Pushing feminist new materialist vitalism to an extreme: on bare death

Where is the end of becoming?

The end of becoming or its immanent limit is described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as follows: ‘[t]he imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula’ ([1980] 2007: 279). Meanwhile, becoming-imperceptible is characterised as – among other things – being ‘present at the dawn of the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 2007: 280). Braidotti rewrites the concept of becoming-imperceptible using the categories of death and life. She aims to introduce a ‘positive approach to the discussion of death’ (Braidotti, 2006: 144), reading death through the ‘generative powers of Zoe’ (Braidotti, 2006: 144). She states:

[d]eath is overrated. The ultimate subtraction is after all only another phase in a generative process … Death is the ultimate transposition, though it is not final … Zoe carries on, relentlessly generative … Death … is the becoming-imperceptible of the nomadic subject and as such it is part of the cycles of becomings … Death … is merely a point, it is not the horizon against which the human drama is played out. The centre is taken by Bios-Zoe and its ever-recurring flows of vitality. In and through many deaths, Bios-Zoe lives on (Braidotti, 2006: 144–150).

Preoccupation with the self in the process of becoming-imperceptible is troubling. ² On the one hand, Braidotti wants to dissolve the self into the world, yet, on the other hand, by singling out the self as a starting point for becoming, she (re-)establishes the opposition between the self and the world. In effect, she creates the same old illusion that we can actually detach the self from the world. This opposition is problematic for some feminist new materialist takes that pay particular attention to how the human is entangled in more-than-human worlds (e.g. the concept of trans-corporeality introduced by Alaimo [2008] or viscous porosity in Tuana [2008]) and for approaches that see dualisms as worthy of ‘pushing to an extreme’ rather than introducing or maintaining. Beginning with the self is a gesture that I read as paradoxically (given the intention of introducing the self to the process of becoming-imperceptible) sustaining the domination of the self in Braidotti’s work. ‘The self’ is being examined, whereas ‘the world’ seems left behind. Readers might want to ask what is going on with that ‘world’ that we are becoming and merging with? Does it have a chance of becoming something else as well? For example, nothingness or the self? To return to the phrase used by Deleuze and Guattari, who defined becoming-imperceptible as, among other things, being ‘present at the dawn of the world’ ([1980] 2007: 280), what if we – entering into the process of becoming-world – find ourselves present at the dusk of the world? What if the world ends while we are preoccupied with our selves? In the context of apocalyptic narratives, affects and visions in the Anthropocene and the rates of extinction of species (dubbed the sixth extinction; Kolbert [2014]), this question is particularly alarming. According to my reading, ‘the world’ is taken for granted in Braidotti’s work. ‘The world’ seems to always be in the process of becoming. Isn’t it problematic that for the human becoming is a task or challenge, whereas for ‘the world’ it is just one of its features?

Together with Barad, I could offer the observation that ‘“We” are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity’ (2003: 828). ‘We are of the world’ describes the posthuman condition as always already entangled with ‘the world’: there is no autonomous ‘self’ that might be introduced to the concept of ‘becoming-world’. Braidotti wishes the self to become-world, and her ethical reflections struggle to perform an operation on the self and challenge the always narcissistic ego. Yet, since she chooses to start with the self, she is caught in the trap of taking ‘the world’ and ‘the self’ as opposed to each other. Barad, on the contrary, recognises that ‘we’ are always already entangled with ‘the world’ (‘environment’, ‘the outside’) – this enmeshment is what she calls ‘being of the world’. The condition of ‘being of the world’ is a starting point for a non-anthropocentric ethics and a challenge for thinking outside the traditional notions such as ‘the self’ and ‘the world’. Being of the world means – among other things – that ‘we’ are not always able ‘to put the “active” back into activism’ (Braidotti, 2006: 134), that ‘we’ are not always in a position to refuse ‘to lead a degraded existence’ (Braidotti, 2006: 146), to self-style one’s death, ‘to desire actively to die our death’ (Braidotti, 2006: 152). Rather, it stresses interconnections, dependencies and also shared vulnerabilities that cut across bodies-environments. It means that ‘we’ – as the landscapes of the world – might be active agents, but ‘we’ might as well be ‘ineluctably passive’, as is the case ‘in the face of radioactivity’ (Marder and Tondeur, 2016: 22), when ‘we’ – as being of the world – are exposed, dependent and vulnerable together with ‘the world’.

