Beyond the Carceral #MeToo: Mapping the schizo-aesthetics of body and desire

In this article, we attempt a radical critique of the #MeToo movement. We do not aim to display #MeToo phenomenon as a molarity anchored to the nobility of its supposed historical origin. Rather we showcase it as a nomadological flow. This is a flow that, on the one hand, resonates with and folds the productive intensities of its supposed historical origin. But, on the other hand, it turns into a dangerous mad line of flight with a potential to stultify the relational dynamics of genders. Secondly, we will argue that what lies behind the metamorphosis of ‘Me Too’ activism into a dangerous line of flight, inclined to devilishly restructure the socius, is its precarious connection with the elusive media images. Thirdly we shall show how as a dangerous line of flight #MeToo activism ends up becoming an ally of neoliberal carceral feminism and governmental schemes of incarceration and surveillance. And finally, we will focus on explaining the positionality of #MeToo in the light of schizo-aesthetics of body and desire.


Genealogy and the Social Displacement of #MeToo
It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance. For this void does not create a deficiency; it doesn't constitute a lacuna that must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think (Foucault, 1994: 373) October 10, 2019, online edition of Economic Times, India, viewed '#MeToo' as ushering in a time of tumult and hope (Indulekha, 2019). However, a radical Schizoanalysis of this view may expose it as bearing proximal concomitance with populist thinking rather than being transgressively creative, inclined towards subverting the 'normative' or generating the new. i However, the question is what structural aspect of populist thinking such views represent? It may be argued that when such views are rendered spatially they betray a kind of analogy with what is viewed as the triangulation of a dialectical field. ii At one end of this field lies affectual antagonism in the form of tumult while the other end stands pregnant with glimpses of hope and desire for a reconstructive change. However, it is not because such views are generative of a dialectical field, indicative of a rigid abstract schizophrenic oscillation between affectsotherwise sensed or experientially encountered as existing in a state of dense intertwinement-that one needs to think beyond it. Rather, this is because #MeToo for many attempting to delink it from the trajectory of populist thinking may generate little of what we view as the reconcilable dialectics of tumult and hope, even less of what a beginner in postcolonial studies may put down as a kind of fertile 'in-between'. iii Rather it could lead one into the speculative territoriality of dystopia awaiting round the corner to be grounded, given that in the self-referential circularity or rotundity of the 'globed' condition in which we live there are only actualisables or tangibles. In this sense, the disjunctive spectral territoriality of dystopia which #MeToo activism lays down no longer indicates an intangible virtual real, but one in the process of becoming our actual existential ground. This is a ground that holds within its spectral pleats and folds surreal visions. These are visions of social normativization or even worse normalization of what appears as a state of self-imposed isolation, incarceration, social ostracism, and routinized production of inoperative bare life .
But then, isn't there any truth in such views that needs to be preserved for the emergent futurity wedded to what we call the post-truth? And then don't we need such views even in the juridico-legal sense of the term to consolidate the position of the 'official minorities' in the social tapestry, given that exploitation and harassment of these minorities can be empirically validated?
However, an unproblematic alliance with the problematics of Spivak's disclosive observation that subaltern cannot speak while addressing issues plaguing institutional minorities-women in this case-could be as hopeless as making these minorities speak at all cost (Spivak, 1988). This is because thinking through Spivak's disclosure (Sharpe & Spivak 2003) while approaching minorities may not only entail totalizing a vibrating pulsating heterogeneity but may also lead one to equate Spivak's conceptualization of subaltern with that of the institutional minorities. And then not all minorities interpellated by the panopticon iv institutional gaze can be called the subalterns or the least empowered, differing 'desiring machines' (Buchanan, 2008) as each one of us happens to be willy-nilly.
But then the legality and the truthfulness of what we call the democratic freedom can be measured only when the minorities are given the democratic freedom to speak from their unique positions and in a language they consider to be the house of their individuated beings. v And in this sense it ought to be the majority who must stoop down to comprehend the nuances of the minorities' position and their languages rather than asking them to account for what they consider to be rightfully theirs. But at the same time, it is the slide from an institutionally inscribed minoritarian position to majoritarian one that each one of us experience and unconsciously express every moment that needs to be kept in mind while registering the vocal trajectories of the so-called minorities. This is because it is the very immanence of this slide that constitutes one's ontology and its commitments and in the very process schizophrenizes them, bringing about an uncanny intermeshing or a perplication vi of -as Clayton Crockett in his book Deleuze Beyond Badiou (2013) puts it -the foundational constituents of one's identity in relation to others (Crockett, 2013:46).
