becoming-water: notes on revolutionary anarchomasochism
"Once one has found oneself one must understand how from time to time to lose oneself - and then how to find oneself again ... For the thinker it is disadvantageous to be tied to one person all the time." Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human (1)
1. One basic physical technique in non-violent direct action (NVDA) training involves falling to the ground and relaxing to become a loose dead weight. The tactical purpose is to take more arresting officers out of action -- it can take four pairs of hands to carry a floppy horizontal body. An activist says -- "when I do this I roll with the motion, if one grip is lower I roll to the side and turn. I become
water. My body becomes so loose and heavy that sometimes I can slip out of their hands altogether, they have to stop and grab me again."
2. An anarcho-pervert says -- "Ever since I can remember my sexual fantasies involved relations of power and domination. For example, I remember many childhood fantasies involving captivity -- Princess Leia in the death star chamber, or princesses in towers, or when I played on the rocks at the beach, caverns and tunnels where you could take and hide captives. Only much later I encountered what's now called the 'BDSM scene', and found that these people make themselves identities related to the roles in my fantasies -- they are called dominants, submissives, tops, bottoms. I didn't know what to be -- I would have to choose an identity, but it struck me that what mattered to me wasn't what role I was in, but the scenes themselves. When I fantasised as a child, was I the princess, or was I the captor? Actually, I don't remember, and part of me thinks maybe I was neither -- what was important was just that the scene was taking place, not that I identified with a particular character within it. Now, to enact such a scene in real life, I have learnt to play a role within it -- but, I insist, taking a role came later, the scene came first."
3. In Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the masochist
becoming-horse scene (equus eroticus), the masochist doesn't imitate a horse, play a horse, experience being a horse, or even turn into a horse. It isn't about a human subject taking on horse characteristics, or even a human subject turning into a horse subject.
Becoming-animal is actually a kind of de-subjectification -- or, as they would put it, a flight from the "transcendent plane of organisation", populated by subjects and objects in their arrangements and structures, to the "plane of immanence", in which there are no subjects or structures but only momentary, time-specific "assemblages" -- becomings, events. "It is the wolf itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life." (2) On the "plane of organisation" you may find -- a man, a horse costume, a mistress, a riding crop. But on the plane of immanence there's only -- a masochist
becoming-horse staring up at a pair of shiny boots on an overcast afternoon. Or -- a floppy direct actionist body
becoming-
water being carried to a van by four weary coppers.
4. In the "rational choice" version of the theory of power, power is exercised by effecting the incentives of intentional agents. The two most basic ways to exercise power, on this account, are to make threats and to make offers. An exercise of power is not a direct application of physical force on an object-body, but an appeal to a subject with interests. The policeman threatens me with a raised truncheon -- I agree to move because I don't want to get hit. The boss offers me a wage increase -- I break the strike because I want to eat. This kind of power requires a subject, a persisting subject with a future, someone who cares about the wounds on a recovering body, or the wages that keep flowing into a bank account, or the months to be spent in prison. This subject can be destroyed in NVDA training or in masochism using techniques which, at least temporarily, open up a line of escape from subjectivity. Thus, which is what appears paradoxical to those who haven't experienced it, the masochist is freed by domination, just as the activist can pass through and beyond overpowering force. Pain, subjection, force and violence inflicted upon the self, are converted into energies that propel the practitioner outside of the self -- a rocket to sub-space, which is what masochists call their plane of immanence. Of course, the subject does return -- in play, masochists place their trust in the dominant not to damage the subject body that will return when the scene is over. Activists have no such trust in the state -- the risk of harm is something the subject must accept and affirm before taking a temporary absence.
5. In this theory of power we are talking about human beings able to make intentional actions. It could be objected that human subjects may often respond to threats, offers and other stimuli in ways that shouldn't be considered actions at all -- the policeman raises the truncheon and "instinctively" I flinch or step back. But wherever we want to draw the boundaries of what we class as intentional action, the fact is that it can take training to widen the range of our possible responses to violence and domination. Many of our responses might be best considered as "reactions" rather than actions in the fullest sense. Proponents of non-violent interventions often characterise violent responses to state violence as reactive -- violence, they say, generates violence, traps, cycles of harm and reactive counter-harm. On the other hand, we can point out that most non-violence, in the general sense, is passive submission rather than active intervention. Both violent and non-violent responses can be reactions -- patterned responses triggered by fear or vengeance, weakness or resentment. One claim made by some non-violence advocates is that if we surrender the opportunity to respond with violence, while at the same time taking care not to fall into passive submission traps, this self-imposed limitation pushes us pushed to become creative, experimental, more active. (Not going to discuss here whether there can or can't also be creative violence -- this piece is just on anarcho-masochism, anarcho-sadism can be a companion paper.) Look at the case of
becoming-
water: once the body is fully
becoming-
water, once the course is fully taken, and presuming it stays fully taken (there will of course be interruptions and decision points that might break the course), we might say that the practitioner has ceased acting altogether. But also, ceased reacting. (Or rather, no longer acting or reacting as a human intentional subject does -- instead, rolling with the movement of the swaying copper-hands, acting as
water does -- once the action is committedly begun, the rest flows.) But the idea is, if it's done right (anything might be done wrong --
becoming-
water could also become a habitual reaction), the initial act of committing to
becoming-
water is an action, based on training, that breaks out of the trap of usual subject-responses to state violence. The normal untrained set of available responses -- cower, run, hit. If we are confined to just these reactions, we are in a trap -- pain-trap, suffering-trap, fear-trap, reaction-trap. The action of
becoming-
water intends to undo the reaction-trap, and its way of doing so also involves breaking the subject-trap. The idea of a creative intervention as an exit from a trap: creativity is to identify a twist, a knot, a weakpoint, a point of leverage -- a subversion, a perversion, a kink. (What Deleuze and Guattari call a "line of flight".) The one silken thread on a chinese courtesan's dress that, if you give it one gentle tug, will unravel the whole elaborate composition. Or, a luddite says -- "the thing is to find the spanner, just the right one."