Simultaneity

The second point that I wish to make in my reading of Braidotti’s essay relates to the question of the simultaneity of the negative and the positive. What I truly appreciate about the Foucauldian concept of assujettissement ([1975] 1995) and also the Deleuzian notion of agencement (Deleuze and Guattari, [1980] 2007) is that these concepts introduce both the oppressive/limiting/inhibiting and simultaneously the generative/productive aspects of forming the self within power relations. The process of assujettissement thus brings together both – to use Braidotti’s terms – potestas and potentia. When analysing power relations, Braidotti is also interested in both. She postulates beginning theorising with ‘differences of location’ embraced ‘in terms of power, as both restrictive and productive (potestas and potentia)’ (2013: 141). She is an indefatigable philosopher tracing new forms of biopower and necropower (e.g. Braidotti, 2013: 111–130), fully engaged with various novel areas of research popping up within a broader field of contemporary humanities and with how they might respond to the ‘posthuman predicament’ (Braidotti and Hlavajova, 2018: 1). Both critical and creative tasks permeate in what Braidotti calls posthuman critical theory (e.g. 2013: 163–169). At the same time, however, this postulated simultaneity fades away when she diagnoses ‘fixation on Thanatos’ (Braidotti, 2013: 121) as a ‘philosophical habit’ (Braidotti, 2013: 120) that she plans to break and sets herself against thinking about life ‘on the horizon of death’ (Braidotti, 2013: 121). Braidotti endeavours to rethink death through the lens of vitalism and materialism, and she does so by embracing thinking as a ‘gesture of affirmation’ (2013: 134) and by conceptualising posthuman critical theory as ‘the transformation of negative into positive passions’ (2013: 134). Thus, the initial point of departure (of simultaneity of potestas and potentia) is reversed as potestas is put into the ‘ethical transformative process’ (Braidotti, 2006: 134) resulting in turning potestas into potentia. The ‘fixation on Thanatos’ (Braidotti, 2013: 121) is successfully reworked, yet the simultaneity of death and life is lost in this process. As a consequence, a kind of fixation on life emerges as death is overshadowed by life: ‘Life as zoe … encompasses what we call “death”’ (2013: 134), she writes.

The simultaneity of potestas and potentia protects us against succumbing to the illusion of a utopian society; indeed, a society without power relations. And we could also stay methodologically hesitant with respect to any strategy of confrontation or action, stay cautious about it – i.e. agreeing with the Foucauldian diagnosis that ‘everything is dangerous’ (Foucault, 1983: 231). Without this hesitation, we might overlook the extent to which we are coinciding with what we declare to fight against or might treat something as a solution, regardless of its dangers. In order to grasp the simultaneity of potestas and potentia, I will use the example of the body and juxtapose Braidotti’s account of it with Elizabeth Wilson’s concept of the body as a biological matter.

