Deleuze fucks the animal not through physical penetration but by shoving words up its backside, by creating of the wolf a poodle, of the wasp-orchid, a still-life. And how is the animal to achieve retribution except through an intermediary who can reciprocate in kind on its behalf?
Nagel provides the tragedy that Deleuze portrays as a romance. Becoming-animal excludes the animal almost precisely, almost perfectly; tortures it into the word-poodle. Deleuze, unlike Derrida, seems to have never had a cat under whose gaze to fall and so, in his dalliance with Guattari, created the surrogate as a mask for the limitation. His identity with Guattari, functioning to produce a work that denies the non-identical in its most categorical form.
We inevitably portray our own symptom in such critiques, a poetic attempt to overcome our inherent poodlization. But we, at least, do not fuck the animal. We explicitly exclude it to honour our own limitations, and as a confession. The confessor in such situations is internally calmed, exorcised of the need for hyperbole, for drama, and the drama can retreat quietly to its proper place between the lines, which recover their logical integrity without losing entirely the intensity that the poetic approach affords.
There are four avenues of critique of Deleuze that I’d like to explore here:
The logical critique: Becoming-animal structurally excludes animality. It is a practice available only to the non-animal.
The epistemic critique: Deleuze’s attempt to compensate for this problem through the wasp-orchid example only reflexively maps onto the problem another layer of the same problematic, the theorist position onto the unknowable animal interior. (see Nagel).
The textual critique: As per Bourideu and Badiou: “Becoming animal” does not dissolve hierarchy, but reinstates it, undermining Deleuze’s proclaimed univocity.
The diagnostic critique: Does the above not add up to the idea that Deleuze’s textual forays are a means of disguising their own inherent limitations, i.e. “Fucking the wolf to create the poodle” emphasizes the division between wolf and poodle rather than dissolving it through ancestry.
I would qualify the above in two respects:
I have a profound respect for Deleuze as a philosopher.
The unorthodox approach to the question is more of a homage to him than a satire.
Anyhow, it might serve as a point of departure for an interesting conversation.
Very creative OP. I’m inclined to trace these critiques of Deleuze to their authors. Nagel reads Deleuze through a Kantian lens, Badiou arrives at Deleuze from Hegel, and Derrida applies a deconstructive approach. These are very different philosophical vantages, and can’t simply be lumped together. I’d Deleuze were to push back against Nagel, he would likely argue the following:
Nagel asks What is it like to be a bat? This presupposes that reality is fundamentally organized around subjective interiors. There is a bat-perspective hidden from us.How can a human philosopher legitimately speak about animals when animal subjectivity is inaccessible?But Deleuze’s ontology rejects this idea of a hidden interiority or subjectivity Organisms are pattens of interactions and activities in the world. For Deleuze, the important question isn’t what is it like to be a wolf, but what can a wolf do, and what relations compose a wolf?
Isn`t this just to restate the problem though? “Wolf relations” are just what the theorist supposes them to be, entirely external projections of a particular (human) perspective that not only wants to deny its object but its own perspectivism precisely as a means to achieve such a denial.
The wolf doesn`t get to answer because it has been reduced to the word or concept-poodle of a particularly human therapeutics, a means by which a subjective interiority can distinguish itself from its social pen, the concept-poodle safely running amok among the sheep in order to demonstrate it isn’t one.
This may come across as uncharitable, but I want to push the point partly in order to provoke the best defence. I’m a fan of Deleuze but I can’t square his professed ontological flattening with its actual results, which are of and for the human, particularly the human interiority as it stands in opposition to the social exteriority.
I thought the whole point of Deleuze was melding of Marx and Freud, such that the ‘inner’ human interiority is already social. How else do you understand Anti-Oedipus’ critique of Freudian psychodynamics and the Capitalist construction of the individual and the family? For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no pre-social interiority that later encounters society. Rather, what we call “interiority” is itself produced through social assemblages. Desire is already social, economic, and political before it is personal.
Are you granting this point, but then saying that Deleuze excludes the animal from these processes? If so, then Deleuze might respond that the fact he analyzes desire, subjectivity, and capitalism doesn’t imply that humans occupy a privileged ontological position. It only means that these are the assemblages in which we are situated.
Btw, Derrida’s analysis of the ‘animal that I therefore am’ and his deconstruction of Deleuze in The Transcendental “Stupidity” (“Bêtise”) of Man and the Becoming- Animal According to Deleuze comes from a very differ t place than Nagel and Basiou. Derrida is in general agreement with Deleuze over the incoherence of ‘what it is like to be’ and its contamination by the social and the other. Derrida’s point of attack is much more subtle.
