I think that is how we should see Dr Hoffman: as a series of adventures in, or propositions and expositions of Carter's 'philosophy'. The picaresque structure of her novel feeds the idea that we should see the different parts as separate propositions or adventures in contemporary and historical theory and art. It can be situated on the soft edge between art and criticism and can thus rightfully be described, as some have done, as poetic criticism--a literary criticism which depicts the truths of its visions by imaginative constructions, and will thus, intellectually, remain shaky. It will not be scientific in the sense that it lays claim to generalisability, but it is 'knowledge', nevertheless--intuitive knowledge in the Proustian sense, that is to say, a libidinal illumination of enveloped essences.

The use of the plural 'essences' is not incidental here, for Carter's essential philosophy is not an organic or totalising unity that would explain Dr Hoffman. It is not a principle of creation, but rather a unity--as difference in itself--produced as an effect. Literature is composed of aesthetic figures; it does not create concepts in an absolute form but rather sensations of concepts. It develops, so to say, ideas, but these ideas remain prephilosophical. Again, it is to me to combine the different propositions so as to create concepts, concepts which might be enveloped or implied in the aesthetic adventures, but which need to be explicated in order to enhance our view of Carter's 'premises about reality'. It is this creative interpretation which might, in the end, establish an idea of a propositional, libidinal, and evanescent 'meaning' which germinates in the interplay between Dr Hoffman and the outside world.

But before we turn to the different propositions of the novel--sometimes depicted in a separate chapter, at other times expressed by means of a distinct Leitmotif--we should embark upon this hermeneuntical endeavour with what André Pierre Colombat calls 'demysitification'. Before we can experiment with the various propositions of an author, we should first characterise the overall arrangement of the text, not as a definitive structure in which the separate expositions should be squeezed, but rather as a first exploration of the central question that a work addresses. Only after the discovery or the description of what one will take as central issue of the work (and it is mainly at this level that the reading will become in between the writer and the reader, and thus we could see the addressed question a unique, that is, reader-specific, focal point), one can, to stay with Colombat, 'become more sensitive to the Artist's signs', that is, I would say, gain access, through a careful scrutinisation and evaluation of the 'series of adventures', to the enveloped essences. After this, finally, a creation of a 'meaning' will take place in the form of a unique, that is to say, reader-specific, line of flight which will emerge in between the inside world and the outside world of the novel: an evaluation of the relevance of the ideas which the novel develops.

In order to focus first on the central question of the book, I will postpone a more detailed analysis of the first prominent reference to the world outside the novel which I have already mentioned, and turn directly to the second most prominent reference which can also be found in the title. I refer, of course, to the name of the malignant doctor himself which could be read as a intertextual allusion to the famous German romanticist E.T.A. Hoffmann. Besides using his name and the name of one of his characters, Drosselmeier, Carter also uses his tales as a structural model for her story. In various stories, among which 'The Golden Pot', 'Councillor Krespel', and 'The Sandman' a young man falls in love with the beautiful but mysterious daughter of a brilliant but peculiar father who prevents the love from being consumed. Furthermore, Hoffmann's worldview, especially the one put foreward in his fairy tales, is an dualistic one: 'Zwei Reiche, zwei Prinzipien stehen einander gegenüber, scheinbar in vollkommener Unvereinbarkeit.' This is typical for the (late) eighteenth century which was the heyday of both the rationality of the Enlightenment and the 'irrational' believes of the Romanticists in the supernatural. Hoffmann is indebted to both sides: he borrows extensively from the late eighteenth-century Gothic and fantastic fiction, but is nevertheless 'decisively bound up' with the technological innovations of the Enlightenment. He is critical towards the careless celebration of the imagination, but he nevertheless believes, as we have seen in Chapter Two, that when the forces of the unconscious hold sway certain truths can be found--'truths of revelation with a power to explain what cold, analytic reason can not.'

We can clearly see parallels with Carter's overall story. Desiderio falls in love with the beautiful but mysterious daughter of a brilliant but peculiar father who, indeed, prevents the love from being consumed. The world we are presented with is indeed a seemingly dualistic one which opposes rationality to irrationality. Nevertheless, the irrational mirages are transmitted through Dr Hoffman's very rationally constucted desire machines, and thus the two opposites are indeed decisively bound up. And finally, Carter, as we have seen in Capter One, also seems critical towards the careless celebration of the imagination, but nevertheless gives sympathy to Dr Hoffman's assertion that 'reason cannot produce the poetry disorder does.' (p. 206)

While these similarities do, I think, substantiate a link between the two writers, I do not want to go as far as to say that Dr Hoffman is an early example of Carter's characteristic method of rewriting fairy tales. The text does not refer to any specific tale of Hoffmann (besides the three stories mentioned above, also 'Nutcracker and Mouse-King' is identified as a key to the novel) but rather to his work as a whole. Perhaps the allusion to his work is even less specific and serves only as a reference to the late eighteenth century, defined by Carter as a 'period of conflicting ideologies', a phrase she has also used for the 1960s. Her own borrowing from Gothic stories, her allusion to Marquis de Sade, and her verbal echo's of Blake certainly point to the time immediately following the French revolution as an important source of inspiration for her novel. Nevertheless, Hoffmann's work can be seen as emblematic of that period and furthermore it shares two important themes with Carter's novel: firstly, a preoccupation with the unconscious and secondly a concern with the growing mechanization of life and the alienation caused by rationalism and capitalism and thus with modes of domination.

