THE THERE AND THEN

The notion surrounding futurity and its implication in the development of queer theory has become one of the main areas of inquiry because it presents us with a set of challenges that question the current normative political engagement with gender and sexuality. As Judith Halberstam (Reference Halberstam2005) reminds us, futurity is undoubtedly a curious concept that transgender captures in a rather unique way: the scent of futurity is given by transgender embodiment, a site of contradictions difficult to map out because of the complex posthuman relations it is capable of developing.Footnote ³ Certainly, as Muñoz suggests in his book, a sense of futurity is also in the function of queer utopianism he argues for. However, I suggest that trans desperately needs to be located in the present materiality of a here and a now, not projected in the futurity of a there and then, in order for us to be able to contextualize it differently and to break out of the normativity discourse in which it is so desperately immersed. Muñoz's theory draws from Ernst Bloch's The Principle of Utopia (1986), and the argument he makes is based on hope. In his view, the anticipatory futurity of the not-yet is framed as a hopeful methodology “knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling” (Muñoz Reference Muñoz2009, 3). In doing so, he reads utopian performativity as an indication of a “being” that exists but is “not yet here.” The here and now are presented as “a version of reality that naturalises cultural logics such as capitalism and heteronormativity” (12). Elsewhere he writes, “Although utopianism has become the bad object of much contemporary political thinking, we nonetheless need to hold on to and even risk utopianism if we are to engage in the labor of making a queer world” (Muñoz Reference Muñoz1999, 25).

Neither Deleuze alone nor in his work with Félix Guattari has explicitly engaged with utopia. What I want to track down is not so much a genealogy of utopia or a story that spells out acts of utopianism within transgender subjectivity but a utopian ethics in their work from which, I believe, trans politics and the way this multifaceted and ever-changing subjectivity can benefit. I am interested in revealing a mode of utopia as a way of thinking about the present. Such an argument requires framing utopia in an imaginary of material affectivity that finds its outmost force in the active involvement with the multiplicity of the present.

Utopianism, as I frame it here, is the movement in the pursuit of a virtuality that is already real and that happens every day in and out of official recognition. It melds with forces and powerful spatial links that individuals have already learned to understand and channel and with which they compromise and negotiate their individuality, often struggling and delegitimized by a heteronormative discourse that mystifies and victimizes them. Like any visions to pursue in life, it is motivated by desire and necessitates the radical restructuring and reconsideration of the disciplinary politics that govern subjectivity.

The mistake in utopian thought, as Elizabeth Grosz (Reference Grosz2001, 135) notes, is that it confuses a possibility for a virtuality, thus failing to think of utopia as a temporality. Until the framing of the present is influenced by the anticipatory force held by the dimension of the future, utopia will remain an impossibility and a necessity. However, if we can reconceive the temporality of time according to the ethics of multiplicity—which are the opposite of hierarchical dualisms and identity categories—we will be able to let go of fixed realities and, instead, open up unbounded spaces for autonomous becomings. A crucial aspect of utopianism, or of thinking utopian, is that it cannot be mere execution, that is, it is not the realization of a plan—however forward—that already exists. This is, in a way, what Manfredo Tafuri's (Reference Tafuri1976) critique focuses on. In his view, utopia will remain an impossibility because it is always overtaken by distorted forms that are typical of rampant capitalistic societies and will inevitably influence its outreach. In Tafuri's negative analysis, the only possibility to conceive of utopian spaces is not by realizing ideals but by thinking beyond what is known (a no place, quite literally) to any ideology or movement and find new techniques capable of dissolving the crisis given by dialectical synthesis.

Utopia is not a place to reach (or even a nonplace to reach) or a spatial absence to colonize and appropriate. This approach privileges the place over the journey to get there and fails to see that utopia, as queer and as transgender, is more about the movement of material transformations and corporeal intersectionality rather than the realization of an abstract impossibility or the accomplishment of a task. The struggle for politics and legislation to catch up with the materiality of life as it unfolds every day lies in their inappropriateness to extract themselves out of that bubble made of abstract policing and follow the movement of people who have already found a way to slalom through the obstacles with which they are faced.

THE NOT-YET

Although utopia as a focus of academic inquiry first emerged in the 1960s (Levitas Reference Levitas2010, 11), fascination with this concept is rooted in mythological novels of a literary nature and, later on, in a number of political and philosophical commentaries that provide insights into what was considered utopian at different times within different realities (see Hertzler Reference Hertzler1923; Kaufmann Reference Kaufmann1879; Mumford Reference Mumford1922; Negley and Patrick Reference Negley and Patrick1971). The themes discussed as well as the methods of inquiry vary, but what these early studies have in common is an overbridging quest for social progress and a primordial unhappiness with a present condition that is felt as inadequate and restrictive, and therefore “the proper role of utopia [is] to criticise the present” (Levitas Reference Levitas2010, 39).

