androgyny thus becomes the highest, most brilliant power of gender and the thought of gender, the power with which they attain creativity, alterity, freedom. “[T]he androgynous mind is resonant and porous; ...it transmits emotion without impediment; ...it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” What a radiant notion! Androgynous thought is thereby able to escape the binary distinction of man and woman in order to free the creative potentialities it so often stifles and suffocates. Indeed, there is a deathly air about such a clean cut duality:

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman–manly or man–womanly...And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.

This fertility that is affirmed in such a consummation must be rescued from the all-to-easy allusion to sexual intercourse and conception, as there is no longer a simple man, a simple woman, a simple act, but rather a complex dance between two androgynes (I say two, but each of them is already so many!). The fertility is becoming, and the consummation is the chance encounter that frees the forces so often captured and integrated by clear-cut identities. Such becomings-feminine as we find in the story of Shakespeare's sister, these are the stuff of creation, true creation. It is not a simple 'imagined' history, but rather draws out an androgynous trait from Shakespeare himself, a becoming that passes between him and Woolf in the proximity of their encounter. If anyone has shown the importance of becomings, and of becomings-feminine in particular, Woolf has done so here. I might say that my own discovery of these becomings, of this androgyny that clandestinely wanders across the territories of my existence, has been the most powerful and important experience for my own relationship with feminism and femininity in general. Whatever occurs when I do begin to traverse the 'safe distance' I've kept between myself and feminist theory and activism proper will surely involve these becomings-feminine, these androgynous encounters, that I've treasured so much.