IV.2 'a Plant, or rather several Plants'

In Nehemiah Grew's circuit of plant-becoming-animal, the singular object -- the plant -- is suddenly (and tentatively: "or rather") broken into several: one animal == many plants. Yet the division is not unidirectional. Throughout his anatomy, Grew shows plants to contain a multiplicity of animal parts folded into a machinic organism, as when the thecae form "so many little Testicles." Indeed, multiplicity is the site in Grew's work where plant/animal resemblances continually break down; for if, as Deleuze and Guattari write, "a becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling" -- in short, a multiplicity of animals come togetherGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987): 239. -- then plants are the singular become multiple within itself.