However, it is this sense of perplication of the abstracted singularity of selves and others that we fail to encounter in the resolution that has gained popularity among the populist feminist brigade looking forward to actualizing a rhizomatic universalization of the #MeToo movement. vii The resolution that ambivalence of sexual assault of women can be resolved if the man isolates himself and become indifferent towards women at his workplace is ridiculous, to say the least. And what is even worse is that it ironically or better tragicomically attempts to naturalize the social conditions of an outbreak or an epidemic, a condition in which social isolationism is promoted by the institutional bio-political apparatuses as prescriptive norms of existence. Even if the practitioners of the so-called militant brand of feminism viii disagree-though we are yet to see whether something of this kind will just be an aggressive repetition of the established patterns of patriarchal violence or yield something productive-and insist that it is the vicious animality of man that makes him as deadly as a dangerous virus posing a threat to the whole of womenkind it needs to be stressed that whenever bio-political machineries have turned their policies of social isolationism into praxis it has led to unredeemable chaos. The notion of ontology as a pure multiple may seem to be a detached splinter group of a kind of elitist intimidating theorization, as far as the robustly grounded militant feminists are concerned. But it must be stressed that ontology is relational and societies since time immemorial are constituted by inter-subjective and intrasubjective dialogic encounters. Further, it needs to be pointed out that women with their role as homemakers happen to be the creative forces laying the foundation of dialogue making in the public sphere. Moreover, the functionality of the workplaces and public spheres, replete with gendered entities, largely depends on the process of dynamic interaction between these entities. This happens to be an interaction that reflects what Habermas called 'communicative ethics'. ix To debunk this knee jerk resolution may not demand much of what we call critical acumen, but what deserves attention or demands critical engagement is the intellectual genealogy of this movement and its social displacement that resulted in its being notoriously manipulated.
Before metamorphosing into its current avatar 'Me Too' happened to be a movement initiated by Tarana Burke, a civil rights activist in 2006, to support the sexually abused survivors and raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault especially among young women of colour (Gracia, 2017). Although the movement called out men in power as the perpetrators of sexual abuse in organisations, for Burke women's exploitation or sexual harassment as 'a thing in itself' or what Kant called noumena, x stood as an oblique exponent of the continual interplay between patriarchy and capitalism which allowed men to exercise power over women (Burke, 2017). Burke's observation could be critiqued and women can be shown as being complicit with the patriarchal domain of capitalist exchange and transaction, exploiting the aura of blissful cohesive domesticity, 'the inner sanctum', as one may say, to necessitate such exchanges. But the spotlight at this moment needs to be put on the extraordinary nuances of #MeToo genealogical origins.
Burke's observation exposed an existent connective synthesis between despotic signifying regime of patriarchy, modern Oedipality xi -indicative of a triangular or trilinear familial structure with a phallic male as the authoritative figure dwarfing the women and the child-and capitalism wedded to industries of profit making and little concerned with doing away with anything that contributed to the principles of excess production even if it demanded a routinized or ritualised masculinization of financial markets. According to Burke, it was necessary to disconnect from the structures of power and hegemony and the stultifying indifference that the capitalist economy displayed towards these structures as it had the nefarious potency to manipulate them into becoming instruments of profit making. So 'Me Too', for Burke, was meant to eradicate the patriarchal codification of socius and replace it with a kind of loosely configured network, with men and women as interrelational coordinates, caught in a frequent dialogical interplay. But the social displacement of #MeToo was ludicrous, to say the least. It slid from contesting the formation of power blocs to engineering an antagonizing volte-face or an ironic binaric reversal triggering off a process of women hegemony and victimization of men.
As one may say, the social displacement of Me Too happened to be an exercise in grand ironic betrayal. Instead of foregrounding a complex interplay between capitalism and patriarchy and attempting to restructure the world in terms of assemblages, xii Me Too, as Prakriti Renjen remarks, devilishly 'transmuted the shared dynamics of the man-women relationship forever' (Renjen, 2019a) And as it went on to periodically betray the purposive nobility of its genealogical impetuses it portrayed men not only as 'ashamed of their lustful animality' (Renjen, 2019b) but a victim of their own biological urges. So, regardless of its well-intentioned beginning and the sheer grandiosity of what it desired to actualize #MeToo propelled out of its territorial pathways and became a dangerous 'line of flight'. xiii This was a flight that ended up traumatizing the professional and personal space and reawakening the demons of class consciousness as it failed to connect with other significant issues of women exploitation.

