Notes on: Deleuze, G and Guattari, F. ( 2004) A Thousand Plateaus.London: Continuum. Chapter 10 on Becoming:  additional notes, written later:

Dave Harris

(briefer summary here)
The themes of becoming are detectable in various examples in literature and philosophy, described here as 'memories'.  In the first example ('memory')  the film Willard is read as involving a possible form of interrelationship between the hero and a particularly intelligent [anomalous we shall come to call them] rat.  The human hero almost becomes a rat, but chooses conventional love instead and is promptly torn to pieces, like other humans, by the pack of rats.  This memory introduces a number of things including how becoming has got nothing to do with resemblance, the importance of the pack, the role of the anomalous 'favourite', relations between humans and non humans and so on.

In the second example, we turn to ethology, and the recent challenges to evolutionary processes that DeLanda discusses.  Evolutionary theory now does not turn on the notion of filiation, or change over generations, but rather in terms of the production of difference [then we break off, to continue this below -- if only they had edited this shit!!] . First, the difference between series and structure [as attempts to explain similarities and differences between things] .  In the first term, sequences can be explained in terms of resemblances, and this was explained in theology as 'an analogy of proportion'(258) [we need to remember this for later as well].  Structuralism however involves a different sort of analogy, of 'proportionality'.  Here, differences resemble each other as variants of a structure.  This is a more 'studious' approach that helps us to also explain gaps in series and branchings.  It becomes a candidate for 'royalty' [orthodoxy] because we need to develop independent variables that can be combined and correlated together.  Both series and structure have a place in natural history, and both involve some notion of imitating nature, sometimes heading towards some 'divine higher term' at the end of the series, or as some kind of self generating model.  Some of these ideas still have some mileage, and might be applied in other fields.  Similarly, relations between animals also have informed studies of dreams or poetry.  Ideas can leap from one field to another, through various thresholds.

As an example, we have Jung on the archetype as a form of collective unconscious, which often assigns animals particularly important roles, especially the sequences that they go through.  Analysis of dreams, say, become a matter of seeing individual animals as part of an archetypal series.  The series can include all sorts of elements and sequences, human and also animal and vegetable.  Human beings are no longer particularly pre-eminent.  A book by Bachelard is cited as another Jungian example.

Levi Strauss can be taken as the foremost exponent of structuralism, especially his work on totemism, which ignored external resemblances in favour of internal homologies.  People with animal totems are not identifying with those animals, but are using certain characteristics to locate themselves relations with other people as in 'the Crow is to the Falcon…' (261).  The same kind of homology explains the social relations inside clans, like those between warriors and young women [discussed in more detail later-- the ref is to a French study of ancient Greece] - there is a homology between young women refusing marriage and warriors refusing to fight by disguising themselves as women [not from cowardice, but from tactics, it is later argued. A whole discussion about the priority of becoming-woman ensues! From this!].  Animals are also used to express relationships, as when men say that they are to women as bulls are to cows - again they are not claiming literally to be those animals. Structuralism was right to critique the idea of progression only through a series of resemblances.

In the third example we turn to Bergson, and this begins a discussion about reality.  There are 'very special becomings-animal', one popular example is the case of the vampire, and structuralism cannot explain these becomings, and indeed tend to ignore them.  Levi Strauss's fieldwork actually shows lots of these strange transitions, though, especially in myth [so a myth offers a particular challenge to his attempts to apply structuralist notions, as he admits].  These 'blocks of becoming' have to be seen as something important, yet '"anomic"', implying different forms of expression and even 'lines of flight'.  They might be better explained through sorcery [I have no doubt that Deleuze and Guattari had in mind Castaneda's work here, which is explicitly cited later on, and with which they wish to identify, to show they are cool dudes, to the extent of calling themselves sorcerers.  Prats!].

Becoming does not imply structural relations, 'But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification' (262).    Becomings-animal do not just occur in the imagination and are 'neither dreams nor fantasies.  They are perfectly real.  But which reality is at issue here?'.  Becoming introduces us to something other than just using whether something is  real or not.  'What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes'.  Becoming-animal is real 'even if the animal the human being becomes is not'.  In particular, 'a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself' and 'also...has no term'[no fixed objective point, only something that is connected to another becoming, forming a block].  This is where Bergson comes in, because he also says there are realities beyond the familiar ones, 'a reality specific to becoming' (263) [the coexistence of different durations, we are told, coexisting with the usual subjective one]. [So I think this is the main critical thrust,really. It emerges clearly in discussing Kafka's animal stories -- we resist subjectification, especially the two poles offered to us -- dominated subject or domesticated/licensed subject. This is a radical and philosophical way of resisting -- by denying the self-sufficiency of the concept 'human subject'. It's the same sort of critique as the one found in denying objectivity in the section on the haecceity below].

Becoming is not a matter of evolution or filiation, but 'of a different order'.  It is a matter of alliance or symbiosis in the natural world [the wasp and the bleedin' orchid again - their relationship shows a block of becoming.  So does the strange relation between the cat and the baboon mentioned earlier - chapter one I think].  Groups and micro organisms are in alliance, as we see with plant synthesis going on in the leaves.  Neo evolutionism has picked up on this, referring to communication or contagion instead of filiation: our heroes are going to coin the term '"involution"' for this, the relation between heterogeneous terms.  'Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative', is a matter of forming a block '"between" the terms in play'.  In this approach, the animal is not defined by a particular characteristic relating to its species, but in terms of populations which are themselves diverse according to the milieu in which they live.  Change happens not by filiation but because of 'transversal communications between heterogeneous populations'.  This is becoming, it is not a classificatory tree, but a rhizome: it does not imply an obvious correspondence, progress or reduction.

In the fourth example, we develop this romantic version of sorcery [D&G talks of '[we sorcerers' etc. Knobs] .  Becoming-animal involves a pack, specifically, 'a multiplicity' (264) [so a particular critique aimed at individualism?].  The state and other repressive organizations have attempted to classify the animals by their characteristics, and then to classify people accordingly, but what matters instead is expansion, contagion and peopling.  'I am legion'.  Packs are important, for example in the Wolfman's fantasies [Plateau 2] , because they represent not characteristics but 'a wolfing'.  Virginia Woolf [fancy!] has the same trope [she actually crops up quite a lot in this chapter], experiencing herself as collections of animals.  Pack should not be seen as primitive versions of more developed social relations.  Animals have 'pack modes'.  Part of the fascination with them is that they indicate the multiplicity, including hinting at a multiplicity inside us [HP Lovecraft is cited here, when his hero, Carter, becomes aware that he is himself penetrated by all sorts of strange forms, no longer a definite being, although here, that experience produces '"agony and dread]' (265).  Another example is provided by Hoffmanstahl [pass - apparently he experienced becoming a rat, and is mentioned elsewhere. Actually I have now read the offending piece, a short essay in a collection, and Hoffmanstahl himself talks about 'empathy' with the dying rat, part of his general romantic identification with nature].  Lots of suicides by writers are explained 'by these unnatural participations'.  Writers are sorcerers themselves.  They often feel particularly responsible for animals and packs.  We all experience this, becoming-animals, calling us towards new becomings [probably something French?].

Before we go any further, we have to distinguish three kinds of animals [as in the other version ] - pets which we pretend are members of our family, useful animals defined in particular ways by the state or in myth, including archetypes, and finally [the truly challenging ones?] demonic animals, 'pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity'.  Sometimes animals can be treated in each of these different ways, but they vary in terms of their 'vocation'. Even Borges failed to pursue this possibility, by excluding transitional animals such as werewolves, and confining himself to characteristics, even if they were fantastic ones.

Let's look at the notion of a pack.  Can it avoid filiation or some notion of ancestry? [If so, it is more liberated than family or other social groups?]  Of course multiplicities don't need ancestors, 'It is quite simple; everybody knows it' (266).  We need terms like epidemic, contagion, peopling [which is opposed to conventional notions of human reproduction].  There are also 'unnatural participations or nuptials' which can have important roles in nature [natural haecceities?].  All these preferred terms incorporate heterogeneity, for example humans, animals, bacteria, molecules.  These are 'interkingdoms'.  We are far from a simple duality of the sexes which produce all the modifications across generations.  One implication is that 'for us...there are as many sexes [productive combinations]  as there are terms in symbiosis, as many differences as elements [involved in contagion]'.  For example 'many beings pass between a man and a woman', and it is reductive to see them just in terms of production - there is becoming-woman [as we shall see].

These multiplicities of heterogeneous items 'enter certain assemblages'(267), and these include 'dark assemblages which stir what is deepest within us', in contrast to the usual ones of families or state.  We can see that with hunting societies or war societies [and secret societies and crime societies], 'becomings-animal are proper to them'.  This is often the source of myth.  We should not see this as somehow more primitive than in more organized societies.  It is the human equivalent of a pack, and these packs constantly trouble more organized forms.  Packs are 'simultaneously an animal reality, and the reality of the becoming-animal of the human being'.  These relations help preserve the externality of the war machine to the state, for example, and war itself involves a different sort of becoming, with 'multiplicity, celerity, ubiquity, metamorphosis and treason, the power of affect' (268).  Human packs in war, and other packs, including zoological and bacteriological ones, can produce 'a single Furor', which can sweep up any animal [great example of their evidence here - 'cats have been seen on the battlefield, and even in armies'].  The distinction between human and animals can be less relevant than looking at different states of integration between them - in war, in the states, even in music.

