amy ireland & maya b. kronic, cute accelerationism — review
amy and maya treat cuteness like a solution to every problem, meanwhile the piece they parody, a thousand plateaus, treated problems like something the concepts can actually reveal and complicate
popstulates of lingsquishtics
"having been subject to various regulatory mechanisms in force in different eras and among different sectors of society, cute, in its obligingly squishy positivity, has tended to take on whatever characteristics are available—appearing now as insurance against the demise of the oedipal status quo, now as titillating grotesquerie, now as aesthetic mode of the literary avant-garde, now as symptom of the post modern evisceration of grand narratives, now as a form of political resistance, and so on, and so on. a needling suspicion remains: perhaps the apparent loss of reference to crafty intelligence is only a mask for some seriously cute moves. they dont make it work."
chronicland, instead of proposing a genealogy, stage a poorly argued practical semiotics of history. their very writing is conceptually built to get away with looking like an excuse. "cuteness has had such a varied history, wow, it morphs so much! great job nyan!". instead of proposing a philosophy of its history, they take its history point black as cuteness itself being transformative rather than its trajectory, and lazily pin it on the concept itself instead of arriving at a preferred conclusion of its nature, or, if they really wanted to stick with that angle, actually developing a theory of transformability by comparing it to other aesthetic or ontological categories or cultural movements and deriving this tendency backwards from real analysis. or at least actually positing the transcendental nature of such a property in cuteness. instead their next chapter is about cuddles and surfaces and is barely a page long...
how make urself an uwu?
to consider what chronicland are doing in "how make urself an uwu?", we need to explain consider d&g did first, in regards to conceptualizing the body without organs. first, there are five types of specific bwos for them: masochistic (sewing through pain), drugged (chemical coldness multiplying), hypochondriac (self-annihilation), paranoid (destructive external attack and restoration) and schizo (useless re-transformation). on top of this there are two general standards - the plane of consistency aka omnitudo, which is the ultimate combination of all of them, and the cancerous bwo, which is the swelling of the strata and not of the plane, aka literally a bad/overdefined outgrowth on a place that cant hold it.
what is the bwo supposed to fix for d&g? it's supposed to save the body from fixed organization (cuvier), over signification (fascism, interpretation), and subjectification (what chronicland correctly note as the moment that desire is uprooted through boys' forced counter-recognition with girls, and the girls youth is denied from her and displaced into the adult image "the boy’s turn comes next, but it is by using the girl as an example, by pointing to the girl as the object of his desire"). d&g stress disarticulating the organism, experimenting against the necessity to interpret through signifiers, and unnecessarily moving inside/within your own subjecthood (nomadism). you can fail to produce a bwo if you dont fabricate the field (degree 0) or if you dont populate it with intensities or if you block them. you can also accidentally empty it by destratifying too hard, or by growing tumors on it from sedimentation that is too intense too quickly (totalitarianism). a plateau is a region of intensity that doesnt terminate nor climax and is used as a building block for bwo's. importantly, the plane is not simply the sum of all bwos, it selects, aka the abstract machine that draws it determines what can and cannot be composed on it.
the other important thing is that unlike for chronicland, where their uwu is a topological creativity engine, for d&g it's also the primary concept through which we can interpret the problems that arise out of desire itself. whilst chronicland displace desire as a background character and a part of the story of the cute in the "fappartus of rapture" (speaking about it in ways such as: "the intrusion into human history", "what does it want from us?", "no one ever glomped a funkopop (you cannot displace cuteness and cuting onto a shelf)", "cute's disruption of desire and subjectivity", "it is already elsewhere", "psychoanalytic drives are backstories", "a pulsion unto itself"), d&g actually use the bwo chapter to make a conceptual distinction about desire. they argue that there are three priestly curses (desire as lack, desire subordinated to pleasure amd desire as impossible jouissance).
d&g already stage the anti-lacanian paradigm (infamously, lacan left the table after being told the news by guattari) that cuteness is supposed to be overstaging, where they displace the bwo as "desire as immanent process without external reference" and call the act of joy "immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, distributing intensities of pleasure and preventing them being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt.". on top of this they built a distinction between the tonal and the nagual. the tonal is organism + significance + subjectification, and the nagual is the same exact thing, but replaced with the becomings and intensities that bwo offer.
the particular problem is that of desire, and deleuze already posit that there are many forms of desire the bwo has to work against, or more accurately, that it is that very desire that it sometimes ends up honoring, that the bwo is the segmentary genealogy of desire itself, the way it takes shape in social assamblages in real time. you get many kinds of desire according to them, you get empty, cancerous, fascist, or suicidal bwos. take a look:
"the bwo is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires. and not only because it is the plane of consistency or the field of immanence of desire. even when it falls into the void of too-sudden destratification, or into the proliferation of a cancerous stratum, it is still desire. desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate."