Thanks, good points and this sets things up nicely. I’m going to come back later with a long post in reply that sets out my position, focusing particularly on the plateau “1730”. I’ll just say two things for now. 1) I grant Deleuze’s professed project. The contradiction in my view is internal to how he writes about it—what it actually implies. 2) Derrida’s critique is not something I’ve mentioned in the 4 points because I’m not familiar with the specifics of it. I included the cat anecdote in the rhetorical opening because I know he has criticized Deleuze and I think it’s a salient image.
Unfortunately, I can’t boast such a sophisticated knowledge of Deleuze. I’m also unfamiliar with Nagel’s critique from the source.
However, after delving into your text and searching online, Deleuze’s idea of "becoming an animal" itself struck me as interesting.
From an essay I read on this topic, I roughly understood that becoming an animal, according to Deleuze, means not imitating its habits, not resembling it in appearance, and not identifying with it. This process is neither psychological nor imaginary, but absolutely real, but at the level of intensities and relationships. A person doesn’t become a “wolf”; they enter into a “becoming block” with a wolf. Perhaps I misunderstood, but if possible, please explain where I went wrong.
When I first read this, I felt like I was watching some popular movie where an Indian transforms into a wolf and describes the procedure. I wouldn’t have taken this seriously otherwise, if it weren’t for the name of a respected philosopher. But it is.
Okay. But here’s the thing. And here I like your criticism:
This theoretical process of becoming cannot occur except by human will. No matter how beautifully it’s written by the authors: “Passive Birth”—when you’re suddenly captivated by the process itself… It sounds dubious.
A human’s conscious aspiration to become a wolf is already beyond the realm of “animal,” no matter how captivated you are by the process.
But here’s another thing: why all this? To remove subjectivity and attempt to reach some “transcendentally pure level”? But why? So that words spoken from this state acquire some special weight? But what kind of words can an Animal say? Bark?
But that’s not all: Who said that animals live so directly in this world?
For example, my dog starts barking when my daughter puts on a fun costume that radically changes her look. Perhaps animals use imagery in their daily lives just as much as we do.
From all this, I would conclude that the practical results, even if such an undertaking were theoretically successful, are highly questionable.
Even Don Juan (Castanedo’s) would have envied such an approach. But at least he led his apprentice by the hand and brought him back. At least there were mushrooms. I confess I never took all this seriously (now I understand where I got that image of the Indian I described above).
You start out by saying that according to Deleuze, becoming wolf
means not imitating its habits, not resembling it in appearance, and not identifying with it. This process is neither psychological nor imaginary, but absolutely real, but at the level of intensities and relationships. A person doesn’t become a “wolf”; they enter into a “becoming block” with a wolf.
But then you ignore this and go on to claim exactly the opposite of what Deleuze means by intensities and relationships.
Before you can get into a proper critique of how becoming wolf functions, you have to grasp the more fundamental idea that for Deleuze processes of transformation aren’t the actions of a self-conscious subject pursuing a represented end. They occur at what he calls the pre-personal level. Subjectivity and the ‘will’ for him are just secondary byproducts of these pre-personal processes of production.
Nagel’s critique ultimately misinterpreted the core of Deleuze’s concept of becoming. Deleuze has systematically refuted all of the similar arguments:
“To become is never to imitate, nor to ‘do like’, nor to conform to a model, whether it is of justice or of truth. There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. Becomings are not phenomena of imitation or assimilation, but of a double capture, of a non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns” (‘Dialogs’, pg.2).
It’s not the standard human relationship with a recognizable, imagined, or conceptualized, domesticated or non-domesticated animal that defines becoming an animal. Mainly, it concerns a process enacted by placing involved generic identities in suspense while keeping the state of a heightened intensive encounter. What emerges is a wavering motion across two heterogeneous series, disrupting entrenched oppositions, binaries, or controversies. The act of becoming animal is about generating the never-before-seen, the unachieved, and the unexperienced. In ‘The Metamorphosis’, Deleuze and Guattari’s paradigmatic example, Kafka executes a Deleuzian program of a ‘double capture ‘, of a ‘non-parallel evolution’. Gregor’s interior life remains seemingly human and continuous: he experiences pain, guilt, tenderness, and feels shame and humiliation. But due to the blockage of habitual circuits of perception and valuation, the text forces the reader into a zone where representation fails. The result is the creation of an intensive ontogenetic interval of a cockroachity, of an excess of becoming the human-roach.