The fifth example, being a sorcerer again[they really should have left this alone] .  'Wherever there is a multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional individual', who acts as an important intermediary for any alliances.  Again we find this in fiction, for example in the unique whale Moby Dick, who has a personal pact with Ahab.  This is 'the anomalous' mentioned above, and it can be displayed in a number of forms.  We are not using this term to mean abnormal, but relying on its Greek derivation meaning something unequal, 'the course, the rough, the cutting edge of deterritorialization' [classic circular definition]  (269).  We define it formally in terms of its relation to the multiplicity.  But at the same time, there is a real contradiction between pack and loner, contagion and alliance, and we see this for example in Ahab's project to become-whale, meaning he has to shun the rest of the crew [another example is a character Penthesilea --one of Kleist's -- the leader of the Amazons who falls in love with Achilles at Troy and thus flouts the customs of her tribe]. [Back to Moby Dick, it is interesting to compare this account with the actual novel. Ahab tried to think like Moby Dick in plotting the charts of the whale's passage, the better to intercept him.  He rejects his allotted role as a human hunter, to the fear and disgust of Starbuck.He realizes his fate is intertwined with that of the whale, that they are involved in some drama which has existed 'before this ocean began to roll' . But is this wanting to become whale? Ahab is dragged into the world of the whale it is true, but he wants to kill the beast, from solely human motives of revenge,as Starbuck points out].  Anomalies are not just standardised differences or eccentricities [a discussion of DH Lawrence and the poem on tortoises here - he was also into becoming], nor some pure representatives.  We define the anomalous in terms of its affects, not its characteristics - it is the outsider that produces effects.  It displays the 'phenomenon of bordering'.

This helps us tidy up discussion of the multiplicity.  We know that it is not defined by the extensive elements that it produces, nor by the usual kinds of categories or characteristics when we tried to comprehend it from outside.  It is composed by intensive 'lines and dimensions'(270).  If we change dimensions we change the multiplicity, so there must be a borderline for each multiplicity, 'the enveloping line or farthest dimension which collects together all the others, like all those lines or dimensions in a pack at a particular moment'.  Moby Dick is the borderline for Ahab, and he wants to pass beyond it to get to the pack as a whole.  Borderlines or anomalies are crucial [which is why Ahab ignores normal whales].  Packs have borderlines and anomalies whenever an animal shows anomaly, or wherever we can divide the pack in a particularly indeterminate way [weird this, a way that makes it impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, outside it, or on the boundary, 271].  There is also the notion of a threshold so that individual animals cross it and turn into a pack, sometimes led by one individual.  In other cases, individuals that never belonged to packs can force a boundary to be drawn.  Packs can also be colonized by forces that place centres into them of the conventional family or state type -classical evolutionary theory sees this as progress, but in human cases, it can involve reinstating authoritarianism, 'or pack fascism'.

Sorcerers afford anomalous positions, and form alliances rather than filiations, alliances with diabolical power, but also alliances 'inspiring illicit unions, or abominable loves'.  These have produced definite themes in theology opposing sexuality, as a process of filiation but, above all, as a power of alliance: this is a way of getting round controls on procreation, for example helping the Devil to colonize human societies.  Alliance is still seen as dangerous, despite attempts to regularize it as marriage.  Leach is cited on witchcraft to show how sorcerers also frequently come outside the family group through indirect relations, and bring in other families through alliance. Contagion through conventional membership of a pack, and drawing a pact with the anomalous are perhaps no longer contradictory [citing Leach again].

Becoming-animal is classically an activity associated with sorcery, often drawing on an initial reliance with a demon, infecting human beings to enable them to become members of a pack, and then spreading to other human beings by contagion.  A certain politics is involved, since these assemblages challenge those of the family, state and organized religion, and 'express minoritarian groups' or the oppressed.

Lots of examples follow 'pell mell' of cases we could study (273) - wild men, warriors, leopard men, riot groups, religious anchorites, half animals who initiate sexual practices overriding family powers.  Again these show an ambiguous politics.  Sometimes they lead to domestication or appropriation by religion or state [one example is of saints who show the right way to relate to animals].  Sometimes sorcerers themselves become incorporated.  Some novelists have agreed to become domesticated [including Scott Fitzgerald].

The sixth example, still being a sorcerer.  Becoming-animals are not particularly important, and, indeed, are only locations on a whole continuum which include by becomings-woman, becomings-child.  The first one 'possesses a special introductory power', and is often important in sorcery.  And the other end, there is becoming-molecular, and even becoming-imperceptible.  The latter is again a theme in literature in Melville, Lovecraft, or other science fiction [Asimov is cited in a note].  Music is also filled with all sorts of different becomings, and may be heading towards the imperceptible, 'through which the inaudible makes itself heard'(274).  Drug literature helps.  So does Castenada, where our hero becoming a dog [in a peyote-inspired hallucination] leads to his becoming molecular, and he comes to realize that humans are fluid, luminous and made of fibres connecting them to the rest of the world, so that human beings can disappear altogether.  All these becomings are possible, all involve different 'thresholds and doors', which we can experience in particular ways.

Packs and multiplicities 'continually transform themselves into each other...  This is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing' (275) Multiplicities cannot be defined by the elements or by their centres, but by the number of dimensions they have, and all of these, and the variations they display are immanent: since they already have heterogeneous terms linked by symbiosis, constant transformation is likely.  This is illustrated in the Wolf Man's fantasy about wolves, bees  and anuses [cited in the other set of notes for this chapter].  The same implications are applied to the 'fascinated Self', which is located between multiplicities, so that 'the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities'.  The multiplicities have a borderline featuring the anomalous, but there are many borderlines, even a continuous line of borderlines or fibre along which multiplicities change.  At each stage, there may be a threshold requiring a new pact.  [Using Castenada on the fibres again - more to follow].  'Every fibre is a Universe fibre.  A fibre strung across borderlines constitute a line of flight or of deterritorialization'.  The anomalous can act as a border around a multiplicity, which it stabilizes temporarily [until circumstances permit different numbers of dimensions], but it also implies further transformations along a given line of flight [literary examples from Moby Dick - the whale is the borderline around the pack, he is also the demon with whom that one makes a pact, and he is the line of flight, represented by the 'terrible fishing line' that can lead into the void]

The crossings or transformations do not follow a logical order, like the supposed order between animals, vegetables and molecules.  Instead, each multiplicity is symbiotic and holds together 'a whole galaxy' of animals plants and particles.  The heterogeneities do not display a logical order.  Sometimes sorcerers attempt to codify these transformations [referring to a novel by Dumas, 276 - pretty weird, stressing unpredictability]. There are 'alogical consistencies or compatibilities...  No one, not even God,  can say in advance whether two borderlines will string together or form a fibre, whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis'].  No one knows where lines of flight will end, and abolition or annihilation are possibilities unless we can avoid them by 'good fortune'.  We can check for consistency 'case by case' to see if there is an affective symbiosis or transformation [the example for such pragmatism is wondering about the effects of starting to practice the piano again!]: 'Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: make a rhizome', but you can never predict what's going to happen, 'so experiment' (277).

However, there are criteria which we have be used to guide us through the dangers.  There is a possibility, for example that multiplicities can be conceived as lying on a plane, with their boundaries 'succeeding each other' in a nice controllable way.  This gets us to the 'flat multiplicity'.  However, we have not flattened dimensions, and multiplicities can continue to have increasing or decreasing numbers of them.  The final reconciliation and control announced in Lovecraft  is rendered 'in grandiose and simplified terms' - that is, the conception that all the dimensions line up, so that two D figures are cut from three D ones and so on.  In practice, the plane of consistency intersects  all dimensions to link together any number of multiplicities, or rather, 'the intersection of all concrete forms'.  Thus the plane reveals all [possible?  concrete?] becomings, and acts as a kind of 'ultimate Door providing a way out for them'.  However, not all becomings will reach this point [of philosophical enlightenment].  Lawrence shows how a becoming-tortoise can do it, running from 'obstinate animal dynamism to the abstract, pure geometry of scales'[beats me! Try for yourself here ], apparently without losing anything, preserving consistency.

Everything becomes imperceptible [if becoming is pursued on the plane of consistency]. The plane is therefore a multi dimensional figure [various names for it include the Rhizosphere, 278, and at n dimensions the Hypersphere or the Mecanosphere].  It is the abstract Figure or, since it has no form, the abstract Machine, 'of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration.  And the abstract machine is the intersection of them all'.  This notion of waves and vibrations, borderlines on the plane of consistency 'as so many abstractions' is also discussed by Virginia Woolf, where each individual character also designates a multiplicity.  On the plane of consistency there is a single abstract Wave, incorporating the more concrete waves, vibrations following a line of flight, traversing the whole plane.

