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Abstract
This paper conducts a mixed semiotics of unsafe homo passional assemblages. It begins with an exposition of Deleuze and Guattari's instructions for mapping the multidimensional circuitry of assemblages along the generative and transformative poles. Unsafe sex is a line of desiring movement involving expressive matter from the pick-up machine. After HIV/AIDS, the pick-up machine's de-territorialised movements have been problematised, their a-semiotic matter becoming a testimony to the limits of the imperative to practice safe sex. These assemblages have been overcoded as being unconscious and ineffable; however, this paper traces their mixed semiotics involving the a-signifying particle-signs of the pick-up machine as well as conscious lines of desiring movement involving the segmentarity and mirror vision of a recognisable social identity as a gay man. In all of these passional assemblages the pick-up machine's nomadic movements have become buckled by a number of sovereign, consuming microfascisms. The lines of movement have reached their threshold limit, weakening their capacity for making new connections for new lines of becoming and creative mutation. Throughout the paper it is argued that the macropolitics of safe sex has failed to grasp the possibilities for new passages that can be drawn from the molecular soup of the pick-up machine and its micropolitics of perception, affection and conversation. It is not necessary to prohibit its lines of movement as new possibilities for homo sexual culture will emerge by drawing on affective potentials drawn from the pick-up machine in conjunction with new affective material.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the reviewers for their helpful comments, which hopefully have improved this paper. Special thanks to Joseph Pugliese for his supportive and constructive comments.
Notes
1. In “state space”, the passional subject's speed and intensity of desiring movement is regulated and relativised within a striated or “gridded” surface of fixed and identifiable points and pathways (Massumi 1987, xiii; Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 385–392 and 489–492).
2. For Deleuze and Guattari, “politics” is a pragmatic experimentation with particular problems of living that involves a strategic interchange between any particular regime's molar segmentation and its molecular flows, widening the orbit of politics to include virtually anything (1987, 213). Conventional politics operates by making “macrodecisions and binary choices” expressing binarised interests that delimit the conceptualisation of these problems and subsequent decision-making (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 221). However, below this macropolitics, Deleuze and Guattari reveal a world of micropolitics involving the “microdeterminations, attractions and desires” of molecular flows involving mass movements (or the masses) that are irreducible to macropolitical determinations, but that necessarily feed into and respond to this macropolitics (1987, 221–222). In this way, any political problem cannot be reduced to an axiomatic system that is transcendental and autonomous as it is always in relation with everything else, including mutating micropolitical determinations (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 461). Always located within this infinite web of connections and disconnections, including forces that it cannot presently master, politics can only benefit from “experimentation and intuition”, in particular when its present macrodeterminations have reached a stopping point and require a re-ordering that necessarily involves de-territorialisation and augmentation/boosting by making new connective flows (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 461).
3. Deleuze and Guattari identify three tasks for schizoanalysis: (i) to “destroy … molar aggregates … the structures of representations” (1983, 311 and 338). A negative task, its movements are in “permanent revolution”, preferring the “overflight” of de-territorialisation and de-coding, so that bodily movement is freer for polyvocal, open-ended, inclusive molecular forms of investment (forget, destroy, cut, breakthrough, but stay connected to virtual potentials, actualised through lines of variation, deviance, mutation and divergence); (ii) to describe how particular modes of desire function: “the nature, the formation, or the functioning of … desiring machines, independently of any interpretations” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1983, 322) – to construct diagrams of “desiring machines … how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the machine, what constitutes misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what becomings” (1983, 338); and (iii) to “reach the investments of unconscious desire of the social field, insofar as they are differentiated from the preconscious investments of interest, and insofar as they are not merely capable of counteracting them, but also coexisting with them in opposite modes” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1983, 350). It is this third task that I am referring to here in relation to microfascisms. In A thousand plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1987, 225) characterise a micro-fascism as a “microtexture … [that] explain(s) how the oppressed can take an active role in oppression”. Pre-conscious investments can be reactionary when the molecular movements of those in a line of flight retain an investment that pre-determines modes of desire in stratified ways that don't coincide with its de-stratified molecular revolution (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1983, 343–351). Becoming-gay involves a double movement where the subject withdraws from the molarity of phallic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality and where a minoritorian identity acts as a medium of becoming-otherwise (Guattari Citation1984, 233–235; Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 291). This de-territorialises the subject from molar male identity, however its assemblages are thoroughly mixed, with some formations being closer to the molar pole than others as desire is re-territorialised by the apparatuses of class, race and gender that produce segmentarity (e.g. possessing potent phallocratic mixes such as the exclusive active personage who wants to fuck his partner raw – or – the reverse position of wanting to be fucked senseless).