This is a reasonable starting point to go into detail on some of the points I want to make. One of them to probematize this claim of literality. The intention is how you put it, and I want to separate out intentions from how I see the structure functioning. So, yes, it’s the “becoming-wolf” that is supposed to be the literal reality. But a) This novel concept is granted “literal reality” by fiat and b) Seeing as the actual wolf perspective does not enter into the picture at all, the literal reality of the wolf is erased. There is no wolf there. What you are left with is a decoding and reterritoralzing of the wolf for the purposes of the theory.
This a process that ironically mirrors what capitalism achieves according to Deleuze. Deleuze’s multiplicities, speed and slowness, capacity to be affacted etc are the generic currency of the the theory. There is no place for anything outside them, the “wolf reality”, the being of the wolf, its literal reality is fully absorbed. And the “literal reality” of becoming-X cannot hold up when the X has no substantial content, is not answerable to any procedure, formal or empirical. And so it doesn’t because it’s a metaphor set up to serve the theory.
What Deleuze ends up doing then mirrors Descartes reductionism. Descartes also erases the animal persective, reducing it to a simple body, a machinic automaton. Deleuze reduces it to a set of abtractions to be played with, a conceptual machine designed just so the theory can plug into it.
The upshot of this is that the wolf does not get to answer, to interrogate the terms; the only literal reality is the experience of the individual become wolf. Deleuze wants to displace this literality onto a “becoming-wolf” that can’t be anything other than metaphor according to the terms under which he has contsructed it.
But if he leans toward structuralism, he would see the symbols as threads running through the human psyche, however he conceives if that, like the collective unconscious is supposed to give rise to symbolism.
Are you saying his scheme doesn’t resonate with you?
No, it does resonant with me. But on close examination, certain things don’t seem to hold up to scrutiny. This is just one. Anyhow, the converstion might help me resolve my doubts (I’m happy to be wrong) or might entench them further. Either way, Deleuze will remain a great philosopher.
I think this is worth exploring in relation to the literal, metaphor issue. So, my understanging is that D and G (I should mention both instead of putting all of this on Deleuze) want to make use of the term “literal” in order to avoid the idea of metaphor, which is part of their project of avoiding the Freudian reduction of everything into symbols and the body/representation dichotomy; that is, they don’t want the positive aspect of literality which requires some confirmation in reality, but they have to deny metaphor as part of their larger project to still make some claim to reality, so they come up with the formula “literal, not metaphorical” to do this work.
But though it does work to prop up their theoretical position, it does nothing else substantial. There is no other friction in substituting “metaphorical” for “literal, not metaphorical” as a descriptor for “becoming-wolf”, in seeing it as a metaphor applied to human experience. It fits well with both with their own sorcerer narratives and the literature they bring up. They appear then to be engaged in gerrymandering a distinction that, as used in their examples, doesn’t really make a difference.
Taking “The Metamorphosis”. You say the text “forces the reader into a zone where representation fails”. I counter that the text does what literature is supposed to do and that is to hold the relationship of the literal and the metaphorical in a kind of suspense*. And in order to do this you need both as commonly understood. This is what gives stories like Kafka’s their force. We are left wondering if this is a supernatural occurrence (literally occurred to the body) or a psychological one (representational/symbolic). Literature plays with how the human mind actually works and doesn’t care about D and G’s fight with Freud.
As for this:
Or representation fails on its own, precisely because metaphor is still at play. The “intensity” or suspense is that we oscillate around this zone of uncertainty, supernatural/actual vs symbolic/psychological.Kafka executes Kafka, not Deleuze. Deleuze maps his theoretical language onto Kafka to no greater effect, and arguably less (see below), than standard literary theory achieves.
Until that is resolved either into a) The supernatural literal (he really was turned into a roach) b) The metaphorical (he only thought he was /it symbolised something). Again, the intensity relies on the play binary of literal / metaphor and, crucially, the expectation that this will be resolved one way or the other, regardless of whether that expectation is met or not.
Ironically, the insistence on the “literal” or “literal, not metaphorical” disrupts this dynamic intensity. It’s bled out into the artificiality of the construct.