Far from being able to fully address the nuances of the Braidottian notion of the body in this article, I wish to think about what concept of the body stems from the idea that our body is able to caution us in the case of danger threatening our own sustainability. ‘Our bodies’, Braidotti claims in ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’, ‘will … tell us if and when we have reached a threshold or a limit’ (2006: 137). Your body, thus, is supposed to alarm you: that’s enough, you went too far! It seems that there is something in the body (in this body that might alarm us) that serves as an unchangeable measure, something against which we can assess the scopes of destruction (is that too far or not yet?). What might that be? One of the possible answers is that it is the organicity of the body that might alarm us – organicity as something not complicit in the processes of destruction, as a substrate, a point of reference. But is the organicity of the body really a good measure to determine our limits? In Wilson’s (2004) article ‘Gut Feminism’, in which she develops an account of organic thought, she proves otherwise. ³ Wilson works with cases of hysteria and bulimia and analyses how biology is not only resistive but also complicit in the way those illnesses evolve. She emphasises that the biological data and the organic body were oftentimes placed outside of the feminist theories’ interests, but it would be worthwhile to see biology and the organic as always already cultural and political and as such always already within the scope of feminist theory. Considering Wilson’s work on organic bodies, it is worth exploring how our bodies could actually give us a warning given the extent to which they organically think on their own – sometimes organically collaborating with what we recognise as oppressive, or, in Braidottian terms: reactive, passive, negative. ⁴ Bearing in mind Wilson’s research on bulimia (particularly e.g. on how the throat is complicit in the process of how bulimia evolves), we might hesitate a bit when we hear ‘trust your guts!’. Or, at least, the expression might come with a twist. As Wilson explains: ‘[t]he gut is sometimes angry, sometimes depressed, sometimes acutely self-destructive’ (2004: 84); the ‘biological writing’ (2004: 78) and ‘the biological unconscious’ (2004: 78) are not always pointing to us the way out of destruction, and sometimes they lead us directly into it. When in cases of bulimia ‘the organism itself is beginning to think’ (Wilson, 2004: 82), thus when destructive behaviours become autonomous and compulsive, it is hard to treat bulimia. According to Wilson, ‘there is no a priori, fundamental demarcation between these entities [psyche and soma, mood and gut, temper and digestion, etc.]’ (2004: 84). Applying this perspective to Braidotti’s account of how ‘our bodies tell us if and when we have reached a threshold or a limit’ (2006: 137), we might raise the following questions: how would it be possible for our bodies to know what is good for us? And what is good anyway? How is it possible for the body to alarm us with an ‘Enough!’ when it is itself in the process of re/writing in both destructive and generative ways? Wilson’s contribution here is a way of taking seriously the condition of ‘being of the world’, because in her recognition of the lack of ‘a priori demarcations’, she is stressing the fact that there is no outside position/healer, like the body or the world, which could stop us from self-destruction or encourage healing. Both potestas and potentia are entangled, making every breath we take simultaneously life-giving and deadly, or, as Yoldas’s work, to which I will return later, shows with reference to plastic, it is both a killing and life-forming substance.

Ambiguity

The simultaneity of potestas and potentia, of the affirmative and the reactionary, of the positive and the negative, demands from us a hesitant or ambiguous approach.

In ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’, Braidotti suggests that we can transcend the pain, the negative and melancholy, and transform them all into the immanent ‘threshold of sustainability’, move on to the positive affects that lie at the heart of ethics. ‘[E]thical behavior’, explains Braidotti, ‘confirms, facilitates and enhances the subject’s potentia, as the capacity to express his/her freedom’ (2006: 134), whereas unethical behaviour ‘denies, hinders and diminishes that impetus and hence makes the subject unable to sustain it’ (2006: 135). Those distinctions between ethical and unethical behaviours are premised, however, on the possibility of detaching oneself from one mode of being (the negative, meaning unethical) and moving to the next (the positive – ethical). They are also based on the possibility of clearly distinguishing between the negative and the positive, the reactionary and the affirmative, the life-giving and the deadly. However, as I have already argued above, it is impossible to fully delimit one from the other. Detaching oneself from one mode of being and moving to the next is impossible because in the ‘becoming-world of the self’ we only succumb to the illusion that we are detaching ourselves from our selves, whereas we do not take into account the condition of being of the world and the fact that we are always already entangled with the world. Clearly distinguishing between the positive and the negative is impossible because of the simultaneity of potestas and potentia: as I argued above, healers do not inhabit land outside of power relations. There is ambiguity in the fact that there is potestas in potentia as well as potentia in potestas.

Braidotti suggests that all in all death is indiscernible and indistinguishable from life, after all ‘cells multiply in cancer as in pregnancy’ (2006: 145). The same might apply to pain and utter joyfulness, to stillness and great speed. One is taken over by the other; pain by joy, immobility by speed and death by zoe: ‘not only is there no dialectical tension between Eros and Thanatos, but these two entities are really just one life-force that aims to reach its own fulfilment’ (Braidotti, 2013: 134). Instead of one taking over the other, I would prefer to think of the two as ambiguously in/distinguishable, as being in out-of-joint touch, as companion species; one is haunting the other, one is accompanying the other like a shadow.

In the two following sections, I introduce the concept of bare death and interpret an installation by Yoldas to – as pointed out at the beginning of my discussion – push Braidottian vitalist approach to an extreme. I undertake this task with an eye on what vitalism leaves behind. Colebrook – mentioned at the outset of this article – defined it as ‘a matter that fails to come to life’, ‘unproductive and devoid of relations’ (2008: 59). I name it bare death. Updating vitalist and materialist ethics to ‘our today’ needs, as I claim in this article, a shift of attentiveness towards bodies-environments, being of the world, human-non-human landscapes of the world. Those landscapes – as I see it – are at least partly the landscapes of bare death.

