Kavka’s metamorphosis
Anonymous Wed Feb 27 22:04:42 2019 No.12673862 [View]
In Metamorphosis, the main character wakes up as a beetle. The entire short story describes how becoming a beetle fundamentally changes your perception of things. His old habits & routine were completely destroyed, it was a rupture of a personal identity. But out of this shattering, new ways are opened. If you are familiar with Tarot, a rupturing of time is a bit like the cards Hanged Man and XIII. Deleuze’s becomings are modeled largely like Gregor’s transformation. One can compare Gregor with the becoming-recluse of hikkokomori. Now one might ask “hikkokomori aren’t ACTUALLY beetles though”, but for Deleuze this is a badly proposed question. There is no stable identity, no actual identity, there are only how the flows are interpreted, repressed, transformed ect. Once one understands that, one can go ahead and consciously cultivate new alliances to choose becomings that one desires and that are useful to them. Think how becoming-beetle might be useful to a hikkokomori. Deleuze also warns us to stay on the edges of the pack of becoming. A hikkokomori has become-beetle so deeply that finding a way out is very difficult. The center is too intense, the self will not survive (Remember card XIII as not an end but a transformation).
Becoming molecular
“Everything ties together in an asymmetrical block of becoming, an instantaneous zigzag” (p.307)
Jumping slap bang into the middle of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus is the Bear Grylls entry point into philosophy.
One of the biggest challenges in reading it is trying to get a grasp what, exactly, is under discussion at any given point. The answer is, unhelpfully: everything. This means that any point of specificity within the text is being offered as a case, not an example. The cases of a given concept in the text are vast and chaotic - because the concept hopes to apply at such a fundamental level of abstraction that it can be used to describe electromagnetism just as well as explaining the shopping list on my fridge.
This long answer can be read backwards. The more familiar you are with Deleuze’s philosophy and influences, the further you can skip forward. Technically speaking, the question is answered, and the section in A Thousand Plateaus is discussed directly in sections 4 and 5. Sections 1,2 and 3 are an attempt to generate intuitions of greater and greater complexity, to get to the point where the language of the text makes sense.
I make use of a number of over-simplified examples to get to that point. These shouldn’t be taken as arguments that Deleuze has made or is making, rather they are tools that help me think about the space within which Deleuze is making his arguments. Hopefully they are helpful to you too. One of the biggest challenges of reading Deleuze is that he is trying to write in a space beyond analogy, and against the smooth categorizations of language - accordingly he doesn’t give examples (A is like B), or define terms cleanly (A is any x that has such and such properties) because that would defeat the purpose. In the beginning of this answer I do both, but like I said, these are just tools to get to the space where they are no longer necessary, like Wittgenstein’s ladder.
Deleuzian becoming - A demonstration by means of intuition - The Demarcation Problem.