This first theme, the concentration on the unconscious, is part and parcel of the Romantic period which saw an growing emphasis on individuality:

This can be linked directly to Dr Hoffman in which Albertina claims that all subjects and objects she and Desiderio encountered in the 'loose grammar of Nebulous Time' were derived from a similar source: their desires, their unconscious (p. 186) and that she has 'been maintained in [her] various appearances only by the power of [Desiderio's] desire.' (p. 204)

Correlating desires to the unconscious, however, would not be the first thing a Romantic would do. In the eighteenth century the concept of the unconscious takes the form of a religious myth: God is the absolute 'universal unconscious', suggests the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling (and thus the transcendental continues to exercise influence on the Ego) and, thus, in moments of other-worldly inspiration one comes closer to the divine purpose of life. Consequently the unconscious is per definition good. Why, then, does Albertina speak of the 'dark abysses of the unconscious' (p. 186) from which emanates a desire for her own gang-rape? Even atheist Romantics valued the irrationality which emanated from the unconscious positively; at best the forces of the unconscious were seen as messengers of both good and evil principles. Carter is clearly influenced by Freud's ineluctable appropriation of the concept. It was Freud, the pessimist, and, above all, the rationalist, who defined the unconscious singularly in terms of 'dark' instincts and desires which formed a threat to civilisation. Carter's conceptualisation does allude to the eighteenth century notion of the unconscious, as does her whole setting, but it is mediated by the Freud's sceptical considerations.

The term 'mediated' is very appropriate because Freud, in his turn, was influenced by the Romantic notion of the unconscious. We can see this influence very clearly in Freud's paper 'The Uncanny' (1919) in which he, ironically enough, arrives at his gloomy conceptualisation through an observation of Schelling himself. 'Unheimlich,' says the latter, 'sei alles, was ein Geheimnis, Im Verborgenen bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist.' 'An uncanny experience', writes Freud, 'occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.' An examplary illustration of such an experience can be found in Hoffmann's story 'The Sandman'. In a recollection from his childhood, the student Nathaniel presents the lawyer Coppelius as the personification of the feared Sandman who tears out children's eyes and feeds them to his children who peck them up with their hooked beaks. The anxiety about one's eyes, writes Freud, can be paralleled to the fear of being castrated, and he points at Oedipus' self-blinding to validate this claim (as we can see, primitive beliefs and infantile complexes are closely connected). What follows, in a footnote, is a psychoanalytical reading of the tale which sheds an intresting light on the relationship between Desiderio and Albertina. Olympia, the automatic doll with which Nathaniel falls desperately in love, is 'exposed' by Freud as 'nothing else than a materialisation of [Nathaniel's] feminine attitude towards his father in his infancy.' (What this 'feminine' attitude exactly comprises remains obscure: possibly it refers to the fact that he does not actually kill his father, or even does not wish to do so, while he is supposed to, according to the Oedipus-complex). Freud claims that the diabolical Coppelius, who threatens to blind/castrate him, and the 'good' (real) father, who prevents this, together represent the father-imago 'split by his ambivalence.' Olympia is thus nothing more than a 'dissociated complex' of Nathaniel's, and expresses the student's obsessive fixation upon his father which obstructs the possibility of loving his betrothed Clara.

Desiderio and Albertina are entirely the same except for their sex (p. 199). Thus, we could see Albertina as the materialisation of Desiderio's 'feminine' attitude towards his father, whom he has never known, but whose place is taken symbolically by the Minister. The Doctor, being the father of Albertina, is also Desiderio's father. Together these two men represent the opposites into which the father image is split. The novel could then be read as the account of Desiderio's socialisation. The Doctor, his 'bad' father, repressenting lawlessnes, immorality, and unbridled carnal desire (which, as we have seen in the last chapter, psychoanalysis values as anti-social and destructive), is killed, and thus the elongated oedipus complex (represented by Albertina) is resolved in favour of rationality and an ordered and harmonious society. Desiderio rids himself of the complex but is consequently defined in relation to lack, which is, as we have seen, highly appropriate in psychoanalytic theory. Thus, psychoanalytically speaking, the novel has a positive ending for Desiderio, in opposition to Nathaniel who kills himself, grows old in perfect contentment.

It seems a little far-fetched, but Carter was probably well aware of Freud's reading of 'The Sandman' for she alludes terminologically to Freud's paper with the 'reality-testing' practices of the determination police. And even if this phrasal reverberation is accidental, Carter's familiarity with the theories of Freud, to whose Interpretation of Dreams she even refers directly in a footnote (p. 186) can be expected to be ample enough as to be able to predict this possible reading of the text herself. I think Carter self-consciously played with psychoanalysis, but does not seriously subscribe to all of Freud's postulates, for one thing because they mythologise the unconscious by binding it to myths like Oedipus (which serves as a transcendental element). Furthermore, if she had to give up the Surrealists, whom she admired, because they 'were not good with women', as we have seen in Chapter One, she certainly has to give up Freud, whom she said to have loved 'as though he were an uncle', because he is an archetypical misogynist. Carter does not appear to be particularly inclined to a total liberation of the unconscious because she believes it to contain both productive and destructive desires, but she does seem to be working towards a demythologisation of it because it dips into our conscious life as a conservative element. It furnishes the, what she--as we have seen--named, 'false universals' with a natural, and thus unchangeable, veneer. When we realise that unconscious desires are by and large culturally determined and are not derived from some innate self or essence (although of course pathological factors can have a determining role) we could arrive at a more authentic, dynamic conceptualisation of the unconscious and, as a result, paint a more realistic picture of human subjectivity.

