Above, you will find our recorded lecture, and below you will find our script.
This lecture was hosted and written by Jobee, Don’t Even Dream About It, and Cody Without Organs.
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Introduction
Maty: Hello Everyone, welcome again to the third official “Negative Maps” lecture.
Today, we are going to be be going over the longest plateau, in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical anti-treatise A Thousand Plateaus, which goes by the full title “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…”.
Even the title itself has a lot we can break down. Why is it dated at 1730? What does it mean to become animal, intense, or imperceptible?
[the word 'vampire' (or 'vampyre'!) first appeared in english language w two 1732 publications, in;
march– the translation from german of an investigative report on arnold paole, a serbian hajduk who supposedly turned vampire after his death, triggering an epidemic in his village of meduegna that killed 16 people, following which;
may– the release of an article entitled 'political vampires' by the london magazine, an anti-semetic political metaphor against ‘ravenous ministers’, ‘blood-suckers’ who plundered ‘publick revenues’ through policies of taxation long after death]
When one begins the plateau, the reader will immediately form a new set of questions, such as why is the plateau divided into a series of memories such as memories of a Naturalist, Bergson, Spinozist, Sorcerer and eventually more abstract concepts like Music, and Molecules.
Most of these questions will surely be attempted in this lecture, but we are by no means providing a final interpretation on the matter. This plateau is by all accounts a rhizome, a multiplicity, and as Deleuze and Guattari later reiterate, a Haecceity. By this we mean, this text does not call for a single final interpretation, or a Judgment of God, but rather invites us to play on the plane of consistency, like a Childish Spinozist.
Before getting into animals, Spinza, sorcerers, vampires, werewolves and molecules, let's answer the first question: Why becoming? This answer is simple, because becoming is fundamentally opposed to being.
Being is seen here as a static category, like dead objects in a museum.
To be is to assume some stable sense of coherent identity.
“I am this, I am that”.
Deleuze instead says that the only kind of being is becoming. Becoming is change, flux, flow, and movement. Or rather, becoming can only be seen as that which is always changing and always different.
Cody: This metaphysical approach returns us to the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus, we call this process philosophy and Deleuze has traced for us a series of minor philosophers who engage and create concepts for the philosophy of process - of becoming and Difference.
Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson are the main trio which Deleuze have devoted seminars and several books of work to, in them Deleuze and Guattari find concepts and lenses of which to help form their own cartography.
Their own concepts. Their own perspectives.
"we prefer to filiation, contagion."
Becoming Beyond Representation, and the Genealogy of Becoming-Animal
Cody: The Plateau is named after three particular concepts from D&G inspired by not only the process philosophers but also scientists, minor scientists who approach their phenomena with a methodology that differs in some ways from the major schools of scientific inquiry.
And from literature, film, art.
We call this the nomadology or nomadic style of D&G, they belong to no land domain, they are instead a territory.
They take concepts and weapons from anywhere there are concepts and weapons to be found.
The philosopher Georg Hegel refers to Wissenschaft (knowledge), such as Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (humanities and social sciences), which are also the domains across the West for the main scientific strands that can include other forms of knowing like logic -
Deleuze and Guattari find concepts and respond to Wissenschaft, different domains within and across academia - after the beginning opens with a little analysis of a film (Memories of a movie goer), the Plateau starts by discussing how evolutionary and natural sciences develop their scientific method of classifying and structuring their respective phenomena - via serialization and genetic filiation.
Monsters are at least as old as campfire, as the stories told by campfire, as the shadows borne from campfire. Levi-Strauss, in his study of myths, is always encountering stories by which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes… something else. This is part of what Deleuze & Guattari refer to as a ‘block of becoming’. Though possible to explain this phenomena by correspondence between two relations - the human passing over into animality, the animal passing over into humanimality - D&G feel you’re robbing yourself. You’re taking the story far too literally, in order to fully ‘get at it’ - the myth is always re-encoded by the storyteller. There are two multiplicities, sure, but same becoming; the self as a threshold, as a door. “A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. Neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or… an identification.”
“Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real… for if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes.” There are no pre-existing objects. Instead, objects, subjects, concepts are composed of nothing more or less than relations, reciprocal enfoldings gathered together in temporary and contingent unities. Furthermore, since a relation cannot exist in isolation, all entities can be understood in relation to one another.
“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 exists only as taken up in another becoming of which it itself is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first.”
Maty: “Becoming-Animal…” begins as geneology of different models of representation in the study of natural history. Primarily, they discuss the models of representation referred to as serial and structural.
A serialized model of resemblance can be reduced abstractly to the following formula: [1 than 2 than 3 than 4]. Such as a chain reaction where ‘a’ causes ‘b’ causes ‘c’ and so on. Or similarly with a series of resemblances: “a resembles b, b resembles c”. History from the perspective of some forms of theology, begins with a ‘first cause’ (a) which causes all other causes (b,c,d and so on). From here we arrive at a series of resemblances with ‘God’ -- where all living and nonliving things are imperfect deviations of God through space and time.
God is seen here as putting time into motion (chronos), while enforcing a model of representation where God is at the top and all other things are viewed as imperfect variations of God.
The structural model of representation on the other hand says “a is to b as b is to c”. An example they give is ‘gills are to breathing underwater as lungs are to breathing air’. This is a type of resemblance understood by structure or analogy. For example, the proletariat are to the bourgeoisie, as the Serfs were to the Lordship.
Distinguishing these two types of models, Deleuze and Guattari say “In the first case [serial], I have resemblances that differ from one another in a single series, and between series” -- a is different from b which is different from c, or a changes into b which changes into c.
Think of how Pokemon evolve in a series of transformations.
Charmander becomes charmeleon and becomes charizard. This is a type of change through space and time, or Chronos (Chronological Time).
Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari say “In the second case [structure], I have differences that resemble each other within a single structure, and between structures” -- [a, b] are seen as similar to [b, c] metaphorically. These are a kind of family resemblance.
Charmander is to Charizard what Squirtle is to Blastoise.
Through both of these, ‘God’ is seen as the third term which allows these differences to be judged.
Trying to escape ‘God’ as the perfect first cause, Darwin’s Evolutionism poses a similarly serialized model of representation. In Evolutionism, we still have serialization, except now it is with small changes in genetic deviation through a process of natural selection that are what cause evolutionary change. Through time and small genetic differences in the series, species a becomes species b. Furthermore the serialization of species-change is viewed as necessarily progressive or regressive. Progressive when species become stronger and better adapt to their environment, regressive when they become weaker and less fit. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say “This problem [of serialization and structuralism] is in no way behind us”.
Evolutionism (like Theology) has a horizontal axis of alliance (alliance between species, and amongst species), as well as a vertical axis of filliation or series axis (genetic change over time, hierarchy). The vertical axis is genetic change over time discussed previously, whereas the horizontal axis is akin to Kropotkin’s theory of Mutual Aid -- that cooperation amongst and between species influences the survival of said species.
As Nieztche’s observation that ‘God is Dead’ points out so well, we have not escaped theology so much as replaced it with a new content -- which is the theology of science. The regime of signs has changed, but the way which signs are ordered in sequence and groupings is largely the same.
Deleuze and Guattari take this observation a step further, saying that Jungian psychoanalysis finds a similar representative model in archetypes, whereas sociological structuralism models representation of symbolic understanding. In fact, much of the history of philosophy falls into one of these representational models.
With Deleuze and Guattari, we stop seeing becoming as ‘a resembling b’ or ‘a and b’ resembling ‘b and c’. We say ‘a goes into composition with b’ and becomes ab. Or even, difference itself populates a surface such as with the formula [and…and…and]. Each of these ‘ands’ are always different, and can link unnatural participations together which are not always filial or hierarchical. This would be called a line of flight.
For an example of alliance between species, consider the relationship of the wasp and the orchid. Deleuze and Guattari say that there is a ‘block of becoming’ with the wasp and the orchid where neither are imitating the other, but forming a new body which is ambiguous and temporary. The wasp and the orchid form a heterogeneous block of mutual becoming.