Bloch's utopia complies with these canons. It is a work of productive fantasy, “venturing beyond” (Bloch Reference Bloch, Plaice, Plaice and Knight1986, 4). It comes from the belief that wishful imagination of what is not yet assumes a hopeful function that can produce advancement in humanity. Hope has a utopian function insofar as utopia is an imaginative idea that extends to the future as a directional promise of new and better possibilities. In other words, it stems from the necessity to find something else beyond the now, a way “into the future possibilities of being different and better” (144), beyond “the darkness of the moment” (287). It is through the productive function of projecting oneself elsewhere that, for Bloch, the spatio-temporal distance between an unsatisfactory now—reality as it is —and our true wishes—hope—can be shortened. However, in this paradigm, the futurity of our wishes remains wrapped in a veil of not-yet. Namely, it may be, but it is not just yet. The “Not-Yet Conscious” is then the utopian potential of the unconscious, which wishes possibilities that are still in the not-yet space but anticipate what might be. It is down to the “Not-Yet Become” to transform that anticipatory wish into material change. The shift between these two moments of Bloch's utopia is the potentiality between what one dreams of and what the physical world can actually accommodate and transform into reality.

The function of imagination as a productive incentive for change should not be seen as an abstract endeavor, Bloch maintains: he makes it clear that hopeful wishing must be contained within the parameters of attainability in order for it to become concrete utopia, which is to be distinguished from abstract utopia purely based on impossibility. “Pure wishful thinking has discredited utopias for centuries, both in pragmatic political terms and in all other expressions of what is desirable; just as if every utopia were an abstract one” (Bloch Reference Bloch, Plaice, Plaice and Knight1986, 58). So we can see that Bloch gives utopia a double function: the ontological materialism to remain in the “real-possible” and the future anticipation that pushes the horizon further and sets bigger goals each time. The majority of the criticism attracted by Bloch is concerned with an overly idealistic approach, which Ruth Levitas identifies with the unrealistic expectations to expect change without confronting the constraints of the outside world (Levitas Reference Levitas2010, 118), the present, the here and now.

Further, I argue that the dimension of the “Not-Yet” in Bloch—be it Conscious or Become—delineates a limbo that fluctuates in a static space wherein the generative force that utopia is initially attributed is arrested by contingency. In other words, the realization or nonrealization of that imagination that, in theory, should move toward change is totally reliant on the external conditions that might or might not actualize it. This anticipatory form of wishing, then, while it provides—as Muñoz suggests—a methodology in the way that it can propel an impulse toward progression, it also delegates the utopianism of futurity to pure function and never really fulfills that need to become concrete, not even in its second stage, the stage of the “Not-Yet Become.” Bloch's optimism and the dream of a better society, typical traits of his Marxist background, direct such a notion of utopia toward a conflict between transcendence and abstractism that seems to totally incorporate experience in the equation. Bloch says, “The Here and Now, what is repeatedly beginning in nearness, is a utopian category, in fact the most central one; even though, in contrast to the annihilating circulation of a Nothing, to the illuminating circulation of an All, it has not yet even entered time and space” (1986, 145).

Consequently, perhaps even more regrettably, we have the ideal, which is nothing other than a future disconnected from the present, and we have reality, which is a present deprived of any substance or potential because its only function, as present, is to anticipate a future dimension that it (the present) does not retain. In such a vision, it is not only the future that appears idealized in its not-yet limbo, but also the present (the here and now), emptied of its organic connection to the future. Theodor Adorno points out the same concern: “the counterfactual yet-to-come, is draped in black. It goes on being a recollection of the possible with a critical edge against the real: it is a kind of imaginary restitution of that catastrophe, which is world history: it is freedom which did not come to pass under the spell of necessity and which may well not come to pass ever at all” (cited in Bloch Reference Bloch and Palmer1985, xl). Furthermore, there is an almost compulsive attempt to control the chaos (the possibilities) of the future in favor of an attitude toward serial rationality. Here utopia serves propaganda, as it provides an avenue for control and political manipulation.

Muñoz, in my reading, makes the same mistake: he claims that the spaces of today can inform and instigate the spaces of tomorrow and traces his utopian genealogy through a variety of queer phenomenology experiences selected from among the subcultures of queers of color, women of color, street artists, and performers, and through those alternative, marginal existences, he delineates the aesthetics of queer utopianism, insisting on the endless modes of being that emerge from queer culture. This is the point of access through which we are shown that queer utopianism is possible. However, despite Muñoz's attempt to emphasize an underscoring materiality, stressing the importance of concrete utopia, his account still sounds “willfully idealized” (2009, 86), to use his own words: his continuous returning to the past to read what is missing in the present appears reluctant because of the lack of political reach in the queer accounts he uses to delineate his utopianism.Footnote ⁴ In a sense, although he maintains that queer utopias are a collectively shared labor, what comes across from his archives are the isolated individual stories of subcultural narratives: the materiality of his queer performativity fails to lead to political relevance and it is difficult to grasp the passage from possibility to actuality. In a sense, without knowing, Muñoz reproduces and confirms the impossibility of that Not-Yet limbo where “the radical promise” of queer utopia never finds the necessary invested deployment in real life. A real life made of heterogeneous and promiscuous urban practices and the exposure to an often hostile and difficult to penetrate sociality wherein there is more than state consent at stake turns Muñoz's “concrete” utopia into material impossibility. Let us freeze this concept here for the time being and move on to consider the temporality of the future from a different perspective.