Me Too, Radical Feminist Agency and Fear of 'Media' Rhizomes
From the vantage point of epistemology, it may seem more like a cliché nowadays to dwell on the instability, precarity, performativity, and inconsistency of the real and to expose the truth as being contextual, situational, and contingent. And it will not be dramatic at all to claim that the non-interpellative character of the reality and truth is what we get to experience in pre-symbolic terms in our life world, dispersed across differential territorialities in which we live, though we almost always fail in finding a language to communicate our experience. But at the same time, it is not also very uncommon in academia to put forward this argumentleast in the form of an explosive disclosure-that what lies behind the discovery and proliferation of the uncertainty of the real and consistency of our encounter with the contingency of truth is the paranoic search of what we intuitively sense as truth and the real. As we get aggressively intense in our search only to make our existence a parody of detective fiction the more we get closer to realizing the fictional nature of truth and reality. Needless to say, but it is our encounter with, and situatedness in, the media that express this process best. And it is our frantic and obsessed search for truth in every media image that auto-propels us into an era of post-truth. This happens to be an era that suffers from the absence of reality principle or exults in the performative aesthetics of the hyper-real. But it is primarily this era's exultation in and unabashed celebration of the hyper-real that opens up a post-truth condition everywhere. Whatever is positioned as 'true' in the media stands as ambivalently configured or doubly articulated: 'So real, yet not real'?
So, when #MeToo turns to social media, polishing the divide between having and have-nots-or between those who have access to media even while lacking the capacity to understand the workings of it and those who do can't afford such access-it leads to very dangerous ends: 'lives are destroyed, careers are devastated' as social media images and narratives demand that they be repeatedly reconstructed and deconstructed instead of converging into and resonating with some sort of digestible or an assimilable singular sense. As these images both work for and dis (re) place the truth instead of being true, our search for truth intensifies as we encounter these images. Moreover, it is our search for truth that demands that we display a kind fetishistic allegiance with these images. This is an allegiance that necessitates the production of a rhizomatic network of relations and combinations while creating patterns of transforming them into an unrecognizable immanent fold (Bryant, 2008).
It must be stressed that according to Deleuze and Guattari a rhizome being non-linear, anarchic, and nomadic in its very unfolding stands as an alternative to anthropomorphic arborescence: 'unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point; and its traits are not necessarily linked to the traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non-sign states (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 21-22). So, it is true that social media or even the print media may not be exactly what Deleuze meant by rhizomes, but they play a catalytic role in functioning as cross points where women from different types of organisations, social movements, and struggles can come together and display their solidarity. However, it may be argued that what prompts #MeToo activists to treat social media as an ally of the dialectical resistance that they offer to the regular sexual exploitation of women by males is, to put it reductively, the Hollywoodish poetic justice it delivers at the end. For these activists, this is a kind of justice that not only exposes and altogether devastates the accused that they consider to be a villainous male, inclined upon exploiting a gullible or an innocent woman but also turns the latter into a lasting symbol of women's heroic struggle against their sexual exploitation by males.
It also could be argued that the #MeToo movement's use of social media as the most effective instrument against male sexual exploitation of women mirrors women's desire in general to receive quick justice it facilitates. When the state and the federal laws and the court system fail to deliver justice for the exploited women, it is the social media that works as a justice providing machine. Moreover while providing justice social media bolsters the populist conviction that is most often used to highlight the delayed functionality of our courts: 'justice delayed is justice denied'. The media continuously pushes the sexual harassment stories to the foreground and by doing so acts as the proverbial conscience keeper of the socius. Women Media Centre's 2018 report on #MeToo shows that after New York Times and the New Yorker came up with a slew of sexual assault and sexual misconduct allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, more than 15,000 headlines, bylines, and articles in worlds' most widely circulated newspapers covered it feverishly (Steinem, 2018a). Gloria Steinem, co-founder of the Women's Media Centre said in this context 'Naming sexualized violence makes it visible and subject to prosecution,' she added, 'In the past, what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural' (Steinem, 2018b). The first was public and could be changed and the second was private, off-limits, even sacred. By making clear that sexualized violence is political and public social media cuts into the borderline between the public and the private that the perpetrators of sexual crimes rely upon.