If evolutionism has anything to salvage, it is alliance not filliation! As Deleuze and Guattari say, "If evolutionism includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domains of symbiosis that brings into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms with no possible filliation" (238). Symbiosis is defined as “a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups”, but you could also add different kingdoms of species and phylum.
You may see here a connection to Donna Harraway’s idea of ‘companion species’. Harraway says that “Companion species [like humans and dogs] are relentlessly becoming-with”, or establishes a mutual becoming with one another. In addition, the dog has a complicated relationship with human history. As Harraway says in the Companion Species Manifesto “Dog people like to forget that dogs were also lethal guided weapons and instrunments of terror in the European conquest of the Americas, as well as in Alexander the Great's paradigm-setting imperial travels“, and also house pets. You also have exotic pets, such as Mike Tyson's tigers. My little beasts.
What Harraway takes issue with Deleuze and Guattari is their supposed hatred for house animals. As Deleuze and Guattari bluntly declare, “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool”. This upsets Harraway because she interprets Delueze and Guattari as having a “scorn for the homely and the ordinary”.
In Harraway’s defense, posthumanist theorist Rosi Braidoitti says : “companion species [like Dogs, Birds and Cats]…have been historically confined within infantilizing narratives that established affective kinship relations across the species' '. And furthermore, their inscribed status as house animals, much like animals inscribed as ‘food animals’ are all coded as such by the machinic force of capital.
However, what Harraway seems to miss here is that Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism here isn’t about the house animals themselves but of the familial relationship set up by humans with animals. Or in other words, how dogs and cats are codified within an oedipal-familial framework.
Robert Leston, in his essay detailing the Harraway/Deleuze-Guattari divide goes as far as to say “When Deleuze and Guattari say that “anyone who likes dogs and cats is a fool,” they are speaking specifically about the very same people Haraway addresses” when she criticizes the infantilizing nature of Dog culture.
In the first part of “Memories of a Sorcerer”, they define three types of animals: familial-oedipal, Jungian state-animals (or animals of divine myth, like the serpent-devil), and pack animals. The issue of familial-oedipal animals is how animals are sorted in an aborecent structure of representation, and for state-animals how they are structured in a divine mythos of representation.
Dogs and cats can be all of these types of animals, but they are funneled into the oedipal framework. What Delueze and Guattari want therefore is a true involvement, a real becoming. Which is always molecular and ambiguous.
Cody: Philosophy is itself usually split into around 4 currents: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and ethics, mostly in academia but there are a multitude of other ways to label branches of philosophy, such as language, mind, political etc -
D&G take these concepts back into their philosophical territory, onto their plane of immanence, where they can melt down the concepts.
"like how one melts down a cannon to make new weapons" - (Negotiations)
And produce new concepts.
By creating a plane of consistency which pulls the frameworks of modern natural science into the metaphysics and ethics of particularly Spinoza - the domain particularly known as post-structuralism" which responds to the linguistics of structuralism and to the systems inspired by structuralism.
What we get is "not series, or structure. Not filiation, but contagion".
"all things happen on one plane. The plane of Nature. Though nothing natural happens here, there is no difference between natural and artificial. Between nature and artifice."
Artifice: artificium, based on ars, art- ‘art’ + facere ‘make' - workmanship, to make art.
Artificial itself means 'synthetic' in the sense of being Man made.
This is for instance how Marx conceives of human nature -
From Erich Fromm's Marx's concept of man:
"The concept of the active, productive man who grasps and embraces the objective world with his own powers cannot be fully understood without the concept of the negation of productivity: alienation.
For Marx the history of mankind is a history of the increasing development of man, and at the same time of increasing alienation. His concept of socialism is the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization.
Alienation (or "estrangement") means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remains alien to him. They stand above and against him as objects, even though they may be objects of his own creation. Alienation is essentially experiencing the world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object."