In this Carter parallels Hoffmann's intrest in the unconscious. He too wants to undo the unconscious of a transcendental element (in his case God). Not necessarily validating irrational emanations from the unconscious as 'good' because of its alleged divine origin, he points out the dangers of an uncritical acceptance of a supernatural dreamworld. Hoffmann does believe that attentive inquiry into the irrational parts of the mind can reveal truths which cannot be found by cold, analytic reason, just like Carter seems to think there is truth in the statement that reason cannot produce the poetry disorder can, but they both warn for unreflected romanticism and a world of free flight of personal desires. There is nothing supernatural about the unconscious, contend the committed materialist Carter and the materialist avant la lettre Hoffmann; it is simply that intuitions, desires, and fantasies can be creative and fertile and offer 'real possibilities for changing human and productive relationships.'

And here we come to the second theme which links Carter and Hoffmann: their joint concern with the growing mechanisation of life and the alienation caused by rationalism. Hoffmann lives and writes at the transitional period from feudalism to capitalism. He is, already in this early stage of capitalism, cautious about the alienation which it might cause. His tale 'The Golden Pot' (1814) opens with the student Anselmus knocking over a basket of apples and cakes set out for sale. 'This accident turns out to be the major dramatic conflict of the story,' writes Jack Zipes, 'market versus human values.' The two entities seem mutually exclusive. Hoffmann is similarly apprehensive about the possible side-effects of the growing mechanisation of life as a result of the rationalisation process. The figure of the automaton, a mechanical doll that was a popular kind of entertainment at scientific exhibitions and fairs, is employed to represent the 'tendency of early capitalism which caused humans and human relations to assume the properties of things and machines while the real productive power and quality of human beings became distorted and obscured.'

This apprehension is comparable to the reaction of Carter. She, too, is wary about the alienating tendency of capitalism and mechanisation, although her considerations, in line with her time and her contemporaries, pertain to a very specific kind of technological alienation: electronic representation. The transmitters of Dr Hoffman are clearly modelled on the satellite dishes which broadcast the stultifying multiplicity of television images which can be said to be alienating in the Situationalist sense that they partake in the distancing of real life by means of representation. Carter's analysis of the apparatus which had become the central medium in the Western hemisphere during the 1960s, does not seem to be far from Debord's: 'it functions (...) as (...) a method of relating to the real world by proxy.' Television is a simulacrum, she writes, real life is not like it is on 'the box'. But one cannot fool all of the people all of the time, and thus, she continues, television is 'implicitly radical'. She seems to agree with Enzensberger that the medium is potentially revolutionary for it could, for example, do away with educational privileges of the bourgeoisie. As it is, however, she writes, television is engaged in consciousness shaping rather than in consciousness raising.

Carter's analysis resembles those of a host of cultural critics, ranging from Hoffmann to Marcuse, who are not so much anti-technological or anti-rational, but rather wary about the uses to which it might be or has been put. The cental text of this paradigm is, I think, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their thesis holds that enlightenment rationality has been used instrumentally: to dominate rather than to emancipate. And this domination, Horkheimer and Adorno say, is effectuated by an instrumentlisation of culture. Cultural expressions, they assert, are mediated by an industry which seeks to make the masses into consuming automatons not autonomous beings.

Hoffmann can, in this light, be seen as an early defender of the unfettered creative individual and an unrestrained, though enlightened, imagination. The instrumentalisation of the imagination, which can be seen, for instance, in Hoffmann's tale 'Little Zaches Named Zinnober', and the socialisation process that wants to drain the individual of creative and critical qualities, which is evident in, for example, 'The Golden Pot', is the result of what he believes to be a betrayal of the real humanitarian principle of the Enlightenment and of the freedom of the individual that was promoted by the French revolution.

As I said, Dr Hoffman's emissions bear a strong likeness to television broadcasts. It might look like real imagination, but it is in fact instrumentalised imagination. It is imagination which is intricately bound up with what we have defined as categorical thought. Hoffmann might be an adversary of this image of thought but Carter depicts her character Hoffman as someone who is closely connected to it. He builds his ambiguous liberation on physics; the Doctor is thus not as anti-rational as he pretends. The liberation of 'man' is effected by 'the liberation of the unconscious' (p. 208). But the unconscious is not truely released. 'He penned desire in a cage and said: "look! I have liberated desire!"', judges Desiderio (p. 208). 'He was a hypocrite,' he continues, who demands 'absolute authority to establish a regime of total liberation.' (p. 38) In the end, Desiderio is given the casting vote between the Minster's and the Doctor's philosophy, and his decision resolves in favour of the Minister's logical positivism. 'I might not want the Minister's world', he concludes, 'but I did not want the Doctor's world either' for '[the Doctor] might know the nature of the inexhaustible plus but, all the same, he was a totalitarian.' (p. 207)

I do not think Dr Hoffman is a direct figuration of Ernst Hoffmann. Rather the character alludes, besides to Hoffmann as a representative of Romanticism, to, amongst others, a host of 'libertarians' like Laing and Marcuse, the embodiments of the counterculture, and André Breton, the chief exponent of Surrealism who had, according to Carter, 'like many libertarians (...) a marked authoritarian streak'. What these critics have in comon is a strong humanistic essentialism, and it is, I think, this belief in a human 'self' which separates Carter from these critics. Hoffmann, for instance, believes that rationality and mechanisation alienates people from their humanitarian core. His preoccupation with the unconscious was only fueled by a wish to define this essence; his denunciation of the divine as origin of human actions serves to postulate a humanist and materialist essentialism. Laing, Marcuse, and Breton all adhered to Freud's conceptualisation of subjectivity. They do not question the idea of a static self from which all conscious and unconscious actions and thoughts can be derived, but only challange the belief that the unconscious should remain repressed in the intrest of civilisation. Liberating the human core and its desires from the restraints of the capitalist rationale is their ultimate goal.

