I formulated a short variation on the theme of Geoffroy and Cuvier on the fly during Q&A at the London launch of Cute Accelerationism back in June. As sometimes happens in conversation, I found myself giving a brisk short-circuit of certain points which, in the book, were left to the reader to decrypt. I had been intending to post it here and this thread on Twitter gives it an added impetus.
If @Kitsumute’s interpretation is correct, it is puzzling that such a trad anti-DeleuzoGuattarian canard (BwO as overenthusiastic idealisation of ‘pure potentiality’, hence D+G as anarcho-desirante spontaneists fatefully ignorant of real-world politics and things that ‘take work’, what is vaunted as difference is really just same-old capitalist repetition, etc.) should be rolled out against Cute Accelerationism, when the book is marked by a painstaking effort to counter any such tendency (in so doing following the fine grain of D+G’s work). Even more so the apparent corollary that cute/acc appropriates and idealises transness as an emblematic form of such unconditioned plasticity. (Not to mention the suggestion that the egg [‘cute ova’] is a figure at once ‘utopian’ and deadly, unknowingly complicit with ‘transphobic backlash’, and that the real way forward is teleology, the real triumph ‘assuming a final form’, arrival at the safe terminus of identity, since ‘becoming cannot avoid the risk of death’.)
The theme of the egg in Cute Accelerationism is inseparable from that of careful navigation, initiation, the trial and the ordeal [n.7, pp53–68]. Cute takes some work. The egg as figure of potentiation and plasticity is in every instance accompanied by questions of pragmatism, tentative exploration, irreversibility [p159], and the articulation between virtual and actual [passim]. We insist on this both in the context of transcendental philosophy and in an empirical and experiential register (expanded upon further in my Gender Synthesis). The space given over in Cute Accelerationism to an extension of A Thousand Plateaus’s dramatisation of the Geoffroy/Cuvier debate does some of the work of articulating the two and explaining why this is a methodological question.
As detailed at great length in note 78 [pp96–104], the debate between Geoffroy and Cuvier is ultimately not a conflict between two accounts of biology or palaeontology, but a philosophical conflict which hinges on the mobilisation of transcendental plasticity (Geoffroy’s ‘unified plane of composition’, which in D+G becomes the ‘plane of consistency’) as a horizon along with a series of heuristic strategies for exploring and marking out the space this philosophical gesture makes available to thought. (To thought, but—once we come to translate this back into the question of transition—also to action.)
How do we understand the articulation between the unity of the animal kingdom and the multiplicity of animal species? For Cuvier, all of the empirically-observable distinctions in the animal kingdom have always been there, and that’s how God wants it, and that’s that, it’s all cataloguing from here on in. For Geoffroy, this concedes too much to facticity and affords too little to scientific curiosity and inventiveness. He takes a radically different path: instead of detecting differences that allow us to order specimens into predetermined compartments, if we think topologically, if we examine bodies and skeletons with a view to the transformations through which one might be stretched, folded, and squished into the other, then a continuity is revealed between all species: we can fold a crab into a horse and we can fold a horse into a flea, and a flea into a giraffe…. The whole set of transformations between them describes a kind of transcendental animal, and—all-importantly—this approach enables the scientist to discover commonalities, continuities, and homologies that are not immediately observable.
Cuvier’s response: What are you talking about? Look, here are all the animals in the world; I’ve examined them, I’ve systematised them, this is what they are and this is how their similarities and differences allow us to classify them…and…I have never seen a transcendental animal.
Cuvier is right. We have never have seen a transcendental animal, but this is a question of methodology. Rather than setting out from empirically observable facts (which by the way will always be influenced by inherited categories and modes of thinking), you set out from a conception of a plane of continuity where everything can potentially be folded and refolded and unfolded ad infinitum. And then you look at the empirical from that perspective, and you try to work out how a crab can become a horse. If you can’t discover the continuity by morphing between the animals around you in the world, then look at embryos and monsters, that’s what Geoffroy did: you look at creatures that are not quite developed and you look at creatures that have developed in an abnormal way, in order to discern virtual continuities that don’t appear in normally-actualised versions. This methodology affords you a way to work where you’re not immediately constrained by presupposed natural facts and given realities, and opens up the possibility of discovering powerful new cross-sections and connections.