The concept of bare death

Bare death is what Braidottian vitalism leaves behind when an ethical transformative process becomes ‘the task of turning the tide of negativity’ (Braidotti, 2006: 134). It results in erasing how both human and non-human deaths matter. Braidotti suggests that death is only meaningful for the human narcissistic self (‘For the narcissistic human subject … it is unthinkable that Life should go on without my being there’ (2006: 144)), whereas in fact ‘[d]eath as process from the specific and highly restricted viewpoint of the ego is of no significance whatsoever’ (2013: 137). Narcissism is – for Braidotti – a purely human sin, flaw or feature that disappears when the self loses itself – presumably when confronted with zoe. In opposition to the human attached to its self, zoe is an impersonal, a-personal, inhuman force, indifferent ‘to the interests of humans’ (2006: 147). As a result, death is an event (or process) that touches humans but leaves zoe indifferent to it. Death matters (to zoe) only to the point that it is part of its generative cycles. What happens to the rest, to all that does not get to enter into the ‘generative powers of a Life’ (Braidotti, 2006: 158)?

The concept of bare death stems from Braidotti’s use of the notion of bare life. Bare life – as she notices following Agamben – is what sovereign power can kill. I would add to that – also following Agamben here and his concept of homo sacer – that bare life is a life that sovereign power can kill but also a life that stays intact because it cannot be sacrificed (Agamben, [1995] 1998). Therefore, bare life is at the same time most vulnerable to death and immune to it (in the sense that it cannot be fully consumed by death). Cognately, bare death describes a situation in which something has died but cannot enter into the ‘generative cycles’ (Braidotti, 2006: 147) of a life; it cannot be fully consumed by a life. There is thus a certain dose of resistance in the dynamic flow or cycle of life and death, a porosity in a seemingly even surface, a disruption of the smooth life into death (and vice versa) transition; the temporality of death and life becomes ‘out-of-joint’.

This disruption of time, space and the cycles of life and death is strongly present in the Anthropocene and forms ‘our today’. The landscapes of bare death might be illustrated by nuclear or plastic sceneries. For instance, Michael Marder depicts ‘red forest’ near Chernobyl’s ground zero: ‘Here, pine trees turned reddish and perished shortly after the accident, their fallen trunks accumulating on the ground over the last thirty years. They are not decaying as they should, nor being digested into the earth nor transformed into compost. The timescale of finite life has been disrupted and the same fate has befallen death as well’ (Marder and Tondeur, 2016: 28). Death here is not consumed by life; it stays intact, frozen, bare. Bare death is thus an effect of disturbing the temporality of ‘generative cycles’ of zoe in e.g. the Atomic Age. Svetlana Alexievich provides an example; she writes: ‘Chernobyl was – first and foremost – a catastrophe of time’ ⁵ (Aleksijewicz, [1997] 2012: 31), ‘[t]ime broke up’ (Aleksijewicz, [1997] 2012: 33); people involved in eliminating the harmful effects of Chernobyl were – according to Alexievich – ‘rescuing life itself. The time of life. Time alive’ (Aleksijewicz, [1997] 2012: 37). The Belarussian writer not only underlines the fact that a nuclear catastrophe like the one in Chernobyl disturbs time and space, but she also tries to grasp how it endangers life itself beyond the human with the following provocation: ‘Chernobyl reaches beyond Auschwitz and Kolyma. Beyond the Holocaust. As it touches the end. It leans on nothingness’ (Aleksijewicz, [1997] 2012: 38). Alexievich – as I understand it – is not aiming to diminish the tragedies of Auschwitz and Kolyma, their violence and deaths. According to my reading, she rather points to the fact that the Atomic Age – due to longevity of radioactive elements – violates the very concepts of death and life beyond the human and, thus, disables life’s potential to fully regenerate, to transform death into ‘generative powers of zoe’. Chernobyl from Alexievich’s perspective leans on the end of the world – the dusk of the world as I dubbed it in the above.