Thus while Romanticism, the counterculture and Surrealism do break with grand naratives like Enlightenment optimism and objectivity of truth and morality, they still adhere to two important myths which are intricately bound up: the humanist conception of the individual and a fallogocentric metaphysicism which holds that all questions of meaning are refered back to a singular founding presence which is imagined to be behind a representation rather than 'fluctuating in and around its particular usage or cultural application.' The messianistic utopianism of the aforementioned movements clearly reflects the typically Hegelian notion of a core of human essence which strives to realise itself. Hence the revolutionary experiments of these libertarian movements remain, despite their demands for an unlimited freedom of desires, creativity, and imagination, ultimately bound to the dialectic. Similarly, the search for meaning outside representation--detached from the aesthetic experimentation, possibly even hidden more profoundly by it--and the interpretation of language as an expresion of the subjectivity of the speaker, hinders the possibilities for direct political change through art and language. It denies the fact that the (political) actuality which fluctuates in and around the artifact or expression could be as bizarre, non-logical, nonchronological, paradoxical, or heterogeneous as that artifact or expression itself, thereby implying the idea of an ordered and logical metaphysical realm underlying our chaotic existence. This idea, of course, is inextricably entangled with the image of the subject as a 'bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and congnitive universe; a dynamic centre of awareness, emotion, judgement and action.'

Carter, however, does extend her criticism to the underlying epistemological assumptions of humanism and fallogocentrism, for she comes to realise that the political and cultural climate of the sixties is still very much male-centred and thus remains a partial pars destruens. It is poststructuralism which offers her paradigmatic starting-points for this criticism of the fundamental patriarchal makeup of sixties radicalism, for this 'movement' parallels her own feminist venture on some key points, such as the rejection of the humanistic concept of subjectivity and the renunciation of the dialectical image of thought. Whereas liberal feminists persisted in their belief in the unified, apparently ungendered humanist subject, and radical feminists tried to recapture their essential femaleness through a separate women's culture, British materialist feminists, like Carter, partook in the displacement of the subject which was started by structuralism and refined by poststructuralism. This was caused by the fact that the theoretical debates of British socialism and Marxism were profoundly influenced by Althusser.

In the early 1960s, British socialism and Marxism, against some Marxian conceptions, believed in the constitutive subject, as a result from the influence of Raymond Williams, who advanced a left-liberal, culturalist and empiricist socialism. This position was attacked during the 1960s by a self-conscious New Left, which sought to be theoretical, scientific, and rationalist. Using the Althusserian concept of relative independance between base and superstructure, they are able to integrate Marx' famous assertion that it is not people's consciousness that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence which determines their consciousness, and the feeling that the individual ostensibly heads over his or her own determination. This, ultimately, rests on a psychoanalytical understanding of the subject as unconscious and therefore as subject of desire. While, in the Althusserian conception, the social formation terminates in the subject, in the process (or the discourse) of desire, which the subject enters when constituting him/herself as a subject, the subject is always constitutive though only within the terms of the social formation within which it is formulated.

Materialist feminists, however, came, at that point, in a precarious position. Marxism, despite the relative independence proposed by Althusser, remained to see everything into terms of class. An adherence to the strict, structurally informed, Althusserian school would not, in the end, lead to an understanding of the acquisition of a gendered subjectivity because his account of the subject as ideologically constituted is, as Hirst and Woolley have demonstrated, not consummensurate with the psychoanalytic understanding of the subject on which it rests. It was this psychoanalytical appropriation which could give answers to the questions of gender in the construction of the subject. What was needed was a theory which could account for an affiliation between Marx and Freud, and certain poststructuralist investigations, amongst which, prominently, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, offered chances for this realignment. Their concern with both psychoanalysis and Marxism leads to a historical sketch of the interrelationship of desire and power which corresponds to the research of Foucault on discursive fields--described by Chris Weedon as 'arguably' the most intresting poststructuralist theory for feminists. Taking their place at the junction of Lacanian, Althusserian and Foucauldian poststructuralism, I think Deleuze and Guattari's theories are very useful for (British) materialist feminism in general and for Carter in particular.

What unites Carter and Deleuze and Guattari is their ambiguous relation to psychoanalysis, both Freudian, and Lacanian. While Deleuze and Guattari launch a full-scale attack on psychoanalysis, they are, as I have written in chapter two, seriously indebted to Lacan for their intellectual development. Their flippant and parodic critique is only directed against the most reductive version of orthodox psychanalysis; some of their conceptualisations are acutally very close to Freud's original writings, such as for instance their concept of the inclusive disjunction. And while they conflate the Freudian and Lacanian discourses and make fun of them, they do acknowledge that Lacan has saved psychoanalysis from the 'frenzied oedipalisation to which it was linking its fate' but then imediately reproach him for having 'brought about this salvation (...) at the price of a regression' towards the despotic age, for 'the unconscious (...) would be reinterpreted starting from [the despotic] apparatus, the Law, and the signifier--phallus and castration, yes! Oedipus, no!'