The transcendental methodology is inherently trans-, and the theory and practice of transition must necessarily be transcendental. Why? Because you can’t even start trying to ‘get somewhere’ without assuming that, between things that you’ve been told are naturally and incontrovertibly distinct and always will be, there is continuity. It’s only by precipitately committing to the inkling of virtual continuity that you can set out on your way to actualising something new. This is not about debating truth or ‘facts of nature’, it’s a question of methodology. Start from the egg, or the BwO, in order to start from where you are.
This is all summed up in D+G’s image of the egg ‘you always carry […] with you as your own milieu of experimentation’[p27] and in a line in the book where we say that there are two sides: there’s Cute’s unrealistic aspiration, which is to melt everything down, to return to pure potential, to be able to become anything you want; and then there’s pragmatic step-by-step experimentation with becoming and change. Every time you change something, that changes your view on what you’re changing and what its conditions and affordances are, and so the exploration into what you could become, and what connects with what, continues. In any given case of becoming one might discover limits might be discovered to how much the actual can be counteractualised and new virtual continuities can be actualised, but it’s a question of refusing the given at every stage, and this is conditional upon taking the egg as your horizon.
‘Cute’s unrealistic aspiration—meltdown into the egg—is simultaneously a pragmatic programme—patient dismantling of the sausage machine’ [p32]. Could it be clearer?
Geoffroy was indeed perfectly unrealistic, unjustified, neither properly empiricist nor logical, in giving himself the unified plane of composition as his guiding model. ‘More poet than observer…lacks logic from start to finish’, says Cuvier [p28]. But it was only in this way that he was able to orient his empirical studies (and as we should know from centuries of epistemology and decades of science studies, there is no such thing as a pure unconditioned empirical observation). Geoffroy’s approach would turn out be very important for modern evolutionary thinking—and the ‘alluring phantoms’ of the ‘anatomical philosophy’ slated by Cuvier were ‘the very driving force responsible for showing the route that [would] open up new horizons’ (Appel, quoted on p103).
(In case you think this is all a stretch, just a strained philosophical metaphor, recall that Geoffroy was also one of the first biologists to say that, looking at the genitals of sexually dimorphic animals, they’re actually the same thing turned inside out [p102], and that ‘[e]very animal was originally a hermaphrodite’ [p89].)
My contribution to Cute Accelerationism owed a great deal to my own experience of gender transition, and the opening pages of Gender Synthesis explicitly discuss my caution in making sure that I was not taking off freely from the contours of my bodily experience to produce some kind of bad abstraction in which the navigational difficulties, problems, and unknowns of transition would disappear. The cutie observes that following their own obscure impulses with fidelity and care is conditional upon hypothesizing that, where they have been told there are non-communicating compartments, there is virtual continuity. The cutie explores the ramifications of this hypothesis, the fields it opens up, the legacy socially normative abstractions it destroys (along with parts of the self that were attached to them), and the passages this makes it possible to actualise. The cutie will surely bump up against real constraints as they navigate, but it is precisely the landscape of the real that we want access to, these are discoveries we would never have made had we abided by so-called ‘natural’ constraints. And (as a trans friend explained to me during my period of fear, uncertainty, and doubt) once you break through, although you may find a home for yourself, you will never again be able to find your way back out of the landscape of becoming into the neat procrustean compartments of Being—which were, after all, pretty dull.
‘But anyway, there’s no more point complaining in advance about misinterpretations, since you can’t predict them, than fighting against them once they’re made. It’s better to get on with something else, to work with people going in the same direction. As for being responsible or irresponsible, we don’t recognize those notions, they’re for policemen and courtroom psychiatrists.’
— Deleuze and Guattari, 1972