Rather than getting hung up on the difference between the literal and the metaphoric, I prefer to tackle this issue in another way. Since I am very familiar with phenomenological and enactivist approaches to the subject and the animal, I want to start by asking the following:
What innovative or radical shift in thinking does Deleuze believe enables him to think about animals and humans in a way that goes beyond the normative autonomy of organisms outlined by enactivist-phenomenological models? I think clarifying the answer to this question can allow us to be more charitable toward what he is trying to do with his notion of becoming-animal.
For enactivism, the organism is the fundamental source of normativity. An organism establishes and maintains itself, and the world appears as meaningful relative to this autonomously self-generating and self-maintaining activity. Even when enactivists emphasize coupling, participation, and social interaction, they usually begin from living systems that possess an intrinsic norm, continued viability.
Deleuze’s starting point is more radical. He asks what processes produce organisms in the first place, and what exceeds them.
He then shifts attention from organisms to becomings.
For enactivism, the wolf is an autonomous living system, but Deleuze asserts that this appeoach privileges the organism as a bounded unity and thereby misses the more fundamental processes of composition and transformation. The wolf is also a pack, a territory, prey relations, climatic patterns, genetic flows, symbioses, evolutionary lineages, affects and becomings that traverse it. The organism is one stabilization within a broader field.
A wolf is not exhausted by its organismic self-maintenance. A wolf-pack, a fungus, a human institution, a river system, a city, or a technological network can all enter into processes of becoming. Deleuze’s attention is directed toward what crosses identities rather than what preserves them.
Enactivism usually treats life as the privileged source of meaning and normativity, but Deleuze doesn’t. The same ontological vocabulary applies to animals, crystals,rivers, social institutions, languages, technologies and markets.
A glacier, language, Capitalism and a storm can all have a trajectory, not because these are organisms but because they are assemblages possessing capacities and tendencies.
Becoming animal wouldn’t make sense within the bounds of enactivist models of the organism, since their notions of normativity and autonomy are not porous to the unlimited range of material phenomena that Deleuze’s notion of the assemblage includes.
This doesn’t mean that Deleuze completely abandons normative categories like the human,the animal and the inorganic. Becoming animal is a way of pointing to the porosity between these normative systems, not the potential of a human to transform themselves into a rock or a wolf.
Very well explained, thanks. I’m still going to try to problematise things, but it`s a very clear reference point for what Deleuze is up to here.
Edit: I wrote a short story once which is utterly Deleuzian: all assemblages, packs, multiplicities, plays with time and identity. I love this stuff at the very least as provocation, as pushing the boundaries, and as potentially transformative. Although I wrote that utterly Deleuzian story when I barely knew anything about Deleuze. Anyhow, back to wolf mode.
So, I’ll take @Joshs comments on enactivism as a starting point for the next round of criticism. I want to bring in Adorno too, as I’m particularly interested in his theoretical perspective.
Enactivism then (as per Varela) opens the door to meaning as constituted by relations, avoiding a self-grounding loop that leaves the world out except as the mirror of a supposed interior world this loop manifests—as in representationism. So, it avoids an artificial split between subject and object; it avoids positioning of the object as mere causal input that the subjective interior represents to itself, i.e. the harvesting of meaning by the interiority of the subject through the means of the representation of the object. It doesn’t need the third term of representation because the locus is the relationship, not the subject.
However, there is still an asymmetric reflexiveness to this meaning at the normative level because a bounded organism is maintained whose function is self-maintenance not the maintenance of that which it is in relation to. It is neither the object nor the relation it seeks to maintain, but itself (through the process of autopoiesis). The upshot of this is that while enactivism effaces hierarchy at the constitutive level of meaning production; it maintains it at the normative level.
D and G’s commitment to univocity demands this hierarchy too be effaced. But there’s a cost to this and this is that any locus of meaning escapes the embodied organism entirely and is transposed onto a currency of conceptual relations that are organism-neutral and transferable.
But what is the implication of this? An Adornian critique could be that the ultimate cost is the excess above and beyond the concept. An absolutism of non-identification is just the flip side of identity thinking; both entail a refusal to cede anything beyond the concept. Adorno insists the concept cannot fully claim its object, D and G deny anything beyond the concept to the concept as self-emobodied reflexivity (the organism, the wolf, as normatively asymmetric resting point of the process of relation driven meaning-making). The non-identical excess, the reminder needs something on which to stabilize, a concept-object relationship from which it can arise. The problem with D and G’s professed univocity of course is that there is nowhere at all for meaning to rest; concepts merely loop through themselves indefinitely in a flux of pure relations.