However, one wonders whether by turning to social media #MeToo activists make way for justice in the juridical sense of the term or basically consider justice provided by the law court as some kind of futile deduction based on a wide gamut of empirical evidence available? Secondly, is the justice that the #MeToo enthusiasts finally capture through social media happens to be what we sense as justice in absolute terms or a kind of perspectival justice or more disturbingly a kind of justice driven by one's interest or ideology? Isn't it true that our condition is stultifyingly paralogical and entails an irresolvable dialectical conflict between differing perspectives depending upon and drawing their legitimacy from their contextual positionings? It is evident that #MeToo enthusiasts take the socalled victimological perspective or the perspective of the accused, but in the process, don't they work by the populist conviction that usually an accused has no story to tell? All these soul-searching questions may have been already hurled at the #MeToo activists but reiterating them is to generate a critique of the populist conviction and work towards framing a potently perverse rejoinder to it if needed. As one may say, justice is delivered in the real sense only when it is delayed because the time spent on delivering justice is the time that the law courts usually dedicate to deliberating and debating a specific accusation, positioning it in multiple nuanced contexts, and treating both the accuser and accused as entities with political rights. Moreover, allegations made by the accuser may not ever pass the legal litmus test when it is subjected to one, but the circulation of accusers' names and details in social media ensures that his reputation gets marred even before he is proved guilty by juridical means. It is true that rhizomatic circulation of the details of the accused ensures that it is eventually transformed into something unrecognizably ambiguous because this kind of circulation makes way for such details to enter into various discursive combinations and relations, debates, and deliberation and stand subjected to a dense deconstructive perspectival play. It may even be argued that this is a play that may even end up proving that the accused has been framed up or is blameless. But, positioning of such accusations in social media invites the world to engage with them repeatedly and in the process give these accusations all the unwanted prominence that they may not even deserve.

Me Too, Populism and Carceral Feminism
Me too activism, as we have argued above, produces a rhizomatic network by playing a catalytic role in functioning as cross points where women from different types of organisations, social movements, and struggles can come together and display their solidarity. So, it will not be altogether irrelevant to imagine-imaginations are potently perverse though-that this activism has a kind of proximal association with what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring machines.
However, it may be argued that social media-driven Me Too activism doesn't at all resemble what Deleuze and Guattari called a desiring machine meant to enable a productive entropy of assemblages but works more like dysfunctional or defective desiring machine intent upon producing horrors of rigid taxonomical divides and static molar aggregates (Merriman, 2018). Unlike Deleuze and Guattari's notion of desiring machine which yields fluid subject positions resisting their subsumption in contexts or categorical imperatives the atrophied desiring machine that social media activism at best mimics folds up the line of flights or sews up the perversely cracking up molarities so they can be contained and manipulated by the biopolitical apparatus. As one may say the so-called de-territorializing abject xiv is forced into clinics and asylums and in the process sadistically tied to the dictatorial regimen of the governing machine. Further, many may consider the act of binding the dispersive molecular flow of ontology into a visual extensity or tight-knit organized subjectivity as the only way to acquire and benefit from political rights, but what we often position as subjective extensities are always in a state of being subjected to matter's very own immanent micro-politics.
It must be stressed that it is the inherent fluidity of subjects to stand at the brink of being deterritorialized into an infinite series of relations and combinations that lays the ground for the transformation of social codes and laws. The desire to make laws always stands intertwined with a complementary desire to transform them and make them correspond to the innate transformability, supple segmentarity or the vibrational dynamism of every context, given that the veridicality of a context lies in demanding a constant renewal of laws and codes brought to bear on it. In this sense #MeToo social media activism doesn't produce or stand concerned with vibrant contingent subjects entrenched in the dynamism or performative entropy of contexts or caught in a dialogic encounter with the renewal of laws and codes these contexts necessitate. On the contrary, what this social media activism produces are fixed and frozen subjects, subjects tied to their religio-mythical destiny and evolving according to a linear arborescent schema, gradually inching towards what they predetermine as their goals. This is precisely how this activism plays into the hands of or becomes an ally of the totalitarian biopolitics and the economy of neoliberalism. On the one hand, this activism produces subjects who are happy in their subjection to governmental interpellation aimed at controlling, governing, classifying, documenting, and taming these subjects. On the other hand, these subjects reflect an abstract nonnegotiable fixity of character, bearing proximal concomitance with recyclable commodities. And the transgressive potential that these subjects occasionally reflect happens to be one engineered by the biopolitical apparatus, one that this apparatus goes on to check and manipulate.
