158 Kathleen S. G. Skott-Myhre
infinite liminal development. This shifting of our relation to time and space
that produces us as non-axiomizable code holds the possibility of eluding
capture by capital in its efforts to overcode our phenomenological
experiences. While postmodernity offered us resistance through linguistic
reclamation and epistemological reconfigurations of our identity, Anzaldúa
(1987) and Barad (2007) open the possibility of an ontological complex
fluidity of movement that engages a cosmic dance between elements.
The steps of such a dance are spontaneous, although not without an
intrinsic virtuality of order. Certainly, they are neither binary nor linear in
their movements as the body moves across the lifespan. There is no
universal or proper mode of dance—no set steps that predetermine how the
dance will develop; neither right nor wrong moral compass to guide or
direct us. Perhaps it is more akin to what Stockton (2009) refers to in her
work on queering development or as “growing sideways.” This queering of
development is no longer growing up with all the stage markers of healthy
growth according to the predetermined logic of capitalist bourgeois
adulthood. Instead, Stockton talks about “irregular growth involving odd
lingerings, wayward paths and fertile delays” (as cited in Edlestien, 2018,
p. 84). This shift towards the irregular and wayward rather than the neo-
liberal drive towards entrepreneurship and being ‘all you can be’ takes the
logic of ontological posthuman materialism and utilizes it as what Guattari
(1995) refers as “stuttering.” In his writing on the production and effects of
“minor literature,” both with Deleuze (1986) and on his own, Guattari
(1995) proposes that certain forms of writing subvert our understandings of
the world and ourselves. O’Sullivan (2009) tells us that
such stuttering and stammering of language operate to produce what
I would call an affective-event that in itself can produce what Guattari
calls a ‘mutant nuclei of subjectification’ and thus the possibility of
‘resingularisation’ (a reordering of the elements that make up our
subjectivity). (p. 249)The production of an “affect-event” is a moment of transitions between
states of being. It is, to use the language I have used earlier, a liminal