Memories of a Spinozist I/II & Memories of a Haecceity
Cody: This is how Spinoza describes sad passion in the Ethics, Marx's man is one of history, a history of the development of man itself.
Human nature, as Aristotle says -" political animal" who is that which makes itself out of nature. Alienated in a sense from nature.
Spinoza says that when two bodies Collide or interact with one another, they can divide or join. Split or become one. Alienation or sad passion is becoming-divided when colliding with any body.
In a Spinozist-Marxist framework, Man is produced by nature and the producer of nature, they exist on the same plane [the plane of organization/development].
They are both unique expressions of a single, infinite substance.
Which we call monism.
We find this in the materialism of Marx, the neutral monism of William James, and the substance monism of Spinoza.
[sigma grindset tip #230; always b debord postin]
Alienation, collision with the Other, interaction with bodies, this is where change proliferates, the body without organs is pure alienation. Spinoza and Nietzsche make us right at home in alienation.
This metaphysics and conceptualisation also provide the flavor of immanence, this means, in opposition to transcendence, all things stem from within, not from without.
To conceive of all things as expressions of a single substance, as opposed to something like Cartesian dualism between mind and body, a split dichotomy, Spinozism conceives of monism where mind and body are both expressions of the same thing.
This same thing not being a higher, unified, transcendent or ideal form like Plato's forms or Kant's Das Ding, but a greater whole which stems entirely from the internal, from involution. The One is said with a single meaning of all the multiple. Being expresses in a single meaning all that differs.
Deus sive Natura, God or Nature. Where in this single, panpsychist plane of Nature, the distinction between a dualism of man and nature is flattened. A Flatline Construct.
They are interdependent, in a constant dialectic, they are mediated with one another. Hegel calls this Spirit.
An evolutionary diagram or genealogy conceives of an arborescent, transcendent model, from top to bottom, of filiation and genesis, it specifies between the identities within a genus orfamily and the difference between these identities. Wolves are all wolves, but not all wolves are the same.
In an éthologie, an ethological point of view, there is no higher identity or signifier which comes to represent all things under the same plane, but all identities and Differences between are explored as unique to one another. All things that are being (being Wolf, being Dad) are switched to becoming.
Father to son is still an aspect of this rhizomatic approach, oedipus and genealogy still function, but they join in a conjunctive synthesis with other forms of topology, such as between species, between behaviors, between kingdoms. In this way, a wasp and an orchid both engage in a becoming-wasp, becoming-orchid, they enter into relations with another that produce new lines of flight for each and for them as one. The orchid changes, the wasp changes, and both become singular and unified expressions. Yet they also produce out of themselves and each other, something entirely new. They can also fail, this failure and the failures of becoming mark the plane of immanence as much as successful becomings do.
Maty: This is what Bergson calls creative evolution. "To involve is to form a block", a block of becoming. To evolve means to go somewhere (backwards or forwards), whereas to involve means to go into composition or decomposition with something else.
As Deleuze and Guattari speculate, becoming-animal does not proliferate by filliaton but instead by contagion. Consider how vampires create new vampires. They don’t create families of vampires, but proliferate by contagion and infection. They form packs and multiplicities. Vampires may operate solo when feeding, but you can always find the crypt where they all hide together. Becoming-Animal is also always a process of continual ambiguous change; “...packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other. Werewolves become vampires when they die”.
One of my favorite quotes from this plateau is when D&G say, “It is in war, famine, and epidemic that werewolves and vampires proliferate”(243). What D&G are getting at here is precisely the same point as Marx compares Capitalism to Vampires which ‘sucks living labor’. As it sucks living labor, capitalism converts said labor into more capital. Similarly, in war and famine, we see a similar kind of economic boom. At the same time that Capital causes war and Famine, it also profits from them. This is how vampires proliferate.
Becoming-Animal, therefore, is not a metaphor. It is a real becoming even if the animal the human becomes is not a real animal. It's not imitation or being, this is a false binary. Becoming is something more in flux, less stable. Becoming is ambiguous, something that folds into each other.