Moreover, the recent form of feminism as displayed by #MeToo is not for emancipating women, but to draw a carceral set up for men. It has turned into the mechanization of militarised humanism rather than bringing equality in the socius. It needs to be noted that Carceral Feminism refers to a system that encourages policing, prosecution, and imprisonment of that gendered transgressive agency that creates sexual violence. It was Elizabeth Bernstein, a professor of women's studies and sociology at Barnard who was the first to use the phrase 'carceral feminism' in her 2007 article The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'. In her article, she argues that carceral feminism does not address the underlying economic conditions that are more hazardous than gendered violence. It fails to accommodate the undermined voices that continuously struggle to exist in the imperial, white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal foundations of the nation. Instead of pushing for the preconditions necessary for feminist liberation, this populist feminism gives the movement a 'carceral turn' restricting feminist horizons to become individualistic and punitive rather than collective and redistributive (Bernstein, 2007

De-territorializing #MeToo: The inclusivist terror of the 'Feminism for the 99%'
The authors of the book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser (2019) may have treated #MeToo movement as integral to what they attempt work out in their book, a new configuration of feminism, and frozen #MeToo activism, in this process, as a symbol of a gender-specific struggle against the overarching presence of patriarchy. It may also seem that these authors end up distinguishing me too from the so-called carceral and corporate feminism. But then #MeToo activism not only makes way for these feminisms, but it stands as a devilish offspring of neoliberalism.
The question why these authors blur the distinction between Me Too feminism and their version of radical feminism? It may be argued that in their book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Ibid) the authors make an innovative attempt to resuscitate a moribund feminist theory: a theory weary of combating in epistemic terms the interminable cyclic patterns of patriarchal hegemony and teasing out the nuances of women exploitation across space, time, and bordered hermeticism of geopolitical territories and cultures. It is quite common in the emergent epistemes nowadays to stress the heterogeneity of existential patterns, indicate the vibrating and pulsating diversity as constitutive of transnational globality, undermine the cartographical geopolitical stratifications, including the very notion of the concentric globe, and lastly schizophrenize the singularity of ontology, so much so, that it altogether remains elusive to binary formulations and persist as a pure multiple. xv And it is equally common in this scenario to encounter plural or differential feminisms, feminisms that address the plurality of women issues in multiple contexts and make us realize the impossibility of creating universal feminism governed by a singular agenda. However, seeking to keenly establish the relevance of the traditional left or put forward its project as an unfinished one, authors of Feminism for 99%, invent a kind of revolutionary feminism. This is a feminism that while working from the traditional left perspective seeks to make way for its continued relevance.
These authors, willy-nilly, carry out an exercise in Deleuzean genealogy while diligently constructing a singular, unified, universally valid feministic agenda, though they cut out from this agenda which they fashion in organistic and orgiastic terms xvi the 1% they choose to call the corporate feminists. It will not be altogether inaccurate to claim that thinking from a traditional leftist ideological bloc these authors blend their appropriated geneticism with their passionate attempt at restructuring the world in the lines of a typically Marxist base-superstructure model. The authors of the Feminism for the 99% make it evident in their book-contrary to prevailing opinion from the likes of Negri and Hardt that the global world is an Empire riddled with networks, connections, and linkages and with an invisible and intangible centre of power-that this is pretty much a structured world despite being riddled with a mind-boggling diversity, and its structurality rests on its perpetuation of binary, centred, hierarchical ways of existing and thinking. Their indifference towards plural feministic formations and especially towards third world feminisms that they do not even allude to in their footnotes shows that they consider the plurality of feminisms meant to address the issues of what Negri and Hardt call the Empire as being a cop-out exercise by the proverbial Empire builders or the corporate capitalists (Hardt & Negri, 2006).
Interestingly, the authors of the Feminism for the 99% offer a very creative resistance to the postmodern ethics of Univocity xvii because, as many might argue, in their book they provide an exercise in reconstructing what the architects of the postmodernism made inoperative, the grand narratives. Instead of stressing heterogeneity of circumstances, positionalities, contexts, contingencies demanding an oceanic proliferation of micro-mini narratives they foreground corporate capitalism or neo-liberalism as the visible common enemy meant to be vanquished. It is true that one gets to view multiple shades of corporate capitalism at work everywhere, conspiring to corporatize the public and the private spaces, flooding them with commodities so they look like differential versions of storehouses, and even turning the entire rhizomatic machinery of thinking, its multiple lines of flights or its dialectical opposed poles, as the traditional leftists may say, into a cartography of profit making. Yet there are parts of the world with no clue or desire to go global. For example, India still has the highest absolute number of child brides in the world nearing a figure of 15,509,000 (UNICEF India, 2017) and UNICEF records '27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday and 7% are married before the age of 15' (Ibid). These are the socio-cultural, religious, and cultural complexities or nuances that take ironic pride in staying local, just local, and even indifferent to the spontaneous process of 'local becoming global'. As one may say, shibboleths hardly make their way into departmental stores.
