The Openness of an Immanent Temporality

David Pagano

English Department
Old Dominion University
dpagano@vwc.edu

 

E. A. Grosz, ed. Becomings: Explorations of Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.

 

Elizabeth Grosz is one of our most able theoretical writers, combining clarity of articulation with originality, perspicacity, and sophistication of thought. Those who follow the sometimes mind-wrenching discourse on time and temporality should be pleased that she has lent her acumen to the topic. Having focused primarily on the question of space in her 1995 Space, Time, and Perversion, she turns her full attention to time in her 1999 collection, Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Happily, her skills as editor in the recent volume prove equal to her skills as a writer and thinker in general. She has put together a fascinating and insightful collection of essays, written in a style largely as lucid as Grosz’s own, and constituting an important contribution to current thinking about the philosophy and cultural experience of time. Each of the essays pursues the question of becoming–the way in which our experience of time is an experience of perpetual opening toward an indeterminate and indeterminable future, toward change, surprise, the event, the unpredictable, the incalculable, and the new. As Grosz puts it in the fine essay that opens the collection, “Thinking the New: Of Futures Yet Unthought,” she means to explore “the ‘nature’ of time, the precedence of the future over the present and past, and the strange vectors of becoming that a concept of the new provokes” (15). Or again: “This is what time is if it is anything at all: not simply mechanical repetition, the causal ripple of objects on others, but the indeterminate, the unfolding, and the continual eruption of the new” (28). It is vital that we think time in these terms today. As was already clear in Fredric Jameson’s well-known 1984 assessment of postmodernity as “dominated by the categories of space rather than by the categories of time” (Jameson 16), and as has been further suggested by such rhetoric of totalization as that surrounding the Human Genome Project or the establishing of a “global village,” we live in a time when the possibility of the surprising or of the wholly other seems less and less tenable. As Grosz and her writers are well aware, it is not a question of denying the accretion of knowledge or the fact of our increasing interconnectedness (still less of depending on the touch of an angel to provide the culture a renewed sense of the Beyond), but of rejecting System in favor of a materially and discursively situated immanence that nevertheless allows for the unfolding of alterity.

 

The essays deal with a variety of different topics and thinkers, but Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson are the foundations here, along with some of Deleuze’s actual or virtual interlocutors: Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Klossowski, and, especially, Michel Foucault (Grosz herself had dealt with Deleuze’s version of becoming in “Architecture from the Outside” in Space, Time, and Perversion, and “Intensities and Flows” in Volatile Bodies). There is, of course, a danger in such an interdisciplinary collection. Demarcated by an abstraction such as “becoming” and embracing topics as varied as the post-human “techno-body,” the postcolonial nation, the nature of the human glance, the Peruvian Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and French literary pornography, the volume risks being vaguely compelling to many but fully interesting to no one. To what humanistic or post-humanistic endeavor could the idea of becoming not be applied? Yet this danger becomes a virtue in Becomings, for the question of the future is also the question of interdisciplinarity and hybridity in general: how does one maintain an openness to alterity or novelty without sacrificing the intelligibility that comes with boundaries, context, discipline, familiarity, and a shared language? How does one move ahead without that move having been forecast in advance by the rules of the game? In part, one listens to many voices and experiences many degrees of unfamiliarity. Following Bergson, several of the essays explore the ways in which durée can be seen as both unified and fragmented, both forming context and allowing difference. It is in this same sense that the volume should be read in its whole-but-multiple entirety if the full effect of its exploration, its posing of the very question of exploration, is to be experienced.

 

Given the influence of Deleuze on the collection, as well as Grosz’s perennial concern with bodies, it is not surprising that perhaps the central concern of Becomings is with time as immanence and that its central assumption is that we need to think of the new or the future in a way that goes beyond the twin dichotomies of possible/real and idea/matter. We are called to think the future in terms of a certain kind of empiricism, to think it neither as pure idea nor as a noumenal realm in opposition to the phenomenal one of the present; the future is not what gets incorporated into and limited by the already-material and thus determined present. Rather, the future, as the becoming of the present, is the very trace of what both de-materializes the present and de-idealizes the yet-to-come. In Deleuze’s terms, we must think of becoming not as realizing the possible, but as a mode of actualizing the virtual–where both the actual and virtual are equally “real.” It is a question of, as Grosz writes, “resist[ing] both a logic of identity and a logic of resemblance and substitut[ing] differentiation, divergence, and innovation” (27).