The seventh example  looks at theology and the conventional argument that human beings cannot become animal, because there are only limited essential forms that cannot be transformed into each other, although they can be linked by analogy.  Classical models for theology include discussion of Ulysses and his companions [transformed into animals by Circe], and Diomedes [pass].  In neither case are these real transformations for medieval theologians, and Ulysses's companions simply believe themselves to be transformed because particular images have been brought to the forefront of the observers' minds.  In the second case it is the devil that assumes animal bodies, and things that happened to those animals are then transmitted to human bodies.  Becoming-animal happens only in demonic reality through the activities of the devil.

The work in alchemy and early physics also threw up the issue of accidental forms, which were seen as 'more or less' transitional from essential forms (279).  This in turn implied certain independent qualities such as degrees of heat, which could combine with other independent qualities, say colour, to form a 'third unique individuality distinct from that of the subject'.  Accidental forms displayed '"latitude" constituted by a certain number of composable individuations'.  This is the haecceity, an individual intensity that [always? can?] combines with other intensities to form another individual.  It is true that [human? No] subjects can participate more or less in the construction of accidental forms, but this in turn implies a certain 'flutter, a vibration in the form itself'.  Adding together subjects [must be another concept - an individual object?] also adds together intensive qualities.  It follows that an overall body will display distributions of intensity, latitudes and also 'speeds, slownesses, and degrees of all kinds'.  The latter comprise the body's 'longitude', providing a whole cartography [there is a note referring us to a French work on natural philosophy in the middle ages]: another definition of the longitude of a body - 'the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given relation',where the aggregates are part of each other according to the [nature and strength] of the relation between them (283) .  So between substantial forms and 'determined subjects' (280) [the latter sense of subject] there is a whole set of processes at work involving haecceities and their combinations, 'degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them'.  (281)

Eighth example - Spinoza 1.  The way Spinoza understands substantial or essential forms is by starting with abstract elements that have no formal function, but which are still 'perfectly real' and which differ according to their 'movement and rest, slowness and speeds'(280).  They are not classical atoms which would preserve forms.  Nor can they be divided any further.  They should be seen as 'infinitely small, ultimate parts of an actual infinity, laid out on the same plane of consistency or composition'.  They always come in infinities.  They produce individuals by combinations of movement and rest and their speed.  Those individuals might go on to compose other individuals according to more complex relations of movement and rest and degree of speed.  'Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities'.  The plane of consistency of Nature is a real and abstract machine, composed of assemblages and individuals, each of which has its own infinity of particles in an infinity of interconnected relations.  We can use this conception to understand that all the elements of nature are unified in the sense that the same processes applies to the inanimate and the inanimate, the artificial and the real.  The unity comes from 'a ground buried deep within things', not the will of god.  It consists of a plane on which all the specific forms and functions are laid out, distinguished only by their speed and slowness.  This is a 'plane of immanence or univocality', and we need no analogies to relate things together: 'Being expresses in a single meaning all that differs'.  It is not that substance is a unified thing, rather that an 'infinity of modifications...are part of one another on this unique plane of life' (280-1).

These issues arose in early debates on the nature of science, with one set of proponents [Cuvier] taking analogies as the key, especially analogies of proportionality [when it comes to bodily organs which can be understood as having analogous functions], and this helped replace the notion of a transcendent unity.  Another approach [Saint-Hilaire] stressed abstract anatomical elements or particles, pure materials relating together to form given organs, with functions depending on speed or slowness, movement and rest.  The latter lead to evolutionism and notions of precocious or retarded rates of growth.  Implicit in these early debates was the notion of a fixed plane of life, 'a single abstract Animal for all the assemblages that effectuate it', and the notion of transformation as a matter of folding, so that vertebrates fold in the womb to produce features such as spinal cords.  There is no master plan or transcendent element.  Composition is more important than organization, and development becomes a matter of movement and rest.  Thus [rather than the causal unfolding of a master plan] 'It is a question of elements and particles, which do or do not arrive fast enough to affect a passage, a becoming' (282).  The 'jumps, rifts' between assemblages do not mean that they are irreducible, merely that they contain elements that have arrived at different times.  Lead times and delays are themselves part of the plane of immanence.  On that plane, 'anonymous matter' enters 'into varying connections'.

[Big switch to the human realm] 'Children are Spinozists', that is they can think of materials as aggregates with different elements with different relations of movement and rest.  Little Hans [inevitably] shows this by referring to things like his 'peepee maker' not as an organ but rather as an aggregate material.  Thus it makes perfect sense to ask if girls have one, nothing to do with oedipal anxiety, and to make different assemblages between boys and girls based on things like how pissing functions - standing up, for example - or to argue that locomotives have one but chairs do not 'because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, decompose the relation with the material that the yielded something else, a rung for example'[quite a lad, little Hans!].  Children apparently it find it hard to describe exactly what an organ is, but this does not mean that they think only in terms of part objects: it is more to do with perceiving how the elements of the organ combine particular elements.  This is not animism but 'universal machinism' (283), seeing 'an immense abstract machine' is capable of 'comprising an infinite number of assemblages'(283).  We have to understand children's questions as 'question machines': their use of indefinite articles indicate their abstract thinking.  'Spinozism is the becoming child of the philosopher'. [We have closed the circle -- we began by announcing that children were Spinozists and now we have it the other way around as confirmation -- and it all depends on D&G heavily reading Little Hans and making assertions about 'children'].

Ninth example - Spinoza again.  Relations of movement and rest also involve 'a degree of power'[to modify an individual, including its power to act].  We can think of these as intensities coming from both the external parts and the individuals own parts -- affects.  These are important for becoming as in Spinoza's question 'what can a body do?'.  In the dimension of latitude, we can see limits produced by the affects of a body 'at a given degree of power'- we can think about latitude as distributions of intensive parts, a matter of capacity, while longitude refers to extensive parts producing relations [with other bodies].  This helps us define bodies without referring to organs and functions, or even species or generic characteristics - instead we look at its affects.  ' A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox'. All a tick can do is climb a tree, detect an animal beneath, fall on it and burrow in, three affects, limiting its powers -- it is indifferent to everything else.

There is a link with Spinoza's ethics, that is the extent to which bodies can experience other aspects, like those from another body, and whether this will destroy or limit or increase its power.  Children help us again.  Little Hans describe horses in terms of the list of their affects and how they composed assemblages, like those between draught horses and wagons, how blinkers limited their eyesight, how they  pulled heavy loads, had big dicks, how they died occasionally in the street.  Little Hans was also in an assemblage with his parents, the house, the street, and the right to go outside.  This permitted him to become horse, 'not [via] fantasies or subjective reveries; it is not a question of imitating a horse, "playing" horses, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy' (284).  There is no relation of analogy between Little Hans and the horse.  The issue was whether Little Hans could transform his own elements, releasing aspects that would 'make [him] become horse, forms and subjects aside'.  There is a possibility of 'an as yet unknown assemblage that will be neither Hans' nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans'[an imaginary assemblage ensues -'in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee maker, whatever'.  That would have a therapeutic effect by unblocking him.

Apparently, Hofmannstahl [in his fictional letter, here] also shows the possibilities by contemplating a dying rat baring its teeth 'at monstrous fate', not identifying with or pitying the animal, but analyzing the composition of speeds and affects affecting it [well, he experienced deep sympathy and some sort of reverence for and awareness of Nature that exceeds words]. This 'makes the rat become a thought', but also 'the man becomes a rat'.  They are not the same thing, 'but Being expresses them both in a single meaning in language that is no longer that of words, in a matter that is no longer that of forms, in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects' (285) [Science fiction!].

'This is not an analogy or a product of the imagination'[of course it is you prats!], but a matter of analyzing speeds and affects and how they are composed so that we can draw the diagram, pose the problem.  Someone called Slepian [French reference] posed a problem in a suitable way, in that he thought men should not be hungry all the time so he should become a dog.  No imitation or analogy was involved, but instead the parts of his body were 'endowed' with 'relations of speed and slowness' that would make it become dog in an original assemblage.  He wears shoes on his hands, thinks of his mouth being used like a dog muzzle to tie his laces, making particular organs relate to other organs in a different way.  The only problem he faced apparently was thinking about what could act as a tail - and that would involve making the characteristics of the tail possess elements common to sex organs in humans. 

