Meeting the composer halfway : which Anne Boyd?

There is an image of the Australian composer Anne Boyd (b. 1946) that is at once stable and predictable, and pointing to the unceasing movement of difference in which there is no stable centre. The flux of movement in the identity of Boyd, to draw the words from Deleuze, ‘implies a plurality of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a co-existence of moments which essentially distort representation…forcing us to create movement’. At the same time, there is a tendency in the collective assemblage of enunciation to stabilise and fix the image of Boyd and, in so doing, to reinforce her negative opposition to the male composer and thus her inferior membership of the category ‘composer’. In this way, her identity works against Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, in which difference is always dynamic, and in which ‘difference is shown differing’. Representational images of Boyd fail ‘to capture the affirmed world of difference’, for representational logic mediates and treats identity as static and stable, and ‘moves nothing’. The concept of identity has always been fundamental to musical composition, forming the trope of the heroic master composer. I will explore the processes that give form to the identity of the woman composer, focusing on Boyd. A perennial problem for feminist theory has been how to break with the binary system of thought which conceives of man as the ‘universal ground of reason and good thinking’ and woman as the Other. The challenge, then, is how to engage Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming-woman’ to counteract the implied negativity of ‘being-woman’. The point of departure for much feminist work is that women’s subjugation is taken as a given. The Deleuzian-feminist perspective, however, shifts from this negative idea, suggesting that feminists have always looked for solutions outside the standard modes of philosophical questioning. As Colebrook argues, feminism has been more interested in ‘what a philosophy might do, how it might activate life and thought, and how certain problems create (rather than describe) effects’. When feminists have been confronted with theories of the body, they have tended to ask ‘an intensely active question, not “What does it mean?”, but “How does it work?” This leads Colebrook to argue that ‘any movement of utopianism or any politics of future is … best thought of through a Deleuzian notion of becoming’. For Colebrook, Deleuze encourages different kinds of questions: ‘questions beyond determinations of identity, essentialism, emancipation and representation’. In particular, Deleuzian philosophy ‘provides a way of understanding the peculiar modality of feminist questions and the active nature of feminist struggle’. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, ‘all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings’. Grosz stresses, however, that ‘becoming-woman’ is not based on the recognition of woman as a molar identity, that is, on her definition as a fixed, physical, female form. According to Grosz, ‘for women, as much as for men, the process of becoming-woman is the destabilisation of molar (feminine) identity’. Becomings can never be determined in advance and nor can we necessarily know what a becoming might be moving towards. Becomings are always double: they have the potential both to affirm change and to engender further becomings elsewhere.