Further, one wonders how desirable it is for these authors to view #MeToo as being complementary to their project of constructing a conspicuous left-leaning, singular, unified feminist agenda against the neoliberal capitalist governing apparatus that stands responsible for the persistence of patriarchy. Isn't this gesture of providing epistemic credibility to #MeToo in the current times when it has ceased to be a line of flight disseminating affects and intents of its genealogical origin and has instead gone on to betray its seizure and manipulation by a section of elites for causes extremely narrow and personal flawed? While Burke's intellectual disclosure that it was the synthesis of patriarchy and capitalism that opened up sites of patriarchal hegemony and exploitation of women was the key constituent of #MeToo in its current avatar this movement looks like a viable or an 'affordable' hitting below the belt mechanism.
It is understandable that since the very idea of '#MeToo' stands concomitant with the process of taxonomical genders' especially women's resistance to the unwanted sexual advances by males, keen on colonizing the organized exteriority of former's bodies, it stands as integral to a project meant to defeat neoliberalism and the condition it creates for the perpetuation of patriarchal hegemony and women exploitation. However, when it comes to saying 'No' to unwanted male sexual advances-since that is what repelling the unwanted sexual advances begins with-it must be stressed that this kind of phonocentric or semiotic resistance cannot always be empirically quantified or measured. But on contrary, the utterance of the word 'No' releases an affect that gets displaced as it leaves its sender and penetrates the symbolic territorial space of its receiver. Moreover, this kind of resistance demands heterogeneity of contextual and situational interpretations. As one may say, 'No' is an affectual state, caught in a state of intertwinement with a range of proximal affects in a state of co-becoming. And this is the reason perhaps that when it travels from one to the other it slips, slides, and glides over the territorial body space of the receiver without penetrating it and demands contextual hermeneutic enclosures. The differential potential line of flights that the utterance of the word 'No' releases may need to be creatively mapped before one folds them into making an incontrovertible singular sense.
Further, with #MeToo one encounters the unfolding dimension of retributive politics rather than any determined effort to subvert the neoliberal policies that produce conditions for the perpetuation of patriarchy benefitting the so-called educated, upwardly mobile, and elite feminists. And the irony is where the exploitation and the harassment are real, palpably oppressive and concretely visible, and even almost beastly, for instance in the case of those we call the minorities or subalterns, #MeToo has made a very little difference. It would be fair to argue that instead of laying new grounds for the minorities to speak up it prevails as the handmaiden of capitalocenes. xviii This is the reason why most of the cases we come across happen to be controversial ones with gaps and silences that invites a kind of exercise in-depth hermeneutics. This happens to be a hermeneutics that leads to the production of a connective rhizome rather than functioning as a ground for empirical anthropological exercises leading to the discovery of truth which is imagined as being structurally analogues to the natal seed planted under the layers of soil. It seems in their urgency to include a slice of populist perception of #MeToo or show that they stand affected and inspired by the populist prevalence of this movement the authors of Feminism for the 99% have not taken cognizance of the fact that it doesn't stand as a form of agency for the have-nots, the minorities or the so-called subalterns. And while trying to stultify the hierarchal top-down exercise of power that leads to harassment of genders they display a kind of highbrowish detachment from those theoretical disclosures that views the bio in terms of the play of hierarchical forces. xix This is a play that even manifests in the relational dynamics of the so-called minorities and shows the politics of the governed to be a tragic mimicry of institutional politics.

Me Too, Control and Surveillance
It is obvious that the patriarchal exploitation of women is rampant, regular, routinized, oppressive, and ubiquitous, but at the same time, it may not even be altogether unjustified to claim that #MeToo activism tries to construct a virtualistic moral universe inimical to the revisionary or reinventive understanding of the concept of the ethical.

Striking an effective distinction between old yet insistent morality and a typically Spinozian and equally revisionary understanding of the concept of the ethical Brent Adkins in his book Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide argues:
A morality functions according to principle while an ethics functions according to experimentation. A morality presupposes a discontinuity between principle and action while ethics presupposes continuity of action and character. A morality tells one what one ought to do while ethics asks what one might do. (Adkins, 2015:96).