The project failed at this point because the relations of the tail and the penis could not be used to compose a new assemblage - and apparently this led to all sorts of psychoanalytic thinking as a backward step.  However, undaunted, we can see 'the failure of the plan(e) as part of the plan(e) itself' (286) -- something has come too early or too late, and this is chronically likely since the plane is infinite.  The example also shows another possibility, that another plane has returned to prevent becoming [an invention necessary to preserve the consistency of the first argument].  [Presumably they mean the plane or plan of psychoanalysis, because they go on to discuss psychoanalysis and how it has dealt with becomings- animal]

In psychoanalysis, understanding children fetishists or masochists has always been a problem and the psychoanalysts 'even Jung' could or would not understand.  They just saw animals as representing drives or parents, failing to see the reality.  Instead of drives they should have been thinking of assemblages.  Freud reduced the experiences of Little Hans - so that the blinkers became the father's eye glasses and so on.  Nothing was said about the street or Hans' witnessing the death of a horse [except as a scene for oedipal struggles].  A therapeutic chance was missed as a result, seeing the plane as only a phantasy.  [See also the Wolf-Man in chapter 2]

The same might be said about understandings of masochism and its becomings-animal [discussed earlier].  Masochism also shows us that we need deliberate tools or apparatuses to push nature to the limit and annul the organs - things like masks and bridles [and the case summarised again].  We misunderstand by extracting any single element or segment and its 'internal speeds and slownesses', and then we are left with connections' that can only be explained as imaginary or as symbolic analogies.  Psychoanalysts do this all the time, but we can all experience it as a danger, leaving becoming only as '"playing the animal, the domestic oedipal animal' (287), imitating a domestic dog .  'Becomings - animal continually run these dangers'.

10th example - haecceity.  [I'm still mystified by this concept.  I can see that it is a non human gathering together of particular elements in a contingent or emergent way, but I always thought that applied to all empirical objects -- and subjects.  I don't see the need for this particular concept.  I thought it was simply more contingent or less durable than other assemblages, but our heroes deny that].  We have to remember that the body is defined only by longitude and latitude, at least on the plane of consistency, that is the sum of all the material elements belonging to it [longitude], and the sum of all the affects it is capable of [latitude] [this time, it is intensive affects, just to be annoying].  Spinoza thought of this first.

However, there is another 'mode of individuation very different from that of the person, subject, thing, or substance' (287) - the haecceity.  It can be used to describe a particular or local season, hour or date.  These are still individual in a perfect sense, 'lacking nothing', although different from a thing or a subject.  They consist 'entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected'(288) [but isn't that exactly the same as the body as defined above?  Maybe molecules and particles are to be distinguished from material elements?].  Haecceities are 'concrete individuations that have a status of their own', and can produce change in things and subjects.  To take an oriental example, where apparently haecceities are more predominant than subjectivities or substantialities, the haiku collects together 'floating lines constituting a complex individual'.  [I think a perfect example here would be the photograph that joins together in an instant a number of things that happen to be present at that time] [These are examples in art, of course --are these typical?]. Other examples include C. Bronte on the constituting effects of winds [which I don't get at all], and Lorca's poem about the collection of disconnected events all happening at 5.00 PM, including the funeral of his best friend.  The same goes apparently for hours of the day in Lawrence or Faulkner - they are 'a very singular individuation'.  Individual degrees of heat or colour can combine in latitude to produce bodies that might be cold here and hot there depending on its longitude, as in a 'Norwegian omelette'[AKA baked alaska]. 

These are not individualities of the instant, as opposed to the more permanent ones - there are some animals whose lives last no longer than a day or hour, and a group of years can be as long as 'the most durable subject or object'.  We have to think of an abstract time that is equal for both haecceity and subject or thing.  Tournier discusses meteorology as between the extremely slow geology, and extremely rapid astronomy [I don't understand the subsequent comments on his novel - incidentally, my voice recognition typed comments as comets].  Even in this [highly relativist?] time, an individuated life is different from the individuated subject who leads it.

It might be a matter of talking about different planes.  The plane of consistency composes haecceities, while subjects and objects are formed on another plane in a different temporality.  The plane of consistency works with Aeon, 'the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here' (289) [A ref to Bergson,maybe -- clear as forking mud].  We have an analogy in music where tempo and non tempo can be assessed against a pulsed time, but there is also a non pulsed time [says Boulez] 'both floating and machinic, which has nothing but speeds or differences in dynamic [SIC]'.  In other words, we're not talking about instant vs. permanent, ephemeral vs. durable, but rather 'two modes of individuation, two modes of temporality'.

We must not oversimplify [or pin ourselves down too clearly] , comparing subjects 'of the thing or person type' with haecceities as 'spatiotemporal coordinates'.  Because 'you [have to] realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that'.  The face can become a haecceity, a curious 'mixture of elements of time, weather and people' [quoting none other than Ray Bradbury again, this time in The Machineries of Joy].  We have individualities which are unformed and non subjectified, including a life as above.  We also seem to possess a 'climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack'[presumably terms used in various literary works as metaphors?].  We can reach this [through becoming].

Nor is the haecceity a mere 'decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or...appendages that hold things and people to the ground'.  The haecceity is an entire assemblage 'in its individuated aggregate', defined by a longitude and latitude, 'independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane'.  There is some notion of 'the wolf itself' [and horses and children] that 'cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, the season, an atmosphere, an air, or life'[so we're getting close to the idea of a contingent assemblage?].  [At particular times] 'the street enters into composition with the horse'.

[But let's complicate it again] there can be assemblage haecceities and interassemblage haecceities (290), and the latter are particularly important for becoming, since they offer an intersection of longitudes and latitudes..  [Got that?  Well forget it, because] 'the two are strictly inseparable'.  The elements in a haecceity are 'not of another nature' compared to things or people.  We should really refer to composites to be 'read without a pause: the animal - stalks - at - five o'clock'.  This is the 'becoming evening, becoming night of an animal, blood nuptials.  Five o'clock is this animal!  This animal is this place!'[Which leads to the example from Virginia Woolf about the dog running in the road, so that "this dog is the road".  Note that St Pierre said she had no trouble getting this!].  We learn from this that spatiotemporal relations and determinations are not attached to things, as determinations, but rather are seen as 'dimensions of multiplicities', so the street is as much a part of the assemblage as the omnibus or horse [Little Hans again, of course].  'We are all 5.00' [presumably meaning, that we can all experience these contingent assemblages]. Haecceities may even be distributed between optimal and pessimal moments like noon and midnight for human beings.

The plane of consistency contains only haecceities which intersect [but are they not intersections themselves?].  Back to Virginia Woolf and the uniqueness of moments in the life of Mrs. Dalloway, on a particular walk, for example, who experiences a number of perceptions.  This apparently shows that 'the haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin or destination; it is always in the middle.  It is not made of points, only of lines.  It is a rhizome'

The plane of consistency has haecceities for content, but its own forms of expression, a plane of content and of expression.  The expression in question shows only 'proper names, verbs in the infinitive, and indefinite articles or pronouns', producing 'the least formalized contents', a mode of expression that has no formal signifiances or personal subjectifications.  We have to remember [an earlier argument, one that is even in AntiOedipus I think.And also discussed in Machinic Unconscious ] that infinitive verbs should not just be seen as indeterminate: rather they best express 'floating non pulsed time' as above, the better to express the time of the 'pure event or of becoming', articulating different speeds and slownesses outside of metric time.  The infinitive offers 'pulsations or values of being' (291).  The proper name should also not be taken as indicating a subject.  It can nominate a species, for example.  It can refer to subjects that are not the same as the forms which they take for classification purposes [an individual case? Maybe acting as a typical or pole case?].  Here, proper names are depicting not persons but 'the order of the events, of becoming or of the haecceity', and the example is giving military operations or tropical storms proper names, making them 'the agent of an infinitive', not the subject of the conventional tense.  Proper names mark particular longitude and latitudes [where becoming has temporarily solidified?] - thus Little Hans is the proper name of a becoming-horse, and a werewolf the becoming-wolf.

Nor do indefinite articles or indefinite pronouns indicate something indeterminate in themselves.  Rather, they are applied to indeterminate forms, or not linked to a determinable subject.  They are perfectly adequate to refer to haecceities or events which are not individuated in a form or a subject.  Individuation is found instead in an assemblage, independently of forms or subjectivity.  Children's usage can show this, when they use the indefinite to refer to an individuated collectivity, to the chagrin of psychoanalysis: children refer to 'a horse' or to 'people' or 'someone', and this cannot be translated into some definite objects or subject like Father.  There is inappropriate personology.  Linguistics makes the same mistake if it deals with third person pronouns as something that lacks 'the determination of [proper] subjectivity'(292).  So terms like 'he' and 'they' are really referring to a 'collective assemblage'[is there any other kind].  Blanchot is apparently on to the same issue.  These assemblages can be 'of the haecceity type', relating to the event, not being effectuated by persons, something that happens that cannot be represented in personal statements.  Thus 'the HE' makes a diagram of an assemblage: it is not overcoded or attempting to transcend statements, and indeed 'prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations'.  There is a general applicability to occurrences and becomings [leading to the famous mystifying quote: 'A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS'.  This is deliberately like classified ads or telegrams on the plane of consistency, and reminds our heros of Chinese poetry and its procedures.

