Reading Notes: Deleuze and Guattari, "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..."
The piece opens with discussion of a film called Willard (more info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_%281971_film%29) The main character has "a becoming-animal not content to proceed by resemblance" --- there is "an irresistable deterritorialization that forestalls attempts at professional, conjugal, or Oedipal reterritorialization."
"Natural history conceives of relationships between animals in two ways: series and structure." Series is in series (a is like b is like c is like d), structure is like an analogy (a:b::c:d). "Ideas do not die" --- relationships between animals are bound up in relationships between humans, conceptually --- also in "science... dreams, symbolism, art, and poetry." Jung, archetypes, animals as moderators in a cycle of "nature-culture-nature." Structuralism doesn't let you say "I am a bull" or "I am a wolf" but it does let you say "I am to you as a wolf is to a sheep." ...I'm a little skeptical of that last bit but I never claimed to truly understand structuralism.
Myth is insufficient for understanding becomings-animal; we need the sorcerer. (italics theirs!) "becomings expressed in tales instead of myths and rites"
So, becoming here is a technical term. Here's the definition they provide: "Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? 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." The fact that "becoming animal" has a specific metaphorical meaning both for them and for me, and that these things overlap but are not necessarily the same, is... interesting!
"Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something..."
All right, and that's our introduction!
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, I.
"A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity." Both in the sense of existing in relationship to other things and in the sense of "a fascination for the outside." (Hello, otherkin? Maybe.) "We are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion." I am large, I contain multitudes? I'd agree that it's those modes that are most interesting, not characteristics. "Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle." Huh. That's... almost religious-sounding to me? (Also correlating this with writers' suicides, which they do, sounds hella problematic to me, but I'm not going to touch that right now.)
They say there are three kinds of animals:
"bands transform themselves into one another" makes me think of "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" by Victor Pelevin, and the way that the main character ends up joining the werewolves. "The vampire does not filiate, it infects." States and pre-States and religious orders aren't becomings-animal; crime syndicates and secret societies are, or at least can be. "The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime machine" can all be becomings-animal that are appropriated by the state. The principle here: Pack and contagion.
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, II.
"Every Animal has its Anomalous" --- there is an individual who acts as a gateway to the becoming-animal. Ahab, or the rat Ben in the Willard film. "The anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual" or it would be animal kind #1 above. Apparently this thing is Lovecraft's "Outsider." "A phenomenon of bordering." (Does this connect to Set somehow? I'm not up on my Egyptian myth but it reminds me of something I heard once.) Sorcerers are anomalous in this way, but between villages.
"The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the becomings of the warrior." (Be all you can be, indeed.)
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, III.
"sorcery proceeds by way of becoming-woman" and hello we're back to the Diprose article from week one. That was Diprose, right? I should look this up later. Drugs "introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off."
"The Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion)." Ummmm. Umm. What. This helps a little: "A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization." But there's no logical order, they say. Actually this makes sense if I think of it in terms of strata, this idea of many borderlines mashed together and cut by a "plane of consistency" that can "bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities" and is the "intersection of all concrete forms." Does this speak to Barad and her agential cuts and attempt to define something objective? I think so! Maybe? I'm not sure why I keep coming back to Barad, I really need to read the rest of her book.
The Waves by Virginia Woolf is apparently a great example but unfortunately I haven't read it. You could say that there are becomings and lines of flight in Orlando, though, and that would even have some apparently surface-level relevance to gender studies. Becoming-man and becoming-woman are explicit there, and Orlando is a fiber strung across borderlines of time, and maybe Orlando's estate, too, their pack.
MEMORIES OF A THEOLOGIAN
"Theology is very strict on the following point: There are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal." (Haters gonna hate.) Wait, alchemy? What?
MEMORIES OF A SPINOZIST, I.
Oh god I know so little of Spinoza. And this section makes no fucking sense at all. It's about... infinitely small particles that are not atoms? That form organs? And how a locomotive has a "pee-pee maker" and a chair does not? I am not making this up.
MEMORIES OF A SPINOZIST, II.
"Spinoza asks: What can a body do?" I've seen this before, somewhere. "Affects are becomings." We define bodies by affects, not by organs or by species. Children talk about animals based on what they can do --- there can be a "symbiosis" by producing the same affects. (Affect, not effect. Stupid English.) "A composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency." Trying to become dog by putting shoes on your hands and failing due to lack of a tail but being OK with this failure. Psychoanalysis failing because it tries to reduce becoming-animal to metaphor. We must annul the organs to become animal, as in the case mentioned in "Body without Organs" where the man dresses as a horse for sexual gratification, but this runs the risk of finding yourself "playing" at being an animal rather than actually becoming one. (So true.)