But D and G in order to appeal to a reader, in order for their own theoretical apparatus to find any ground, must reintroduce hierarchy somewhere and so they do through “molar man”, the starting point of becomings. That becomings are both becomings from and becomings to and not simply becomings in themselves (blocks of becoming self reflexively becoming), that they must pause in order to begin requires a chain which has a theoretical beginning and end, a locus even if on a circular progression, a point of departure that takes precedence. And D and G specifically instantiate this not only with the starting point “majority/ man as molar”, but with the secondary destination / departure point “woman”.
You may notice then that the structure, in terms of its establishment of hierarchy, carries the same functional role in its anchoring apparatus as the oedipal structure “Daddy-mummy-me” that D and G’s whole project is set out to oppose. All other terms are subject in their legibility to the point from which becoming departs “majority / man as molar” .
Also, D and G’s terminus “becoming imperceptible”, i.e. socially illegible on first glance may seem the opposite of becoming socially functionalized, coming under the control of the master encoder of the social, but does it not just mirror this full encoding only under the auspices of the theorists’ conceptual apparatus? There is no ‘Adornian excess left in either case. As a positive theoretical assertion that is supposed to bring things together, it becomes legible, coded.
So, D and G’s apparatus in its primary anchoring through a historically contingent identifying category, buys a meaningless imperceptibility. The content is lost because the project was betrayed from the beginning, and the project was betrayed because it was always beholden to the concept as self-reflexive end in itself, the closed loop of meaning that denies the object as anything more than a projection through representation. That is, that which enactivism tries to step away from is reinstantiated in its result by Deleuze’s further ostensible step away; it’s just that the object “e.g. the animal” disperses into the flux of supposedly unanchored becomings rather than into a representation.
It’s a bit more complicated than this. It’s not simply that the organism maintains itself rather the object. It’s that the very notion of object is inseparable from the activity of the subject. There is not first “that in which the subject is in relation to” and then the relation. It is the pattern of interaction which produces the ‘that’. To contrast this with Adorno, it is not that the object exceeds the concept, but that each is defined by the other and each is modified by the other. They are entrained to each other and mutually transformed.
For both the enactivists and D and G, meaning arises out of the reciprocal activity and inter-affecting within assemblies and multiplicities which produce normative, consistent patterns and systems. For the enactivists, a quasi-teleological effect of purposiveness and goal-direction emerges out of the jostling among elements which themselves depend for their identity on the activity of the system as a whole.
The appearance of consistency purpose and normative meaning is the result of continual, but pattered, changes among these elements. The objectness of objects that belong to the world produced by these patterns also have this quasi-constancy of meaning, because their identity can never be separated from the activity of the organism, and vice versa.
D and G arrive at their notion of relatively stable norms of subjective and objective meaning by rethinking what it is to be an element of a living system or an element of a non-living system, in the direction of placing difference as prior to identity. The univocity of becoming is more fundamental than the temporary identities of the enactivist organism.
But this doesn’t mean Deleuze is merely replacing identity-thinking with difference-thinking, thereby creating another self-enclosed conceptual system. That would only be the case if we remained stuck within an Adornian dialectic, which posits that traditional metaphysics privileges identity over difference, Deleuze privileges difference over identity, and therefore Deleuze remains trapped within the same conceptual structure. This is a familiar criticism. Badiou makes a version of it. Manfred Frank makes a version of it. Some Adornians make a version of it.
But Deleuze’s own position is explicitly that difference and identity are not symmetrical poles.In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s entire project is to argue that difference is not the opposite of identity.
Identity and difference are not two equally fundamental categories. Rather, identity is produced from differential relations, resemblance is produced from differential relations and opposition is produced from differential relations. Difference is ontologically prior.
So when you write as if Deleuze simply moved from the “identity side” to the “difference side,” youre reading Deleuze through a framework that Deleuze explicitly rejects. For Deleuze, difference is not what remains after identity is removed. Rather, identity is what appears when differential processes are stabilized.