what is important to understand then is that basically in d&g, the concepts of distinction, characterization and a pre-conceived notion of the concept are essential to understand the bwo. the uwu, on the other hand, is treated as the exact transformative force that continuously evades conceptual capture. it cannot be "put back in the box" because "daddy admin and the marxocrats unite against cute but it is elsewhere already". daddy admin isn't built as a concept, it's mentioned three times, assumed to be obvious, the main one which says that he "collapses any one individual back into their natural body" but that all the moe needs is the curves of the egg to become cosmically indifferent or whatever (not whatever, it is a great concept but also sparsely developed, tackled elsewhere). even the marxocrats are simply shelved off as the binary philosophy of the frankfurt school "from bratwurst-denken to frankfurter misera bilism, always sausage vs. egg.".
meanwhile, when it comes to desire, chronicland have abandoned the lacanian niche entirely. this is a great and productive topic, but the way they treat the concept ends up being shaky:
"‘conflating desire with identification, or “wanting to have” with “wanting to be or be like”, the experience of cuteness thus produces a “strange constriction of the gap between consumer and commodity”", "no one ever ‘makes love with another person as a whole", "if you want to see cute acceleration—actual cyberpunk—look at twenty-first-century trans communities. from snapping selfies to distributing memes to inventing new genders to sharing lewds to relaying egg-cracking initiations", "accreting novel machines with which to eggscavate the first circuit and ‘change nature’, with the retarded antimarkets of above ground capitalism left to catch up if and when the state approves." "every body that enters the pipeline becomes lube for the pipeline."
so it's clear that chronicland read desire as appearance, economic goal, a process of becoming in your own self-image, almost a type of self-signfiying subjectification, far from what d&g meant by it "a becoming is not a correspondence between relations. but neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification." the last quote, a "lube for the pipeline" is quite scary, since it signifies a particular type of relation that self-hosts its own inspirations or imaginations "above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination", something d&g would be against, since they envision becoming as a communication only between asymmetrical forces, as a becoming of a line of flight, a contagion of a pack, essentially, the ability to self-transcend your own state as pulled by the force of something else, but to still be measured as most equal to your own state of current possibility, maybe defined clearest here: "starting from the forms one has, the sub ject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. this is the sense in which becoming is the process of desire."
for chronicland, the "antimarkets" of above ground capitalism could never market the way that internet trans communities can, who are supposedly over-producing a post-significatory corporeal reality, by virtualizing their own identities and desires. young girls want to resist being economically deployed, they want to remain youthful even more than young men, and the job economy is a secret cutification ritual. none of this is literally what they say, but you can see how cuteness is a social discourse weapon, and this issue will come back at the end of the review of this chapter where the topological question is raised in full.
let's ask this question first. "the bwo is not at all the opposite of the organs. the organs are not its enemies. the enemy is the organism." do they know this? surely they know this, undoubtedly. it's not like they failed to read the bwo chapter, so it's not like they've already committed the big crime. but it doesn't matter if they know or not. the question is, why do they stress in the notes that cuvier only sees correlation where geoffroy sees connection between seperate organ groups for different animals, and that this is supposed to amount to the body without organs as something that topologically unifies the virtuality behind every organ-construct as forward facing? when for d&g, to make yourself a body without organs amounts to figuring out how to evade oversignifying or undersignifying yourself too quickly. they mention repeatedly "thresholds, edges, gates", something that chronicland seem to have done away with almost entirely:
"the actual, lived emotion of having breasts does not resemble breasts, it does not represent them, any more than a predestined zone in the egg resembles the organ that it is going to be stimulated to produce within itself. nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients’ (deleuze and guattari, anti-oedipus, 19)." there's two problems here, the first is of the nature of their book, what is the point of showing a completed discourse in your notes, instead of treating it like a live discourse in the actual book? the notes section in their work is more destructive than if they faced it directly, they literally look like they're digging for propagandistic positioning, for a certain way of weaponizing d&g rather than for a full reading. this is because it's actually possible to read deleuze as just an intensity-junkie, if only that was the case.
this is the exact danger of reading the virtual as denying the sphere of a pre-actualized essence of corporeality. the egg does resemble a pure intensity, that is, a virtual potential for constant reorganization, morphing, new beocmings for d&g. but it also has a complicated relationship with signification, it points to how a subject can actually allow itself to be formed without entering into underdefinedness or a constant self-sabotage the way they describe, or a tyranny that fully overcodes or signifies on top of corporeality and denies its power. what chronicland do to d&g is that they seem to be forcing the threshold itself to signify an opening that over-denies signification, that over-qualifies intensity.