Carter's relation to psychoanalysis is similarly indeterminate. She is involved in a conscious play with both Freudian, as I have shown earlier, and Lacanian discourse, to which she refers, for instance, in the second exhibit of the peep-show called 'The Eternal Vistas of Love' (p. 45) which alludes to the Lacanian idea of the self being an endless pursuit of reflections in the eyes of the other. 'I soon realised I was watching a model of eternal regression', comments Desiderio, thereby admonishing Lacan's conception of the self. The feminist response to psychoanalysis in the early 1970s was almost as negative as Deleuze and Guattari's. Kate Millet, for instance, argued in her influential Sexual Politics against the biologically based psychic structuring of femininity which she saw as central to Freud's work. Millet was aware of the contradictions in Freud's texts, but, nevertheless, highlighted his theory of femininity which holds that the anatomical difference directly affects the structure of the feminine character. Other readings of Freud suggest, on the contrary, that psychoanalysis breaks with this anatomical determinism and that gender identity is structured by a psycho-sexual development (like the Oedipus-complex) which is social rather than biological. The subject remains fixed by these universalist psycho-sexual structures, but not in the same way or to the same degree as it is by biology. Thus it would open possibilities for change. Lacan's linguistic appropration of Freud's theories, as we saw, liberates the subject from both biology and Oedipus, but, nonetheless, rehabilitates the sexual difference as central to psychoanalysis by means of his concept of the phallus as the transcendental signifier which guarantees control of desire. While, in theory, no one can posses the phallus, a constant sliding in Lacan's texts between the phallus as Other and the phallus as male sex-organ, reveal that it is patriarchy that actually controls the symbolic order. This has been emphasised by feminist psychoanalyst thinkers like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray who try to appropriate psychoanalysis for feminist purposes. They arrive, however, despite their anti-essentialist and anti-biologistic ambitions, at a positive theory of feminity, and thus end up with the very essentialism which Carter, as a materialist, abhores. Despite this seeming anti-productiveness of psychoanalysis for feminsim, Carter cannot dismiss it. She shares the Lacanian view that desire is the motivating principle of life and remains preoccupied with the notion of the unconscious. Just like Deleuze and Guattari, Carter is much indebted to psychoanalysis for her intellectual development, for it enabled her to move from her intuitive feminism to an understanding of the gendered acquisition of subjectivity and the relation between desire and domination. It led her, furthermore, to the conviction that myths are extraordinary lies designed to make people unfree. Thus her goal is to denaturalise and demythologise the unconscious--unconscious desires and processes, yes! Phallus or Oedipus, no!

Besides their ambiguous stance towards psychoanalysis, Carter's oeuvre and Deleuze and Guattari's work parallel each other on many other points. Carter and Deleuze share an intrest in sado-masochism and hermaphroditism. Both Carter's and the Deleuzoguattarian corpus furthermore show a concern with representation (both written and visual), marginalised groups and power. Dr Hoffman mirrors Deleuze's study into Proust, for Carter alludes to the Recherche via the name Albertina, and Deleuze's contemplations about time and love, for the novel sets up complex theories about these two phenomena. The most prominent allusion, however, is, as I have said, Carter's description of Dr Hoffman's desire machines.

In a cavern underneath Dr Hoffman's castle Desiderio is guided round the laboratory containing the desire machines. 'Here, where the dungeons should have been,' he recollects, 'there were white-tiled corridors soundlessly floored with black rubber and lit by a strip lighting far more brightly than day.' (p. 209) 'It was a very sterile place.' (p. 210) They enter a 'busy, deserted laboratory' in which numerous 'glass vats and tubes were bubling with a faintly luminous, milky, whitish substance.'(p. 209) In this distilling plant, the Doctor explains, 'the secretions of fulfilled desire are processed to procure an essence which has not yet pullulated into germinal form. Even with an electron microscope it is impossible to detect the slightest speck of root, seed or fundament in this, as it were, biochemical metasoup and it is safe to say we have cooked up for ourselves in our glass casseroles a pure, uncreated essence of being.' This metasoup is 'precipitated' in the reality modifying machines which, 'formulated on the model of objective chance, taking "objective chance" as the definition of the sum total of all the coincidences which control an individual destiny', 'spontaneously [generate] the germinal monecule of an uncreated alernative.' Issuing from the 'essential undifferentiation', described as a 'whirling darkness shot trough with brilliant sparks' these germinal molecules of 'objectified desire' , once agitated, form themselves in 'divergent sequences' called 'transformation groups' in order to bring a 'multi-dimensional body' into being 'which operates only upon an uncertainty principle'. (pp. 210-211). These bodies appear on screens 'something like TV screens' which showed 'a confusion of endlessly swelling and diminishing ectoplasmic shapes formed around central nuclei of flashing lights.' (p. 210) 'It requires extreme persistence of vision,' continues Dr Hoffman his explanation, 'to make sense of the code at this stage. Nevertheless, those formless blobs are, as it were, the embryos of palpable appearances. Once these undifferentiated yet apprehendable ideas of objectified desire reach a reciprocating object, the appearance is organically restructured by the desires subsisting in latency in the object itself. These desires must, of course, subsist, since to desire is to be.' (p. 211).