 

Many of the essays that most directly confront this issue are those that focus specifically on the writings of Deleuze. Manuel De Landa, in “Deleuze, Diagrams, and the Open-Ended Becoming,” situates Deleuze as a “nonessentialist realis[t]” (33) whose sense of time is in line with contemporary thinking about self-organization in the physical sciences. For De Landa, Deleuze maintains the openness of the future via “divergent actualization, combinatorial productivity, and the synthesis of novel structures out of heterogeneous components” (41). In “Diagram and Diagnosis,” John Rajchman reflects on the “‘time of politics'” (42) in terms of Deleuze’s idea of “the time to come.” He argues that Deleuze does not imagine a messianic future (as in the thought of Gershom Scholem), but rather an empiricist becoming of our actions in the present: “The problem of the time ‘to come,’ then, becomes a ‘pragmatic’ problem of how to act to make repetition a feature of the future–a worldly matter of action and friendship requiring no ‘mystical authorization'” (45-46).

 

Dorothea Olkowski and Claire Colebrook, both of whom focus on Deleuze’s collaborations with Felix Guattari, present the two densest pieces in the collection. Olkowski, in “Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming,” provides an entryway into Capitalism and Schizophrenia by emphasizing, against certain of its readers, the text’s open-endedness, its emphasis on “nonrestrictive desiring-productions” (106). According to Olkowski, it is in the very breakdown of desiring machines that they become “destabilizing, deterritorializing, releasing flows which otherwise would be channeled into a (social) organism, a stabilized, territorialized order” (107). Colebrook, in “A Grammar of Becoming: Strategy, Subjectivism, and Style,” reads Deleuze’s geology-project against Foucault’s genealogy-project. She concludes that, taken together, they outline the possibilities for thinking of becoming in terms of strategy rather than in terms of identity. Colebrook grounds both thinkers’ projects in a wonderful reading of Nietzsche’s idea of repetition in On the Genealogy of Morals: “Genealogy takes place as a positive repetition of becoming human; and it is through this repetition that human reactivism will activate itself as an effect. The effect of the human will be seen as an effect” (121). That is, repetition affirms the human as active rather than as reactive, which is to say as an effect of its strategies rather than the fantasized ground prior to any strategy. Eleanor Kaufman’s “Klossowski or Thoughts-Becoming” compares Deleuze to Klossowski’s Laws of Hospitality, reading both writers as performing “‘corporealizing thought'” (Klossowski’s description of Nietzsche’s writing as partially constituted by his illness) (154). In Klossowski and Deleuze, “[p]rovoked by the body, thought ascends to a space where it can revoke the body, but not without being energized by the body’s very materiality” (154). This “positive and joyous” (153) process of the body leaving its trace in thought breaks down identity, and therefore opens the way to unprecedented identities.

 

Despite their celebration and/or advocation of durée as the privileged mode of temporality, these provocative articles are, on the whole, to be commended for not indulging in Bergson’s excoriation of spatiality. For example, although Edward Soja is nowhere cited, I sense the presence of the spirit of his Postmodern Geographies, which follows a certain thread in Foucault in criticizing the Bergsonian tendency to equate space with death and determination, and time with life and freedom. Clearly Deleuze himself, with his interest in geographies, lines of flight, and territories, would not be beholden to such a dichotomy.

 

Perhaps because grappling with Deleuze tends toward a deepening of questions rather than an establishment of positive answers, the essays that do not specifically take the writings of Deleuze as their subject develop some of the collection’s sharpest arguments, as opposed to reflections. In “Becoming an Epistemologist,” Linda Martín Alcoff argues eloquently for an epistemology and an authorization for truth-claims that would not be opposed to becoming–that would not, in other words, be beholden to a neo-Kantian noumena/phenomenon dichotomy, such that epistemic claims are merely more or less accurate representations of what is permanent, true, and Beyond. She grounds her argument in a reading of Foucault in which truth is not “collapsible to power” (57), not merely a mask that power puts on, but in which “knowledge has no autonomous existence apart from power” (62). In this sense, the becoming of power relations and of knowledge can be seen as mutually constitutive for “an immanent rather than a transcendental metaphysics” (70): it is not that we must abandon the possibility of truth, but that truth in no way dwells in some noumenal realm apart from the materialities of power. Even the idea of representation, Alcoff argues, can be maintained, as long as it conveys “a productive, always partial and temporally indexed, description of a virtual reality, that is, a composite of temporary constellations” (72). For Edward S. Casey, in “The Time of the Glance: Toward Becoming Otherwise,” the glance explains the tension in Bergson’s description of durée as a whole that nevertheless cannot be totalized (Grosz and Gail Weiss in their pieces also deal with this aspect of Bergson). The glance involves a “double leakage,” in which its “penetrative particularity” detotalizes the exterior world even as the durational subject is penetrated by what the glance takes in (95). Because the glance is thus always located “on the agitated edge of the restless subject” (96), it is of a single duration but is also that which attends to a constant stream of difference; it therefore constitutes a whole but perpetually-differentiating becoming.