In fact, it becomes obvious with the observation of Brent Adkins in the backdrop that the moral universe #MeToo activism constructs lead to a kind of stultified gender performativity. While a universe operating with Spinozian ethics xx will not position genders in an evolutionary schema reflecting a patterned, hierarchical and arboreal progression emanating from and expressing what we could view as the embedded centrality of roots, but will equate genders with their becoming the so-called #MeToo activists' moral universe operates otherwise. It judges the action of genders in accordance with the moral principles it lays down in Platonic terms (Gilliam, 2017), positioning what it considers to be a signification of conformational gender performativity as superior to what it considers to be perverse. In other words, such activism lays down moral paradigms and models for slavish imitation and assigns values to different gender performative acts according to their proximity to this paradigm. The gender performance it considers superior are the ones that consolidate this paradigm rather than subverting it. Thus, willy-nilly, it sets up a dictatorial regimen of rights and wrongs where it positions certain acts with the potential to transgress the constructed logic of right and wrong as evil. Further, it may be argued that in the gendered binary moralistic universe of Me Too activism entities are not merely hermetically gendered, but understood only as Organic entities or molarities to be empirically weighed, penetrated, enslaved, captured, colonized, contained, and incarcerated, rather than being seen as expressions of matter.
It needs to be stressed that bodies seen as dynamic matter are primarily heteronormative or are always in the process of becoming what Deleuze calls 'Body without Organs' xxi indicative of matter's immanent potential to enter into infinite combinations and relations. This is a potential made up of a line of flights that severely problematize the generic understanding of the body in terms of its unified organic structuration or rigidly stratified appearance that makes us sense them as being resistant to change. However, Me too activism operates with a kind of organicist understanding of bodies. So even a single culpable action of any particular gender is understood by these activists as indicative of his whole character or ontology and his other actions are not meant to be understood in terms of their differential contexts, but are meant to viewed in the light of that action as if it were some sort of readymade yardstick to judge the aberrant movement of his being. The popular axiom that one may refer to here to show the limits of such understanding is this: once a thief always a thief. So, the interplay of action that constitutes the very being of the one accused of harassment cannot be sovereign and autonomous. Rather the fate of the accused is tied to allegations made against him. It is this understanding that me too activism expresses triumphantly in social media as it publicly exposes someone to be a harasser without giving him any scope at all to tell his side of the story.
Further, it is this organic understanding of body these activists nurture that makes them consolidate, and be an ally of, governmental policies of incarceration. On the one hand, by incarcerating the transgressing individualities or desiring bodies, as one may say, the bio-political government expresses its alliance with the unproblematic populist understanding of governance. And on the other #MeToo activism consciously ends up being an ally of these governmental schemas as it limits itself to labelling individualities. These schemes not only invest the socius with affectualities of fear and paranoia and devastates the very constitution of ontologies based on relating to others, but creates a gated community where discipline is followed by control.
Further, while #MeToo activists are not only guided by what they see as the unified clarity of the presumed hermetic bodies of genders, they express it too in their very eyes or gazes no less than what we often view as the voyeuristic male gaze. If what we get to learn about the gazes from the encounters we stage with our surroundings is that the former works less towards registering the external appearance of the body and more towards destabilizing or creating a schizophrenic split in the object it encounters, the operational eye of these activists always attempts to yield formulated ontologies in binary terms. So, a woman, for these activists, is not merely understood in terms of her bodily features or the erotic sensations that she excites according to a populist fantasy, but in terms of her constructed identity. And this makes women a reactive force, weaker, helpless, either at the point of fizzling out or being devoured by the muscular intrusive male agency. As a matter of fact, it will not be wrong to claim that for the so-called #MeToo activists a scenario of harassment needs to be explained in terms of a partisan binary arrangement of Nietzschean world view: 'Male is the bird of prey and women is the helpless lamb' (Nietzsche, 1887). Thus, the kind of explanation that needs to be given in the cases of sexual harassment must be of a kind that restores male his vital, lusty, and lumpen masculinity and women her established feminine virtues. But if it is the binaries that the Me too activists seek to secure by applying some kind of deductive logic to the Nietzschean world view while analysing a sexual harassment scenario in that case these activists may also be required to note that it is the not stronger, but-tongue in the cheek-the weaker reactive force that stands as the cornucopia of manipulative agency in the Nietzschean universe.xxii According to Foucault power lies in resistance which appears more as a kind of 'reactive strategy' rather than bringing transformation (Foucault, 2000). Rather than understanding Feminism as an act of resistance by simply defeating, overturning, or suddenly altering the disciplinary power, it has to be comprehended as a mode of transformation. However, it must be understood that violence against women cannot be dealt with exclusively from the perspective of body politics. Reducing the feminist movement to a minor issue of protecting only the women's body is a way of flattening and emptying the political complexity as well as that of life. The #MeToo activist agency is not only protectionist in the sense of understanding man women relational dynamics in terms of unitary formation of their bodies, but it also fails to connect with the molecular dynamism of the matter that constitutes them. And we get to sense this failure of the activists in their very approach to desire which for them happens to be a subject centred agency. Moreover, for these activists, desire not only happens to be gendered but is almost always equated with a violent inner need or urge to possess, capture and seize, something that according to the moralistic universe ought to be checked if one wishes to embrace the transcendental divine.