Here we are presented with the Doctor's version of the cogito: 'I desire therefore I exist'. This cogito is similar, as we have seen in Chapter Two, to Deleuze and Guattari's, but this is certainly not the only analogy between Deleuze and Guattari's machines désirantes and Carter's imaginitive production line. Carter's description could be seen as a visualisation of Deleuzoguattarian conceptualisations.

The boichemical metasoup of essence of being can be seen to refer to Deleuze's virtual realm of ideas--the groundless, unfounded chaos in which the singular points, characterising problems without solutions, have no fixed identity, function or location but only a differential relation with other singular points and a potential for various forms of embodiment. This virtual realm parallels the Proustian essences and the Nietzchean perception of the world as an interrelated multiplicity of forces, with desire occupying the same place in Deleuze's virtual realm as the will to power does in Nietzsche's world of becoming, flux, and change. This latter analogy is exceedingly apt when the dicethrow metaphor is recalled. Carter writes that the reality modifying machines are formulated on the model of objective chance, taking this as the definition of the sum total of all the coincidences which control an individual destiny, and thus the trajectory from essential metasoup to the multi-dimensional body parallels the Nietzschean throw of the dice as the affirmation of chance and multiplicity and necessity and unity. The germinal monecule mirrors the molecular movement of the deterritorialised and decode flows which are not reducible to a primordial or final unity, but nevertheless form divergent sequences (or series) towards the Body without Organs/multi-dimensional body which constitutes a peripheral unity; a body which, as we can see on the television screens, remains fluid and slippery. As I have argued in Chapter Two, this multi-dimensional/Body without Organs mirrors the figurative constallation in which decoded signs, which have become nonsigns or point signs that are multi-dimensional (!), temporarily integrate. Both Carter and Deleuze and Guattari refer, at this point, to television as radically deterritorialised medium: three million flashes of light per second transmitted by television; it requires extreme persistence of vision to make sense of the code at this final stage of history. Nevertheless, as Carter writes, these formles blobs are the embryos of palpable appearances. Once these undifferentiated yet aprehendable ideas reach a reciprocating subject, thus not a free, emancipated subject but one that moves mechanically backwards and forewards like a piston, they, in convocation with the desires subsisting in latency in the subject itself (the unconscious), restructure the appearence (the conscious). I think it is appropriate to recall Carter's conclusion that television is a medium engaged in conscious shaping rather than conscious raising. Dr Hoffman's desire machines are, similar to television, implicitly radical. As it is, however, they are engaged in conscious shaping rather than conscious raising; the potential radicalness of the machines is 'controlled' by the set of samples (p. 211). And this set of samples presents us with explicitly sexual, if not misogynist, exhibits: 'The legs of a woman, raised and open as if to admit a lover' (p. 44), offering a good view of 'the landscape of the interior', (this exhibit is appropriately called 'I have been here before'), 'a candle in the shape of a penis of excessive size', (p. 46) and 'a wax figure of the headless body of a mutilated woman' with a knife in her belly' (p. 45-46). The last, seventh, exhibit which Desiderio describes foreshadows what Dr Hoffman has in mind for him. It is called 'perpetual motion':

While Dr Hoffman's desire machines seem productive in an emancipatory sense, they rather, aim to restrict desire by binding it to the sexual act, as the last part of the tour round the laboratories, which brings the men to the love pens, shows:

This is, of course, not an image of the 'total liberation' which the Doctor says to strive for. The starkly naked lovers form 'a pictorial lexicon of all the things a man and a woman might do together within the confines of a bed of wire six feet long by three feet wide.' (p. 214) They are, thus, (sexually) liberated within the given confines. This might look like liberation but is, I would say, more like permissiveness. But the lovers, who all volunteered, don't see this and choose to remain in their glass coffins because their desire is effectively managed in the direction of (erotic) passion.

As Weedon has argued, a theory of the unconscious which is solely linked to a sexually based concept of desire, is not productive for feminism. Worse, I would say, it reaffirms the patriarchal structure of society and its misogynist content. Dr Hoffman is thus exposed as the dialectical 'other' to the Minister: they are both, as Robinson writes, 'complicit in the same ideological agenda: they both posit Man as an imperialist subject whose desire gives free reign to exploitation and domination'.

Dr Hoffman can consequently be seen as a diabolical genius who, while purporting to liberate desire, wants to channel it in order to gain total control. The secretions of this channelled desire are 'gathered up three times a day by means of large sponges' (p. 214) and are subsequently, as we have seen, processed to procure pure essence of being. The verb 'to procure' has a double meaning: firstly to derive by carefull exploration, and secondly to provide a woman for someone else's sexual satisfaction. I think Carter's use of the verb refers to both meanings. Essence is procured from a faintly luminous, milkey, whitish substance. Could sperm not be described by those adjectives? Essence of being, then, is constituted by male desire. Being thus remains to be defined as masculine. Women, nevertheless, are provided in order to facilitate and ensure male satisfaction, which is required for the necessary secretions. Hence, women are mere agents that are employed to continue the patriarchal structure of society. Read in this light, it is inevitable that Dr Hoffman's desire machines had to be destroyed in the end. They might seem revolutionary but, in the last instance, are uncovered as instruments which reaffirm the patriarchical structure of society, which sustain the complicity between desire and domination.