MEMORIES OF A HAECCEITY
OK, hold up, pause. (Paws.) "Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object's "thisness"." (Wikipedia) Moving on.
"A body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude," and see page 32/260 for a definition because that's a lot of copy-typing. D&G use haecceity for the thisness of something like a season or an hour. Aeon as indefinite time (infinitive), chronos as definite time (all other verb tenses) that "determines a subject."
"This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock." "Five o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place! ... That is how we need to feel."
"This semiotic is composed above all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive, and indefinite articles or pronouns." Such as "The becoming-wolf of the Were." "A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE." (That would be a wicked band name. "THIS ROCK LOBSTER-GOD WILL RENDER YOU A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.")
MEMORIES OF A PLAN(E) MAKER
These planes are both structural and genetic. " A hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret structure necessary for subjects." "A mental principle." "Even if it is said to be immanent, it is so only by its absence."
Oh, and then there is something different! An abstract non-structural non-genetic "plane of Nature" that is not natural. (Oh my god they cited a woman who isn't Virginia Woolf! Not that any of this makes any sense to me.) This second type of plane is focused on slownesses and speeds, music of the millisecond, John Cage mumble mumble wat.
Page 39/268 has some whatthefuck about how bears have evil eyes and can see through the distortions of gravity.
Oh I was wondering if this would come back to strata. "Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are strata or relations between strata." "The plane of... immanence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature.... is the body without organs." Are they chaos and order? Becoming a body without organs is all about differential speed? Actually I can see that. Sort of. Maybe. Every hair on her pelt alive with tidings of the immaculate present. "A clock keeping a whole assortment of times."
Page 42/271 has interesting stuff on Proust: "Her apparent slowness is transformed into the breakneck speed of our waiting."
MEMORIES OF A MOLECULE
Again, becoming-animal is only one type of becoming. Music has all sorts of different kinds of becomings --- becomings-woman, becomings-bird, becomings-molecular. "Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular. This raises all kinds of questions." (THIS? Of all things, THIS? This is one of the few things that makes SENSE.) "All becomings are already molecular." As opposed to molar, sure, but I'm not sure that's what they mean.
OK here's something I can work with: "Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter. Clearly this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle and reindeer, etc.) or something that does not even have a localizable relation to the animal in question." I like to believe I become-fox through a poem. "You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog." How does this relate to gender performance/perfomativity? In performing gender, do we emit molecular woman? D&G say it is "possible --- only possible --- for the woman" to occupy a privileged position with regard to becoming-woman. There is a microfemininity that "produce[s] in us the molecular woman." They say that even the most "phallocratic" authors emit becoming-woman particles in their writing thanks to the efforts of Virginia Woolf. "The reconstruction of a BwO... is inseperable from a becoming-woman?" HUH. The girl is a line of flight. Yeah, I can see that. "becoming-woman... produces the universal girl." "The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo" [0]
"Love itself is a war machine endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles." YES THIS. What are they headed for? "becoming-imperceptible," the end of becoming. Whoah. A becoming-everyone/everything as a type of asceticism.
Whoah did this suddenly turn into drug theory? Page 54/483 talks about how "the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this becoming." Goal: "To reach the point where 'to get high or not get high' is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary." ...Yes. Thank you, D&G, for explaining to me why I stopped doing drugs.
MEMORIES OF THE SECRET
The secret: "content that has hidden its form in favor of a simple container." Actually, that makes a lot of sense cryptographically. "The secret has its origins in the war machine." If a secret reaches the "infinite form of secrecy," it becomes imperceptible, I think because its secrecy has overridden its content? Women's secrecy is like "the celerity of a war machine against the gravity of a State apparatus." It hides nothing.
MEMORIES AND BECOMINGS, POINTS AND BLOCKS
You can't become-man because man is majoritarian/dominant and "all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian." They distinguish against "minority" in both the numerical and social senses. "man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular." "A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end," so maybe it's not properly a vector, but a direction, that is, the part of the vector that is not its magnitude. "Becoming is an antimemory" --- memory always reterritorializes. In light of that, what does it mean that this chapter is structured as a set of memories? Oh hey they cite Orlando in a way similar to how I did earlier, though in terms of "blocks."
"Principal characteristics of a punctual system":
BECOMING-MUSIC
This is the last section! Rejoice!
"Musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute its content." They mentioned this before but I thought it was among their bogus ideas so I just ignored it. Let me try to grapple with it some more --- ignoring all the crazy context for a moment, just that sentence. Becoming-foo is the process of exuding molecular foo. Musical expression is the process of producing a set of sounds, but those sounds evoke things in the listener. The process of this evocation involves sending out woman, child, and animal particles? Is musical expression minoritizing? They say later that it has a potential fascism in its thirst for destruction. ... I'm gonna read some more and come back to this sentence. I feel like it's possibly a key that will make some other things make sense if I can get it.
Fort-da (Freud's repetition compulsion) as a refrain, the child's play as musical. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. "The refrain itself is the content of music." Then, "The refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, forgoing it." Music deterritorializes the refrain. Music deterritorializes the voice like painting deterritorializes the face.
"No flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes."
"The becoming-woman and becoming-child of music are present in the problem of machining the voice." Castrati, OK, but I'm not sure I buy the generalization. Becoming horse through playing the harmonica at inhuman speeds? That makes sense and I'm not sure why.
Page 77/306 has a set of four theorems about deterritorialization. This is a helpful place to return to the next time "deterritorialization" in context is confusing.
I still don't buy musical expression as inseparable from becoming-foo. I'm not sure I will, so I'm going to leave it at that.
...How in the hells do I make this into notes useful to someone else in my class?
[0] "intermezzo" is a chapter title in the novel I'm working on and this just kaboom yes wow.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/50017.html.
"Natural history conceives of relationships between animals in two ways: series and structure." Series is in series (a is like b is like c is like d), structure is like an analogy (a:b::c:d). "Ideas do not die" --- relationships between animals are bound up in relationships between humans, conceptually --- also in "science... dreams, symbolism, art, and poetry." Jung, archetypes, animals as moderators in a cycle of "nature-culture-nature." Structuralism doesn't let you say "I am a bull" or "I am a wolf" but it does let you say "I am to you as a wolf is to a sheep." ...I'm a little skeptical of that last bit but I never claimed to truly understand structuralism.
Myth is insufficient for understanding becomings-animal; we need the sorcerer. (italics theirs!) "becomings expressed in tales instead of myths and rites"
So, becoming here is a technical term. Here's the definition they provide: "Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? 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." The fact that "becoming animal" has a specific metaphorical meaning both for them and for me, and that these things overlap but are not necessarily the same, is... interesting!
"Becoming is a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something..."
All right, and that's our introduction!
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, I.
"A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity." Both in the sense of existing in relationship to other things and in the sense of "a fascination for the outside." (Hello, otherkin? Maybe.) "We are not interested in characteristics; what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion." I am large, I contain multitudes? I'd agree that it's those modes that are most interesting, not characteristics. "Writers are sorcerers because they experience the animal as the only population before which they are responsible in principle." Huh. That's... almost religious-sounding to me? (Also correlating this with writers' suicides, which they do, sounds hella problematic to me, but I'm not going to touch that right now.)
They say there are three kinds of animals:
- "individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history... anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool." Fuck you too, Deleuze.
- "genus, classification, or state animals; animals as they are treated in the great divine myths" --- Jungian archetypes basically.
- "demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale"
"bands transform themselves into one another" makes me think of "A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia" by Victor Pelevin, and the way that the main character ends up joining the werewolves. "The vampire does not filiate, it infects." States and pre-States and religious orders aren't becomings-animal; crime syndicates and secret societies are, or at least can be. "The hunting machine, the war machine, the crime machine" can all be becomings-animal that are appropriated by the state. The principle here: Pack and contagion.
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, II.
"Every Animal has its Anomalous" --- there is an individual who acts as a gateway to the becoming-animal. Ahab, or the rat Ben in the Willard film. "The anomalous is not simply an exceptional individual" or it would be animal kind #1 above. Apparently this thing is Lovecraft's "Outsider." "A phenomenon of bordering." (Does this connect to Set somehow? I'm not up on my Egyptian myth but it reminds me of something I heard once.) Sorcerers are anomalous in this way, but between villages.
"The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. States have always appropriated the war machine in the form of national armies that strictly limit the becomings of the warrior." (Be all you can be, indeed.)
MEMORIES OF A SORCERER, III.
"sorcery proceeds by way of becoming-woman" and hello we're back to the Diprose article from week one. That was Diprose, right? I should look this up later. Drugs "introduced us to a universe of microperceptions in which becomings-molecular take over where becomings-animal leave off."