NO PRESENT, NO FUTURE

Muñoz's hopeful futurity as an optimistic turn for the emancipation of queer finds no support in Lee Edelman's and Leo Bersani's passionate polemics on the rhetorics of happiness and communal affectivity. Bersani's Homos expresses skepticism for “the rage for respectability so visible in gay life today” (1996, 113). According to Bersani, the trends in queer theory follow a script of tolerance that exhausts, if not neutralizes, the subversive challenge they should cultivate. Bersani's famous provocation “should a homosexual be a good citizen” questions whether queer theory should continue to follow the path set out by heteronormativity or, rather, rediscover its own specificity. Similarly, Edelman's “No Future” challenges the reproductive power that children retain within society and their promise for “a reality guaranteed, not threatened by time, sustained by certainty” and the illusion of immortality that they feed.

The so-called antisocial politics in queer theory root back to Guy Hocquenghem's book Homosexual Desire, in which he writes that the history of civilization stands on oppression and “forms the interpretive grid through which desire becomes cohesive energy” (Reference Hocquenghem1993, 137), channeled into an Oedipal heteronormative force. According to Hocquenghem, there can never be a revolution of dominant heteronormative cultural practices until the notion of desire is reworked. “Revolutionary demands must be derived from the very movement of desire; it isn't only a new revolutionary model that is needed, but a new questioning of the content traditionally associated with the term ‘revolution,’ particularly the notion of seizure of power” (135). Hocquenghem's work is concerned with the social emergency homosexuality that he was associated with in the early 1990s, the stigma of AIDS associated with it, and the way danger was dealt with. Through his analysis, what is important to notice—as it will be the founding principle of the antisocial turn in queer theory—is the idea that desire can be revolutionary only when it opposes social order, not when it becomes part of a civilized ideology. The question this raises is: why would one want to be a civilized citizen?

Bersani is concerned with the “desexualising discourses” that surround desire. The social striving to naturalize nonconforming sexualities, on the one hand, aims to de-trigger the politically disruptive aspect of homo-ness, while on the other, it works as a boost “in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance” (Bersani Reference Bersani1996, 5). Accordingly, acceptance, too, assumes the contours of a politically orchestrated game of give and take, designed to control and neutralize what could disrupt, to transform “gay men into infinitely fascinating taboos, … less dangerous to look” (21). Bersani's main argument revolves around the idea that queer studies have fundamentally forgotten how to be queer, that is, they have failed to account for sexual specificity, and, at the same time, in their preoccupation to gain legitimation and status, they have created an inclusive queer narrative that shuns the multiple and contradicting ways one can be queer. Significantly, Bersani's critique was published at a time when queer studies were just emerging as an independent scholarship and the performative theory of Judith Butler had introduced new perspectives on how to enact gender. In such a context, his negative approach echoed more loudly and, in a way, gave origin to a “negative perspective” revisited and enhanced by Edelman and his famous call for “No Future.”

What Edelman adds to the argument—more to the point in this context —is the notion of reproductive futurism, which “impose[s] an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations” (Reference Edelman2004, 2). Reproductive futurism develops a cultural and political rhetoric that works toward the continuation of civilization—of the species, in a way—through enhancing the sacrality of heterosexuality.

With the cry, “fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital l's and small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as it prop” (2004, 29), Edelman identifies children—emblematic symbol of hope and future—as tools for political machinations of rhetoric on an ideal of future that is only the faithful reproduction of this present. “The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity, an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism” (21). Children, he says, are the embodiment of futurity, a project that looks forward, the most powerful result of the sociopolitical investment in heteronormativity, the embodiment of the past, present, and future of civilization.

Both Bersani and Edelman are concerned with the sociality of queerness insofar as sociality is the expression of a cultural hegemony. In a context in which to exist and be recognized one must abide, absorb, and reproduce, they suggest that this sociality is not worth taking on, and only in a total refusal of affectivity, sociality, and emotional participation do they find a way for queerness to exist coherently, that is, as an opposing force, not compromised by trade-offs with heteronormative maneuvers. So we have it that sociality requires a de-centering of the social order. “Rather than a life-force connecting pleasure to life, survival and futurity, sex and particularly homo-sex and receptive sex, [the sexual instinct] is a death drive that undoes the self, releases the self from the drive for mastery and coherence and resolution” (Halberstam Reference Halberstam2008, 140).

The provocations in Bersani and Edelman's works, then, can be summed up as follows: community politics has not produced the desired results, the assimilation of the predominant values have not led to freedom, the definition of oneself through the identification with a productive normality has hidden and not resolved the matter: why, then, continue enacting this community spirit and participate into a vision of futurity that, for queers, is death? Rather than being marginalized by an idea of society that rejects queers, why not make the conscious decision to reject sociality and become a marginal body?

The centrality of Edelman's views in this context is expressed by what he calls “reproductive futurism,” a temporality that, he argues, insists on presenting an idealized future, thus conferring it (the future) a superior value over the present and therefore promoting politics that preserves a logic “where futurism always anticipates, in the image of an imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will suture identity by closing that gap, queerness undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as subjects” (Reference Edelman2004, 24). This encourages a political and social justification of the failures and lacks of identity politics of the present, in view of a future that, Edelman argues, is in fact an illusion, for it is corrupted by the reproduction of sameness. Paradoxically, in Edelman's view, it is hope for the future that kills the potentiality of queer in the present, which, by contrast, is what Muñoz's utopia relies on: the temporality of “the coercive choreography of a here and now” (Muñoz Reference Muñoz2009, 162) that inspires a utopian future in the “there” and “then.”

