Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES? □ 35

 

multiplicities of every variety. Take the Wolf-Man's second dream during 

his so-called psychotic episode: in the street, a wall with a closed door, to 

the left an empty dresser; in front of the dresser, the patient, and a big 

woman with a little scar who seems to want to skirt around the wall; behind 

the wall, wolves, rushing for the door. Even Brunswick can't go wrong: 

although she recognizes herself in the big woman, she does see that this 

time the wolves are Bolsheviks, the revolutionary mass that had emptied 

the dresser and confiscated the Wolf-Man's fortune. The wolves, in a 

metastable state, have gone over to a large-scale social machine But psycho-

analysis has nothing to say about all of these points—except what Freud 

already said: it all leads back to daddy (what do you know, he was one of the 

leaders of the liberal party in Russia, but that's hardly important; all that 

needs to be said is that the revolution "assuaged the patient's feelings of 

guilt"). You'd think that the investments and counterinvestments of the 

libido had nothing to do with mass disturbances, pack movements, collec-

tive signs, and particles of desire.

 

Thus it does not suffice to attribute molar multiplicities and mass 

machines to the preconscious, reserving another kind of machine or multi-

plicity for the unconscious. For it is the assemblage of both of these that is 

the province of the unconscious, the way in which the former condition the 

latter, and the latter prepare the way for the former, or elude them or return 

to them: the libido suffuses everything. Keep everything in sight at the 

same time—that a social machine or an organized mass has a molecular 

unconscious that marks not only its tendency to decompose but also the 

current components of its very operation and organization; that any indi-

vidual caught up in a mass has his/her own pack unconscious, which does 

not necessarily resemble the packs of the mass to which that individual 

belongs; that an individual or mass will live out in its unconscious the 

masses and packs of another mass or another individual. What does it 

mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract 

him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, 

whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to 

find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within 

himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join 

them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the 

other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every 

love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be 

formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some-

one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires 

the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the 

multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A 

pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a

 

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6 □ 1914: ONE OR SEVERAL WOLVES?

 

woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's 

throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent 

upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. Albertine is slowly 

extracted from a group of girls with its own number, organization, code, 

and hierarchy; and not only is this group or restricted mass suffused by an 

unconscious, but Albertine has her own multiplicities that the narrator, 

once he has isolated her, discovers on her body and in her lies—until the 

end of their love returns her to the indiscernible.

 

Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the 

masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the 

internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. The 

distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which 

are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types 

of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places— 

machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given 

moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: "I love you" (or 

whatever). For Kafka, Felice is inseparable from a certain social machine, 

and, as a representative of the firm that manufactures them, from 

parlograph machines; how could she not belong to that organization in the 

eyes of Kafka, a man fascinated by commerce and bureaucracy? But at the 

same time, Felice's teeth, her big carnivorous teeth, send her racing down 

other lines, into the molecular multiplicities of a becoming-dog, a 

becoming-jackal . .. Felice is inseparable from the sign of the modern 

social machines belonging to her, from those belonging to Kafka (not the 

same ones), and from the particles, the little molecular machines, the 

whole strange becoming or journey Kafka will make and have her make 

through his perverse writing apparatus.

 

There are no individual statements, only statement-producing 

ma-chinic assemblages. We say that the assemblage is fundamentally 

libidinal and unconscious. It is the unconscious in person. For the moment, 

we will note that assemblages have elements (or multiplicities) of several 

kinds: human, social, and technical machines, organized molar machines; 

molecular machines with their particles of becoming-inhuman; Oedipal 

apparatuses (yes, of course there are Oedipal statements, many of them); 

and counter-Oedipal apparatuses, variable in aspect and functioning. We 

will go into it later. We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, 

only of types of interpenetrating multiplicities that at any given moment 

form a single machinic assemblage, the faceless figure of the libido. Each 

of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind, and we reproduce its 

statements when we think we are speaking in our own name; or rather we 

speak in our own name when we produce its statement. And what bizarre 

statements they are; truly, the talk of lunatics. We mentioned Kafka, but 

we could just

 

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