6. Clearly most people in the world of BDSM are very far from being anarchomasochists. All masochists may find their way to sub-space, and enjoy the experience, but for many conventional masochists this little death is a temporary anomaly, a blot on the larger meaning of their practice. "Lifestyle" practitioners use BDSM practice not to destroy or subvert but to reinforce identities. It is true that there can be subversive angles to "identity SM" -- for example, the dyke who identifies as daddy has an extra twist on the male dominant. But this is far from anarchomasochism, which is a study of
becoming (
becoming-daddy not being a daddy), training in revolutionary transformation, experiments with the self. First, we can distinguish between roles in scene, and identities that aim to persist through scenes. Identity BDSM -- roles in scene are used to construct and reinforce persistent identities - identity masochists "explore their inner submissive", identity sadists "grow into mastery". Anarchomasochism -- roles in scene are used to deconstruct and subvert identities. The SM game is a shuffling of roles, it breaks ties between roles and individuals, roles and bodies. Shuffling: a female body stars in the role of daddy, a fat body is worshipped, a wimp becomes-tyrant, a male arse gets penetrated by a female cock. Hybridising: man-dog, mummy-daddy, pussy-cock. Roll of the dice, mutating and combining -- creation, as in evolutionary genetics, is mutation, stray combination, drift.
7. The anarchomasochist intention -- or better, the anarchopervert intention, at this point we can generalise out a bit -- is thus to de-solidify, de-root hegemonic identities through repeated shuffling and creative mutation of roles in scenes. Sexual identities, gender identities are obvious targets but nothing is safe here -- scenes take on economic relations, age games, religion, everything -- because, as the pervert Foucault spotted, social life is already thoroughly perverted in every dimension. Scene playing on its own isn't enough -- it's still possible for players, even with the most eclectic and variable tastes (polymorphously perverse switches), to erect and maintain a barrier wall between the play-space and life outside the scene ("dungeonisation"). The capacity to create strong barriers around sexplay is why anarchoperverts shouldn't be lulled into thinking that scene-playing alone constitutes subversive action. The additional requirement is that the play-space is porous, so that perversion seeps out into outside life, contagious, so that gradually it's not just that everything is brought into play but that play is brought into everything. The anarchopervert playspace is not a sound-proofed dungeon but a leaky laboratory.
8. Every escape out of the self is temporary, and there is no quick leap out of identities. There is a kind of naturalistic fallacy that still lingers in some revolutionary thinking, that oppression can be lifted like a lid, destroy hegemonic institutions and values and stand back and let natural order run free. The truth is that one norm can only be replaced with another, one that manages better for now to nourish us in our life and struggle. One identity has to be replaced with another. Identities fitting for anarchoperverts include: anarchist, friend, comrade, lover, revolutionary, pervert, luddite, saboteur. Identities to smash: mummy, daddy, husband, wife, king, subject, etc. etc. The difference between these two series should be apparent: anarcho-identities are independent and egalitarian, interchangeable; the to-be-smashed roles are all ones that can be defined only within polar or hierarchical structures: a mummy needs a daddy, a husband a wife, a king subjects, etc. Hegemonic identities are the ones we get turned on playing as roles in scenes -- they are scene-roles, so what are they doing making claims to stick in real life? Anarcho-identities are precisely ones that don't make any claims for structures, couldn't preclude any re-shuffling in new scenes. The identity par-excellence is the one that itself arises just in the course of dedication to anarcho-SM -- scene-player, experimenter. Which is to say, in our terms -- revolutionary anarcho-pervert. Voila.
(1) 2:306
(2) Deleuze and Guattari -- A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum 2004 p.289. More generally see plateau 10 "1730:
Becoming-intense,
becoming-animal,
becoming-imperceptible", as well as Plateau 6 "How do you make yourself a body without organs?"
