Parturition envy and homophobia: some notes

Quoted from:

Conceptions and Contraceptions of the Future:
Terminator 2, The Matrix, and Alien Resurrection
A. Samuel Kimball Camera Obscura 2002 (Project Muse.)


What is a figure of speech in Plato becomes a propositional certitude in
Aristotle, whose massive oeuvre, as Robert Con Davis has demonstrated in
The Paternal Romance, develops the implication that thinking is a
masculine activity of conception—not metaphorically but literally. (10)
In the Metaphysics, for example, Aristotle deduces that "it is by the
form [eidos] that we recognize everything." (11) Form is the
metaphysical principle that structures matter, that provides every
substance with its telos, and that thereby explains the development of
living things and renders their respective structures intelligible. What
is more, form, Aristotle declares, is quintessentially masculine and
conceptive—it is spermatic. Thus, in the Generation of Animals,
Aristotle points out that it is the male body that "is able to concoct,
to cause to take shape, and to discharge, semen [sperma] possessing the
'principle' of the 'form.'" (12) The "first motive principle," form or
eidos, is not only "a natural and intrinsic expression of maleness" but
a self-generating one. (13) Since the male's body "causes to take shape"
and then to "discharge" the seminal principle of form, which doubles as
this principle's physical vehicle, maleness thereby inheres in that
which informs every substance, including maleness. (14) Maleness,
therefore, forms itself according to the self-generativity of
Aristotle's "first motive principle." Aristotle arrives at a deductive
necessity: "The generative parent is . . . male" (4.3.767b).

footnotes:
10. Robert Con Davis, "Aristotle and the Gendered Subject," in The
Paternal Romance: Reading God-the-Father in Early Western Culture
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 73-96.
11. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. John H. McMahon (Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus, 1991), 4.5.1010a.
12. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. and ed. A. L. Peck
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 4.1.765b.
13. Davis, The Paternal Romance, 86.
14: Since the female produces only an impure kind of semen which she is
"unable to cause to take shape or discharge" (Aristotle, Generation of
Animals, 4.3.767b), she cannot do what the male can—namely, bring form
into being. Having no proper being of her own, she is but a debased form
of the male.

Born of male parthenogenesis parturition envy finds itself locked within
a finite misogynist masculine sexual economy. The impure (dirty) semen
of the female monthly discharge cannot itself cause to take shape any
form and is excluded from the sexual economics of production. Sexual
reproduction is then an affair to be carried out between men with the
female womb being the appropriate carrier of masculine reproduction.
With the phallus as the capital of this relationship between men male
homosexual relations must be excluded since this would immediately
consume the phallus (being capital) and lead to the collapse of this
sexual economy. Also excluded are equal relations between men and women
since the womb which is women is the mechanism of exchange and so cannot
be equal, hence allowing only homosocial relations which occasion a
controlled homoerotics between men and future men (adolescents) which is
to situate this economy within a double impossibility. It is then
necessary that a line of escape sets off as a sacrifice of the present
phallus to the birth of the future phallus as a metaphysics of Being and
as such is the structuring line of homophobia in masculine
parthenogenesis and parturition envy and also the suture line which
cannot be met since this meeting would result in the lost of the
phallus. This is the castration line which in Lacan structures language
as the bar between Signifier/signified. This suture, the bar of
castration, then has two names; homophobia and homosexual, and it is
this suture or line which performs an immanent critique on masculine
parthenogenesis which structures the inequality between sexes according
to a masculine sexual economy and as such takes on a novel monstrous
form hitherto unrecognised and unrecognisable.

See also:
Mafarka and Son: Marinetti's Homophobic Economics
Barbara Spackman, Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994) 89-107

Deleuze's univocal

It is not good enough to cite Deleuze's univocal. It has to be thought. The unease with Deleuze's virtual could very well be the demand for actual univocity. The demands of potential against equivocal possibility. This suggests a reading of Badiou's argument for an actual univocal against Deleuze's virtual.