Rather than situate A Thousand Plateaus in its position as an intensification of existentialism, a thorough going-beyond of Heidegger, an exploration of Nietzsche’s maps, and a declaration of war on Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, I’ll see if I can just bring you up to speed with D&G’s metaphysical project with a visualization exercise:
Imagine you’re eating an apple. This seems like a simple “event”, you, the subject, are eating, verbing, the apple, the object. There’s two things, you and the apple, and the verb “eating” quickly tells us who’s the boss owing to the laws of syntax. But if we try to define these things we quickly run into some difficulties:
Where’s the “cut off” for the apple, as in, where does it end and begin? In our day to day dealings, using geometrical space containing a majority of transparent oxygen is a convenient measure for demarcating objects. So the apple ends at the green skin, and the bite mark. However, this is obviously just a pragmatic and intuitive short hand at the macro (molar) level. Surely we can find a more “objective” edge by zooming in to this edge and drawing up a line. As we zoom in to the edge of the apple, though, a nice clear line doesn’t reveal itself, the edge rather, like a fractal, becomes more and more ambiguous. We discover that other things are eating the apple too, that the skin is porous, that chemical reactions are exploding off it, we find that our bodies (hands), are effortlessly transferring energy in the form of heat into the apple, which is causing other imperceptible (at the macro level) chemical shifts (and this heat is being caused by our own digestive systems digesting the apple). Now we are “zoomed in” these tiny transformations in the apple are huge. Around the bite mark there’s even saliva, containing our DNA, bubbling and transforming the sugars in the apple and reacting with the acid, with particles flaking off and floating through the air in a cloud being sucked up through our noses, so even “where does the eating begin and end” is beginning to get blurry…
We can, ironically, demarcate this problem by calling it the demarcation problem (Note: Deleuze doesn’t). You might think that this ambiguity (of the object) is essentially meaningless. For all pragmatic intents and purposes we have no trouble defining where the apple ends and I begin, even molecular chemists have their methodologies so this ambiguity is not really causing any one too much trouble. We just define the object something like this:
With the green circle shrinking and expanding slightly depending on our purposes. But D&G’s reply would be twofold: Firstly, we’re doing metaphysics, so it is interesting and problematic, and, more importantly, secondly, where an apple ends and begins in a geometrical space indeed isn’t a problem very well suited to cause us worry, but where a person begins and ends in a political space is. If we just use pragmatic “edge-marking” techniques we haven’t problematized the issue of who is marking these edges, and for what pragmatic function. We mark the edges of the apple like this so we can coordinate our bites, and not eat our hands, which is obvious enough, but when we mark the edges of something like “woman/man”, “normal/abnormal”, “sane/insane”, “permissible/perverted” these demarcations can have huge consequences. This is doubled when we consider that the demarcations are merely a method for creating regions on a cloud of molecular elements distributed chaotically for some pragmatic ends (again, what ends?) and then begin to use the demarcation as primary, mistaking the map for the territory, as it were: “there are, naturally, only men and women, and they are all such and such, and you’re either one or the other.”
So D&G’s critique begins against the modes of thinking that mistake the map for the territory, and don’t question the political, social, cultural, and administrative aims for which these maps are expedient.
A few things should be noted here:
That mistaking maps for territories isn’t of itself nefarious (just incorrect according to D&G), but can be put, obviously, to nefarious ends (for example in the political processes of “dehumanizing” a group).
Also, that this mistaking maps for territories is our fundamental and intuitive way of thinking the world, not some special or deficient case. We’re always dealing in and manipulating maps. Language itself is cartography. The object that is given to us in perception is already mapped.
Furthermore, the maps, once drawn, are not merely sterile descriptions but are performative upon the “molecules” they organize. Have you ever met someone who eats the apple core? Well it makes a difference to the actual apple whether the core is eaten, or treated as surplus and composted, or thrown in the bin. This creates feedback loops. We can see this in the history of agriculture and cultivation: apples getting bigger and sweeter over the millenia. It’s not, strictly speaking, the apple’s concern to become bigger and sweeter, it’s the concern of the maps that apples became ensnared by, subsumed under.
Understanding the demarcation problem shouldn’t be too taxing. Anyone who has realized that a country is more than lines on a map, and that the lines on the map signify nothing but an idea, not some geographical feature, has intuited this problem. However, one usually stops at this “woah, dude” point, and doesn’t then try to think what is underneath the map.
“but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive.” (A Thousand Plateaus, pg.4)
Deleuze and Guattari are just getting warmed up.
Becoming - The Tree Greens.
So, how do we think beyond the maps with their static regions (being)? A hook Deleuze uses in The Logic of Sense is to get us thinking of verbs as primary. Verbs are often seen as less substantial than nouns, or adjectives, because their mapping is more chaotic (if you’ve studied a foreign language you will know this oh-so-well). He transforms the proposition “The tree is green” to “The tree greens”. He argues that greening is more fundamental than green (referring to an unfurling event from which we derive the static theme “green”), and that making this shift makes certain metaphysical problems about objects and their properties become less problematic. By A Thousand Plateaus we’ve gotten to “a-treeing greens”. That is, we are turning static “beings” (regions on the map with their properties allocated by definitions that demarcate their edge points), to “becomings” “doings”, “transpirings”, the molecules squiggly shifting under the molar territories on the map.