It is not about representation at all. In fact, it is about involution as opposed to evolution. Involution is forming a block of becoming, a multiplicity with other heterogeneous elements. "Involution" does not include a thing progressing or regressing. It is always creative. Affecting and affected. Infecting and infected.
Involution is also lateral as opposed to vertical. It is creating alliance, forming bigger and more powerful bodies with others. But what we become is much more ambiguous and less stable. Heterogeneous as opposed to homogenous. Diverse intensities rather than forms.
“Nothing is more explicit than Levi-Strauss's famous texts on totemism: transcend external resemblances to arrive at internal homologies.” “Absolute conformism… with which all human possibilities are identified for all time, has no external limit other than the fear of falling back into formless animality. Here, in order to remain human, men must remain the same.”
“A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity.”
The Egyptians believed their language was that of the gods. One day, to prove it, they put newborns in a house far away from all society to see if they would learn to talk, to speak Egyptian alone. They came back 15 years later - and what did they find? The kids talking together, but bleating like sheep. They hadn’t noticed that next to the house was a sheep-pen.
We know this when we say that the human is a social creature, and it’s the same when we come to understand we’d die without one another. D&G say we do not become animal without first developing a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity. Is this the Hegelian other; found outside, only later recognised to be inside? “The “I” repeatedly finds itself outside itself… I am, as it were, always other to myself, and there is no final moment in which my return to myself takes place.”
“That is the only way Nature operates – against itself.”
If the first principle of becoming-animal is: pack and contagion, the contagion of the pack, a second principle seems to tell us the opposite: “wherever there is multiplicity, you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with that individual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal.” Beelzebub is the devil, but the devil as lord of flies; you won’t find a lone wolf, but a leader of the pack, and Captain Ahab cannot resist becoming-whale - one that bypasses the pod and enters into direct alliance with “the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby Dick.”
This is what Deleuze & Guattari say “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.”
Cody: Becoming does involve species, types, forms - Wolves, Plants, Dads - but bodies and their relations, affects,
Thoughts and extensions, modes and attributes.
Systems to be constantly opened up.
Contagion. The genes from mother and father to child are not so much down as they are across, horizontal as much as vertical, on the same plane, genes are not purely genetic, but also environmental, epigenetic. Father to son, to wolf, to sun. To dirt, to vampires.
On a single plane of nature, all things exist, but not all things are equal: “Schools, bands, herds, populations are not inferior social forms; they are affects and powers, involutions that grip every animal in a becoming just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal.”
God is a thinking thing and an extensive thing.
Spinoza, Vampires, Werewolves and Sorcerers
Cody: Vampires have a reality about them, as do werewolves. Sorcerers are those who open up these becomings between things, and away from things. Fantasy and reality both play on the same plane, and where one no longer takes ontology to be hierarchical (realms of more or less real reality, such as simulated reality, holograph, material, videos games, or "Real life") but flat.
Non-fiction and fiction take place on the same plane.
Becoming is not an imitating. A representing. It is ambiguous. Becoming itself becomes. One is never sure what one is becoming.
Becoming vampire means infecting -
Becoming animal means exploring the molecular relations and affects available on the plane of immanence which do not mimic an animal but create the animal.
Becomings are foldings and flattenings, they are expressions of multiplicity, of individuated assemblages colliding into each other, opening up límits to become part of a greater, unified whole. A larger, more powerful body.
In order to become you must give up who you are for what you can be, this is the ubermensch who embraces alienation and affirmation. Who knows "there is no doer behind the act, only the deed itself".
Where subject and object Fold in on one another. Universal and particular. World and spirit. Man and nature. Nature and artifice. Man and animal. Man and god. Dog-God. Manimal. Sorcerer. Werewolf. Vampire.
Maty: Becoming mostly on the molecular level via imperceptible changes within oneself and between others. It is always a becoming-with. An involvement, a haecceity. The proper name of a person doesn’t designate a singular identity but a shifting set of lines which are always moving. It is in this way that the proper name of Hurricane Katrina is not much different from Dionysus. The proper name merely refers to the event, much like how the Mississippi river refers to the event of the river despite its perpetual flow and movement.