deleuze and guattari are not gods that we should follow every word of. but they are writers who take the very role of their concept as speculative rather than self-fulfilling and this has nothing to do with the "gerontocratic reactionary" chronicland blame cuvier of, or in other words degeneracy as something non-productive. chronicland's stylistic degeneracy is extremely productive for the narrative and polemic, but not so much for the concept. or in this case even related to maybe a "necrophiliatic" canonicism, one supposedly inherent in such a distinction, or if we were to follow only the voices of the dead, who are better than us clearly. no, no no, it is far worse than that. they tie "presentism" with functionalism directly in their indictment of otherwise fairly intentioned slurs towards cuvier, as if the present has been laid bare, castrated away from functions. no more functionalism! that isn't what they say, but that's what everything they say sounds like. now why mention all of this? because the way they stage cuvier x geoffroy debate lands on something very important about the topology of intensity. take a look:
"he can only think of organs in terms of functions—which would surely break down during such unnatural passages!—whereas geoffroy makes himself a body without organs. and one open to the great outdoors—his transformist in sistence that ‘ecological conditions have a great pow er to alter organized bodies"
now, this is really a minor thing, because the general jist of the topic is covered correctly by chronicland as it amounts to the general point of d&g, that of course being that a constructed becoming beats a priorly inherited signification of "working organization" as an inherited concept. but there is a minor issue here, that of course being that it's precisely that matter (corporeality) and function (intensity) are the only things remaining in a bwo once signification is removed. why? well here's the odd way that d&g seem to be phrasing it:
"we define the abstract machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain. a diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression", and, speaking about what the organism does to the bwo: "the organism is not at all the body, the bwo; rather, it is a stratum on the bwo, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the bwo, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.". further yet, however, speaking about the relation between the bwo and the abstract machine: "the plane of consistency is not simply that which is constituted by the sum of all bwo's. there are things it rejects; the bwo chooses, as a function of the abstract machine that draws it."
so, what's the catch? the catch is that, it's clear that functions themselves aren't an issue. and it's clear that the dogon egg is indeed this ultimately transformative state, the one that chronicland note as: "folding girls into boys is after all just a matter of ‘relative sizes and inversions', dart-objects and wedges, bussies and girldicks, a continuum of reversible intertouchings". d&g themselves have a few very similar lines, it almost looks like something they would have written in place of maya and amy, it goes something exactly like: "thus girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through." as well as "does a girl have a peepee-maker? the boy says yes, and not by analogy, nor in order to conjure away a fear of castration. it is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function. quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest..."
so there it is, not function by itself, but the type of function an intensity can produce. but wait, there's more! "cuvier assumed that if the transformations were not physically conceivable—if one set of bones could not be topologically remolded into the other—then homologies were meaningless", cuvier also says, as noted by chronicland: "“i don’t believe no crocodile ever walked along its own forehead”, and here is dalcq: "whatever problem is raised by zoology, comparative anatomy, or palaeontology, it must, in the final analysis, be rethought in embryological terms." what we are talking about here is the idea of an "apparent unity of plane of composition of the multiple", the one geoffroy made his project's supreme goal.
so here's the real issue: if you do as maya and amy do and correlate the egg as a self-productive relation to itself by rerouting intensity towards inspiration and away from signification, rather than a potentially productive relation to movement itself as already-realized (as d&g do), you end up falsely assuming as cuvier does that what geoffroy is doing for the unity of the plane is that he's arguing that since in the egg every whale has teeth, every whale has already imagined a post-tooth state, as in, since that is a possibility, it is on one hand virtualized, and on another, the egg itself is the break away from the world of facts. one thing chronicland do snipe from d&g is the idea that the egg isn't a reversion from adulthood back to childhood, but that it's a reversion from post-adulthood signification into the pre-signification that childhood already inhabits rather than a new mode of signification., but this "formless state of intensity" cannot possibly be held as being productive because of it's underdetermination. it's underdetermination is something the bwo is supposed to diagrammatically sketch. how can the uwu allow itself to be simply an imitiation of underdetermination upturned into intensification through a viral force of communication (sharing memes, influence)? yes, as d&g say, for them the becoming-animal is a collective event, but not one necessarily of influence.
d&g have an actual whole explanation between a diagram and a program, the former being a possibility, the later a signification. they explain exactly how to make yourself a bwo: 1) lodge yourself on a stratum — don't start by blowing it up. 2) find an advantageous place on it — experiment with what it offers. 3) find movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight — locate where the stratum can be moved. 4) produce flow conjunctions, try continuums of intensities segment by segment. 5) have a small plot of new land at all times.
chronicland, on the other hand stress "‘if i wear paws on my hands, then their elements will enter into a new relation, resulting in the affect or becuting i seek." (imitation) + "‘elective bodily zones’ become targets for new ‘drives which find in them a “source”’ (intensity as self-determining) + "is cat boy tummy a nostalgic echo of the maternal belly or rather a libidinal surface grafted from interspecies snuggles?" (failure to seperate replication from determination). all of these issues point to one central, heavily unanswered question: is the dogon egg's pre-unity itself a fixed determination, or is topological multiplicity's final limit (the final limit of the form of corporeality) itself the function of intensity? because if it is, it goes against d&g's assamblification of this force, the mechanization of functionalism that as shown earlier, is stressed in a nearly individuated, simondonian manner, to be related to one's own becoming within the pack, the determination that underscores virtuality rather than spawns from it. the bwo does not happen to be inside the egg, the social process itself, even in d&g's time already proved it. it is irritating to even imagine that the uwu defines itself as related to potential as a unity of all possible transformations, as just a mere political problem.