Muñoz and Edelman present two approaches in considering the future that I find equally problematic: the former overrelies on a productive form of future that never fully keeps its promise because it freezes its potentiality in a not-yet dimension that ends up neutralizing instead of enhancing it. Furthermore, the politics of affirmative relationality and futurity as envisioned by Muñoz are too closely linked to the hegemonic rhetoric of happiness and fail to account for vulnerability or instability, in favor of rosy assumptions that, in fact, do not match a realistic consideration of the state of affairs.Footnote ⁵ Reality for transgender people—and this is, in my view, the main limit of Muñoz's analysis—is not about writing poetry, theater performances, radical activism, and underground forms of art. It is, rather, the constant renegotiation of their subjectivity with the friction they encounter and with which they must come to terms in their day-to-day existence. Muñoz's utopia is a luxury that not very many individuals can afford: most of them are just too busy getting on with the mundanity of a life that, more often than not, presents threats to their personal security, well-being, and basic human rights and in which nothing can be assumed, but everything is to be conquered every day.

Edelman's account, too, shows a manifest teleological approach toward the politics of the present. In particular, his conceiving of the future as sameness and therefore the closure toward all the possibilities of contamination and encounters betrays that “ethical” demand he himself puts of queer to subvert a future that, by his own terms, does not serve its purpose. So, if the present is disappointing and the future will not be any better, from where does Edelman draw any potentiality to enact change? To build a new ethics of utopianism that can account for the mode of futurity embodied by transgender subjectivities, I wonder whether the argument still needs to be articulated in either impossible hope or self-annihilating cynicism. Is there a path we can follow beyond the mutually exclusive hope and negativity, construction and deconstruction, sociality and inwardness?

Queer theory's failure to engage with difference effectively is rooted in the inability to let go of essentialisms and concepts that simply cannot paint a different picture than what has been available thus far. This is because it is too fundamentally immersed in a double optic, the same double optic that queer proposes to dismantle. This means that the only possible consideration of futurity must be done using a totally new and different set of spatial and temporal tools capable of cracking that normative imperialism that has dominated the debate. The first question to pose is not, then, what is the future but rather, when is the future? And is it possible to reconsider utopia through the temporal relocation of the future? As we shall see, a Deleuzian reading of the temporality of the present may offer us a new perspective.

So far we have seen that, one the one side, we have the double dimension of the mutually exclusive dichotomy present/future conceived on a hierarchy between reality—however disconnected from the real—and imagination, the productive hopefulness that, in Bloch, connects the now to a then we are not sure about. The wishing subject projects its wishful hope to an object that is responsible for its realization. This system of knowledge whereby conscience is a result of the transcendental mediation between a space that one wishes and a space that might happen is limiting, for it creates a void that neither the subject nor the object can fill. On the other side, we have the abolition of the dual relationship subject/object, and all we are left with is the self. Deleuze's concept of difference is paramount here. Deleuze allows us to relocate the space of action of the subject—which is no longer subject but is simply self—right back into the self so that its full being—fully expressing and living—happens internally and does not depend on any external relations. In a way, we can think of a self that is fully formed and self-sufficient in the totality of its being. This body—the self—in being a whole unit is also different, where difference, far from comparative, is to be considered a difference in being. In other words, the self is different only by virtue of being, which means that its modes—to which I will go back later—of being respond solely to one command, that of being what they are. So, how does the self find its whole inside and how can it surpass the limits of transcendence?

TEMPORAL IMMANENCE

In this attempt to reframe utopia as a mode of the present, we must understand the difference between immanence and transcendence. Deleuze's concept of immanence—or better still, of ontological immanence—derives from Nietzsche and Spinoza, and it is, first of all, as Deleuze himself declares, an ethical choice, “a mode of living, a way of Life” (Reference Deleuze, Tomlinson and Habberjam1988, 122), an ethical (and ontological) self-empowerment, we could say, where being is nothing other than being itself and life finds its completion.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891), Nietzsche develops the concept of the Übermensch, presented as the ideal goal that humanity can set out for itself in order to achieve self-development. This concept has attracted much criticism,Footnote ⁶ and its consequent symbolism around the Nietzschean imagery of the death of God and its reactionary values against the morals of Christianity, but it is relevant here because, as David Lane suggests, it “symbolises the promised end product of a process of overcoming all pre-established cultural values of transcendence, and, as such, based upon a faith in materiality, the senses and the earth” (Reference Lane2008, 91). From here and through the work of Deleuze, I suggest, it is possible to draw a sense of how the mundanity of life immersed in the materiality of the present can become enacted revolutionary utopianism.

