Watery Body III — Hyeryeong Choe

Hyeryeong Choe
known as Heebi
based in Rotterdam, NL

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Becoming a Watery Body
I. The Uncontrollable Death
II. The Uncontrollable Flow
III. The Uncontrollable Becoming
IV. The Uncontrollable Connection
— Bibliography / List of Figures

III. The Uncontrollable Becoming

FIG 5. Part of FIG 2.

Behind the green, exploding lower half body,
long and stone tower-shaped flesh are spewing fluid like fountains.

1) Becoming in Fluidity

Fluid cannot be fixed. It constantly mixes and flows. It does not stay within a single form, but seeps, leaks, and saturates. It continually transforms. Fluid always overflows. This mode of existence fundamentally conflicts with the logic of being, which presupposes stable forms and clear boundaries.

Against this notion of fixed being, Deleuze proposes becoming. Becoming does not describe a complete transformation of one entity into another, nor a linear movement from one stable state to another.¹⁴ Rather, it is a process that escapes the order of identity and sameness. Different entities come into contact, transform one another, and continuously produce new arrangements. In this process, no longer remaining a fixed substance, it is always in a state of transformation.¹⁵ This generative force of becoming is “mad.” It does not stop, does not stabilise, and cannot be measured. It is a pure, moving energy of generation that disrupts and exceeds systems of fixation.¹⁶ These “mad elements” destabilise the concept of being that seeks to maintain the world as a measurable and ordered structure.¹⁷

This movement of becoming resonates with the ontology of water. Astrida Neimanis connects water with ontology by attending to its qualities. It continually mixes and transforms. Water moves at different speeds and in different directions, never repeating the same state.¹⁸ What is important here is that water does not simply meet and mix, but carries within it the potential to become something new through mixture. In linking these qualities of water to Deleuze’s concept of becoming, Neimanis writes: “Water not only flows between, and connects bodies; it also facilitates new kinds of bodies…water becomes difference.”¹⁹ Water, then, is a material through which becoming is made visible. It reveals the continuous flow of generation in its most immediate form. All beings exist in a state of becoming. The force of this becoming is sensorially intensified in the leakage and mixing of bodily fluids, what I call watery vitality. In this sense, watery vitality is the material expression of a becoming-mad, the way in which the ceaseless force of generation appears
within the body.

This chapter presents two moments in which the body is situated within this process of becoming, from the intimate and personal experience of mixing bodily fluids during sexual contact to the imagined continuity of amniotic fluid that connects my mom and me. It is important to note, however, that these two examples are not positioned as linear events. Sexual intercourse can easily be understood as a preliminary stage of gestation, as part of reproductive logic. But this thesis approaches them as parallel events. While Deleuzian feminist thinkers, including Rosi Braidotti, have often discussed (various forms of) gestation as examples of becoming, I aim to show that the force of becoming can be experienced even in bodies that are not pregnant. Through this thesis, I argue that becoming is not limited to biological reproduction and that the generative force of the body can be felt beyond the framework of pregnancy.

2) Sexual Fluids

Bodily fluids that leak out of the body flow, encounter other fluids, and mix with them. They wet different bodies. Fluid changes. In the lower left of FIG.2, fluids erupt upward. This movement of eruption invites a sexual reading. During sexual encounters, I feel liquids that soak my skin and enter my body. I cannot tell whether what drenches my lower body is my own vaginal fluid, my lover’s pre-ejaculate, or the sweat of both our bodies. At a certain point, these fluids lose their origin. They can no longer be traced back to a specific body. They remain only as a state of flowing, mixing, and saturating. Indistinguishable. No longer definable. This liquid enters my body and flows out again. Within this movement, my lover and I are no longer two separate individuals, but part of a watery flow that soaks and blends us together.