Extending this criticism to Deleuze and Guattari's machines désirantes, we can find support for this reading in various feminist texts. Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisations seem to be productive for women, but are, after careful scrutinisation, unveiled as processes which arrive at the opposite: the redisappearance of women from discourse and history by making them mere agents of the liberation of mankind. That is not to say, however, that my conclusions regarding the usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas for materialist feminism are erroneous, as we will see.

'Like most modern thinkers,' writes Rosi Braidotti, 'Deleuze's starting point is the death of the subject, defined in terms of the dissolution of identity.' The desiring machines are, as we have seen in Chapter Two, their conceptualisation of a denaturalised, post-humanist, desexualised human body-rid, thus, of its polarised genders. They are 'less a metaphor than a diagram, illustrating the process of formation of the subject.' This subject is seen as the field of intersection of the various forces which impinge upon him/her, notably desire, the main dynamic force, which creates lines of connection between material subjectivities. As we have seen in Chapter Two, the concept desiring machines is closely connected to the Bodies without Organs, the material surface on which the codes of language interact and which are totally denaturalised and desexualised. Both concepts emphasise the non-centrality of phallogocentrism in the construction of subjectivity. There is no centre: whereas the molar aggregates fix the flows of desire to a static core of human being, the molecular or the nomadic, represents not so much a 'being', but rather a 'becoming' which flows through (rather than to) the desiring machines and only finds a temporary integration in the peripheral body without organs. Becoming, write Deleuze and Guattari, always tends toward the periphery, the marginal, the minority. Minority is not defined quantitatively but rather qualitatively, that is, normatively: 'women and children, Blacks and Indians, and so on, will be minorities in comparison to the standard constituted by any American or European white-Christian-male-adult-city-dweller of today.' Deleuze and Guattari's path of liberation now follows this becoming-minority, the obvious example being, as we have seen, the becoming-schizophrenic. They, however, also point to a becoming-woman because man has been the main point of reference in the binary opposition that has defined women as the structural 'other' of the classical system of representation.

So far, Deleuze and Guattari's proposals for a new post-humanist, post-Freudian subjectivity seems to parallel the materialist feminist venture: it proposes to denaturalise and to demythologise, as we have seen in the last chapter. The problem, however, lies in the fact that they also propose to desexualise the body. On the one hand, of course, this is the logical extension of the desired de-essentialisation and depolarisation of oppositions. On the other hand, however, it denies a voice to the, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, rapidly growing number of women (including materialist feminists) who assert the everyday reality of their lives as the affirmation of sexual difference. 'My life has been most significantly shaped by my gender,' writes Carter. How then can she, or any other feminist, do away with this gender altogether. Luce Irigaray's often quoted questioning of Deleuze and Guattari's postulates is very pertinent in this respect:

That this sort of mystification is needed in order to cover up the fact that the desiring machines, which are like Dr Hoffman's desire machines essentially erotic, is revealing. Not much later Deleuze and Guattari, as the former writes, 'had to give up Félix' beautiful word (...) for it is not propitious to assume leaving behind the human body by reducing sexuality to the construction of little perverse or sadistic machines that lock sexuality in a theatre of phantasms.' They increasingly preferred to denaturalise the human body by means of their Body without Organs. That concept, however, is also questionable, as Irigaray insists:

We are here caught by one of feminism's most complicated predicaments: the process which Alice Jardine has called gynesis, the putting into discourse of 'woman' and 'the feminine'. Should one continue to follow what seems to be a consistent continuation of the poststructuralist dispersal of the subject, a project which has been invaluable for the opening up discourse for women, when this presumably results in women's redisappearance from the scene of history, when this leads, again, to the putting out of discourse of 'women' and 'the feminine' as real, empirical, that is to say non-metaphorical, category? Braidotti's answers to this question is clear:

Carter's final denunciation of Dr Hoffman might be explained along these lines. The Doctor is a thoroughly poststructuralist thinker resembling, as I have argued before, Deleuze on many points. He advances instead of 'an either/or world' an 'and+and' world and explores the 'gaps between things and definitions' (p. 206). He disintegrates people resoling them to their constituents-'a test-tub of amino-acids, a tuft or two of hair.' (p. 54) and is receptive to margins and the marginal. He nevertheless, also like Deleuze, believes in the 'inherent symmetry of divergent asymmetry' (p. 213) and thus does not take the fundamental asymmetry between the sexes into account, reiterating and reinforcing women's subordinate position as agents of male subjectivity.

Albertina, too, is the 'harmonious concatenation [a very appropriate word in this respect, RvdW] of male and female.' (p. 213) She remains as such, despite (or maybe because of) her elevated status, a mere agent of the Doctor. She too is supposed to volunteer for her 'pathetic endless pilgrimage' in Dr Hoffman's love pens. This will not bring about her liberation, but rather reiterates and reinforces her and other women's subordinate position. Albertina is merely a 'dream made flesh' (p. 215): a my(s)tical other materialised. In her becoming-multiple she is a paragon of Deleuze's fluid subjectivity, but the trajectory towards her final destination, a 'pilgrimage' which could be likened to the 'becoming-woman' as a misogynist trajectory, points towards the place assigned to women in the Deleuzoguattarian discourse, that is, mere agents of the liberation of mankind, and therefore she and her father had to be imaginatively killed.