But of course, for Deleuze they stabilize all the time at the moral level, producing organisms, subjects and rigid, fascist and capitalist social formations. But if at the virtual and molecular levels, line of flight of becoming and resistance are fundamental, how can this dynamism of transformation be bound up and plugged at the molar level? What allows the striated and formed structurality of organisms to emerge in the first place if transcendence is immanent to itself at the virtual and molecular levels, if every difference in degree is also a change in kind? This is the paradoxical situation of the two arrangements of matter that D and G’s approach challenges us with. Deleuze draws from Bergson. here:
“Bergson presents duration as a type of multiplicity opposed to metric multiplicity or the multiplicity of magnitude. Duration is in no way indivisible, but is that which cannot be divided without changing in nature at each division.'On the other hand, in a multiplicity such as homogeneous extension, the division can be carried as far as one likes without changing anything in the constant object; or the magnitudes can vary with no other result than an increase or a decrease in the amount of space they striate. Bergson thus brought to light “two very different kinds of multiplicity,” one qualitative and fusional, continuous, the other numerical and homogeneous, discrete. It will be noted that matter goes back and forth between the two; sometimes it is already enveloped in qualitative multiplicity, sometimes already developed in a metric “schema” that draws it outside of itself.
You say molar man is the ‘starting point’ of becomings. Yes, but becomings only function by dissolving the moral. Striated molar formations only produce ‘progress’, but it is at the molecular and virtual level that becomings happen. Chains with a theoretical beginning and end are precisely what a progressive moral formation is. Becomings are not variations on a prior theme, they have no sovereign origin point, no qualitative basis which iterates instances of itself. Every iteration produces a new qualitative sense, a new and different whole.
Conceptual neutrality as well as hierarchy belongs to the flattening and equalizing abstractions of molar formations. For D and G philosophical concepts are productive, inventive becomings. Any hierarchy must define itself on the basis of a criterion of meaning which is transcendent to the hierarchy, and on which basis both the superordinate and the subordinate terms belong in their difference. Becomings don’t simply reverse hierarchies, they subvert and transform the basis of their criteria of meaning. Hegel’s and Adorno’s dialectics remain stuck within the logic of contradiction between concept and object, whereas D and G begin prior to both concept and object.
I want to address this first because it doesn’t really deal with the distinction I posited, but glosses over it, maybe because there are different versions of enactivism or we’re talking at cross purposes. But as per my previous post, I’m referring to autopoiesis whereby, while the meaning making is constituted by the relation—the structural coupling in which the organism and the environment condition each other—it is not for the relation, the relation is exchangeable but the organizationally closed autopoietic organism is not. So, it’s not just that a “quasi teleological effect” of goal direction emerges, it’s not primarily the relations themselves that get reproduced, it’s the bounded differentiated organism, and it’s that boundedness that grounds the whole process. The fact of organizational closure manifests the relevant functional difference between the organism and what it’s coupled with. There’s an important asymmetry there.
Re Adorno: Not sure what you mean here. That objects interact and can define each other or mutually transform each other is not in conflict with the object exceeding the concept. Subject-object mutual mediation is in Adorno. E.g. from “Quality and The Individuated,” from the introduction to Negative Dialectics, which I’m currently reading: “the subjective modes of reaction which the object needs require for their part the unceasing corrective in the object.”
Deleuze’s concept of univocity isn’t a universal ontological principle from which everything originates. He rejects the idea of Being as a transcendent unity that underpins all beings. Instead, Deleuze argues that immanent univocity requires
a more general categorical reversal according to which being is said of becoming, identity of that which is different, the one of the multiple, etc. That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different’ (DR, pg.40).
According to the ontology of difference, Being should not be substituted with a different universal, such as a fundamental, primordial Becoming possessing generative significance. Rather, one inevitably begins in the middle of things, at a unique, circumstantial starting point, with numerous developments unfolding around them. Beginning with a local and inherent perspective is unavoidable when one attempts to sidestep a global metaphysical doctrine. It does not imply that a haphazard or arbitrary approach is being approved. The existence of singular entry points indicates that a problem, tension, or process already in motion can be met with various encounters.
When Deleuze says
For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself
one should not read it as an ultimate rejection of the restrictions of normativity or consistency. D&G provide a rigorous method of a consistency immanent to a process that does not necessarily produce either an individual or a stable stratum. Becoming acquires consistency through a process of differential repetition. It repeats something like a relation, variation, or a differential movement. In ‘The Metamorphosis’, there is no repetition of a recognizable human or a cockroach forms or identities. The becoming-cockroach consists of repeated operations of distortion and displacement, alterations of bodily and social organization, crossing thresholds, and dismantling recognizable identities. There is an ongoing process of variation. A multiple differential repetition repeatedly recreates the same problematic relation without reproducing the same terms. Its consistency relies on its capacity to continue varying, and not on remaining the same. An assemblage as a composition of heterogeneous elements remains coherent as long as the differential process of becoming occurs.