The split between good and evil or even between truth and lie is formulated by Nietzsche in terms of the “otherworldly” and its opposite, what is commonly named “thiswordly.” The “otherworldly” and the “thisworldly” stand for transcendence (“heaven”), that “inhuman dehumanised world which is a heavenly Nothing” (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche1969, 59) as opposed to empiricism (“truth”). On the one side, the clashing dimensions of science, and on the other, its transcendental double: faith. Nietzsche's position in this binarism, delivered through the character of Zarathustra, is “remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes!” (42). In this sentence, Nietzsche expresses the fundamental split between this world and the other world, between divine and terrain, and highlights a form of materialism—“being true to the earth”—that is essential to becoming an Ubermensch.Footnote ⁷

Deleuze's understanding of transcendence preserves this formal split: it is everything beyond being, an illusion, “any organisation that comes from above and refers to transcendence, be it a hidden one, can be called a theological plan: a design in the mind of a god, but also as evolution in the supposed depths of nature, or a society's organization of power. It always involves forms and their developments, subjects and their formations … it always implies a dimension supplementary to the dimensions of the given” (Reference Deleuze and Hurley1988b, 128). So, without the force of Being and the counterforce of the Act (in other words: without the Subject and its Object), life is one and it is unified with thought. Elsewhere transcendence is identified with “common sense, the unity of all the faculties at the centre of the Cogito, is the State consensus raised to the absolute” that threatens desire (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 376). The counterpart of common sense is the “schizophrenic,” who, contrary to transcendental essentialisms, is capable of producing nomadic thought (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004a, 7–21).

“Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001, 66). This mode happens immanently. Life in immanence is a unified force that proceeds by “variation.” It is a

The reverberation of its “streaming, spiralling zigzagging, snaking” is “complete power, complete bliss … no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act—it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001, 27). Thus, immanence exists by means “of variation” and only in a mode of becoming. Such movement is a force both eternal and nonhierarchical; it does not go “from one point to another” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 323), for “a line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or continuous points. A point is always a point of origin. But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination … A line of becoming has only a middle” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 323). Nothing is outside of immanence, which “is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari, Tomlinson and Burchell1994, 45), and nothing exists if not in becoming. “Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 324). It is only by, in, and through becoming that one can be. Anything that is outside of this immanent becoming—that is, life—will serve transcendence and weaken immanent life and its ability to keep producing the new. Similarly, what is not in the present is not in immanence (it is outside of life) and therefore unable to become, that is, to live. “Becoming cannot be conceptualized in terms of past and future … [It] remains indifferent to questions of a future and a past … it passes between the two” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 322). The concept of immanence is essential because in it we find the essence of specificity, “the impersonal yet singular life” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001, 28), a “commitment” (Colebrook Reference Colebrook2002, 82) to empiricism that allows to begin from specific experience—molecular—as a condition for molar.

Immanence, then, informs nomadic ethics, which Rosi Braidotti identifies with the multifunctional and complex flow of bodies, energies, desires, and affects that operate by “logic of invention” (Grosz Reference Grosz2001, 113) and are always conceived in terms of multiplicity—filled with “multiplicity which changes in nature when it divides” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 534)—an irrational force (or multiple forces) that bring together different and discontinuous degrees, shapes and forms. It is smooth space, a “heterogenous, in continuous variation … amorphous” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 536) that de-territorializes and re-territorializes in a constant infectious movement from smooth to striate and back to smooth so as to “to free up the fixed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new organisations” (Parr Reference Parr2005, 67). These smooth spaces employed here are spaces of difference. They delineate the movements, orientations, and linkages (or lack of) in constant variation that do not rely on referential objects or points but rather move following haecceities, that is, singular modes of individuating relations in the world that go beyond mere definitions of good and evil, “since only the subject which incarnated it in the midst of things rendered it good or bad (Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001, 4). In contrast to this, striated spaces (identified with the state) are sedentary, striated by trajectories, regulations, roads, and directions.”

This process from striate state through newly created smooth space is the precise moment when the revolution of becoming takes place, and, in its perpetual oscillation, it preserves being (Life) from the static and stiff crystallization of established norms. “Smooth space is constantly being translated, transformed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2004b, 524). The turn of immanence that reverts to transcendence, from de-territorialized to re-territorialized and from new to old and back to new ensures the vitalism that is essential to life. The importance of spatiality in this thesis is paramount because it constitutes the primary and most inflexible interlocutor in the compromises that transgender individuals must undertake in the day-to-day expression of their subjectivity. To conquer space—from striated to smooth—is not only a question of external validation but also the victory of the specificity of one's subjectivity over the smooth rendering to preestablished identities.

FUTURE IN THE PRESENT

The common understanding of temporal phases sees the present as the moment where past and future separate. It is our day-to-day conceiving of time, a model that derives from Aristotle's Physics (Reference Aristotle and Bostock2008), defined by a “number of movement in respect to before and after” (4.11.219b2, 220 a25), where the past has a “no-longer” dimension and the future holds a “not-yet” anticipation, two containers in which things take place in an infinite linear mode and past and future are delineated by the position of the now. Heidegger opposes this very principle of eternal, time-less time. His views deeply inform Deleuze's understanding of time, to which I will return shortly. Heidegger envisions time as a more cohesive dimension in which the past takes up the effects of the present and the present provides a direction for what the future might become. Three distinct but far from separated moments—past, present, and future—are expressions of the same motion: what is in the past is connected to the future through the present. This is the human-centric analytical perspective of Heidegger that sees being in time. The Being-toward-death state of being places Heidegger's emphasis on the Zukunkt (future): the anticipatory Zukommen (come forth, come toward) projects us into the future, yet future is not infinite, there is an end to it. This is why, for Heidegger, we have the possibility to shape our future and make it our own through the present, so as not to “waste” a chance and, at the same time, not to let that anticipation disappoint us. The novelty in this conception of time is that time is no longer seen as “a movable image of eternity” (Plato 1969, 37D), but it faces death. That is to say, it does not happen in a dimension of eternity, it is not an infinite series of linear “now” points that passes us by, but “it is only for a being that lives with an awareness of its own mortality” (Alweiss Reference Alweiss2002, 118), that is, it has a deadline pending on it, death.Footnote ⁸