There are no dogs, only “doginatings” that begin and end (but not ex nihilo, a beginning and an ending are transformations, with the in-between being a “semi-stable” state representing the crossing of some threshold at some critical point (ice->water->steam is a useful analogy to think about this (i.e, we can grasp these transformations but they are anything but smooth or linear, the properties, the capabilities, and possibilities, of ice and water differ drastically, and they turn on a dime at a single privileged point on a scale))). Doginatings, bumbling and shnurfling around, persistently “dogging” before deadening and decomposing. Around this giant cloud of dogginating we draw a region-of-best fit, and call the region “dog” and use various methods for describing and shoring up the line (DNA convergence, genus and species, commonality of phenotypical expression, commonality of function/commerce (i.e pets), commonality of stances towards (“this is how you teach a dog to play fetch”), legal jurisdictions (kept on leashes in parks), etc). But obviously this map has nothing to do with dogs, with the a-dogginating that’s a-going on around there-ish. The definition “Dog” is static and dead, only referring to frozen dogs (wherein we derive the cute paradox “every dog has a dog for a mother, so there was no first dog, so there are no dogs), whereas “doginating” describes a process that is persisting in a semi-stable state underneath the definition “dog” and can find a new semi-stable state (evolution) or fall apart (extinction) without caring one iota about dog-dna, “man’s best friend”, “good dog/bad dog”, or the whole big canine genus.
A body (thing) is not defined by the form (shape) that determines it nor as a determinate substance (material) or subject (individual) nor by the organs (parts) it possesses or the function it fulfills (role). On the plane of consistency a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (semi-stable states) (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects (transformations) it is capable of at a given power (threshold) or degree of potential (latitude). (A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 287, my elucidations, approximate, italicized in brackets)
This idea of longitude and latitude makes us look through the maps that demarcate regions based on “shapes”, “material”, “function” and so on, and draws attention to what gives these maps their possibility: moving, resting, eating, chasing “sums” of elements oscillating between different semi-stable states (chasing, playing, play-chasing, sleeping), expressing themselves in concert through passive and active transformations (the dog becomes a bark, becomes a hunter, becomes a hunted, salivates, becomes dusty, becomes dead) which represents their capabilities and extremities.
A racehorse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox.” (pg.283)
A quick summary:
Things only seem like things (discrete objects) because we have some pragmatic interest in treating and demarcating them as such in a given context (field (map)), and this is mirrored in and enforced by language in the most part. (FYI this is straight from Nietzsche).
Things, though ensnared by the methods with which we demarcate them, aren’t really concerned with the maps we have drawn, accordingly, they blur and bleed out of the borders. Hence, the limit of each individual map: can the biological account of the dog adequately describe its emotional place in the family as brother? And, conversely, can the family’s thoughts/stories about their beloved Fido-brother explain the dogs infatuation with feces?
