Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? D 29

 

Oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in 

the kennel, the analyst's bow-wow.

 

Franny is listening to a program on wolves. I say to her, Would you like to 

be a wolf? She answers haughtily, How stupid, you can't be one wolf, you're 

always eight or nine, six or seven. Not six or seven wolves all by yourself all 

at once, but one wolf among others, with five or six others. In 

becoming-wolf, the important thing is the position of the mass, and above 

all the position of the subject itself in relation to the pack or 

wolf-multiplicity: how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far 

away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity. To soften 

the harshness of her response, Franny recounts a dream: "There is a 

desert. Again, it wouldn't make any sense to say that I am in the desert. It's 

a panoramic vision of the desert, and it's not a tragic or uninhabited desert. 

It's only a desert because of its ocher color and its blazing, shadowless 

sun. There is a teeming crowd in it, a swarm of bees, a rumble of soccer 

players, oragroup of Tuareg. lam on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; 

but I belong to it, I am attached to it by one of my extremities, a hand or 

foot. I know that the periphery is the only place I can be, that I would die if 

I let myself be drawn into the center of the fray, but just as certainly if I let 

go of the crowd. This is not an easy position to stay in, it is even very 

difficult to hold, for these beings are in constant motion and their 

movements are unpredictable and follow no rhythm. They swirl, go 

north, then suddenly east; none of the individuals in the crowd remains 

in the same place in relation to the others. So I too am in perpetual 

motion; all this demands a high level of tension, but it gives me a feeling of 

violent, almost vertiginous, happiness." A very good schizo dream. To be 

fully a part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed 

from it: to be on the edge, to take a walk like Virginia Woolf (never again 

will I say, "I am this, I am thai").

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Problems of peopling in the unconscious: all that passes through the 

pores of the schizo, the veins of the drug addict, swarming, teeming, fer-

ment, intensities, races and tribes. This tale of white skin prickling with 

bumps and pustules, and of dwarfish black heads emerging from pores gri-

macing and abominable, needing to be shaved off every morning—is it a 

tale by Jean Ray, who knew how to bring terror to phenomena of 

micromultiplicity? And how about the "Lilliputian hallucinations" on 

ether? One schizo, two schizos, three: "There are babies growing in my 

every pore"—"With me, it's not in the pores, it's in my veins, little iron 

rods growing in my veins"—"I don't want them to give me any shots, 

except with camphorated alcohol. Otherwise breasts grow in my every 

pore." Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of 

the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the uncon-

scious itself was fundamentally a crowd. He was myopic and hard of

 

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0 D 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

hearing; he mistook crowds for a single person. Schizos, on the other hand, 

have sharp eyes and ears. They don't mistake the buzz and shove of the 

crowd for daddy's voice. Once Jung had a dream about bones and skulls. A 

bone or a skull is never alone. Bones are a multiplicity. But Freud wants the 

dream to signify the death of someone. "Jung was surprised and pointed 

out that there were several skulls, not just one. Yet Freud still. . ."

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A multiplicity of pores, or blackheads, of little scars or stitches. Breasts, 

babies, and rods. A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuareg. A multi-

plicity of wolves or jackals ... All of these things are irreducible but bring 

us to a certain status of the formations of the unconscious. Let us try to 

define the factors involved: first, something plays the role of the full 

body—the body without organs. In the preceding dream it was the desert. 

In the Wolf-Man's dream it is the denuded tree upon which the wolves are 

perched. It is also the skin as envelope or ring, and the sock as reversible 

surface. It can be a house or part of a house, any number of things, any-

thing. Whenever someone makes love, really makes love, that person con-

stitutes a body without organs, alone and with the other person or people. 

A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body 

upon which that which serves as organs (wolves, wolf eyes, wolf jaws?) is 

distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion, in the 

form of molecular multiplicities. The desert is populous. Thus the body 

without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of 

the organs insofar as it composes an organism. The body without organs is 

not a dead body but a living body all the more alive and teeming once it has 

blown apart the organism and its organization. Lice hopping on the beach. 

Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multi-

plicities. The problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do 

with generation but rather peopling, population. It is an affair of world-

wide population on the full body of the earth, not organic familial genera-

tion. "I love to invent peoples, tribes, racial origins ... I return from my 

tribes. As of today, I am the adoptive son of fifteen tribes, no more, no less. 

And they in turn are my adopted tribes, for I love each of them more than if 

I had been born into it." People say, After all, schizophrenics have a mother 

and a father, don't they? Sorry, no, none as such. They only have a desert 

with tribes inhabiting it, a full body clinging with multiplicities.

 

This brings us to the second factor, the nature of these multiplicities and 

their elements. RHIZOME. One of the essential characteristics of the dream 

of multiplicity is that each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance 

in relation to the others. On the Wolf-Man's nose, the elements, deter-

mined as pores in the skin, little scars in the pores, little ruts in the scar tis-

sue, ceaselessly dance, grow, and diminish. These variable distances are 

not extensive quantities divisible by each other; rather, each is indivisible,

 

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