Conservative reterritorializations everywhere!

This post has been brewing for a few weeks, since I finished The Machinic Unconscious (5 stars, ten out of ten, would read again), so I’m getting it out irrespective of length, typos etc. As it had been a while, I went back to the start of chapter one of Chaosmosis, to see how my understanding of the primary text got on now I'd thrown some secondary material at it. Good! was, I think, the general conclusion. Thought For The Week(s) was sparked off by this quote, coming early doors on p. 3:

...contemporary history is increasingly dominated by rising demands for subjective singularity” that express both "aspirations for national liberation" and "conservative reterritorializations of subjectivity.

Thought/interpretation incoming: Today (the 30-year-long-day that stretches from 1992 to 2023) there is a proliferation of identities, of attempts to carve out different models of, and experiments in, what subjectivity is. These are (often) deliberate and conscious attempts to resist or subvert the previous dominant Western/US/capitalist models of subjectivity, challenging what it is to be a person, what we should aspire to etc. But! the way that this resistance takes place often involves an appeal or claim to be a return to an older kind of subjectivity - one that was hidden within or covered over by the dominant Western model.

This kind of resistance is less about overturning the old system because it is oppressive/dull/we just kind of want to cos it’s been a while, y’know? Instead, the claim is that we need to overturn the current dominant ways of being a subject because we claim to have unearthed an even older, more originary system (originary… it feels like it's been ages since I used that word. "What's that, did someone say nationalism?" asks Heidegger, sticking his head round the door to a canned laugh track. Yup, that’d be the “national liberation” and “conservative reterritorializations” Martin. For maximum cross-inter-reference-textuality, this also came up in my German lesson that week, and got me back into my watching-Tatort phase).

I was thinking about this - as I often do these days - in relation to gender, and how the trans discourse is often steered towards appeals to history, whether this be personal ("I have always felt this way") or wider cultural ("the idea of two binary genders is a recent western phenomenon”). As this blog was originally intended to have a what’s-going-on-in-my-life aspect to it, I should probably say that this struck me because I’m going through the gender reassignment dance at the moment (and what a dance! Forms! Appointments! Acronyms! How the fuck do you change your name on the deeds to your house? What - and where - even are these?) and it’s interesting seeing how the suggested answers acceptable to WPATH are framed when what you are basically trying to argue for is the authenticity (bleuuurgh! What a word..) of your identity.

Particularly when you’ve just been reading Guattari on the creation of new modes of subjectivity as an artistic practice. Identities (do I mean the same thing as subjectivities there, or have I conflated that which one should not flate..?) are works of art. We are notoriously unsure how to treat works of art until they have the weight of history behind them (is it art? Is it good art? Come back in 200 years and find out!). So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that we do the same thing with identities, national, gender, or otherwise.

I was still surprised though!