This collapse of individual boundaries in sexual experience can be understood as a kind of death of individuality. Georges Bataille understands the human as a being that seeks to move beyond its discontinuous individuality.²⁰ Sexual ecstasy, the loss of self, and fusion with the other all partake in this structure of the “little death.” For Bataille, sexual relations are not simply acts of connection, but events that destroy individual separateness in order to reach the other.²¹ However, this argument has a significant limitation in that it is grounded in a male-centred structure of desire and risks reducing sexual experience to a conventional account of heterosexual reproduction. Nevertheless, this thesis critically engages with Bataille’s insight into the dissolution of the boundaries of discontinuous beings. From this perspective, sexual relations are not movements towards completeness, but events in which individuality collapses through contact with the other, accompanied by an encounter with death.

The mixing of bodily fluids in sexual contact is also not a process that moves towards completeness through union with other substances. It is a moment in which the individual body can no longer sustain its own boundaries, as it leaks, flows, and collapses in contact with the other. I understand this as a moment in which the becoming in watery ontology emerges, being directly experienced through the body. What is crucial here is that the fluids can no longer be identified as belonging to anyone or as anything. Becoming-mad. In the moment when bodily fluids mix, they no longer belong to a single body. They belong to multiple bodies. The distinction between “mine” and “yours” becomes meaningless. It is impossible to distinguish whether the fluid is sweat, vaginal fluid, or semen. Bodily fluids flow across the skin, soaking and permeating the distinction of the individual. The body no longer appears as a closed entity, but as an open watery field in which penetration and mixture take place. In this state, the body is no longer a being with a fixed quality. It loses its boundaries and enters a condition in which it can no longer be clearly distinguished from other bodies. This is not a movement towards a final state of completeness, but an ongoing process of mixing and transformation. It is the body in a state of becoming.

3) Gestational Fluids

Water changes, yet remains connected. Streams gather to form the sea. Seawater evaporates, disperses into the air, and returns again as rain. Rain seeps into the ground, becomes rivers, and flows back to the sea once more. It is impossible to determine a clear beginning or end of water. Water cannot be precisely located at its origin, nor can its shift from one state to another be precisely determined.

My mom and I were often told that we looked like twins, or even like clones. From our facial features to our height, body shape, leg form, the way we walked, and even the way we spoke, we were strikingly similar. At times, when I look in the mirror, I feel as though I am looking at my mom’s face. After she was hospitalised, she hugged me quite often. Each time, her body felt thin and slightly cold. It was a very different sensation from the soft flesh and warmth that I remember from when she held me as a child. Watching my mom’s body, which was so similar to mine, gradually wither away, I began to imagine my own formation and birth.

“Remember the liquid ground,” as Luce Irigaray writes.²² All living beings emerge within a liquid field.²³ I imagine myself as a foetus within my mom’s body, submerged in the same flow, sharing the same fluids. Rosi Braidotti describes the pregnant body not as a unified individual, but as a field in which different forms of life and matter coexist and transform one another. The foetus and the maternal body share the same fluids, constituting each other’s conditions of existence. The placenta and umbilical cord are material structures that reveal how the two cannot be separated, and the body is no longer a bounded unit but a relational entity formed through flows.²⁴ Within my mom’s body, I was not fully an independent “self”, yet neither could I be reduced to a part of her. I existed with her, yet was also different from her. We were one and two at once, two and one at once. The boundary was indistinct, and separation could not be clearly determined. I shared my mom’s amniotic fluid, blood, hormones, minerals, and microorganisms. I was formed through her bodily fluids, while at the same time altering the flows of those fluids.

However, this relation is never simply one of stable or harmonious coexistence. To share bodily fluids is also to invade, transform, and potentially threaten one another’s bodies. Sophie Lewis describes pregnancy as a relation of sacrifice and violence, in which it is not even clear who the victim is. Biologically, the pregnant body is flooded from within. The control of circulation is overridden, arteries are forced open, and blood pressure is driven into overdrive. An amniotic sac forms to contain the amniotic fluid, which fills with a mixture of water and electrolytes, and later sugars, fragments of wandering DNA, fats, proteins, urine, and waste.²⁵ The maternal body and the foetus exist in a state of tension. The foetus threatens the maternal body, drawing on its resources. The maternal body attempts to protect itself. The immune system is suppressed, the placenta invades, and tissues are torn.²⁶ At the same time as a body that shared the same fluids and existed as a single body with my mom, I was an unkind guest within my mom’s body. I flooded it, drew its fluids, and ruptured it. Gestation, therefore, is not a stable coexistence, but a tense condition in which bodies invade one another, and boundaries collapse through the sharing of fluids.

