BECOMING FOR BEGINNERS
A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself [...] theory is by nature opposed to power. (Deleuze 1977a: p.208)
Why Study Deleuze?
Who was Deleuze?
What are Deleuze/Guattari’s key concepts?
What are Deleuze’s major works in translation?
Actual/Virtual
Like a mirror reflection and its material stimulus, the present moment has two sides: its actual, physical extension and its virtual side that is already part of duration. The process of remembering seeks to actualize the virtual via a recollection–image. In order to find it, memory searches through the virtual reality of layers of the past.
Affect, Affection-Image
Affect is a neuronal response to external stimulus. Qualitative, not quantitative, it involves the body’s power to absorb an external action and react internally. Affect is an intensive vibration, Deleuze’s ‘motor effort on an immobilized receptive plate’, rather than an extensive sensory-motor act. Bergson and Deleuze compare affection-images to adjectives.
Anomaly/anomalous
Anomalies are unnatural, irregular elements in a system, forces of potential transformation. The anomaly or outsider ‘carries the transformations of becoming’, and is an entity in perpetual motion, unfixed in its identity. It maintains its transformative potential as it becomes. Anomalies subvert subjective wholeness and undermine species norms.
Assemblage
An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities that remove the subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity. The human assemblage is a multiplicity that forms new assemblages with existing social and cultural assemblages of material movement, force and intensity.
Becoming
Becoming is defined as ‘extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sensations without resemblance’. Becoming refutes binary divisions and enables further transformations, melding subjects and objects in close proximity. The embodied consciousness of the spectator participates in the process of becoming.
Bodies without organs (BWOs)
The term ‘body-without-organs’ is borrowed from Artaud to suggest the ‘true’ condition of the human body if freed from the punishments of a repressive God. Deleuze and Guattari remap the fixed biological body as a dynamic force field of speeds and intensities, ‘traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality’ which includes the mind. The body-without-organs is ‘affective, intensive, anarchist’ in nature. Amoeba-like, it is open to surrounding matter, which it incorporates.
Diagrammatic Component
Deleuze melds style and content to suggest a predominant diagrammatic component for each art–work. One example is the ubiquitous spiral in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which unites camera movements, architecture, costume and special effects as well as narrative structure.
Duration/space–time
Bergson’s concept of duration is shaped in distinction to the space–time of quantum physics. Deleuze distinguishes the extensive, spatialised time of the self-conscious subject from the intensive time of duration, which partakes of the élan vital of all evolving life. Humans can perceive the workings of duration in intensive states of consciousness, and in art.
Extensive/Intensive
The action-image expresses extensive, goal-oriented movement in space, as in its extreme form of the ‘action movie’. The affection-image vibrates intensively rather than extensively, as in Francis Bacon’s use of colour. An ‘intensive map’ is a cluster of affects in the process of becoming.
Haecceity
Haecceity is the quality of ‘this-ness’ in a ‘thing-in-itself’. Haecceities are intensive states experienced by the automatic or autoerotic movements of machinic desire rather than by the psychoanalytical subject. The use of colour, the timbre of a voice or the rhythm of a movement are haecceities not reducible to symbolic meaning.
Line of Flight
A line of flight connects singularities, or planes. As ‘a fibre strung across borderlines’ it is a means of deterritorialisation, of thinking afresh. An example is the link between Melville’s Moby-Dick as a ‘white wall’, the human face and the blank cinema screen.
Machinic
A machinic assemblage is an amalgam of processes artificially kept distinct. The machinic assemblage is a multiplicity of forces in motion not fixed components. The human is a machinic meld of body/mind/brain. Our mind/brain/body melds materially with the movement, force and intensity of film technology, for example.
Molecular/Molar
The ‘imperceptible’ micro dynamics of molecules compose both matter and perception in ever–changing motion. The same force flows through congruent elements that adopt specific patterns and formations. Molecularity is distinct from the ‘molar’ macro order of ideological, social and psychic schema. Melding occurs as we connect with other molecular collectivities, or haecceities, by contiguous movements and speeds.
The Movement–Image
Deleuze, like Bergson, identifies the movement-image and ‘flowing-matter’. All cinematic images are movement-images. Images move within and between the frame, via the camera’s motion and the rhythm of editing. Frames move on the screen via the projector and its flickering movements of light. The viewer’s eyes move in the phi-phenomenon as mobile machines that modify and reflect the film’s movement-images. The human ‘living image’ turns virtual movement-images into actual, intensive movements.
Plane of immanence
Consciousness operates on a ‘plane of immanence’ or becoming. This has a macro level (the plane itself) and a micro level (molecularity). Its perpetually shifting motion is replete with ‘speed and slowness, floating affects’. This immanent process produces desire. Schizophrenic intensity spreads along the plane of immanence, which possesses density as well as surface, moved by the non-subjective powers of affect.
Rhizome
Ideas are dynamic events or ‘lines of flight’ which take us into an endlessly bifurcating system. The term ‘rhizome’ (or lateral, multi-forked root system) suggests the nomadic movement of thought by the intensities of a self in process. Arborescence, on the other hand, describes hierarchical systems of thought.
Schizoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari refute Freudian paternalism via schizoanalysis. The rigid template of psychoanalysis is opposed by the emotional immanence of schizoanalysis, which maps an ‘autoproductive desiring machine’, not a subjective ego in a permanently paranoid condition. The unconscious changes form from archaeology to a cartography of motion as it passes from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis is applicable to rethinking both politics and art.
Singularity
In physics, a singularity is the point at the centre of a black hole at which matter becomes infinitely dense. Deleuze uses the term to mean the specificity of a particular component or assemblage, its special, distinctive quality, as well as its infinite potential.
The Time–Image
In the cinematic time-image, time is not derived from movement, but appears in itself. The ‘direct time-image’ emerged in art-cinema after World War Two. It turns from spatial exteriority to ‘mental relations or time’. Defamiliarisation devices, such as the disjunction of sound and visuals produce a more demanding, philosophical form of cinematic experience.
Vitalism, Élan Vital
Deleuze endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the universal presence of dynamic forces in all living, and evolving, entities, including the human. For Bergson, the universe endures, and duration, from his vitalist erspective on evolution, is ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’.