Materialist (trans)Feminism: A Review of Synthetic Becoming (2022)
As Hescham KR, Jordanian director of the film “صيرورة“ (BECOMING), wrote in our comment section: Becomings attract. This was especially true of the following text. I was at Miss Read 2024, standing at our table for the third day, when I see a girl standing a few meters away clutching a simple grey book. On the front of the book was a loud title, at least loud enough for me to hear it over the humdrum of the book fair — SYNTHETIC BECOMING, the title read. Without taking a second to compose myself, I reached out my arm to extend a finger, pointed at the book: “hey, sorry, excuse me” I barked, “but what is that book you are holding?”.
“I’m not entirely sure, a guy upstairs was selling it for €10, he said he didn’t want to carry his stock home—cute though”, they replied.
“I see, thank you. Upstairs you said? I see..” I answered casually, only to turn around and frantically beg Polymnia: “Go! Find that book! Whatever it takes! I must have it—K VERLAG”.
It wasn’t just that the word Becoming was in the title—there are orthodox fundamentalist book stores called Becoming, there are books by De Landa about Becoming, plenty to avoid like allergens—but it was one of what I habitually called “a Virginia Woolf-Deleuze moment” in which Deleuze & Guattari discuss Virginia Woolf’s eureka moment of seeing ‘a particular dog on a particular street, on a particular day, at a particular moment in her life’, triggering a complex emotional reaction that sparked the writing of a new book (a new Becoming). In A Thousand Plateaus, this idea is discussed by Deleuze & Guattari within the framework of the “haecceity”, where the set of particular collisions (dog, road, light, etc) created a complex signifier which entered the frame with as much a personified character as rain. Just as with Virginia Woolf, the particular day, the particular location, the particular girl at the particular desk, holding a particular book with a particular graphic design and a particular title—SYNTHETIC BECOMING—this set of collisions became a haecceity that affected me, as if the voice of God cutting through the noise. I heard the words in my mind, in someone else’s voice. Synthetic Becoming.
When Polymnia returned, she smiled at me and presented to me a copy of the book, saying “it was the last one! and it wasn’t €10 actually, but because I only took ten with me, he more or less said fuck it, why not, take it”. I was over the moon as I ran my fingers through the pages, palpably impressed by the book in the way that only a carpenter can be impressed by a bench.
There was no way of knowing, from a distance, what this book was about, but as I palmed through, I quickly realised—wait, this is entirely about hormones and the endocrine system. There was a visual chemist glossary of various endocrine disruptors ranging from Diethylstilbestrol (DES) to Paracetamol, some really catchy titles, as well as dozens of images that were reminiscent of post-ironic or post-meme aesthetics that have infiltrated high-art institutions all around Berlin. There were even excerpts written in Creole. All of this was set on this really artisanal scrap/recycled paper that was strewn with colourful imperfections as if the paper itself was both an art piece about microplastics in the brain and about the kinds of imperfections/impurities/toxicity that the book discusses in depth. “This is incredible, what the actual fuck is going on with this book?”.
It took a week—to get back from the book fair, to return to my cafe job, to pass through several meetings and catch up with Becoming—before I was able to open the book and start reading it. It was wonderful. The book opens with a manifesto for a Synthetic Becoming and Materialist Feminism, a brief but powerful declaration of what “Becoming”, as a signifier and cultural reference point, meant to the editorial team, and why such a concept was relevant to the endocrine system and hormones — a question even I had been turning over in my mind. Synthetic could have meant artificial (as in unnatural) or assembled (as in multifaceted, complex, the result of synthesis), but as the introduction makes clear—there ought not to be such a harsh separation. Isn’t all synthesis, on some deeper level, artificial? Even Charles Mudede reminded us months ago: humans are as artificial as the nitrogen they breathe. Are hormones that a body produces really so different to hormones that somebody produces? Synthesis is figured here as “a process where simpler elements come together to produce higher orders of complexity”, and this definition is poised adjacent to a definition of Becoming as written by Karen Barad: “Becoming signifies the mutual co-constitution of entangled material and social phenomena coming into being out of different possibilities occurring at each moment”.