[What an evasive and rambling section this is!  It just looks like someone has accused them of not defining their terms, and picked up on this terms haecceity.  This has led to a desperate mystifying and confused attempt to define it in such a way that it does not overlap with terms they have already used like assemblages or multiplicities -- is it a matter of permance? No.Contingency?No -- etc. I suspect it might even have soimething to do with assemblages that are not 'real' or tangible, but we could never confess to that. People who claim to find it a clear and consistent term have far more insight than I do!]

11th example - plan(e) makers.  'Perhaps there are two planes, or two ways of conceptualising the plane'[so it dawns on them now, having discovered problems with the haecceities].  The plane can be a principle which makes potentials visible and audible, 'causes the given to be given' in particular ways.  But the plane itself is not given and can only be 'inferred, induced, concluded from that to which it gives rise' [as in the Bhaskar's transcendental deduction].  Such planes are both structural and genetic, depending on whether they connect formed organizations or those still in evolution.  However, it is more important to realise that the plane always concerns the development of forms and the formation of subjects, as a 'hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret signifier necessary for subjects' (293) [we will end with the mysteries of the dark precursor?].  Planes occupy supplementary dimensions to that which is given '(n + 1)'.  This means it is teleological, a design or a mental principle, a plane of transcendence and analogy [so we have not broken with these terms -- but we are going to transcend them].  It might be found in the mind of god, or in the unconscious.  'It is always inferred' from its own effects.  We can claim it to be immanent, but only in the sense that it is absent,thus  'analogically(metaphorically, metonymically)'. It is not like the seed which is given in the tree.  Effects are functions of planes that are not given.

[We turn to music as a refuge].  The developmental or organizational principle of a piece does not appear in itself but acts as a 'transcendent compositional principle' that is not itself audible.  Stockhausen says as much. Writers also refer to this transcendent unity of principle, including Proust.  In each case, we can only infer the existence of a plane from the forms that have developed.

However, there is an altogether different (conception of the) plane, without forms or subjects, no structure or genesis but just relations of movement and rest between unformed elements, 'molecules and particles of all kinds' (294).  Here we find haecceities and affects, 'subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages'[and intensive time, where it is a matter of arriving late or early, or having different compositions of speed].  This is the plane of consistency or composition, whereas the first one was the plane of organizational development.  With this plane, we find 'immanence and univocality'[and we have sacrificed any way of deducing these processes from empirical examples? What is left is a circular philosophical process of deducing more abstract terms from less abstract ones?].  They call this the plane of Nature, although there is no distinction between the natural and the artificial.  It never has a supplementary dimension - this makes it 'natural and immanent'.  It does not exhibit contradictions, only nonconsistencies [no doubt drawing on Deleuze's reservation about contradictions in Difference and Repetition].  It is geometrical with 'an abstract design', no longer a mental one.  Its dimensions proliferate - 'peopling, contagion', in a non evolutionary form.  There is no proliferation of a principle.  Instead there is 'involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds'.  The plane is fixed [and seems to be divided into sound planes, visual planes and writing planes] but that does not mean that it is immobile: on it we find absolute states of movement, relative speeds and slownesses.

Again some modern musicians have rejected the notion of a transcendent plane of organization preferring the 'immanent sound plane', with different speeds and slownesses and 'a kind of molecular lapping' [a note refers us to repetitive themes in Philip Glass].  This can bring the imperceptible to perception, and free time, releasing Aeon, as in Boulez.  It can take an electronic form where varying 'speeds' [wavelengths?] produce different effects.  Cage is a practitioner of floating time and experimentation.  Godard [no refs or examples] operates with the equivalent for the visual plane, where 'forms dissolve' and everything is represented as 'tiny variations of speed between movements in composition' (295). Sarraute does the same for writing, distinguishing between a transcendent plane that develops forms and fictional subjects, and a different one that 'liberates the particles of anonymous matter' related together by movement and rest. Here, it seems, we can infer this plane too, from the relations between particles etc [once we have sussed what Sarraute is up to? Once we accept that particles are abstract components of planes?] - this is the micro or molecular plane.  [The reference seems to be to a critical work by Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion, and in particular a commentary on Proust].  This is 'a well founded abstraction' [a consistent one -- not surprising because it is tautological?] .

So far, we have implied an opposition between two planes, developing forms and functions on one, and speeds and slownesses with unformed elements on the other.  We can now discuss 19th century German literature through Holderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche [pass].  Apparently, we find haecceities in Holderlin, 'of the season type', and these frame narratives and the assemblages in them.  As seasons change, so forms and persons dissolve and reappear as movements, speeds and affects.  With Kleist, speed and slowness dominate, producing 'catatonic freezes and extreme velocities'[I have only red some of the short stories, but they do offer quite unconventional narratives, with sudden massive increases of pace, and a lot of what could be seen as digressions or explorations].  Although life itself runs through voids and failures, there is still a single plane, and not the principle of organization but a 'means of transportation' (296).  We see not forms and subjects but becomings, forms and subjects as appearances which can be recomposed, and this is his subversive war machine, unsurprisingly heartily disliked by Goethe and Hegel, with their interests in harmony and regulated formations.

Nietzsche dislikes Wagner, his conventional harmonies and his 'pedagogical personages, or "characters"'.  The issue is not to pursue fragmentary writing, but to liberate speeds and slownesses between particles, to undermine form and subject.  The eternal return refers to 'the first great concrete freeing of non pulsed time'.  Ecce Homo 'has only individuations by haecceities'.  Even the failures are an integral parts of the plane.  Even in aphorism, a new relations of speed and slowness between its elements make it 'change assemblages'(297) [work by analogy in normal terms] .  Working with such a plane means inevitable failure because concrete productions can never be faithful to it, but these failures indicate the very existence of the N dimensional plane [Nice -- the inability to depict it shows it must really be there! Same as an argument for God]

[More on the method] We have begun with one kind of plane and led to a more abstract hypothetical one, but this is because the two are inextricably linked, so that we inevitably 'extricate one from the other'.  We can 'sink the floating plane of immanence' back into something empirical or concrete, 'the depths of Nature' and work with planes of organization, analogies and developmental scheme.  We will end with forms, subjects, organs and strata.  Above, back on the plane of consistency, we imply destratification and encounter the BWO ['the plane of consistency is the body without organs'].  Pure speed and slowness deterritorialize, pure affects desubjectify.  The plane of consistency is subject to constant work by the plane of organization trying to plug lines of flight and manage deterritorialization, to restratify them, to reconstitute forms and subjects [so we are back in political struggle -- a strange ontological struggle between planes!]. However, the actions of the plane of consistency are to deterritorialize and destratify - again we need caution here or it will become 'a pure plane of abolition or death', a 'regression to the undifferentiated' (298), so we have to retain 'a minimum of strata, a minimum of forms and functions, and a minimal subject' to hang on to the material and to concrete assemblages.

The opposition between the two planes can be rendered as two abstract poles, the transcendent organizational as in western music, and the immanent as in eastern music.  Western music demonstrates a becoming with minimum sound forms and melodic functions, with speeds and slownesses regulated by these minimal forms.  'Polyphonic richness' can still result, a material proliferation, a partial dissolution of form in the interests of developing form.  There is always independent experimentation as well [their favourite musicians listed on 298], varying the dynamic relations between the forms, for example.  In Proust, we see that the group of girls are individuated not by subjectivity but by haecceity - the group is formed according to different relations of speeds and slownesses, so that a girl can join 'late', having done 'too many things' relative to the person waiting for her.  Swann is different from the narrator because they are not on the same plane - Swann thinks in terms of subjects and forms, so that for example one of Odette's lies is a form with subjective content to be discovered, and the little musical phrase evokes something else, like paintings or landscapes.  The narrator is different: for example one of Albertine's lies 'is almost devoid of content', and seems 'to merge with emissions of a particle issuing form [SIC] the eyes of the beloved'[bullshit].  The narrator becomes not a detective, but a gaoler, attempting to master speed [in ordinary English wanting to regulate tightly the interactions, thoughts, and activities of Albertine].  The phrase in the music eventually becomes locatable on a 'plane of consistency of variation, the plane of music and of the Recherche' [seeing that all things can be associated in recapturing the effects of time, once abstracted from their immediate context].  Swann attempts to reterritorialize [find his bearings by relating Odette and others to his familiar world of painting, having broken with his social bearings], but the narrator deterritorializes, speeding up the abstract machine and replacing empirical connections with 'stronger coefficients that nourish the Work' (300).  There is a risk of dissolving everything, and luckily, the project fails in its full abstract intent [we end not with philosophy but with literary and personal goals].

12th example - the molecule.  Becoming takes place across a range, from becoming woman and child, then animal, then molecular and then particular.  These stages are linked by fibers passing through doors and over thresholds.  Singing, painting and writing all aim 'to unleash these becomings', especially music.  We are not just talking about themes and motifs which might include children's games or refrains, nor the incorporation of birdsong, 'molecular discordances', even the newly arrived 'sound molecule'.

