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2.5 Multiplicities: the Populous Desert

It is important at this stage to re-state the fact  that human individuals are always multiplicities. They are multiplicities in one sense through being nexuses of faculty-affects, or abstract machines. Secondly, they are also divided along the lines of the types of engagement that are waking and sleeping. Finally, and most importantly in this context, they are also multiplicities in the sense of being made up of all of their becomings with encountered bodies, assemblages and zones, including other encountered individuals  who can go into effect either in the form of memory and imagination, or in the form of an empirically perceptual encounter. These last ideas are a large part of what is at stake in the second plateau of A Thousand Plateaus – ‘One or Several Wolves?’, a short plateau that deals with questions concerning schizophrenia and human multiplicities (including multiplicities in the form of groups or ‘packs’). The reference to wolves concerns Freud’s treatment of the ‘Wolfman’, whose fascination with wolves (and with other animals) is taken up into the wider issue of all becomings with animals, and is used to critique the Freudian obsession with familial connections. At one level everything here is a question of becomings or of lines of flight: ‘Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is’ (TP p.32). It is a question here of the pragmatics of fostering connections, and of not entering into fixated engagement with ‘molar’, structural assemblages (the ‘wolf-man’ has a becoming with the religious and military assembages) At another level, it is a question of understanding the non-stratified body as a teeming field of multiplicities. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this non-stratified body (which they call the ‘body without organs’), can be thought of as a desert – or as something which starts out as a desert, but which is nonetheless secretly full of life, and which then can be populated to ever higher degrees: 

The desert is populous. Thus the body without organs is opposed  less to organs as such than to the organisation 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 organisation. Lice hopping on the beach. Skin colonies. The full body without organs is a body populated by multiplicities. (TP, p.30)

Human individuals are therefore multiplicities, and they are also populations of multiplicities. Finally, they enter into groups with other individuals, where these groups are  multiplicities of bodies. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, at a logical level, what is  important about such ‘rhizomatic’ multiplicities, is that even though they are made up of bodies, the term multiplicity remains a substantive: it does not refer to a ‘many’ made up of units, but to a group-body whose operations  vary in complex ways through distance, distribution and other variables, and which changes qualitatively through the addition or subtraction of members. At a schizoanalytic level what is important is that the individual  is (or can be) in connection with human group-bodies  that are not part (or substantially fall outside of)  the double-articulated world of assemblages of power and regimes of signs.

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