This broad, collective monograph presents a manifesto for using the concept of becoming to think about bodies and biological processes. Without specifically going into identity politics or gender theory, this reading of biology and bodies presents a fundamentally transexual and intersexual materialism that condemns the dualisms of Natural/Synthetic, Pure/Polluted and Health/Damaged in order to affirm “impure” and “contaminated” forms of life, and to affirm the capacity life has to recompose itself.
In some parts, the book plays off of right-wing paranoias: male fish becoming egg-laying females due to the excess of oestrogen hormones in water streams. Not much can make the right-wing quake in their boots than the idea of becoming emasculated just by swimming too long in pink (estrogenated) water. The book implies that it is far too late to worry about this process, as it has either been in motion for a long time, or it is the fundamental nature of all things—to be in constant reformation, to be constantly swerving, and in constant synthesis. Oestrogen is everywhere: “we even have oestrogen receptors within the inner-ear, and no one knows why”.
Traditional methods of soy production reduce phyto-oestrogen levels dramatically, but modern factory processes do not—it is not indigenous recipes that are a threat to patriarchy, but modern processes relating to capitalism that ultimately cause such increased levels of endocrine disrupting substances within our ecosystems — you just cannot escape oestrogen and its affect on biological life. The paranoid fear of “feminized men” is itself a confession of belief: conservatives admit that they believe nature can force-feminise “men”, and that there is nothing “men” can do to resist this process—they believe it as a possibility.
All of this brings me back to a text I wrote about Baudrillard—perhaps an unlikely proponent of transsexualism, I admit—and his theories of seduction. In that text I dug out some of Baudrillard’s lesser-known concepts, including an iconic statement that, for me, really captures what is going on under the surface of Baudrillard. In direct opposition to Lacan’s statement “women do not exist”, Baudrillard claims that, if anything, there is no male sex, because it struggles so much to assert its existence, only to repeatedly fail to establish itself and maintain itself. While Baudrillard is talking about signs and semiology, it follows the same pattern as the book Synthetic Becoming: masculinity, maleness, attempts to break out and assert itself above what it calls the feminine, but it struggles to maintain its distinctness, as if always being pulled back into what it attempts to separate itself from.
This reminds me of something that Ann Atwater could say “[CISSEXUAL] people are scared of losing something they never had” — stasis. Identity attempts to resist the currents of the universe, but can never maintain its stance. Like Laruelle said with Blackness—there is no black and white, only black, and once whiteness is seen as illusory, only then can we see beyond Blackness, or only then can we see the truth of black’s all encompassing nature. This is the same radical axiom as can be found in Haitian Revolutionary dialogues. Instead of a natural that is superior to synthetic, there is only a “synthetic nature”. Masculinity, and its feminine shadow, is a “politics of purity” which a study of hormones in the body surely negates — I can map this tightly onto my own idea of metaphysics that is largely influenced by Achim Szepanski and Thomas Nail—rhythm/order arises from the noise/chaos, but it is fundamentally composed of noise—rhythm is of-noise, order is of-chaos.
This book captures so well what Becoming’s editorial line has been working towards, and asks similar questions. For example, in the chapter about Biological Colonialism, there is a discussion of where a body really begins, because pharmaceutical companies who fund biological research on groups of native American peoples find loopholes that allow for the non-consensual extraction of private biological data from subjects based: are the micro-communities who live in your intestines part of your sovereign body? Not if you view the body as a Torus—are the contents of your stomach you? Legally it is ambiguous. We are just as much within hormonal flows as hormonal flows are within us: this is the will of the Lucretian Venus: all must differentiate until all becomes a differential one that continuously unfolds. You can look top-down, and find just two sexes, but from the bottom-up, there are, as Deleuze & Guattari say, n-sexes, unfolding infinitely into orders of complexity. This is a ground for thinking about the triad of Synthetic Materialist Feminism, Materialist Feminist Synthesis, and Feminist Synthetic Materialism: a materialism that is fundamentally synthetic and inherently feminist, and a feminism that inherently discusses a materialism that is itself inherently synthetic.