However, the map can become performative upon that which it encloses. (Example; if you look at a map of linguistic communities in north and central america, you will see a weird perturbation along the political border of the USA and Mexico. Spanish speaking communities bleed across the border (and, indeed, the border only exists in minds and on maps) but the border creates an edge like ripple within the data which can only be understood by referencing the political map, because it is the basis of other actual realities - immigration laws, visas, exchange rates, etc. However, on the other hand, the political map alone is not sufficient (the communities bleed into one another across its ideal geometric edge)). The maps are not only geometrical/geographical, but political, economic, social, familial, biological, etc etc etc (ad infinituum), representing all of the fields that are perturbed by the “thing” that sits across all of them. All of these maps represent (are) so many fields - an economist’s dog, a lawyer’s dog, a biologist’s dog, an architect’s dog, a dog-trainer’s dog, a family’s dog. “Things”, however, are just a feature of maps. Beneath the map are transforming, semi-stable processes of becoming (doing, doing, doing!). In these transformations, these semi-stable states can be seen as book-ended by critical points that these processes stumble into, over, and out of, and represent a fundamental transformation in the process, and the way the game is being played. These states are always denoted by verbs. Ice is ice, until the critical threshold of the transformation into water. Our name for this threshold is 0 degrees Celsius. A dog is a dog, until the critical threshold of the transformation into inert flesh and static organs. Our name for this threshold is death. (Philosophically, it may be important to note that 0 degrees is not something that happens to the ice - this would still be in the logic of maps (region a acts on region b). Melting is something that is written into the very process of “icing”, its very dance that makes it “ice” preconfigures the second act of “melting”) (“A racehorse is more different from a work horse…” at 0 degrees Celsius ice transforms into liquid, but glass maintains its semi-stable state. At 1400 degrees Celsius the glass melts and the water has long since vaporized. Our mapping procedures make us think these are two temperatures but seen as becoming-liquid glass and ice communicate a qualitative affinity underneath the maps, that connect what we call 0 degrees to what we call 1400 degrees…)
Assemblages
So, in the above there is a clear picture of
["doginating" as "becoming"] -> ["Dog" (region) "being"]
But this is way too simplistic. What’s the “doginating”? We run into the Demarcation Problem here too.
When we look at a dog’s teeth (remember, by the way, that the teeth are “teethings”, that is, the sucking up of calcium and the deployment into a semi-stable tooth shape/state, that is itself decaying and resisting decay) we can only understand them by looking at what a dog eats. Those big fangs are a becoming-pointed-sharp. But why are they “teething” like that? Because flesh is “fleshing” like this. The tooth and the skin of the dog’s prey blend and bleed into each other in the “biting”. The biting is another becoming, and it’s another thing we’ve mapped (separated out), but it only makes sense when taken in conjunction with tooth and skin (and belly, and hunger, and the pack, and the hunt, and the plains). So, dogs have teeth and stomachs and hunger and prey with skin and protein and bones in woodlands with hills and wind direction and smells, and in different maps we can create a myriad of regions to demarcate all of this in a myriad of different ways, but underneath all of these maps these entities bleed together and hold each other in semi-stable states between thresholds. In Deleuze and Guattari’s nomenclature, these particles (tooth, skin, wind direction, etc) form into an assemblage.
Why are cheetahs fast? Because gazelles are fast. Why are gazelles fast? Because cheetahs are fast. The legs muscles of the cheetah and the leg muscles of the gazelle are both a single “becoming-fast” resonating in a semi-stable state, but are connected up, also, obviously, to a “becoming-prey-becoming-predator”, a biting, and hunger-ing, a fleeing and a chasing (the leg muscles mean nothing unless there is chasing and eating). Using one map we can demarcate this semi-stable state as “ecological balance”, using another we demarcate it as “the hunt”, using another we demarcate as “segment two of Nat Geo’s The World’s Most Amazing Predators”.
It’s also important to note here that even though the legs of the cheetah and the legs of gazelle are a single interconnected assemblage of “becoming-fast”, the cheetah and the gazelle obviously have different quantitative speeds. It is too simple to say that the gazelle is as fast as the cheetah and the cheetah is as fast as the gazelle; the relationship is asymmetric, and multifaceted. Thinking about this should make us realize how many disparate elements, geographies, temperatures, protein fibers, hormones, neurons, behaviors, tendencies, causes and effects, all get tangled up in this one assemblage of “becoming-fast”. And all of these entangled “things”, too, are not static objects or properties “belonging” to the cheetah or the gazelle, they too are becomings, resonating in semi-stable states between thresholds, entangled together in a myriad of assemblages.