4) Becoming a Watery Body

And a few months later, I was expelled from my mom’s body, with an excessive amount of blood and amniotic fluid, even bringing her close to death. Here, I begin to think about another quality of water. It drowns me. I am afraid of water. I feel I might drown. My fear of water is so strong that I cannot stop thinking about it. This is why water appears so often in my drawings. And yet, when I was inside my mom’s body as a pre-born being, my embryonic mouth, nose, and lungs were filled with this “liquor”, in other words, amniotic fluid.²⁷ I existed within the fluid as the very environment of my life. Then, at the moment of birth, the end of pregnancy in other words, the amniotic water broke, and I expelled that liquid out of my mouth. In that moment, I exited the wet world and entered the unwet world. The fluid that had filled my nose, mouth, and lungs was replaced by air.²⁸ Both air and water are, in different ways, environments of life. Yet the moment I left my mom’s body, the milieu of my survival shifted from water to air. The water that once had sustained my life was transformed into a paradoxical figure of death. My mom’s giving birth was not simply a moment of separation, but a radical shift that transformed the very field of my life.

FIG 6. Part of FIG 1.
the image of explosion

Images of explosions appear in my drawings. I read this explosion as watery too. The moment when the amniotic sac ruptures. The moment when bleeding begins and blood bursts out through the skin. The moment when water is vomited out of the mouth. These are events of release that occur when accumulated energy within the body reaches a point where it can no longer be contained. Explosion is the moment when the surface that once maintained a boundary can no longer endure and collapses. What was inside spills outward, reversing the distinction between interior and exterior. The body transits into another state by expelling the materials that constituted it. This explosion makes it impossible to maintain the assumption that the body is a closed entity. Through this watery explosion, I was pushed out of my mom’s body. Explosion transforms not only the form, but the very field of life. Fluids that had been held under pressure burst outward. Explosion produces a sudden passage from one environment to another.

Therefore, I see the birth as an expulsion, a release, a separation. It may appear similar to the structure of abjection described by Julia Kristeva, in which what was inside the body is cast out in order to establish the boundary of the subject. However, unlike abjection, birth does not fully break the connection between the mother and the foetus. Even after the foetus is pushed out of the maternal body, they are still connected. I was formed within my mom’s amniotic fluid, blood, and later, milk. And those fluids still constitute my body. The body of my mom that I once knew and touched is no longer here, but I see her in the mirror. I feel her in the fluids that shape my body. And I imagine my grandma, who resembles my mom a lot, as well as the possible future daughter of my own. Forms change and time passes, yet certain flows do not break. They continue through transformation, dissolving the distinction between original and copy. Bodily fluids do not remain within a single body. They flow into other bodies. Here, they are not preserved as identical, yet neither are they completely severed. Birth, therefore, is not just an act of expulsion from the body, nor is it a separation. It is the transformation of a relation. This process does not involve the repetition of a fixed identity, but rather the production of difference. It is becoming in the Deleuzian sense.

Thus, my mom, I, and the bodies that came before and will come after are not a sequence of separate individuals, but can be understood as events produced by the flow of fluids passing through different bodies. I feel this flow within my own body. Not as a trace of something that has passed, but as something that is still moving.

This continuity is another condition of watery vitality. It reveals that life does not reside within a single body and comes to an end there. But it flows, leaks, and continues into other bodies. Forms disappear and transform, but the flow of fluids does not cease. My mom, my grandma, myself, my future daughter, and her daughter all exist as different bodies, yet remain connected within the flow.

14 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 1.
15 Ibid., 1-3.
16 Gilles Deleuze, The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 47–48.
17 Ibid.
18 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 66-67.
19 Ibid., 95.
20 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 15.
21 Ibid., 17.
22 Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. G. C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37.
23 Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 106.
24 Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 53, ebook.
25 Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family (London: Verso, 2019), 176, ebook.
26 Ibid., 149-150.
27 Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now, 174.
28 Ibid.