Robinson, in her analysis of Dr Hoffman, also refers to Jardine's Gynesis. She asserts Carter in her text brings to the surface that women, in most male texts, become merely 'foils' or 'prizes' in the stories of male subjectivity: 'The notion of woman as "ideational femaleness" that "can take amazingly different shapes" in Carter's text resonates thematically with the philosophical trend chronicled by Jardine in Gynesis. Hoffman is a figure intent on liberating the repressed of culture, on exploring the margins of philosophy and reason-precisely, the "feminine" disorder that complements masculine order.' Robinson, however, focuses on Jardine's description of Derrida's appropriation of 'woman': 'Woman, in Desiderio's narrative, (...) is like Derrida's "affirmative woman," an object put into circulation according to the logic of male desire.' How then, however, does she explain the Doctor's 'tactical victory'? Why is Desiderio's remaining life defined only in relation to the 'desire to see Albertina again?' (p. 14) Quite a few feminists are not intent on seeing Derrida's 'affirmative woman' again. Braidotti, for instance, wonders how Derrida's appropriation of 'woman' differs from more traditional forms of misogyny. Deleuze's contemplations, on the other hand, are not rejected tout court. 'Without retracting any of the criticism outlined earlier,' writes Braidotti, 'I do think that the theoretical programmes suggested by Foucault and Deleuze respectively are, in contemporary philosophy, the least harmful to women (...) and may be useful to women's struggle.' What is particularly of interest about these philosophers, she says, is that their theories efface the nature/culture opposition which, as we have seen, serves the interests of the phallogocentric system of thought. Thus, it is not what Deleuze and Guattari have to say about women that is useful for feminism, but rather their (or Deleuze's) redefinition of the image of thought, from which I have sketched the outlines in the last chapter, that is invaluable. The erasure of binary logic (especially the opposition nature/culture) without the rejection of difference is a necessary condition for the alignment (and redefinition) of a biological conception of psychoanalysis and the socially based postulates of Marxism, the prerequisite for a materialist feminism: a post-dialectical progressive politics which is susceptible to the questions of real-life women. So I repeat that Deleuze and Guattari's work, at the junction of Foucauldian, Freudian/Lacanian, and Marxian/Althusserian discourses, is of particular interest for a materialist feminism, and thus for Carter. That her novel shows a foregrounding of the notion of 'woman' (mostly in a stereotyped way) without referring to an original model, is the result, I believe, of her creative appropriation of the subjectivity Deleuze and Guattari proposed. This practice can be paralleled to the theoretical efforts of feminists to propose an embodied but de-essentialised feminist subjectivity.

Taking the notion of asymmetry between the sexes as a starting point for the search for a new subjectivity runs the risk of arriving at the abhorred essentialism. However, the appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas about bodies as a surface of intensities and pure simulacra, can solve this problem. Seeing the body as a site of interaction of material and symbolic forces, which no longer opposes nature to culture, can lead to a non-fixed, de-essentialised idea of subjectivity which is nevertheless connected to bodily sexed reality of real human beings. The body is both biologically and sociologically inscribed; it is the 'point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic, and the material social conditions.' This postmetaphysical figuration of the nomadic subject is always 'becoming', always changing, and serves, thus, as an agent of change. And this figuration, while not taking back the criticism about the way it is put to service in the Deleuzoguattarian project, can offer a way out of the phallogocentric image of thought which has confined women to a subordinate position in relation to men.

Carter's novel exhibits a parade of the stereotyped, misogynist images to which women have been objectified by phallogocentrism. We are presented, amongst others, with the sexually receptive, Ophelia-like Mary Anne, the ritually degraded females of the centaurs and with the caged girls in the house of anonymity:

These images of objectified women are simply constructed by men (and they reflect the automatons which figure in Hoffmann's tales). They are, like the poststructuralist figurations of women, not real, but are necessary preconditions for masculine subjectivity to exist. The stereotypes emphasise the asymmetry between masculinity and femininity and their representations. Carter works through all these stereotyped and misogynist images of women not in order to substantiate them, but rather, in a textual strategy parallel to Irigaray's mimesis, in order to retrace backward the 'multilayered levels of signification, or representations, of women' so as to find a point of exit from the phallogocentric definitions of 'woman'. She pushes, like Irigaray, the masculine representation of women to its limits and thus foregrounds its problematic character. 'Woman,' writes Braidotti, 'is the anchoring point form which, through strategically motivated repetitions, new definitions and representations can emerge.' Difference and repetition: it is an active process of becoming. 'Transformation,' she continues, 'can only be achieved through deestentialized embodiment or strategically reesentialised embodiment-by working through the multilayered structures of one's embodied self. (...) It is the metabolic consumption of the old that can engender the new.' And this is exactly what Carter does: she does not relinquish the signifier, as would be appropriate, before she has worked through the multiple layers of signification of it. She does not leave behind women's history, but uses it to arrive at the truly new, the pars construens of a female subjectivity: a de-essentialised embodied nomadic subject which goes beyond the gender dichotomy but which, nevertheless, is sensitive to gender difference. Carter turns to Deleuze's 'materialist metaphysics' in order to conceptualise such a post-dialectical view of difference, difference placed at the centre of repetition, a decentering that inhabits all repetition. Thus the repetition of stereotyped objectified images of women will eventually release the dark precursor; not a female essentialism, but rather a femininity which is not a ground nor a final, Utopian goal or integration; a femininity as a pure multiplicity, a free and fluid subjectivity which always affirms difference, becoming Other, becoming new. A subjectivity which affirms that women, too, can have access to places of enunciation, that women can be agents of political change as and for real-life female subjects, not as male constructs, nor for the reaffirmation of a masculine subjectivity.