4. The map's motif is the body without organs (BwO): the body's operational tendency to reduce, reject or escape the organisations of the organs in favour of an increase and acceleration in the production of differential potential (Robinson Citation1999, 58). As such, it is the body outside any determinate state, its potential for action being virtual, the degree of intensity of thought/matter as it passes through a threshold state from one determinate state to another: intensity = 0 (Massumi Citation1992, 70). Every BwO is “a plateau in communication with other plateaus on the plane of consistency” that can be used as an “enchanted recording … surface” to map desiring production on the plane of consistency, providing a topography of its assemblages that charts the “… amorphous patchwork of affects woven across the surface of the BwO” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 158; 1983, 11–12).
5. Segmentarity occurs when the lines of desiring movement become territorialised and stratified within various assemblages as they criss-cross between various kinds of segments (various social spaces, social classes, identifiable trajectories, etc.) as well as levels (individual, collective – masses and classes) (see Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 208–209). Segmentarity fragments and overcodes experience into classes and segments that, at the same time, confines bodily movement to movement along striated pathways, favouring one line over others (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 210–212).
6. See Deleuze and Guattari (Citation1987: 105–110). Theories of signification are critiqued by Deleuze and Guattari as being too reductive, relegating language to expression and expression to form, effectively subsuming all possible functions (1987, 65–68 and 112–117). They reintroduce content that is neither a signified nor a referent, but instead is a virtual intensive matter with extensive properties that is put to work in a stratum or assemblage (Massumi Citation1992, 43–45). Intensive matter is both non-equilibrium material where intensive differences have not been cancelled, and a virtual force as a result of its affectivity whereby it possesses capacities that produce heterogeneous assemblages (Delanda Citation2002, 161). New lines of becoming and the creation of new concepts or order-words occur along the “… passage to the limit … this movement pushes language to its own limits, while bodies are simultaneously caught up in a movement of metamorphosis of their contents or a process of exhaustion causing them to reach or overstep the limit of their figures” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 108).
7. Incorporeal transformation can be defined as “a change of social status of a body within or across assemblages” (Bonta and Protevi Citation2004, 98). “The incorporeal transformation is recognisable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 81). As such it is constitutive of an event whereby enunciated statements effectuate bodily transformations that possess a materiality as a consequence of the “non-corporeal attributes they express” (such as the judge's pronouncement of “guilty” that transforms the accused into an offender). In this sense, the speech act is performative as it actualises particular events (see Massumi Citation1992, 28–29). The strategic usage of statements provides the conditions of possibility for transmitting statements into order-words and order-words into assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 85).
8. Enunciated statements belong to particular order-words as they are inserted into particular discursive formations using their rules of operation to achieve particular pragmatic or experimental effects. These enunciated statements are necessarily social as they are assembled into these regimes of signs in anticipation of discursive power relations that continue to organise and exercise particular strategic relations within these regimes. In this way the subject of the statement can be conceived as a desiring machine whose speech acts indirectly or directly expresses and intervenes into these regimes of signification and their “social obligations” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 79). In the context of the axiomatics to practice safe sex, these speech acts attempt to direct content in the collective assemblage of enunciation by intervening into these discursive relations in order to “… anticipate them and move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate them or combine them, delimit them in a different way” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 86).
9. An abstract machine “defines the patterns and thresholds … of a complex system” functioning as a “quasi-causal operator that links virtual multiplicities together” (Bonta and Protevi Citation2004, 47). For Deleuze and Guattari, abstract machines are “unformed matters and nonformal functions”, intensive matter that are the cutting edges of creation and de-territorialisation (1987, 141 and 510–511). These abstract machines combine with other matter and particle-signs as concrete assemblages.
10. This swirling and tense relation is described by Deleuze and Guattari: “I am on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or a foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if I let myself be drawn into the centre of the fray, but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd” (1987, 29).
