Deleuze and Guattari 1988

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...

"Natural history can think only in terms of relationships (between A and B), not in terms of production (from A to x)." (234)

relationships:

• series (analogy of proportion) -- "resemblances that differ from one another in a single series, and between series" (234)
• structure (analogy of proportionality) -- "differences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between structures" (234)

"The history of ideas should never be continuous; it should be wary of resemblances, but also of descents or filiations; it should be content to mark the thresholds through which an idea passes, the journeys it takes that change its nature or object." (235)

"A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification." (237)

"Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say tha tyou either imitate or you are. What is real si the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. the becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first." (238)

involution: a form of evolution between heterogeneous terms; not filiation or the movement from less differentiation to more; "becoming is involutionary, involution is creative" (238)

"Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming ia verb with consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equaling," or "producing."" (239)

all animals as packs, as multiplicities (239-240)

affect -- "not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel." (140)

"Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one's bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings." (240)

contagion -- "We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity, peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production. Bands, human or animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes." (241)

"We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming. The Universe does not function by filiation. All we are saying is that animals are packs, and that packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion." (242)

"These multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their becomings-animal." (242)

packs are not families or States or any other ordering institutions

the Anomalous, the Loner in the pack creates space for a relationship of becoming -- is a phenomenon (245)

"The anomalous, the preferential element in the pack, has nothing to do with the preferred, domestic, and psychoanalytic individual. Nor is the anomalous the bearer of a species presenting specific or generic characteristics in their purest state; nor is it a model or unique specimen; nor is it the perfection of a type incarnate; nor is it the eminent term of a series; nor is it the basis of an absolutely harmonious correspondence. The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects, it has neither familiar or subjectified feelings, nor specific or significant characteristics." (244)

"This is our hypothesis: a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in 'intension'. If you change dimensions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity." (245)

"The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance." (246)

"Alliance or the pact is the form of expression for an infection or epidemic constituting the form of content." (247)

"becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. a multiplicity is defined not by its selements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. Since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors." (249)

"In fact, the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities." (249)

borderlines, fibers, thresholds -- "a fiber stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible. Every fiber is a Universe fiber. a fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization." (249)

• c.f. [Leibniz, Monadologie]

resist logical ordering; "Each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy." (250)