However, desire is immanent, self-referential, or auto-poetic, xxiii which opens up a multiplicity of subject positions or enables their co-becoming. As far as the populist conception of it goes, desire narrowly revolves around the notion of bodily pleasure. And the whole of what we see as bodily pleasures, notwithstanding the lust for organized bodies that sexual harassment or exploitation of women effectively mirrors, is perceived as perverse and de-humanizing by the religious Institutions and the sociomoral codes deducted from a very narrow and slavish understanding of religion. So, to be ignorant about and indifferent to the broader understanding of desire and rest on the narrow understanding of it as the #MeToo activists and feminists express expose their interest to be on the safer side and conform to an institutional, religious, codified understanding of it.
Question arises, how moral is it for those people who nurture in them an aggressive desire to possess others in bodily terms, but restrain themselves from producing overt manifestation of it in the public spaces to accuse those who due to neoliberal media-generated sexual excitations-or the hierarchical play of forces within the unconscious as a Nietzschean may say-are provoked to overtly display them? To argue that as long as people do not publicly manifest such desires it is all right is willy-nilly hypocritical. And, on the other hand, to say that activists judging others are incarnations of the moral universe they represent-hence lie beyond the sphere of judgment-is to make them abstractions? The continuous slide from one position to another, from the so-called majoritarian positionality of harasser to that of the harassed, from that of a victim to an aggressor, is natural and indicative of our very being caught in the process of 'becoming.' xxiv And it is this becoming that desire mirrors while connecting with possibilities and disjuncting from them to create newer possibilities.
The broader understanding of desire is that is an eternal process of synthesis yielding multiple subject positions or an intense becoming, an understanding that the feminists and activists will never even desire to know about since their purpose is to keep their activities confined to the sphere of populism. So, when the #MeToo activists wear a specific lens and label a case as one of harassment or exploitation of women by a man they are seized by a populist urgency to make way for the incarceration of the latter. But if they see such a case as just one instance in the process of infinite becomings of a categorical gender they will surely make a lot of difference even in the populist sense of the term. The same goes for the so-called harassed women.
One might view her harassment simply as an instant in her slide towards a dominant authoritative position, given that while one is becoming a victim of harassment one is seized by an outward schizoidical desire, a desire to slide and metamorphose into a harasser. xxv In other words, the victim and harasser are caught in a continual interplay affecting each other beyond recognition. This new form of address or approach is achievable if a woman offers herself a scope for not being the opposite of man but as the very becoming of man's other. Such a change of approach, as Colebroke remarks, will open 'a new way of thinking movements or becoming: no longer a movement owned by identities, but a movement of desires, bodies, flows, and style' (Colebrook, 2000a). Further Colebrook explains Feminist movement must hold the notion of becoming not as 'the becoming of women, but a becoming that exceeds the dual identities of man and woman...' (Colebrook, 2000b). This concept of feminism will bring new ways of thinking that will lead to encounters beyond the notion of identity, essentialism, emancipation, and representations. And we must remember when the symbolic regime creates fixed rigid binaries, nature delivers us from those fixities by setting in motion a process of infinite becomings and simultaneously positing us in that process. When it is often stressed by the #MeToo activists that it is difficult to be a woman in a maledominated world it must be pointed out that it is even more difficult in this world to become a fixed gender. Therefore, as far as the #MeToo activists are concerned, it will be fair enough to say that they must import into their activism a fine slice of intellect. And as #MeToo activists happen to be profoundly literate such a stance will surely provoke them to look at gendered communities as schizoidical live men and women rather than neurotic Zombies. Saswat Samay Das is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. He has jointly authored (Taking place of Language, Peter-Lang Oxford, 2013). He is jointly editing Technology, Urban Space and the Networked Community (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2021), Deleuze and the global terror, forthcoming, 2021)' Deleuze and the Global Pandemics' (Edinburgh University Press, Deleuze Series, forthcoming, 2022). He has published in wellknown international journals such as Philosophy in Review, Deleuze Studies, Cultural politics, Contemporary South Asia and EPW.