11. For others, who oscillate between the fluxes of safe and unsafe passional assemblages, sero-conversion can be experienced as a relief, simultaneously as a liberation from safe sex and a weighty passage to certainty: “In a way it's a relief … I don't have to wonder anymore … So now if I do find someone, the relationship can be 100 percent real with nothing in the way … Maybe now that I'm HIV-positive I can finally have my life” (Green Citation1996, 85). This passage is “quick and the weighty” as the body slows down as it orients to its particular destination “in accordance with the law of falling bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 371).
12. The discursive context of the research interview is in itself an institutional form of content in state space that is a fractal determinant of the material production of the research subjects’ collective enunciations about unsafe sex, shaping the field of sayability within this milieu that remains annexed to the positivist delimitation and control of HIV infection.
13. Duggan defines the new homonormativity as “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay constituency and a privatised, depoliticised gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (1998, 179). This public rhetoric emanates from (mostly) white, male, middle-class gay men who are opposed to left “queerthink”, advocating a moralism that attacks gay libertarian sexual politics, in particular its commitment to “promiscuity”. It advocates for gay marriage and monogamy, favouring “a naturalized variation of a fixed minority arrayed around a state-endorsed heterosexual primacy and prestige” (Duggan Citation1998, 190). She characterises this as a neo-liberal politics that recodes gay politics in more narrow, de-politicised form – “equality” to a few conservative institutions, “freedom” from prejudice and inequality and “privacy” as domestic confinement divorced from politics.
14. The concept of “negotiated safety” was coined by Australian researchers at the National Centre for HIV Social Research using data from longitudinal quantitative surveys where gay men reported this tactic for lowering the risks of HIV sero-conversion (Kippax et al. Citation1993). Being a molecular line of flight, these researchers re-territorialised this as “the negotiated practice of unprotected anal intercourse.within regular partnerships of concordant serostatus”. Negotiated safety is an overcoding of this line of flight that researchers and safe-sex educators have deployed as a strategy of “calculated risk-taking” for men who contract for safe sexual intimacy. Unsafe anal sex is viewed as irrational that rational will seeks to limit by interpolating men to become risk assessors and controllers in their own partnerships (Ridge Citation1996, 100). After following a detailed “negotiated safety” checklist, the partners must wait for a sufficient period to ensure that HIV transmission has not occurred before having unprotected anal sex, while establishing rules regarding sexual relations outside of the primary intimate relationship. This re-territorialisation of unsafe sex requires a return to homonormative temporalities for safety and longevity.
15. Foucault describes passion as: “… a state, something that falls on you from out of the blue, that takes hold of you, that grips you for no reason, that has no origin. One doesn't know where it comes from. Passion arrives like that, a state that is always mobile but never moves toward a given point. There are strong and weak moments, moments when it becomes incandescent. It floats, it evens out … it destroys itself. In a state of passion one is not blind, one is simply not oneself” (1996a, 313).
16. Foucault comments: “transgression prescribes not only the sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated substance, but also a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating” (1998, 70).
17. See Foucault (Citation1996a ,Citationb ,Citationc). Foucaultian aesthetics – the “art of not being oneself” – is a depersonalised strategy in a line of flight from the deployment of sexuality that tactically resists the “truth about oneself”, which would otherwise stratify and over-code the self within the representational regimes of gay identity. Foucault understands this tactical resistance as being located at “the limit of consciousness, because it ultimately dictates the only possible reading of our unconscious; at the limit of the law, since it seems the sole substance of universal taboos; the limit of language, since it defines that line of foam showing just how far speech may advance upon the sands of silence” (Foucault Citation1998, 69–70).
18. “For it primarily the degeneration of the sexual into a relationship that condemns sexuality to becoming a struggle for power. As soon as the persons are posited the war begins. It is the self that swells with the excitement of being on top, the self that makes the inevitable play of thrusts and relinquishments in sex an argument for the natural authority of one sex over the other” (Bersani 1988, 222).
19. See also Halperin (Citation1995), Dean (Citation1996 ,Citation2000). These authors, in different ways, understand passion as being a de-territorialising force capable of dismantling the self as part of the conditions of possibility for re-working cultural boundaries.
20. Hocquenghem does acknowledge that expressive regimes such as “the abject desire to be loved” can become apparatuses of capture for the pick-up machine, re-territorialising it within “civilisation's imaginary affective system”. He also briefly acknowledges how the gay movement risks remaining a subjugated group by affirming itself and joining with the state apparatus in “a game of pride” (Hocquenghem Citation1978, 142–144). He warns: “there is always a trap waiting for desire, inscribing law into the heart of the dispute” (Hocquenghem Citation1978, 142).