Univocal narrative

The term univocal in a popular sense is usually taken to mean one voice and to this one voice is assigned a despotism or totalitarian rule which assumes a priori the right to judge good and bad poetry and which in itself harbours a mystic conspiracy that speaks against the real diversity that already exists. This given diversity is then expected to join in with the univocal despotic voice as a choral which is to say a holding yard for wild horses. A little horse that needs to be tamed. The man of letters that joins the animal kingdom of the mind to be tamed by univocal thought as actualised narrative. Modernism quite rightly objects to this so called univocal despotism and demonstrates against such a self claimed despotic univocal thought multiple voices which would be one of the defining features of modernist narrative. But in this opposing diversity as multivocal to a despotic self claiming univocity, is it not a slippage back into Aristotle and the investment of Romanticism in such a poetics of diversity of what is given which defeats modernist poetics? It seems as if the claim for a diversity of voices against the univocal is a half read Derrida that is contented to leave logocentrism as it is and as a limit deconstruction or again another word for Romanticism. The open that closes as a Venus fly trap does so capturing a swarming fly. Perhaps here we have an opening onto the limits of Open Form or the New Poetry against which a poetry war is being waged in recent United States poetics by the supporters of closed form. Even if I have been published in New York within the auspices of the New Poetry I find that there are questions remaining as to the potential traps that come with being included in this camp that seems willing to be limited to the open provided by Heidegger and poetry as the song of the earth as the limit horizon of poetry. This again leaves open a discussion of what is univocal narrative which requires a way of understanding univocity that is no longer the false univocity of despotism which is to say that a given diversity leaves open a possible dissent from the univocal despotic voice which breaks univocity.

Such a way can be indicated in philosophy by recent metaphysics provided by Deleuze and Badiou, both of whom see a need to posit the Univocity of being as the metaphysical Being of being. This at first sight may also open onto what is called meta-fiction or perhaps another term which I may suggest would be meta-narrative which refuses the meta-narrative poetics which follows Aristotle's metaphysics.

A few quotes from another blog which leans toward or very much suggests univocal modernist narrative: (citation from: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?m=200608)

That is to say, the novel is “postmodern” in the quite literal sense (rather than in the more prevalent extended senses of the word “postmodern”) that it doesn’t reject these modernist distinctions, nor take one side of them against the other, but rather subsumes them all into itself, and speaks unresolvable multiplicities with one voice — what Deleuze calls the “univocity” of being.

[and]

Part of the novel’s univocity is that it theorizes its own allegories and metaphors, without these theoretical suggestions being anything like a master key to the rest of the book — the theories are on the same level as the narrated events and bodies and languages that they theorize.

These quotes and indeed the discussion of the narrative strategies used by Shelley Jackson’s Half Life are very interesting. It provides a potential way into discussing what a univocal narrative may be. There may be more to this discussion when we come to consider Gore Vidal's novels as meta-narratives and by this not only his more obvious "postmodernist" metafictions but the more seemingly conventional historical novels as meta-narrative.

Bakhtin's chronotope

In a footnote Bakhtin writes; "Here we employ the Kantian evaluation of the importance of these forms in the cognitive process, but differ from Kant in taking them not as "transcendental" but as forms of the most immediate reality." (Dialogic Imagination, p 85.) It is a reference to "Transcendental Aesthetics" in Critique of pure reason.

I have been skimming over this section of Kant's writing trying to follow what Bakhtin could mean by removing the transcendental. I am astounded by the violence of the footnote. All that labour by Kant in proving that a priori synthetic judgement is possible and the scaffold comes tumbling down in a side comment. Does the a priori survive this assault?

Is it no longer possible to think on the grounds provided by Kant?

Alien abductions

This blog software. Always learning new software with the dull eyesight of an old man until death do us part.

I do
a performance mimesis

machinic slave.

One may imagine Proust lying in bed with a notebook computer bluetooth wifi network endlessly blogging in search of lost time unexpecting to be read. It is obscene this Deleuze virtual philosophical primal scene. (Freudian.)

Is that what is so deeply uneasy? It cannot be spoken. As metaphors from theoretical physics, chaos theory for example, something that it is not.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a priori space onto which one may hold as a scaffold. Fear an alien abduction. I was abducted by aliens.

Introduction

I was motivated, one could say provoked, to start this blog after coming across a blog at
larval-subjects.blogspot.com/ 2006/08/brief-note-on-virtual.html
--which could it be said (?) diagnosed "a deep unease with something Deleuze is claiming" to quote from the blog. This unease resonates with something I've been thinking on Deleuze's virtual and univocity. Having here what could be named a symptom a certain delicacy and tact is needed if we are to proceed but before doing so perhaps some introductory remarks on why this blog is called absolute deviation poetics.