Pre-Socratic philosopher Hericiltus said “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” By this he might mean that the proper name of the river and the man are both events which are given a proper name out of convenience. The same goes for third person pronouns.
They are rather verbs, actions, becoming, as opposed to nouns which represent beings rather than becoming, which always misses the whole picture.
Deleuze and Guattari say, “The HE [they, she, it etc] does not represent a subject but rather makes a diagram of an assemblage”. This is why they are both also so interested in sentences with an indefinite noun (a noun which doesn’t specify a specific thing), proper name (the name of a person, place or thing) and infinitive verb (a verb which often beings with ‘to’), such as “A HANS TO BECOME HORSE, A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE, ONE TO DIE, WASP TO MEET ORCHID, THEY ARRIVE HUNS.” Or classified advertisements, “dishwasher needed”. All of these statements suggest relationships without actually specifying particular bodies. Or in other words, “It does not overcode statements, it does not transcend them as do the first two persons; on the contrary, it prevents them from falling under the tyranny of subjective or signifying constellations, under the regime of empty redundancies.” It is different to say “The child Hans became a horse” versus “A HANS TO BECOME HORSE”.
It would be a huge mistake to say that a river doesn’t move, or that a hurricane is static. The same goes for The Human. Except that The Human may become involved into the event of the river, or the event of a hurricane, either floating on a gentle stream or thrown into a violent disaster.
Folding and unfolding is how bodies affect and are affected by one another. Symbiosis.
Cody: A nomad science of the rhizome, as opposed to an arborescent, state science.
All becomings refer to a body or form which is characterized by its power and ability to affect. It is in this way vampires and ants are the same. In that what a vampire or ant is représents activity. To vampire and to ant. Affects and relations.
Many cultures through history have had a theology or mysticism which involved insects and animals in the origins of humanity, or as beings which represent an important relation for humans. The Egyptian and Hindu animal gods, taking animal forms. Shape-shifting.
Even modern day alien theorists look at historical examples of beings representing bees, praying mantis, biblical angels, where the alien has become a modern day stand in for the God of the Gaps.
Alien, God, Magic, these terms have been used to designate a type of becoming which is unearthly, inhuman, other. Ineffable. These do not undermine their reality, but underpin it. It is not the words itself that matter, the signifiers or language games. But it is the activity, the affects, the productions which are full of life.
The 10 plagues of the book of Exodus, God's justice, the plague of locusts, this is God's becoming locust and the locust becoming God. Whether an actual event or merely a description of an event, there is still a becoming- either in
These are not two separate distinct modes. Two types of being
They are unique expressions of the same thing - one can become God, become alien, in both thought and expression. These condense onto the same plane of Nature and Immanence. And onto a plane of consistency. First, they are intensities. Then, they are extensive.
J-Rod, an insectoid human being from our future. Gregor, the alienated becoming-bug of Kafka.
Mythology and logos on the same plane. Past and future on the same plane. Reality and fantasy.
Bugs and gods and people. Mountains and rivers and mothers. Evolution and involution. We are already animals, gods, aliens, we always already have them - or can have them. Can become them.
Maty: Digable Planets, hip-hop group from the 90s, rapped about bugs, planets and galaxies as being expressions of infinite variation on differing cosmic scales. Butterfly says “Every man's a planet and the props are there to get it. Insects roll together with the spirit in our orbit”. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari say “children are Spinozist” because they view things in terms of speed and movement, capacity for affecting and being affected, Digable Planets say “We’re just babies, man”. We are infinitely small, as bugs are, but also contain multitudes as Planets do.
Aliens breed, probe, and experiment on humans. Much like humans breed, probe and experiment on animals. Gods, aliens, humans, animals experiment on nature.
Nature is a surface, like a desert, populated by tribes and bodies. So is the body of the schizophrenic. Of the nomad. On it are purely Unnatural participations.
BECOMING-IMPERCEPTIBLE
Becoming-Imperceptible means becoming ambiguous. Becoming unrecognizable. To be imperceptible, an invisibility and imperceivable, though still real and existent.