"The Wolf-Man's pack of wolves also becomes a swarm of bees, and a field of anuses, and a collection of small holes and tiny ulcerations (the theme of contagion)." Ummmm. Umm. What. This helps a little: "A fiber strung across borderlines constitutes a line of flight or of deterritorialization." But there's no logical order, they say. Actually this makes sense if I think of it in terms of strata, this idea of many borderlines mashed together and cut by a "plane of consistency" that can "bring into coexistence any number of multiplicities" and is the "intersection of all concrete forms." Does this speak to Barad and her agential cuts and attempt to define something objective? I think so! Maybe? I'm not sure why I keep coming back to Barad, I really need to read the rest of her book.
The Waves by Virginia Woolf is apparently a great example but unfortunately I haven't read it. You could say that there are becomings and lines of flight in Orlando, though, and that would even have some apparently surface-level relevance to gender studies. Becoming-man and becoming-woman are explicit there, and Orlando is a fiber strung across borderlines of time, and maybe Orlando's estate, too, their pack.
MEMORIES OF A THEOLOGIAN
"Theology is very strict on the following point: There are no werewolves, human beings cannot become animal." (Haters gonna hate.) Wait, alchemy? What?
MEMORIES OF A SPINOZIST, I.
Oh god I know so little of Spinoza. And this section makes no fucking sense at all. It's about... infinitely small particles that are not atoms? That form organs? And how a locomotive has a "pee-pee maker" and a chair does not? I am not making this up.
MEMORIES OF A SPINOZIST, II.
"Spinoza asks: What can a body do?" I've seen this before, somewhere. "Affects are becomings." We define bodies by affects, not by organs or by species. Children talk about animals based on what they can do --- there can be a "symbiosis" by producing the same affects. (Affect, not effect. Stupid English.) "A composition of speeds and affects on the plane of consistency." Trying to become dog by putting shoes on your hands and failing due to lack of a tail but being OK with this failure. Psychoanalysis failing because it tries to reduce becoming-animal to metaphor. We must annul the organs to become animal, as in the case mentioned in "Body without Organs" where the man dresses as a horse for sexual gratification, but this runs the risk of finding yourself "playing" at being an animal rather than actually becoming one. (So true.)
MEMORIES OF A HAECCEITY
OK, hold up, pause. (Paws.) "Haecceity (from the Latin haecceitas, which translates as "thisness") is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object's "thisness"." (Wikipedia) Moving on.
"A body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude," and see page 32/260 for a definition because that's a lot of copy-typing. D&G use haecceity for the thisness of something like a season or an hour. Aeon as indefinite time (infinitive), chronos as definite time (all other verb tenses) that "determines a subject."
"This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock." "Five o'clock is this animal! This animal is this place! ... That is how we need to feel."
"This semiotic is composed above all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive, and indefinite articles or pronouns." Such as "The becoming-wolf of the Were." "A PACK NAMED WOLF TO LOOK AT HE." (That would be a wicked band name. "THIS ROCK LOBSTER-GOD WILL RENDER YOU A BODY WITHOUT ORGANS.")
MEMORIES OF A PLAN(E) MAKER
These planes are both structural and genetic. " A hidden structure necessary for forms, a secret structure necessary for subjects." "A mental principle." "Even if it is said to be immanent, it is so only by its absence."
Oh, and then there is something different! An abstract non-structural non-genetic "plane of Nature" that is not natural. (Oh my god they cited a woman who isn't Virginia Woolf! Not that any of this makes any sense to me.) This second type of plane is focused on slownesses and speeds, music of the millisecond, John Cage mumble mumble wat.
Page 39/268 has some whatthefuck about how bears have evil eyes and can see through the distortions of gravity.
Oh I was wondering if this would come back to strata. "Forms and subjects, organs and functions, are strata or relations between strata." "The plane of... immanence, on the other hand, implies a destratification of all of Nature.... is the body without organs." Are they chaos and order? Becoming a body without organs is all about differential speed? Actually I can see that. Sort of. Maybe. Every hair on her pelt alive with tidings of the immaculate present. "A clock keeping a whole assortment of times."
Page 42/271 has interesting stuff on Proust: "Her apparent slowness is transformed into the breakneck speed of our waiting."
MEMORIES OF A MOLECULE
Again, becoming-animal is only one type of becoming. Music has all sorts of different kinds of becomings --- becomings-woman, becomings-bird, becomings-molecular. "Becomings-animal plunge into becomings-molecular. This raises all kinds of questions." (THIS? Of all things, THIS? This is one of the few things that makes SENSE.) "All becomings are already molecular." As opposed to molar, sure, but I'm not sure that's what they mean.