All becomings 'are already molecular', however.  It is not a matter of imitation, identification or adopting analogies including proportional relations [as in the theological example above?  Manipulate dogs to have an effect on your own body?].  We have to start with the forms we already have and 'extract particles', noting the relations of movement and rest,speed and slowness that are 'closest to what one is becoming'.  This is a process driven by desire.  It is a matter of proximity, and not analogy.  It's possible because there is a zone of proximity or 'copresence of particles'[a note refers us to the origins of the term proximity in set theory, where it is also known as neighbourhood].  Wolfson is an example (301), translating phrases from his own language into foreign words which sound the same, rendered as 'he snatches from his own language verbal particles that can no longer belong to the form of that language', and does the same with items of food.  So it is a matter of emitting or receiving particles from a zone of proximity [just as in Flann O'Brien as I say in the other file].  We can make yet another attempt to pin down the haecceity as something that emerges from a fog or mist, 'a corpuscular space'.  [To close the circle as usual] we're going to define proximity as 'a notion...that marks a belonging to the same molecule, independently of the subjects considered and the forms determined'.

We have the example of the wolfchildren -which is not a matter of children really becoming wolves, nor even resembling them, or illustrating a symbolic metaphor.  All this upholds the natural system with humans at the top.  Our men Scherer and  Hocquenghem insists that the children have become indeterminate or uncertain, sharing something indiscernible with the wolves, blurring the boundary between human and animal.  Children always have room for other becomings, not regressions, but 'creative involutions' showing that there is an inhumanity in the human body, capable of 'unnatural nuptials' (302).  This is the [special] reality of becoming animal.  It cannot be denied by showing that children only become wolves or dogs within limits.  Given that we all do this, it shows 'an inhuman connivance with the animal', not something oedipal.  It involves constructing a BWO [for adults?] and then exploring its zones of intensity or proximity.  Thus we do not imitate dogs, but we compose something else than what we are used to and then emit particles from it which can be canine 'as a function of the relation of movement and rest'.  This something else need not be 'directly related to the animal', but could be its food, or its relations with other animals, or something that humans used to domesticate animals, such as muzzles, or something quite different as with Slepian, or the strange case of Lolito, who eats bottles or bicycles and feels 'a bond' with dogs.  There is no metaphor here, nor a structural analogy.  The word 'like' means something quite different when linked to haecceities, indicating expressions of becoming not stable signified states or relations.  So when Lolito eats iron, his jaw is in a relation with the material, and this permits him to 'become the jaw of a molecular dog' (303).  Robert De Niro walks like a crab, not to imitate a crab, but to do some work of composition with his film image.

To become animal you must 'emit corpuscles that enter the relations of movement and rest of the animal particles...  That enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule.  You become animal only molecularly' (3O3).  There is no changing between molar species, but 'becomings of man', proximity is between particles and between their relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness.  They believe there really are werewolves and vampires, but see this as 'becoming animal in action', because 'the "real" animal is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity'.  Again no imitation or analogy.  Albertine is not imitating a flower, when she is sleeping, she 'enters into composition with the particles of sleep [so] that her beauty spot and the texture of her skin enter a relation of rest and movement that place her in the zone of a molecular vegetable: the becoming plant of Albertine'.  When she is taken prisoner 'she emits the particles of a bird'.  When she runs away, 'she becomes-horse, even if it is the horse of death'[she runs away and is mysteriously killed while out riding a horse].

Animals, flowers and stones are all made of molecules, but the animal or flower that one becomes is a haecceity [which has now become {sic} a general term for a molecular composite or assemblage}, not a molar subject object or a form.  This leads us to suggest that human beings are also capable of becoming, as in becoming - woman or becoming - child, not resembling the molar entities, although the status relations might be different.  A woman can be defined by her normal form, organs and functions, and thus as a molar identity, an assigned subject, but becoming woman is different.  Imitation can be insightful, for example among homosexual males, but something else is involved in becoming, emitting the particles with relations of etc. etc. [The phrase about relation of rest and movement, speed and slowness etc are endlessly repeated. By now, it all just means the intensive elements that compose entities/assemblages/haecceities?]. Women have to become-woman in order that men can become-women [otherwise no zone of proximity?].  Of course women should engage in molar politics as well, but this should not be their only form of political action - it can be based on ressentiment.  Women and children can become 'desiccated', instead of producing flow.  This makes them a more acceptable woman or child, but actually 'each sex contains the other and must develop the opposite pole in itself'(304).  Bisexuality is not an adequate term - it can represent an internalisation of 'the binary machine'.  The point is to develop 'molecular women's politics' to sap ['slip into'] molar confrontations. Virginia Woolf did not want to write as a woman, but rather pursued becoming - woman, emitting particles to impregnate the entire social field and contaminate men.  Women English novelists have done just that, making even the most phallocratic writers become more indiscernible in zones of proximity, become women [even Lawrence and Miller].

Masculine and feminine have been defined by 'the great dualism machines'(305).  The real issue turns on the body and how it has been fabricated to produce 'opposable organisms'[typical exaggeration, what they mean is that girls are taught to become proper little girls].  Constructing a BWO 'is inseparable from a becoming - woman'[or 'a molecular woman'].  Girls are defined by particles and relations etc.  And are thus haecceities, roaming on the BWO.  Girls defined thus do not belong to conventional social groups, but 'slip in everywhere', and 'produce N molecular sexes on the line of flight'.  This shows us the way out of dualism - we should 'be - between'.  Virginia Woolf demonstrated this.  Girls [thus defined] are seen as 'the block of becoming' that accompanies every dualism.  'Becoming woman... produces the universal girl [becoming is domesticated into conventional forms?] '.  We can see this in descriptions of the special role of girls, as in Russian terrorism or the work of Trost [pass].  The notion of the girl and the child is a key location for molecular politics: both draw their strength not from their official molar statuses but from their becoming- molecular and the effect this can have on standard sexes and ages.  So adults can become - child and men can become - women.  Again, this is not real children or women we are talking about but 'becoming itself that is a child or a girl' (306).  These becomings can be found with both sexes.  [And here is a nice bit of counseling for the modern reader] 'knowing how to age does not mean remaining young: it means extracting from one stage the particles, the speeds and slownesses, the flows that constitutes the youth of that age'.  The same goes for sexual relationships - we must extract our particles and their polymorphous possibilities.  Apparently, this helps us answer the question asked of Proust - why he changed the sex of Albert into Albertine.

All becomings 'begin with and pass through becoming woman'.  We can now explain the remark made earlier about warriors disguising themselves as girls - not a shameful matter, but the warrior's tactic to pursue a line of flight by camouflage - 'the warrior arises in the infinity of a line of flight'[literary bullshit again].  Girls who refused to marry are doing the same thing.  Again they do not resemble each other nor are they equivalent.  The bisexuality and homosexuality of military societies is also not imitative or structural, but instead represents 'an essential anomie of the man of war'.  Warriors are also swept up in the general furore of combat and become - animal.  But this is only possible once they have developed as warriors, and this follows the phase of becoming-women above [specious bollox], the contagion spread by the girl becoming-woman is inseparable from becoming-animal in this case, occupying 'a single "block"'.  The contagion works the other way to do so that the girl 'becomes warrior by contagion with the animal'.  Everything occupies 'an asymmetrical block of becoming, an instantaneous zigzag' (307), in 'a double war machine'[a massive construction based on very flimsy arguments].

More on the significance of transvestism or female impersonation [refd to Bettelheim and Bateson]. It is not social nor psychological but about becoming-animal and its power. Conventional sexuality is the same -- it 'brings into play' n sexes, and 'a war machine through which love passes' (307) [Blimey!]. This is not metaphorical -- it happens after sexuality has 'dried up'. Love is itself a war machine. Sex leads to uncontrollable becomings, 'the production of a thousand sexes'. First men become-women then both become-animal after 'an emission [sic] of particles'. This is not bestiality, not playing at beastliness. Becoming-animal is real in itself, a matter of proximity or indiscernibility, proper sharing with animals.

All these becomings end 'without a doubt' (308) in becoming-imperceptible. This is explored in literature about shrinking men or hermits. It involves a relation between 'the (anorganic) imperceptible, the (asignifying) indiscernible and the (asubjective) impersonal'. It aims at , first, being like everybody else [the knight of faith example]. This was Scott Fitzgerald's goal too [in the Crack-Up]  We have to become a stranger though, requiring 'much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution' as in understated 'English elegance'. We eliminate the easily perceived. We eliminate waste and superfluity [and death apparently], and everything that ties us to molar identities: they provide us with an aggregate identity, but this is not 'becoming everybody/everything'.  The cosmos and its molecular components also have to be involved, so that we have to 'make a world'.  We turn ourselves into an abstract line, through elimination [like Ahab, rejecting all the human comforts?], and then attempt to combine with other lines, as in camouflaged animals 'crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing', certainly not organic divisions, so that it can 'world' with its surroundings.  Chinese poets do the same, apparently, working with only the essential lines and movements depicted through traits or strokes.