Everything ties together in an asymmetrical block of becoming, an instantaneous zigzag" (A Thousand Plateaus, p.307)
So, the demarcation problem doesn’t just let the molecules on either side of the apple skin enter into ambiguous relationships across the geometric/spatial borders we define, it lets radically different dimensions of maps enter into assemblages across wholly incommensurable maps. How? Because the maps come second, and only represent so many attempts at “encompassing and fixing” this “chaosmos” of becoming.
Becoming Molecular - (Becoming-Animal)
Building on from this we can dive deeper into A Thousand Plateaus. When discussing the famous analytical case of “Little Hans” by Freud, D&G use their metaphysical picture to illustrate the situation (Hans, the little boy, had a phobia of horses, especially that they would bite him, after seeing a horse fall over in the street):
Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame… These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? (A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 284)
The above passage demonstrates the diversity of molecules that can be taken up in a single assemblage, and turns us to the question of becoming-horse, becoming-wolf and so on. Freud’s great innovation was the discovery of tunnels underneath our maps connecting disparate regions (the unconscious), whereby a horse, for example, can simultaneously connect the subject to a father, while at the same time concealing the very connection. D&G’s criticism of this is that it hasn’t gone beyond the assumption that the regions on the map are things, beings, and their connections (through the subconscious) are lines of signification. They wanted to flip this picture upside down, where signifying a horse becomes, from this angle, becoming-horse.
Now as they have just said, becoming-horse is not imitating (signifying) a horse, but bringing the particles that constitute one’s body, that one merely is, into arrangements of the assemblages that make up the becoming-horse: the semi-stable states/processes humming along in the region we have loosely demarcated as “horse”. We’ve already pointed out that a dog’s tooth forms a single assemblage with a prey’s skin and a biting, and a (…), so imitating a dog on the plane of resemblance (maps) (i.e. filing my teeth down to points so they look like dog teeth) is not the entirety of “becoming-dog”, that would be just me (region a) signifying a dog (region b), not becoming-dog.
Actors can help us think about this: when an actor needs to play the role of an alcoholic mother, despite being neither, it’s not merely enough to read a wikipedia article about the two topics. Better to find one (an alcoholic mother) and imitate their gait, their tone of voice, their way of holding their bodies. Better still is to go within themselves and find those particles that already are part of the assemblage of “alcoholic mother beats her children”, the disappointment, the aggression, the sadism, the masochism and surplus enjoyment, literally become the becoming-alcoholic mother, raising the intensity of these points over thresholds to create a new organization (assemblage) of the body. Imitating a given example, or set of examples, will always be confined to the demarcated map regions, resulting in pantomime, gestures and movements that signify the alcoholic mother through the logic of the mapping procedures (region a signifies region b). Becoming one doesn’t mean literally becoming an alcoholic and having children - it’s about making the particles one is resonate in semi-stable states in the site of the assemblage alcoholic-mother. Acting is not about imitation, it’s about transformation. Barking like a dog is different from barking as a dog.
An example: 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 movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter. (A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 302)
Likewise with the becoming-animal of the warrior.
The B-52 is not supposed to resemble, or even imitate, a shark (that would be a terrible camouflage concept over the skies of Berlin), but is painted in line with the becoming-shark, becoming-animal, of the soldiers flying it. It’s one outward symptom, or trace, of the transformation they are trying to enact on themselves, on what they are becoming. Making oneself a shark doesn’t necessarily mean “go swimming”… The field of molecules we map into the region “shark” enter into all manner of assemblages: biting, killing, terrifying, gliding, hunting, bleeding, dividing, becoming-invisible, become-explosive, nightmares and horror movies…
To say “the soldiers desire to become sharks” is also inaccurate, because this is always going to be an imitation, because we have already expressed two distinct beings (soldiers and sharks), two distinct map regions. But if we remember that the map is secondary, that the “soldiers” and “sharks” is a pragmatic distinction we make upon a chaotic distribution of particles, we see that the two regions, sharing particles between them in any given map (field), can enter into subterranean singularities and alliances. In one sense, there are no soldiers or sharks, just particles forming into various assemblages in semi-stable states of becoming (Doing! Doing! Doing!) that we then use some method or other to demarcate into regions, this bunch of stuff is a soldier, and that bunch of stuff is a shark. Maybe I write a poem, charting a new map, where the shark stares at a photo of its sweetheart back home and the soldier tracks the smell of blood over a quarter of a mile…
To paraphrase the quote from above: A whale is more different from a shark than a shark is from a manned B-52.