OK here's something I can work with: "Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter. Clearly this something else can be quite varied, and be more or less directly related to the animal in question: it can be the animal's natural food (dirt and worm), or its exterior relations with other animals (you can become-dog with cats, or become-monkey with a horse), or an apparatus or prosthesis to which a person subjects the animal (muzzle and reindeer, etc.) or something that does not even have a localizable relation to the animal in question." I like to believe I become-fox through a poem. "You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog." How does this relate to gender performance/perfomativity? In performing gender, do we emit molecular woman? D&G say it is "possible --- only possible --- for the woman" to occupy a privileged position with regard to becoming-woman. There is a microfemininity that "produce[s] in us the molecular woman." They say that even the most "phallocratic" authors emit becoming-woman particles in their writing thanks to the efforts of Virginia Woolf. "The reconstruction of a BwO... is inseperable from a becoming-woman?" HUH. The girl is a line of flight. Yeah, I can see that. "becoming-woman... produces the universal girl." "The only way to get outside the dualisms is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo" [0]
"Love itself is a war machine endowed with strange and somewhat terrifying powers. Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles." YES THIS. What are they headed for? "becoming-imperceptible," the end of becoming. Whoah. A becoming-everyone/everything as a type of asceticism.
Whoah did this suddenly turn into drug theory? Page 54/483 talks about how "the issue of drugs can be understood only at the level where desire directly invests perception, and perception becomes molecular at the same time as the imperceptible is perceived. Drugs then appear as the agent of this becoming." Goal: "To reach the point where 'to get high or not get high' is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight at the very place where means other than drugs become necessary." ...Yes. Thank you, D&G, for explaining to me why I stopped doing drugs.
MEMORIES OF THE SECRET
The secret: "content that has hidden its form in favor of a simple container." Actually, that makes a lot of sense cryptographically. "The secret has its origins in the war machine." If a secret reaches the "infinite form of secrecy," it becomes imperceptible, I think because its secrecy has overridden its content? Women's secrecy is like "the celerity of a war machine against the gravity of a State apparatus." It hides nothing.
MEMORIES AND BECOMINGS, POINTS AND BLOCKS
You can't become-man because man is majoritarian/dominant and "all becoming is a becoming-minoritarian." They distinguish against "minority" in both the numerical and social senses. "man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular." "A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end," so maybe it's not properly a vector, but a direction, that is, the part of the vector that is not its magnitude. "Becoming is an antimemory" --- memory always reterritorializes. In light of that, what does it mean that this chapter is structured as a set of memories? Oh hey they cite Orlando in a way similar to how I did earlier, though in terms of "blocks."
"Principal characteristics of a punctual system":
- "They serve as coordinates for assigning points."
- The axes can be rotated so as to produce a new set of points, a different representation in three-space.
- The lines between the original points and the rotated points delineate a set of resonances that are "arborescent, mnemonic, molar, structural; they are systems of territorialization or reterritorialization."
BECOMING-MUSIC
This is the last section! Rejoice!
"Musical expression is inseparable from a becoming-woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal that constitute its content." They mentioned this before but I thought it was among their bogus ideas so I just ignored it. Let me try to grapple with it some more --- ignoring all the crazy context for a moment, just that sentence. Becoming-foo is the process of exuding molecular foo. Musical expression is the process of producing a set of sounds, but those sounds evoke things in the listener. The process of this evocation involves sending out woman, child, and animal particles? Is musical expression minoritizing? They say later that it has a potential fascism in its thirst for destruction. ... I'm gonna read some more and come back to this sentence. I feel like it's possibly a key that will make some other things make sense if I can get it.
Fort-da (Freud's repetition compulsion) as a refrain, the child's play as musical. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. "The refrain itself is the content of music." Then, "The refrain is rather a means of preventing music, warding it off, forgoing it." Music deterritorializes the refrain. Music deterritorializes the voice like painting deterritorializes the face.
"No flow, no becoming-molecular escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it, forming passages or perceptible landmarks for the imperceptible processes."
"The becoming-woman and becoming-child of music are present in the problem of machining the voice." Castrati, OK, but I'm not sure I buy the generalization. Becoming horse through playing the harmonica at inhuman speeds? That makes sense and I'm not sure why.
Page 77/306 has a set of four theorems about deterritorialization. This is a helpful place to return to the next time "deterritorialization" in context is confusing.
I still don't buy musical expression as inseparable from becoming-foo. I'm not sure I will, so I'm going to leave it at that.
...How in the hells do I make this into notes useful to someone else in my class?
[0] "intermezzo" is a chapter title in the novel I'm working on and this just kaboom yes wow.
This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/50017.html.