Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures (review)

Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ed. Elizabeth Grosz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Pp. vi + 250. $45.00 h.c. 0-8014-3632-X; $18.95 pbk. 0-8014-8590-8.

Elizabeth Grosz's latest anthology, Becomings, is a tightly integrated and very exciting collection of essays by a group of careful and highly gifted scholars from several disciplines. As Grosz puts it in her introduction, the eleven papers gathered here "represent the interests . . . that literary, cultural, political, and social and cultural theory, as well as science and technological studies, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and contemporary epistemology, have in the replacement of an ontology of being with an ontology of becoming" (7). More specifically, she states, "this collection . . . explores the ontological, epistemic, and political implications of time as a dynamic and irreversible force" (7).

In most of the history of philosophy, as well the histories of the disciplines of natural science, social science, and even history itself, time has been taken to be a constant or a passive medium within which events unfold. Our thinking typically privileges the present or presence and often conceives of the future as nothing but the continuation of chains of causality from the present and the past. In other words, we tend not to think of time as creative and not to think of the future, or futures, as truly open. Thus, being takes priority over becoming, and becoming is subordinated to the laws of nature and history, to past cause and/or preestablished telos. Grosz and her contributors have set out to change all that.

The book is divided into three sections. Section 1, entitled "The Becoming of the World," contains essays by Grosz, Manuel De Landa, John Rajchman, and Linda Martin Alcoff. Grosz's essay is particularly clear and provocative, raising the question: "Is knowledge opposed to the future?" (21). That is, if we conceive of the future as open, as not determined by the past and the present, if we conceive of time as creative, what happens to knowledge? She answers: "If dominant modes of knowledge (causal, statistical) are incapable of envisioning the absolutely new, maybe other modes of knowing, other forms of thinking, need to be proposed" (21). Through an illuminating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, she begins the process of trying to envision such other forms of thinking. De Landa continues Grosz's project by taking up the question of determinism in scientific thinking and sketching a Deleuzian alternative to determinism in scientific work. Rajchman raises the question of whether democracy can be thought and practiced in ways that do not privilege being and representation. Then, at the end of the section, Alcoff focuses on the problem of representational thinking in analytic epistemology and attempts to develop an alternative, via Hilary Putnam, that she calls "immanent realism."

The second section of the book is entitled "Knowing and Doing Otherwise." It begins with an essay by Edward S. Casey on the time of the glance and closes with an essay by Eleanor Kaufman on Pierre Klossowski. Between these are two essays focusing primarily on Friedrich Nietzsche and Deleuze--Dorothea Olkowski's "Flows of Desire and the Body-Becoming" and Claire Colbrook's "A Grammar of Becoming." Colbrook's essay is particularly helpful in explicating Nietzsche's discussions of active and reactive forces--focusing on his analysis of subjectivity as reactive--and the ways in which Michel Foucault and Deleuze take up Nietzsche's project and attempt to re-think thinking in the absence of a static subject of thought.

Section 3, entitled "Global Futures," comprises three essays, each of which includes some discussion of contemporary political issues. Gail Weiss begins with the issue of mammalian cloning in order to think through Rosi Braidotti's criticisms of reproductive technologies. She considers the figure of the monster in Braidotti's work and elsewhere and elaborates on Bergson's writings to counter Braidotti's "pessimism...