If we do this successfully, we will find our own proximities and zones, and grasp 'the cosmos as an abstract machine, and each world as an assemblage effectuating it' (309).  Kerouac and Virginia Woolf were on the right lines, eliminating all resemblances and analogies, but putting in everything that moment included [impossible, of  course].  The moment here is the haecceity.  We then discover the cosmic haecceities and impersonalities.  We suppress everything that 'prevents us from slipping between things'.  We then understand the meaning of the 'indefinite article, the infinitive - becoming, and the proper name'.  'Saturate, eliminate, put everything in'[sounds like a trotskyite hippy].

Movement is important.  It is itself imperceptible, and can be grasped only if bodies are displaced or developed.  Movements or becomings as pure relations of speed and slowness and pure affects are both above and below normal perception, so much of it continues elsewhere.  It operates both before and after perception [or do I mean above and below the thresholds of perception].  It is like Japanese wrestling, with slow advances and then lightning results.  The 'photographic or cinematic threshold' helps us get there, but there is still movement and affect above and below [then a really obscure reference to Kierkegaard, 310].  However, movement must be perceived, we must be able to perceive the imperceptible, by exceeding conventional thresholds of perception: these offer only snapshots of the development and organisation of form on the plane of transcendence.  On the plane of immanence, we must see that aggregates are composed [in a different sort of time], and then we will have reached beyond the thresholds of normal perception [thought of a new conception of time outside normal perception -- I  think. This is really dense. It is probably definitional again -- we have already defined the plane of consistency as possessing this sort of movement and time. We are unfolding implications again, as in 19th century philosophy].  Once we see how the two planes affect each other, we can explain why we cannot perceive movements on one, but must argue for their existence on the other.  Kierkegaard again is cited on faith, which 'must become a pure plane of immanence' [note the 'must'], with the finite as a product.  We see perception now as possible beyond normal limits, no longer tied to conventional subjects and objects, but 'in the midst of things' (311), 'in the presence of one haecceity in another'.

Kierkegaard sees that the knight of faith will penetrate this mystery, but there are other knights [practitioners] of drugs, for example, which also help us to see becomings of various kinds on this plane, a molecular notion of perception [with a reference to Castenada again].  Drugs abandon the usual distinctions between hallucination and reality, for example, and focus their attention on speed and its modification.  There is an 'overall Drug assemblage' where the imperceptible is perceived, perception is molecular, desire 'invests' perception and perceived.  American drug takers, Castenada and others have described this [including somebody called Fiedler - it looks quite interesting, seeing black Americans as the representation of affect, and American Indians as able to produce particularly subtle forms of perception].  Michaux in Europe is also cited - explaining what might be seen as disorientation as entering a new level of perception, 'leaving nothing but the world of speeds and slownesses', the zigzag of a line disrupting faces and landscapes, 'A whole rhizomatic labour of perception, the moment when desire and perception meld'(312).

Sociology and psychology operate with the wrong notion of causality - too general and extrinsic.  Common accounts of drugs operate with general notions of pleasure and misfortune, difficulties in communication, external causes of different kinds.  This is a pretence at understanding, 'as good as saying nothing' [ooh!].  Assemblages never have 'a causal infrastructure', but instead 'an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or of deterritorialization', which is effectuated after connection 'with general causalities of another nature', but 'in no way explained by them'[pathetic weasel, amounts to no more than saying there is a potential for change requiring the right social conditions].  Instead, we have to understand 'the issue of drugs' when desire invests perception, and perception becomes molecular 'at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived'(313) -[that is when we have supplied a philosophy of planes of consistency].  Drugs are then seen as an agent of becoming. 

Pharmacoanalysis is more useful than psychoanalysis.  That served as a model of reference because it could build 'a schema of a specific causality', but this still remains at the level of the plane of organization, which is never grasped in itself, but only inferred or concealed: 'the Unconscious'.  The unconscious is a plane of transcendence which can justify and guarantee psychoanalysis and its interpretations [no different from D and G on the plane of consistency - same transcendental argument?].  This plane has to be connected to the normal system of perception and consciousness following a translation of desire: this is too closely linked to 'gross molarities', however, as with the oedipal structure.  Psychoanalysis operates with 'a dualism machine', dividing conscious and unconscious, perceptible and imperceptible, and cannot perceive the plane of consistency or immanence.  When we operate with that plane, we are involved in experimentation rather than interpretation, and operate with the 'molecular, non figurative and non symbolic'.  The unconscious becomes what is given in 'microperceptions'; desire is directly linked to perception, although desire has something imperceptible, non figurative as its object.  The unconscious itself is no longer a privileged principle of organization, but something constructed on an immanent plane, not something 'discovered', so the basis for the difference with the conscious is no longer relevant.  Drugs make the Unconscious immanent and thus access the plane of immanence which Freud never properly understood [we are told he abandoned experiments with cocaine which might have provided 'a direct approach to the unconscious'].

However drugs do not always succeed in drawing the plane adequately either, and using them risks increasing segmentation, including dependency.  Experiences of becoming from changes in perception still involves merely 'imitating a plane of consistency rather than drawing it as an absolute threshold' (314) [which is why we need D and G philosophy].  Any deterritorializations remain relative, and are often accompanied by 'the most abject reterritorializations', in a nasty sequence.  Lines of flight end in black holes.  Any gain in microperception can be accompanied by hallucination,  delusion or paranoia, which operate with conventional forms and subjects after all.  The dangers have already been discussed: it becomes impossible to master speed, and instead of creating a BWO, drug addicts end up with 'a vitrified or empty body, or a cancerous one'.  Both Artaud and Michaux have warned us about this.  Desire should be linked to perception and immanence, but this can fail in the drug assemblage, and segmentarity remains.

Drug takers are not cautious enough, and can become 'false heroes' or make false starts, benefiting only others.  Drug users tend to 'start over again from ground zero' instead of operating in the middle, and learning how to take and abstain.  Whether the drug experimenters have changed the perception of other is the issue: it is OK for us to wait for them to take the risks, this is 'joining an undertaking in the middle', and learning to choose the right molecules and particles which provide the best proximities.  Technically, 'the vital assemblage, the life assemblage' can be reached with any molecules, even silicon, but it is different with abstract machines which require a more extensive zones of proximity to construct a plane of consistency than silicon can offer.  This is another example of how 'machinic reasons are entirely different from logical reasons or possibilities' (316).  It is not a matter of choosing a model - 'one straddles the right horse'.  Drug users have made the wrong choices because drugs are too unwieldy.  Instead 'the plane must distill its own drugs, remaining master of speeds and proximities'.

13th example - the secret, and how it relates to the imperceptible.  The secret can be defined as something where the content is too big for its form, or where the form itself is concealed, say in a box, and suppressing the relations inside the form.  Concealment takes place for a number of reasons.  However, we should not think of it as a binary term, with disclosure or desecration as its opposite.  There must be a perception of the secret, and this itself is secret: it is part of the concept [the example is when describing the activities of a spy who is secret and who keeps secrets].  The danger is that there will always be a perception 'finer than yours, a perception of your imperceptible, of what is in your box' (316).  This means a further stage of attempting to perceive and detect those who want to penetrate the secret.  Ideally, the secret should be imperceptible initially, as much as its content, but secrets can also spread to other activities, themselves secret - 'the secret as secretion' (317) [killer!].

Since social relations are involved, the secret 'is a sociological or social notion.  Every secret is a collective assemblage'.  As we have seen, there is movement of secrecy - 'the secret has a becoming'.  Secrets originate in the war machine and various other becomings like - woman and these are 'bring the secret'.  Secret societies also have certain laws, protection, hierarchy, silence, compartmentalisation and so on.  Again, there are more general principles or 'laws': every secret society must have 'a secret hind society' to police it; secret societies have a distinct mode of action which is also secret - influence, pressure, secret languages and so on.  However, these depend on the complicity of the wider society.

So the secret 'must acquire its own form' (318), with the finite contents becoming infinite forms of secrecy.  If this happens, absolute imperceptibility results, and the secret takes on 'an eminently virile [vigorous?] paranoid form', both keeping content secret, and acting to regulate the perceptions of others [and some examples from clinical studies of paranoids ensue, including Schreber -- and Roussel!].  Paranoids develop special judgments rather than actually investigating secrets, even the narrator judging Albertine.

Psychoanalysis itself has become 'the infinite form of secrecy', rejecting simple analyses of secret contents.  Psychoanalysis itself is needed to assess the contents 'against the pure form' (319).  However, a paradox awaits ['an inevitable adventure'], because analysis can never provide a simple answer to the question 'what happened?', Or at least a pathetic secret involving oedipus or castration emerges - 'It is enough to make women, children, lunatics, and molecules laugh'.

