Off Centre.

26 The notion of becoming, as well as much of Deleuzian thought, resonates strongly with the notion of queer and has in recent times often been brought together in productive ways. Cohen and Ramlow, for instance, align the two in the following way:

These permutations of queer theory share [...] an assertion of the non-teleological, non-unitary status of 'queer', and in doing so directly echo many of Deleuze and Guattari's elaborations on 'becoming'. [...] Becomings have neither origin nor destination; like the queer, they are neither filial nor teleological. They do not confer identity – molar, sedimented, unitary – but produce an entity cobbled from disparate, provisionally allied parts, a relation of affects and speeds. (3)

27 Let us now take a closer look at the One and its legions – not to establish what they are but in order to follow their line of becomings, and to show how their perception of the world opens up new perspectives. A mirror scene follows soon after the resurrection but does nothing to clarify the status of the One either in terms of gender or in terms of a self-recognition:

The One stood up from the bed, confronting the mirror. A simultaneous succession of reflections, more rapid than vibration, gave back through endless corridors of crystal, a body, still partially clothed, the seraphic head charged with new life. The electrical eyes seemed fed from a near battery – that close mesh of blue veins coursing through the temples? (Barney 24; emphasis added)

As this passage shows, the narrator employs the mirror and the light imagery to defer the viewing of the body which is clearly marked as “a” body, indicating both its genderlessness and the One's detachment from it. The One and its legions thus remain unintelligible in terms of gender, and, as a consequence, cannot attain subject status. The dissolution of gender is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, linked with the notion of the the assemblage – a connection that makes sense when we look at the creation of the One out of light, shadow and a dead ungendered body (a mixture that is certainly highly unlikely to confer gender):

there are as many sexes as there are terms in symbiosis; as many differences as elements contributing to a process of contagion. We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. [...] These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages. (Deleuze/Guattari ATP, 267)

28 Gender attribution is also avoided in the depiction of the sexual intercourse of the One and a character called the Glow-Woman (who is a former lover of A.D). The narrative voice takes a detour in its account of the scene: it describes the act by drawing the reader’s attention to the shadows of the lovers on the wall:

too excited to choose a gesture, we battled, finding no issue to each other. Surprise her into unwilling pre-nuptial ecstasy – break in through her hand barriers? Bedded on the wall, our shadow cut an audacious figure [...]. Were we they .... were they we? Where joined, where separate? Lie down, you shadow woman, and beget us darkness, semblances to feed our Shadows on. (Barney 81)

In addition to the refusal to depict gendered bodies in this scene, the narrative perspective further complicates issues: “we battled” could either refer to the One battling with the woman or to the One battling with the legions. The next sentence indicates that they ponder „taking“ the woman using a certain amount of force – an endeavour that could be aligned with male sexual behaviour. Then the narrator blurs the boundaries completely, asking which is which. Finally, the imperative of the One that the shadow woman “beget us darkness” connotes a female gender rather than a male.

29 A third passage similarly shows the narrator's refusal to reveal the body of the One as a gendered body – a fact that is all the more obvious since the One and its legions get drenched to the bone, an event which could easily reveal their sex. Instead, the narrator again employs light imagery to describe, or rather to avoid the description of the One's body. Furthermore, the One and its legions appear translucent and reflect back their surroundings:

Under the curdling white shirt the One appeared drenched in nakedness. The rhododendrons' reflection made a stained-glass of the transparent flushed cheeks and the translucid eyes. The thin enamel of the teeth let the under-light through. Broken prism were playing about everywhere. The base of a rainbow feeding with fresh colours the pigment of the flowers. (Barney 39)

30 Not only do they reflect their surroundings due to being transparent; since the One and its legions are a multiple entity, an assemblage, their body is open and prone to connect with all kinds of things. This ability once again scrambles the notion of a deviance that revolves around terms easily anticipated. Instead, the One and its legions are a creature that seems to come straight out of Deleuze/Guattari: “a multiplicity [...] continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors. [...] And at each threshold or door, a new pact?” (Deleuze/Guattari ATP, 275) Right after their resurrection, the One and its legions experience this state of openness and becoming one with their surroundings as follows: “The body baring itself for communion, receptive of efflux and influx, ready for exchange, taking from passing things their pleasure-hints, unions innocent of possession” (Barney 16). In this state before the One and its legions encounter others who will make claims of possession, they can be aligned with the Deleuzian notion of a desiring machine which “constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows” (Deleuze/Guattari AO, 6). Wherever the One and its legions go, they merge with their surroundings: “We became so easily what we chanced to see, to sense, divine, that we had some difficulty in summing back our legion” (Barney 85). The legions seem to be wandering off continually and form new alliances with all kinds of things. Likewise, the One's perception of the world is dominated by a loss of boundaries, by things merging into one another – “Hardly discernible the uniting of trees with their reflections, the exchange of river with road, each becoming the other” (Barney 79) – and by unforeseen new alliances and assemblages. For instance, the One and its legions perceive a stop at a gas station as a merging of human and machine: “we slowed down and stopped before the blue-oblong-breasted-red-machine woman who nourished the motor. [...] The machine-woman's umbilical tube had been taken from our motor to another” (Barney 58/59). The people at a railway station are all perceived as hybrid beings, ranging from a “falcon profile asleep under hood” to “a mastiff dog-faced mother, deserted by her batch” (Barney 84). The perception of other people is frequently linked to gender ambiguity: “Women in masks seated by men in beards; some sphinx-like heads bound up in leather helmet. Women or men?” (Barney 56). Although the One and its legions perceive some people as clearly gendered, the preferred mode of seeing is not to attribute gender characteristics: “Fairer to look at a strenuous adolescence, androgynous through exercise, male hardly distinguishable from female” (Barney 61).