21. Westhaver ends his account about the incomprehensibility of unsafe sex by using a second-order hermeneutic that interprets it as “a socially embedded and corporeally embodied desire for recognition – articulated through pleasures” (2005, 366). This overcodes desire as a need for recognition within a social field structured by lack, given heteronormative constraints (Westhaver Citation2005, 358–359 and 362–365).
22. Deleuze and Guattari's describe the body's desiring-production as a material process of connection, registration and enjoyment of rhizomatic flows of matter and energy involving a triple process involving the somatic, social and natural registers that operate beyond the nature/human distinction (Bonta and Proveti Citation2004, 76–77). Firstly, bodies/desiring machines connect with other machines, both causing the current to flow in a particular way that breaks and differentiates it from other flows – “and … and … and then …”. Thresholds of intensity are sensed/recorded on the body as affects and then the flow is momentarily broken, opening a space for either repeating the machinic connections by exclusive synthesis, or, selecting new inclusive connective syntheses – “either … or … or …” If the modes of conjunctive synthesis become consumed on the body as repetitive exclusive syntheses, they become organised, codified and owned by the subject as recognisable social experiences and identities – “So that's what it was! … So its me! … So its mine!” (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1983, 16–22).
23. In Deleuzo-Guattarian pragmatics, this is one of the potential dangers of any collective/mass's line of flight – the problem of clarity (1987, 227–228). From within the molecular movements of the pick-up machine, microscopic perceptions may be experienced as clarity when the subject attains a perception of the molecular texture as possessing a supple segmentarity. This, in turn, runs the “risk of reproducing in miniature the affections, the affectations of the rigid … microfascisms lay down the law”. Deleuze and Guattari describe a microfascism as a “micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with others”. These self-contained microfascisms may further segment as they interact within particular localities at a molecular level, having the potentiality to crystallise as a centralised macrofascism, or to float along a more supple line becoming a “multitude of black holes” that act more like a virus capable of adapting to varied conditions, however within interactions that lack resonance and that involve the clarity and judgments of self-contained, independent microfascisms.
24. As Hocquenghem suggests, this image-machine is perverse in that it “contains a complex knot of desire and dread … [that expresses] … some aspect of desire which appears nowhere else, and that is not merely the accomplishment of the sexual act with a person of the same sex” (1978, 49–50).
25. These re-territorialisations incorporate post-Fordist/post-modern, flexible forms of labour that value qualities such as energetic agility, ruthlessness, speed, swiftness, confidence, arrogance, daily narcissistic scrutiny of oneself, ambitiousness, success, intensified productivity, supercompetitiveness, image-building and self-improvement are linked to this subjectivity (Lambevski Citation2003).
26. Diken and Lausten comment: “The normalised and law-abiding subject is haunted by a spectral double, by a subject that materialises the will to transgress the law in perverse enjoyment” (2005, 118). In their account, the “biopolitics of transgression” reveals the operations of sovereign power, defined as the sovereign's willed state of exception (see Agamben Citation1998; 2005). The state of exception is both inside and outside the law – the exception is granted a permanent and visible localisation that becomes the norm (Agamben 1988, 20 and 174). We find ourselves in the presence of a camp when a space is created where bare life and the juridical rule enter into “a threshold of indistinction” (Agamben 1988, 174). In the camp the life of the citizen becomes reduced to bare life, stripped of political form and value, constituting the unpolitical. This passage is enacted when the political decision is made to exempt a juridical rule and the criterion of its application. As such, all juridical concepts become indeterminate as the production of law and its application are no longer distinguishable moments (Agamben 1988, 172–173). In Diken and Lausten's argument, spaces of orgiastic hedonism are biopolitical camps that demonstrate the logic of the state of exception as being generalised throughout society. The party goer is both a biopolitical body as Foucault would have it, and, a body who voluntarily abandons citizenship, becoming “bare life”. Subsequently, neither “sex” nor the party goer can be located outside the reach of sovereign power. Following their line of analysis, the party-goer becomes both “the object of power and the subject of emancipation” whereby the “freedom” experienced is founded on an extension of the reach of sovereign power (Diken and Lausten Citation2005, 119).