Absolute deviation poetics is a title for some ideas I am working on as modernist poetics theory which is not philosophy in the technical sense of the word. It is also concerned with narrative poetics and what I would term novels and using the term poetics in the sense of a concern with the production of narrative. How does one write narrative? The answer, in short; inside writing narrative is absolute, immanent and univocal. Absolute deviation, using the word absolute in the metaphysical sense of without relation, is the internal poetics of narrative and the being and becoming of narrative. This suggests narrative that is at once both narrative and meta-narrative. For anyone familiar with narratology, myself included, to say narrative is absolute would appear to be utter nonsense. All I can say is it does work as a poetics both in the practical aspects of a first draft of a novel and the subsequent seemingly endless revisions that anyone who has written novels will be familiar with.

I have also been motivated to think about this poetics and hopefully to write something of a theoretical bent in response to a question as to why I called my first verse novel a novel when it also looked like a small collection of poems. After the publication of that first verse novel I set about writing another verse novel but this and the writing of any sort of explanation or defence of the poetics was interupted by a crisis stretching over the last ten and more years and so I have not written in that time anything that has been published in book form. The particulars of this crisis are of little interest except to say that illness is distressing and this innate affect of distress makes me fully human, as Silvan Tomkins would say. I am not ashamed to say I am human even if the affects of being human are shame and distress. I am no anti-humanist modelled on body idealism derived from Nietzsche. I do share with Kant both hope and optimism for humanity despite the many quarrels I may have with Kant as the name of a philosophy and the name of a problem as Derrida would say. Problems here that would also be not philosophical so perhaps not as Derrida would say.

While my own personal crisis is of little interest it does resonate with a more universal crisis and deepening social crisis as the conditions in which all of us must in this epoch of history live. I will perhaps admit to being a vitalist on the edge of the mystic or in the margins of mysticism carrying a hope for life and it is perhaps another symptom of unease that modernist poetics finds itself in mystical borders.

This returns us to the unease of Deleuze's virtual and univocal claim. The writer of the blog I first quoted is referring to secondary literature on Deleuze which seek to translate his thinking into a variety of recent scientific thought such as chaos theory or even to prohibit a direct discussion of Deleuze's own texts which the writer notes appears not to occur with other thinkers such as Heidegger as if there is an unease which cannot be spoken or as Badiou suggests in his writings on truth procedure can barely be said and is rarely if at all articulated. I have not read the secondary literature the writer mentions so can add little to verify this claim. But let us return to this deep and uneasy silence Deleuze's virtual occasions. What could be said further about this "deep unease". Could it be tentatively suggested that being diagnosed here is a philosophical unconscious, wishing to use this word in a broader sense then that ascribed strictly to Freud, which holds onto a scaffold of time and space provided by Kant in the first section of Critique of Pure Reason. There is an unsettling or unease here in that Deleuze's transcendental is a posteriori and can it be said that no longer is it possible to rely on an a priori certainty of time and space as the formal scaffold provided a priori with Kant's philosophy. And then to go a little further and say that no longer can it be assumed that space is a metric multiplicity and that space can only be thought as a non-metric multiplicity and further that space has no pure empty form and is created along side of or with matter at the same time, a consequence of Einstein's theory of relativity. That it is no longer possible to think on the terms laid out by Kant.

If this be so, we have here an unease that goes beyond an unease expressed in philosophical discussions of Deleuze's thought. A silence perhaps which is philosophy's envy and philosophy's distress making it fully human and a silence which is a symptom, a thought without an object, to echo Badiou's discussion of thought, language, poetry. What we also have here is the delicacy and decency of Deleuze's thought of the virtual and Nietzsche's warning against the obscenity of philosopher gods after the death of God. It is very difficult not to admire the decency and delicacy of Deleuze's virtual thought.

It is getting late and I need to stop writing. Perhaps another day I can return to Bakhtin's poetics as amongst the first writings of modernist poetics which is not philosophy and to typing a few words from Rimbaud's eternal return and univocal poetics.