With Deleuze, time assumes yet another form. Temporality is not a domain of the human being only but has a horizon that goes beyond the human dimension. It does not have a chronology but is “a formal network of processes … interacting with one another” (Williams Reference Williams2011, 8). For Deleuze, there is no past or future as such: “we are travelling back and forward in time all the time with no need for special machines or for odd physical properties such as wormholes” (Reference Deleuze, Tomlinson and Habberjam1988a, 55). There is only present: present that assumes different forms but is enacted only as present. Let me explain this better: the past is a series of memories of what happened (in the past) but is no longer happening, yet it is being reenacted in my memory at this moment and is therefore still present (“It is not, but it acts” [Deleuze Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001, 55]), for my act of remembering is happening now, in the present. “The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass … The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Tomlinson and Habberjam1988a, 59). The present, “which does not cease to pass” (59), is the condition for which the past has passed. Without present the past would not exist. Yet one should not conclude that the past is only residual memories of a present through which it has passed: “if it were, there would be many pasts, as many as there are people … [or] as many as there are psychological states of people” (May Reference May2005, 47). Now, the present exists in actuality, “it acts” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Tomlinson and Habberjam1988a, 55), while the past exists in virtuality, “it has ceased to act … but it has not ceased to be,” hence “it should not be said that it ‘was’” (55). The virtual and actual as spaces are not filtered through the phenomenological mind of each of us (they have no “psychological existence” [55]). Rather, these must “be understood as ‘the two sides of the Real’” (Pavoni Reference Pavoni2013, 47), not distinct but ontologically unified as “whole, integral past” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze, Tomlinson and Habberjam1988a, 59).

Utopian becomings, then, need to be understood as the duration that connects the future to the past and that, through perpetual becoming, best embodies the present. Grosz explains multiplicity as the embodiment of all virtualities not actualized, yet present, which contains an element of ideal and the notion of time as becoming, “a mixture of the latency of the past and the indeterminacy of the future” (Grosz Reference Grosz2001, 130–49). The concept of duration is borrowed by Henri Bergson and is the differentiating force that motivates becoming, “the operation of self-differentiation, the elaboration of difference … Duration is that which undoes as well as what makes: to the extent that duration entails an open future, it involves the fracturing and opening up of the past and the present to what is virtual in them, to what in them differs from the actual, to what in them can bring forth the new” (Grosz Reference Grosz2005, 4).

These complex connections need further unpacking: through his reading of Bergson, Deleuze (Reference Deleuze and Boyman2001) elaborates the notion of the virtual. Bergson places the possible and real on the same level: what is possible is not second to what is real, it does not preexist the real. In doing so, he eliminates the possibility of thinking of what is possible as something that will be (but is not yet) realized in the real. Deleuze rejects this Bergsonian notion of the possible and instead replaces it with the notion of the virtual, which is already fully real (it is not in the condition of possibility) and therefore dissolves that passage “possible to real” that Bergson eased out by placing possible and real on the same level. This opens up to a whole new way of accounting for what is real. In particular, I refer to the acknowledgment and inclusion of all those invisible realities that, because of their marginal social location, are often not seen or, worse, deemed irrelevant and silenced through oblivion.

So, the virtual for Deleuze is the condition for the real, “the virtual is real in so far as it is virtual” (Deleuze Reference Deleuze2004, 208), it is the only moment where real experience takes place, “the site of the condition of possibility of the virtual” (Pearson Reference Pearson2005, 1113). Unlike the possible (which is possible but not real), the virtual is real, just not yet actualized. As Andrea Pavoni notes, the relationship between virtual and actual is neither conflictual nor harmonious; rather, is it one in which “they affect each other, in a radical, swerving asymmetry, between the real potentialities of the virtual and their relational actualization” (2013, 47).

Because the virtual operates in multiplicity, it necessitates a vision of the real that is plural and constitutive of difference. For Bergson, difference can be external or internal, the former is concerned with nature, the latter is constitutive, both forming the essence of becoming different (Grosz Reference Grosz2005, 7). What is important is that this is not a binary dualism, but each is an impulse of that movement of differentiation that determines multiplicity. It is through intuition—an ever-productive force—and its tendencies inside and reverse that difference is dissected, assimilated, and forged into the new languages, new concepts, new life. “Intuition is not simply the discernment of natural differences, qualitative differences or differences in kind; it is the inner orientation to tendency, to the differenced between tendencies, it is the capacity to understand natural differences beyond a monistic or dualistic model, not as relation of two terms, but as the convergence of two tendencies or dispositions, not marked by negation but brought together through contraction/dilation” (Bergson Reference Bergson, Paul and Palmer2004, 102).