The more secrecy spreads, 'the thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes', the content becomes molecular, and the form dissolves.  The secret takes on 'a more feminine status'.  Women handle secrets differently, although they can simply invert virile secrecy.  Their indiscretion and gossiping leads to the peculiar ability to both be secretive while hiding nothing.  This is like courtly love, operating with maximum transparency.  It is not like the 'grave attitude' of men, who bear a burden for years, even if it turns out to be trivial.  Women on the other hand tell everything, although 'no one knows more at the end than at the beginning'.  Women are themselves a secret, assumed to be innocent [what a lot of generalized junk!].  Apparently what this shows is that the secret has now become molecular, 'a pure moving line'.  [Later, some people can be 'secret by transparency, as impenetrable as water']

Apparently, Henry James described this best, beginning by looking for secret contents, then discussing infinite forms of secrecy that do not require a content.  He is one of the writers 'who is swept up in an irresistible becoming - woman'[illustrated best, apparently, in Daisy Miller].  [After more flowery stuff] 'Oedipus passes through all three secrets' (320) - the secret of the Sphinx, the one that weighs upon him from his own guilt, and the one that makes him inaccessible, a figure of flight and exile.

Discussion - why is there no becoming - man?  Man is a majoritarian identity, whereas all becomings are minoritarian [I think this means that male identity is supported by the state - being majority is nothing to do with numbers, but rather standards against which others are judged: 'the majority in the universal assumes as pregiven the right and power of men' (321).

Women have a special status in all becomings as a result [a special example of the obvious alternative to the standard?] Ethnic and other minorities can exist without becoming, as reterritorializations.  Even blacks have to undergo becomings to avoid this.  'Even women must become - woman'(321).  These becomings affect men and ethnic majorities as well [then a very odd bit about subjects of becoming always being men, but only as subjects of becoming].  Examples are given in novels or films of the wider effects. Minorities can be a medium of becoming only once they deny their status as 'definable aggregate in relation to the majority'.  So  first a subject withdraws from the majority, then an agent appears from the minority, sometimes in the form of 'a block of alliance' [within one individual]

A woman has to become woman, 'but in a becoming - woman of all man'[got really confused politically now!].  Same for Jews and other ethnic minorities, who have to become deterritorialized.  Thus identity supplied by the majority can be deterritorialized and become part of a programme of becoming - minoritarian.  This can be instigated by anything at all, anything that can suggest the idea, although this is always political and requires eventually, 'an active micro politics', not aimed at winning or obtaining a majority.

Becoming is not a matter of past and future - the two coexist.  Some societies that appear to lack history or are outside of it, are really 'societies of becoming (war or societies, secret societies etc.)'(322).  There is only a history of the majority, however.

'Man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular'.  The faciality function is the form to preserve male majorities and set the standards - the rational European.  The essential point then becomes arborescent and produces its own characteristic oppositions - male/female, adult/child, white/black, rational/animal.  The third eye in the face organizes these binary distributions and reproduces itself 'in the principal term of the opposition'.  Man becomes the central point, its 'gigantic memory'(323), something that resonates with all the other points in an arborescent system [scratchy diagram on page 604 - another one illustrates becoming as a kind of vector].  What this shows is that 'arborescence is the submission of a line to the point' [a connection follows key points in a system of dominance in this case].  Majoritarian memory assigns status to other memories, mere childhood memories or colonial memories, for example.  However, we can elaborate on a system of straight lines between points by developing 'contiguous points'[the example is imagined alternative identities], to produce phantasies rather than dominant memories.  These are useful, but not very helpful in developing becoming, since they do not break with the arborescent schema.

Lines of becoming pass between points, through the middle [like a vector of resultant forces].  There was no beginning or end, no origin, but only a middle -- this is not an average, but 'the absolute speed of movement'[the sum of the other two forces?].  Becoming can block a line because it is a zone of proximity and indiscernibility which can draw in the lines [as an attractor?].  Once this has happened, original contiguity and distance are irrelevant - lines are deterritorialized [as in the orchid and the bleeding wasp: one does not turn into the other, but they generate a becoming as 'the movement by which the line frees itself from the point and renders points indiscernible: the rhizome'(324)].  Becoming also breaks with memory ['is an antimemory'], since memories always reterritorialize.  A line as 'a vector of deterritorialization' makes contact with molecules, makes them break with existing aggregates, the more so that deterritorialization increases.  The block [assemblage?] that results can be compared with the one produced by memory.  Thus we have a childhood memory of ourselves, but also a childhood block 'or a becoming child', something in a zone of proximity with the adult that can produce a becoming.  Again Virginia Woolf apparently is into this notion of blocks rather than memories.  D and G wish to correct any nasty impressions they may have left in their earlier work by using the term memory.

Lines are not entirely opposed to points, nor blocks to memories.  Even a system of points includes certain lines, and blocks can assign new functions.  The issue is that in a system of points, there are linear coordinates, the two basic coordinates but also a 'horizontal line of superposition', and a 'vertical line or plane of displacement' (325) [extensions of those lines?] . Punctual systems can be defined as a set of coordinates like these.  Arborescent systems are included, and so are 'molar and mnemonic systems in general'.  Conventional memory can be considered as a punctual organization because every present refers to 'a horizontal line of the flow of time (kinematics)'connecting an old present to the actual present, and a vertical line of the order of time connecting the present to the past.

We find such a schema in '"didactic"' or 'mnemotechnic' kinds of art.  Music is different, however using a horizontal melodic line, such as the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are superposed, so that points can be counter points.  The vertical line or plane represents  harmonies, not tightly dependent on the melody, but linking with them.  Paintings have both vertical and horizontal dimensions, and colours relate to 'verticals of displacement and horizontals of superposition' [as in the work on Bacon, although here the examples are Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian]. In summary, there are two baselines which coordinate points; horizontal lines can be superposed vertically and vertical lines moved horizontally, following 'horizontal frequency and vertical resonance'; from lines between points can be local connections, and include diagonals which then 'institute' frequencies and resonances.  Systems can be seen to territorialize or reterritorialize.  Lines are subordinated to points.

ln linear or even multilinear systems, the line has been freed, including the diagonal.  Innovative musicians and painters develop the systems to unsettle punctual systems.  Innovators do this,  but that also depends upon the punctual system allowing such operations.  When applied to history and memory, history can elaborate and alter the coordinates of memory, but again creative operations exploring lines can arise - technically between a history of attempting to manage memory, and new multilinear assemblages which arise.  These are becomings and are transhistorical.  All acts of creation require a break with history/memory.  Nietzsche for example sees conventional history as opposing both sub and super historical.  His notion of the untimely 'is another name for haecceity, becoming' (326) [we also rework earlier tropes like maps and tracings, geography as opposed to history, the rhizome].  Creations can be seen therefore as 'mutant abstract lines that have detached themselves from the task of representing a world, precisely because they assemble a new type of reality', which history tries to manage as a punctual system.

Boulez can be seen as drawing diagonals between 'a harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon' (327), in a series of diagonals or 'lines of deterritorialization' (327).  A 'sound block' emerges that has no point of origin 'since it is always and already in the middle of the line', and cannot be located on coordinates.  Nor does it join adjacent points with a conventional line - it is 'in "non pulsed time"'.  This block produces further deterritorializations on a plane of consistency, where it is affected by the usual intensive speeds and slownesses and so on.  This can end in proliferation or extinction.  It shows the power of becoming. The Viennese school [pass] also established a new kind of reterritorialization and was [only?] thus established in history.  Further creative acts came after it.  Creative musicians operate like this, to create a haecceity, usually by forming a diagonal.  In this way, points are subordinated to lines, and serve only to mark [singular or Remarkable] points.  Lots of examples follow [but I cannot follow them].

Here is a repro of a musical score that might help though -- typically, it appears at the start of Chapter 1 (3), not here. It never occurred to me before but if you are breaking with 'pulsed time' you can't use the old musical notation. Diagonal lines are clear:
score

Here is another one with nice diagonals, that I found on the Web:

notation


While we are here, this is one of John Cage's, described using very pregnant terminology:
cage score



'In a multilinear system, everything happens at once' (328) [which I think they would say  can be rendered 'with infinite speed'].  The sound block that results 'propels itself by its own non localisable middle…  It is a body without organs'[Schumann is cited here].  Can this be seen in painting?  Again lines run between points in a different direction, becoming indiscernible.  Diagonals become transversals [more examples that elude me].  Painters they like have abandoned representation, but also attempts to outline any forms - this is where lines become truly abstract and mutant.  Lines do not outline shapes but the spaces between things [one example in the book on Bacon is cubism, trying to depict movement in a painting etc] .  Historically,  perspective was domesticated - lines of flights were occupied and reterritorialized [they explain that 'occupy' means 'giving an occupation to', fixing a memory or code, assigning a function - obscure bastards. Those unfamiliar with Latin,not knowing that 'punctum' means 'point' might also be baffled by 'punctual' systems and wonder what 'being on time' has to do with it?].  Conventional perspective ended in 'a punctual black hole' (329)  [the vanishing point].  However, modern painters realize that lines of flight do not just have to represent depth or perspective, partly because classical perspective showed the possibilities of 'a whole profusion of creative lines'.  Painting therefore may be 'engaged in a becoming as intense as that of music'.