This is what Deleuze means by “becoming molecular”, this slipping beneath the maps and seeing the multitude of assemblages and molecules that compose the “beings” on the map surface, and realizing they can form and blend together. However, Any definition of “becoming molecular” is only ever going to be just an approximation, a “region of best fit” on a map of a context/field… Deleuze is fun!)
Love and gender - The n Genders - Love as a “war machine”
There is no better way of visualizing the concept of Becoming-Molecular, as applied to gender, than this. It’s a visualization by Chris Harrison, of Carnegie Mellon University, of data pulled from Google Books’ 200 year archive of written material looking for verbs that immediately followed the pronouns “He” and “She”, rendered with the additional word in the sentence.
If you’ve soldiered through all of the above, the Deleuzian implications of the graphic should be apparent. “He” and “She” are map regions, when we investigate them they suffer from the demarcation problem, as all map regions do. They are just short hand approximating whole webs of stuff. But what are they approximating? Assemblages (the first column of words in the graphic), doing and asking and moving and growing and deciding and pointing, themselves connecting up with disparate particles (the second column of words).
The only thing we need to underscore about the image is that there isn’t “men” and “women” being caught up in regimes of description in texts, but that “man” and “woman” are themselves regimes of description in texts trying to demarcate fields of interconnected particles and assemblages, designated by verbs.
From this we see how we move to the n genders (not 2, 3, or even 17 or 50). In fact, you can visualize their creation, by imagining the lines in the image as wires, just start plugging different verbs and particles together. Insofar as the regions “He” and “She” are a pragmatic order placed over this field of becomings, by plugging and playing, creating new assemblages, the space beneath the map, and its molecules, wriggle and writhe underneath the symbolic borders. A girl that argues that and suggests that, and a boy that grows up and learns through.
The same applies for sexuality: it is badly explained by the binary organization of the sexes, and just as badly by a bisexual organization within each sex (ala Freud). Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings; these are like n sexes, an entire war machine through which love passes." (A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 307)
One only need to think of the intensity of the self-obliterating passion at the opening of a new romantic affair to intuit this “too great a diversity of conjugated becomings” that are brought into play, this “war-machine”. War machines obliterate and reconstruct maps. Out of this intensity of a new relationship, semi-stable identities form in the wake of the destruction, and in the end, if they survive, you have a couple “in love”.
Now, in the formation of these identities there’s something petty and hideous about a resistance to the destabilizing effects of the war machine upon the maps of classical binary gender demarcations and the organisms that are being transformed by passions into novel region-destroying assemblages… (If you can grasp that sentence you’ve attained “Deleuze lvl.4”). For example, a guy who tells his lover she cannot “argue that” and should “grow up” and “learn through” because that’s what a “woman” does, and that’s what a “man” says (he argues that, and suggests that). The very passion that founds the relationship destroys these stable regions of gender organization creating a myriad of assemblages (arguing-up-that-suggesting-adding-dying-going-becoming bird-becoming-animal-becoming-machine), and brings the demarcation problem to the fore, as the two obliterate each other, in a cloud of molecules, bleeding out and over and under any map that tries to fix their genderfied individuality. They can rebuild themselves however they wish, hence why it’s a bit hideous when the traditional, political, social, cultural, familial, biological maps are restored unchanged, imported wholesale from somewhere extraneous to the site. As sad as any failed just revolution…
If you’ve grasped all of the above, the final step is to realize that the maps that create demarcations over the chaosmos of becoming, are themselves becoming-maps…