 

Weiss, in “The Durée of the Techno-Body,” offers a compelling critique of feminists whom she regards as too pessimistic about the political stakes of current biotechnologies such as organ transplants and reproductive medicine. In particular, she takes issue with Rosi Braidotti, who sees such technologies as inevitably death-bringing and time-freezing, insofar as they impose a mechanical time onto people’s–especially women’s–living durée. While admitting that Bergson might be sympathetic to such a temporal opposition, Weiss argues that he also insisted that “durées are never isolated but always interconnected” (170), which means that other times–including natural rhythms and clock time–are inseparable from our own becomings today. In other words, there is no pure subjective durée to which technological time would be a baleful other. Moreover, frozen time cannot be the same as death-time because death is not beyond durée but “inhabits time as a virtuality which is continually embodied or actualized” (171). Rather than rejecting new biotechnologies per se, then, we need to carefully examine the “corporeal effects” and “discursive practices” (175) in which any given deployment of technology is situated. She ends the essay with a cogent coda on the dangers and the vitiation through overuse of the metaphor of the “monster.” Alphonso Lingis gets the last word with the lyrical, moving narrative, “Innocence,” which explores the becoming of two Peruvians from children into guerilla fighters for the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, and the impossible future they imagine in their (virtually) hopeless fight for justice. It is entirely appropriate that a (second-person) narrative should end the collection: somewhere between the demarcations of philosophy and the unfoldings of literature, the volume ends with a call for a becoming-future unbound by what has come before it.

 

My arguments with these pieces are minor. For example, in Alcoff’s argument that “ontological contours are partially constituted through discourses and other practices” (72), she might have said more about how the epistemologist determines the extent of that partiality, or how one decides how far truth claims are constituted by power (though no doubt this would in part depend upon the particular case in point). In Casey’s attempt to distinguish his discourse on the glance from other philosophers, I think he goes too far in claiming that Derrida misses the fact that Edmund Husserl’s Augenblick does not just disrupt presence but also “affirms the subjectivity of the subject: an abyssal subjectivity but a subjectivity nonetheless” (81). It seems to me that Derrida does not deny the possibility of subjectivity, provided it is thought in a certain way. Finally, Weiss probably moves too quickly from Bergson’s inter-subjective durée to the conclusion that clock time can be part of durée.

 

In any case, as fine as these essays are, for me one of the most brilliant pieces in the collection is Pheng Cheah’s “Spectral Nationality: The Living-On [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization.” Cheah uses Derrida’s speculation on the ghost in Specters of Marx to argue that in postcolonialism, the bourgeois concept of “nation” inevitably haunts the concepts of “culture” or “the people.” The essay is important in part because Cheah reads Derrida carefully enough–it is in no sense another tired academic “application” of deconstructive thought–to show that, if “monster” is losing its metaphorical force, “ghost” still has analytical use for us. Cheah argues, first, that several of the most influential thinkers of postcolonialism (Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Partha Chatterjee, Benedict Anderson) depend upon an idealized “ontology of life” (178), in which the post-colonial condition equals the living, moving, spontaneous, vital force of a resisting people being threatened by the static, oppressive, ideological Thanatos of nationalism. His analysis on this score is absolutely convincing, along with his conclusion that “the fundamental opposition is always between popular spontaneity and its ideological manipulation [via nationalism]” (182). He then follows with a reading of the ghost-logic of Specters of Marx that is less fully developed than, but equally insightful to, recent work on the book by Fredric Jameson, Simon Critchley, and Werner Hamacher. Following the language of “wears and tears” in Specters, Cheah clearly puts the idea that spectrality for Derrida “disjoins even as it renews the present in one and the same movement. The revenant or returning spectral other tears time conceived as a continuous succession of ‘nows.’ But it is precisely the rending of time that allows the entirely new to emerge” (193). However, argues Cheah, Derrida himself wrongly attempts to exorcize the ghost of the nation in his too-simple representation of globalization today–a globalization that, for several reasons, retains and must retain the idea of nation. Thus, the death-like specter of nationalism is precisely what must be “interminably negotiated” (188) by postcolonial peoples as they build a living present and future. The emphasis on Deleuze in Becomings is well-taken and necessary, but I admire Cheah for showing that Derrida’s thought, too, can be important for a philosophy of becoming, one situated beyond the division between matter and spirit, that would speak to contemporary political concerns.