So we have it that full potentiality is already in the virtual, which means that it is already exposed and constantly traversed by intuition that actualizes it. It is life—the real, the virtual—that overcomes life (“life overcomes itself” [Grosz Reference Grosz2005, 10]), and its becoming is not only expressed through its being virtual (present and real) but also by its being in constant re-elaboration. Potentiality, then, does not disappear when it becomes actuality, it does not develop into actuality. Dynamism and positivity are the two traits of the virtual for Deleuze. There is no negation because there is no dialectical exchange—we are in a Spinozan monism—and therefore there are no negotiations or possibilities for hierarchical characteristics between potential and real.

SUSTAINABLE UTOPIAN ETHICS

Through Bergson and Deleuze, it is possible to turn around the notion of utopia that, as we have seen at the beginning of this article, has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of space, anchored in the theoretical spatiality of a no place and located in a time-less future: out of space and out of time. Both are static dimensions, the result of a spatio-temporal dialectical speculation between imagination and invention. We have seen how in the utopic discourses of More and Bloch, the notion of utopia has been uncontrollable and, at the same time, fundamentally controlled: a victim of pressing social conditions which pushed utopia further out in space and further out in time. The function of such a notion of abstract utopia is exhausted in the fulfillment of that reassurance it is sought from it. This kind of utopia stands on hope, the hope for a better future, for progress, for a better place in a better time. While this utopia is projected toward the future and only concerned with the present as a spatio-temporal constraint to overcome, it appears to have no future; it is only the speculative exercise of fantasy necessary for control over what is new, what is innovative, what is truly unique and uncontrollable: what Foucault called “the event,”Footnote ⁹ which is the instrument of power. For Foucault, power as such does not exist and cannot produce consequences because it does not happen on a cause/effect mechanism that produces consequences outside of itself. Power is, rather, an event, and its node of action occurs internally. Utopia as the nonplace in a time-less future is an event in the face of the unforeseeable new, far from being frozen itself, for its precise function is to manipulate the past and project a frozen image of the future onto the present. As Grosz puts it, “a freezing of the indeterminable movement from the past through the future that the present is unable to directly control” (2001, 142). If there is no space and no future in this vision of utopia, how can it, then, account for subjectivity, relations, and diversity? With Deleuze's theory of becoming and with Bergson's theory on time, how can we think of an ethics of utopian that is sustainable? Can we open a utopian space that feeds from the reality of the here and now and actualizes the impulses that come from the future in the materiality of the present? And, finally, how does transgender fit into this?

The reality of transgender people has already come to terms with the incompatibility between the utopia of there and then and a utopian here and now. The shift between what might be and what already is is visible every day in the lives of all those individuals who, sometimes out of political representation and social recognition, construct, represent, and embody their own unique singularity and, in that uniqueness, establish their utopia. Mundane instances of everyday life, such as inhabiting a space, making contact with other individuals, using a public toilet, are occasions on which to imprint one's one narrative. A narrative that is as utopian as it is material: it is generated and kept alive by the specificity of a subjectivity that is already part of a whole and that is as minute and volatile as it is permanent and real. Its utopia consists precisely of its extreme specificity and is often manifested in acts of singular resistance and pragmatism.

If we consider the theoretical narrative of the account of utopia provided in this article, we notice that the subject has never been present or active in this formulation. Utopia was presented as a theory, as escapism, hope, a dream, progress. The common denominator was a spatial description deprived of the subject. Utopia as a vision for a collective, never presented in terms of the “one-man dream” (Manuel and Manuel Reference Manuel and Manuel1979, 1). “There can be nothing collective about Utopia—says Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos—unless one considers the limited, logocentric inter-subjective interface created in the cusp of the otherwise immured experiences of each Utopist, adequate territory for the erection of a common Utopia” (2001, 140). In order for utopian ethics to be sustainable, alive, and generative, they must find a site within the subject before they open up to the responsibility of reframing the world. Being nomadic, becoming nomadic in the Deleuzian sense, is not merely a philosophical theory. Rather, it is a notion immersed in pragmatism and corporeality that, far from being set out as vision to follow or a mode of escapism from alienating reality, finds its best and outmost actualization in the micro social and political stances of the present. It is an immanent movement undertaken immanently by the immanent body, a site “of forces, or flows, intensities and passions that solidify—in space —and consolidate—in time—within the singular configuration commonly known as ‘individual.’… self” (Braidotti Reference Braidotti and Boundas2006, 135). Grosz laments that “no utopia has been framed to take account of the diversity not only of subjects but also of their utopic visions … to the way in which visions of the ideal are themselves reflections of the specific positions occupied in the present” (2001, 142). This is precisely because the very notion of utopia, already weakened in its spatial constitution remote from the pulsating life of the here and now, has been kept together by an ideal of collective representation, that is, the ideal society. The only way of envisioning sustainable utopia, that is to say, a mode of creative, positive agenerative utopianism, is to strip it of its universal value and relocate it in the singularity of the individual who, through passions and affects and through corporeal contaminations, will meld with its spatiality, “so much so that spatiality becomes a quality of the body itself” (Philippopulos-Mihalopoulos Reference Philippopulos-Mihalopoulos2001, 139).