The atomic landscapes of bare death challenge the reassuring promises of Braidotti’s essay, where zoe is understood as a ‘generative process’, ‘cycles of becomings’, ‘ever-shifting processual changes’, ‘ever-recurring flows of vitality’ that ‘live on’. The affirmative, vitalist promise that it is possible to turn from the negative to the positive might not be kept. Braidotti’s readers are invited to recognise ‘one life-force’ (2013: 134) that seizes all instances of life and death. However, the concept of bare death – a death that refuses to enter into this all-embracing life-force – problematises zoe. The vision of ‘everlasting life’ fades in view of bare death that cannot be swallowed and digested by life dynamics. Instead, it everlastingly haunts life. Thus, zoe might not be the only horizon for our dissolved self. It might need its companion: bare death.

The case of bare death

An Ecosystem of Excess – an art installation by Yoldas – addresses plastic landscapes that are yet another illustration of bare death. Plastic commodities – like nuclear by-products – ‘rather than disappearing … linger in undead form’ (Ronda, 2017: 82), creating tangible sceneries like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that covers 1.6 million square kilometres of the ocean. Yoldas’s project began with a provocative thought experiment: ‘[i]f life started today in our plastic debris filled oceans, what kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?’ (Yoldas, 2014). The Turkish-born American-based artist not only observes that plastic has become a powerful agent shaping the environment, but also stresses the harmful effects of plastic on various life forms. Simultaneously, however, the deadly material is also and at the same time life-giving. During her keynote address at the Open Embodiments: Bringing Somatechnics to Tucson conference at the University of Arizona in 2015, Yoldas (2015) reported how she discovered the article ‘Life in the “Plastisphere”: Microbial Communities on Plastic Marine Debris’ by Erik R. Zettler, Tracy J. Mincer and Linda A. Amaral-Zettler (2013). The authors present the results of their research that shows plastic as a new ecological habitat for microbes in the open ocean. These findings inspired Yoldas to imagine plastic as not only a life-threatening or deadly but also a life-forming substrate. Out of this situation, there emerged a whole plastic ecosystem, including organs of the plastisphere like sensory organs (plasticeptors), digestive organs to metabolise plastic (petrogestative system), excretory organs (kidneys for the plastisphere – petronephros); and species and environments of the plastisphere, including plastic feathers coloured Coca-Cola red, Pepsi blue, Fanta orange or Kinley Tonic Water yellow, thus colours that would be – in a plastisphere future – directly derived from the colours and materials of the environment. In her keynote lecture in 2015 in Tucson, Yoldas (2015) explained that she named those uncanny plastic ecosystems and landscapes excessive with reference to Elizabeth Grosz’s recognition of an excess observable in evolution. As Grosz clarifies: ‘[t]his energetic excess is the condition for the production of biological and cultural extravagance, the uncontainable production of intensification, not for the sake of the skills of survival but simply because of its force of bodily intensification’ (2011: 118). A plastic ecosystem thus is interpretable not only as a means of survival but also as intensifying the materiality of life forms, their colours, shapes and potentials.

Bodily intensification in Ecosystem of Excess results in beautiful but also uncanny and disquieting forms. It raises provocative questions by troubling the distinction between the toxic and the life-giving, the deadly and the lively, and by ‘pushing [this] dualism to an extreme’ (Bergson, [1986] 2004: 236). Plastic not only reveals the vulnerability of a body by jeopardising the sustainability of any given life form, but also unfolds the space of vulnerability understood as a possibility to transform, change and re-establish the conditions of sustainability. Plastic calls for ambiguity that could do justice to both its life-giving potential and its deadly effects. Plastic landscapes – as depicted by Yoldas – are, thus, uncannily both dead and alive. They illustrate the excess of life well, its ‘generative powers’ used to form a plastic ecosystem and the condition of bare death that cannot pass, cannot decay, but stays and lives on in an undead form without the hope of full regeneration. It brings hope of opening possibilities for life in unprecedented and unexpected ecosystems and forms and – at the same time – does not erase what cannot be wholly transformed into a life. On the contrary, it stays with it. The Ecosystem of Excess actualises Braidottian vitalist ethics by assisting what it leaves behind: what does not get to enter fully into ‘generative cycles’ of zoe. The art installation allows one to think potestas and potentia simultaneously and to grasp the sense of becoming and transformation of life and death in order to respond to the ambivalent landscapes of ‘our today’ and to understand how death matters beyond the human self.