Becoming imperceptible means that one escapes their look, and can no longer be represented by their appearance or form.
If one is perceptible, others can make sense of you. Pin you down. Which opens you up for manipulation, when someone can make you out, they can find it possible to create their desired outcomes out of you. They can manœuvre the situation and you to meet their own needs and ends.
Imperceptibility leaves others blind. You express something other than that to which you have been formally categorized as a 'being of' - in the same way a binary gender essentialist may pin down to being of a woman as 'having' certain chromosomes or genitalia, or perhaps even expressing certain behavioral characteristics. The stereotype of the bad driver and the Hysteric come to mind.
Perception is therefore always multiple and involves groups, of peopling, of others. It is not only how one perceives themselves, but how others perceive of one. And these perceptions involve their own layers of internal perception, extended outwards into the world. Biases and cognitive confirmation.
Becoming-Imperceptible means losing oneself, and therefore not having a self which can be captured by identity, you cannot be pinned down to anything or anyone. Because one is becoming multiple. Schizophrénizing. To lose oneself is to prevent others from finding you.
Becoming-Imperceptible is the sorcery of abolition through proliferation. There is an idea in Xenofeminism which calls for the “gender post scarcity”, this doesn’t necessarily mean to lock down a million different static identities which perfectly describe oneself. It is instead to make gender so multiplied that it is completely unrecognizable by language.
This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that all becomings are molecular, and that all becomings pass through a becoming-woman. In Eugene Hollands guide to a Thousand Plateaus, he explains that becoming-woman does not refer to someone designated by power as ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ that becomes-woman by imitation or even a Butlerian performance of the molar form of ‘Woman’, but rather the inverse. One becomes-woman or passes through becoming-woman by destratifying gender roles which undermine both ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ as Molar forms. Or in other words, becoming-woman creates lines of flight which escapes state-codification, whereas the Molar forms of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ stratify and rigidify gender and sex as binary categories.
To pass back through the molecular means to be involved with the process of everything else. To become molecular doesn’t mean to become-small, but rather to become-imperceptible -- to move through the middle of things. As Holland explains:
“becoming-imperceptible is achieved by eliminating all forms of organization, signification, and subjectification standing between our desires and our perceptions so that they correlate precisely, thus enabling us to launch forth from home on the thread of a tune, to improvise with the World, and ultimately to meld with it”.
This isn’t to become a homogenous mass, but a sea of difference.
The point is to not be captured by a regime of signs which sorts us into this or that identifying marker. Kieerkagard said, “Once you label me, you negate me”. Once you give me a proper name, assign me a pronoun, and place me into the context of class society, I am atomized (or divuated) from my fellow haecceity. I lose my ability to become a werewolf, to participate in the event of the weather, or to form my own events with others. Perhaps we should only use proper names in order to parody them anyhow? The purpose of becoming-imperceptible doesn’t mean to become atomized, or given a singularly small territory of power, but to participate in the ambiguous river of becoming-world.
Simone De Beauvoir was right to say that “one is not born but becomes a women”. Naming this thing called “being” is always a retroactive and redundant act. To become imperceptible isn’t to become small. It means to become-ambiguous, to dwell within so as to experiment with the lines we were dealt and to keep on breaking them down. Force the lever.
"Psychoanalysis always says find yourself, we say keep exploring your bodies without organs."
It also means opening up one's own perceptions, both how one interacts with the world directly, and how one comes to recognise and perceive the world. Becoming scientist means both entering into relations of the scientist, opening up one's thoughts and imagination to that of science and the scientist, and creating science. These all happen on the same plane. On the body without organs.
One doesn't imitate a scientist. But becomes scientist. Changing both the scientist and the non-scientist as they open and fold into one another.
Through sorcery. Through demonology. [Becoming-Occult]
Becoming imperceptible means to no longer need to see what is happening, but to participate. To become a Haecceity. A Rhizome. To explore. Not to find anything. And of having nothing to be found. This always comes later or after the fact.
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