A good example of the discrepancy between the utopian force of everyday life claimed by the multiplicity of transgender subjectivities and the too often inefficacious political response can be found in the way in which the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) 2004 played out. I will not provide a full analysis of the GRA here, but I am interested in pointing out some crucial parts of this legislation that can highlight the incongruence between the lived experience of being transgender and its politics. The process of gender reassignment is regulated by the clinical industry, which sets behavioral standards by which eligibility is assessed. Successful simulation and fulfillment of a set of enactments commonly associated with the chosen gender over a period of time are the main requirement. Alongside this, there is the promise that the candidates “continue to live in the required gender until death.”Footnote ¹⁰ This predicament is problematic because it poses an issue of equity: it demands an a priori engagement with an ideal of solidity of gender that nontransgender individuals are not expected to engage with and produce (this based on the assumption that gender is stable and those who are not diagnosed with gender dysphoria would not question this notion in the first place). It also opens far more complex issues caused by a more dangerous ideal of purity of gender. By purity of gender, I mean two things specifically: First, the assumption that gender is recognized insofar as it travels on a female/male binary—and therefore any blurry positioning is suppressed. With uncertainty must also go the possibility that feminine and masculine may cohabit within the same subjectivity. Second, there is the possibility for the Gender Recognition Certificate to overwrite one's history, erasing any traces of gender discontinuity in favor of gender coherence, that is, an ideal that gender must be pure and uncontaminated. To open up to an inclusive understanding of difference that trans so well embodies would encourage the argument in favor of fluidity of gender and, consequently, would create room for questioning that monolithic “until death” requirement upon which the GRA is so tightly constructed.

Some transgender individuals do not feel the need to let go of their past as a condition to embrace their present of transgender subjects. The way the GRA tries to eradicate the old gender and replace it with the new so as to erase the traces of what once was can be hard to accept. If, by doing so, the law secures that there is no space for doubt and uncertainty around the newly established gender, some transgender people need the shadow of their past as a constitutive force of who they are today as transgender individuals. To retain feminine and masculine sides within the same subjectivity, and for this to be accepted as part and parcel of transgender, is an instance of utopian reality—the now—with which the law has not caught up yet.

Far from promoting an active involvement with ongoing transgender debates and the real issues that transgender individuals face everyday, such an uncompromising understanding of gender inevitably gives the act the taste of a dead piece of legislation detached from people's lives, worries, and needs. With this I do not intend to dismiss the GRA tout court: the act is certainly useful in affording legal recognition and social legitimacy to trans people who identify as women or men, as it gives people with a coherent path of transition the opportunity to have that history corrected and for a new one to emerge and to be recognized, but also, as pointed out by some scholars and activists, such as Stephen Thomas Whittle and Lewis Turner (Reference Whittle and Turner2007), it has not improved the legal condition of those who identify beyond the female/male categories.

The inflexible and paradoxical way in which politics and the law approach the understanding of transgender is unable to account for the ever-changing subjectivities that many trans-identified individuals embody every day. Their lives, identified beyond the binary, already find new ways of self-identification and fill the absence of a space of their own with new forms of embodiment and identity, thus proving to be already materialized utopias happening here and now, different subjectivities that have broken the mold of the gender binary.

Everyone, including transgender individuals, has a different story, and it is precisely in that one and unrepeatable act of being and signifying for oneself that one can see the utopian force of transgender, which is never as strong and contagious as it is when it is in the here and now of the present.

Deleuze argues that the power of creating is not a judging God, but in life itself and, more precisely, in our ability “to transform and act upon life” (Colebrook 2003, xxiv). It is exactly in this immanent-nomadic-affirmative attitude that the creative force of utopianism lies: in the leaking boundaries of a body that contaminates and is contaminated by passions and desires and that, through self-transforming and self-becoming, takes those same (and other) passions and desires into the world in the constant construction of its own ethics, which, because fundamentally and constitutively different, are, by more of becoming, universal. In this process in which the one is multiple, it is the present and not the future that provides the impulse for the actualization of a virtuality that is already within the subject and that, by appropriating that spatiality, filling its absence, and directing its impulses, finds in the affirmation of its different being the most concrete mode of futurity.

Braidotti argues that sustainability is given by a subject that expresses its potentia through the fundamental drive to life that is not mediated “neither by the will of God, nor the secret encryption of the genetic code” (Braidotti Reference Braidotti and Boundas2006, 134), but rather, she continues, is “embedded in the corporeal materiality of the self” (134). It is, then, that being “faithful to oneself” is not to be mistaken with a “mark of authenticity of a self (me, myself and I) that is a clearing house for narcissism and paranoia—the great pillars on which Western identity predicates itself.” Rather, to be faithful to oneself reconnects being with the emotional, affective, and intellectual awareness of oneself in a mode of interaction with others, “this is the faithful of duration, the expression of one's continuing attachment to certain dynamic spatio-temporal co-ordinates and to endure” (Braidotti Reference Braidotti and Boundas2006, 135).