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Skanky Jane’s recent comments on the “War of Molarity” post has encouraged me to throw up a few more bits and pieces from the Massumi stuff that i’ve been reading. My first motivation for posting these quotes is to offer a little bit more of the Molecular possibilities as a neccessary tangent to the conservative molarizing forces described below. Second motivation involves providing a little background info for the discussion of Massumi’s most recent book, Parables for the the virtual that will follow, (as a bit a an intro to that discussion its worth pointing out that despite its title this book has nothing to do with VR or other digital forms, for Massumi the digital is almost entirely made up of already actualized sets of possibilities through which any “participant” might then move). But I’ll save a more in depth look at that book for another post, in the mean time here’s a little more from

Massumi, Brian
A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.

““Nomad thought” does not lodge itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides on difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.” p.5

“The question is not, Is it true? But, Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions open in the body?” p.8

“Imagination, like habit, is a circuit – less between regularized stimuli and acquired responses in the actual world than between the actual (p101) and the virtual as such. Thought-as-imagination departs from the actual, dips into the fractal abyss, then actualizes something new. It short-circuits molarity, passing directly from a particular state of things to singular response. The generality of molar existence is present only to the extent that the selection of the response is still informed, as a pragmatic precaution, by the system of similarities dictated by molarity.

The fact that becoming-other takes analogy, metaphor, and molarity as its point of departure and moves from the general to the individual means that it is social through and through. It is a collective undertaking, even if only a single body mutates. Its point of departure is not the general in general but this generality (“my” Home), the categorical level of this body (Man or Dog) in this situation: in other words as instituted. There is no other way. Generality has no existence outside of its application to actual bodies. It is an overcoding that exists only as imposed and reimposed, habitually, in an endless being-made-what-one-is-a-priori (generally the same). It is no less a process than a becoming, it just moves in a different direction and frequents different circles. Even if a body becomes in the privacy of its own home, with no one else around, not even the dog, it is still committing a social act. Becoming performs an operation on collectively elaborated, socially selected, mutually accepted, and group-policed categories of thought and action. It opens a space in the grid of identities those categories delineate, inventing new trajectories, new circuits of response, unheard-of futures and possible bodies such as have never been seen before. It maps out a whole new virtual landscape featuring otherworldly affects. Other bodies may slip into that zone of indeterminacy, or autonomous zone, creating the conditions for a contagion of becoming-other – a process as fragile as it is infectious. When supermolecularity succeeds, the forces of molarity must accommodate or kill it. Accommodating a supermolecule means adapting the grid of molar identities to it. A new category is added to the recognized list, and procedures are established to ensure that the integration of the new kind of body into the shared environment does not upset the general equilibrium. A life space opens but it is no sooner surveyed than institutionalized, or captured: molarity is an apparatus of capture of energies that escape it.” p.100-101

“Becoming must keep on becoming, in an indefinite movement of invention opening wider and wider zones of autonomy populated by more and more singularities. Becoming-other begins by differentiating one molecular body from two molar categories, the slides into a cascade of differentiations, creating a volatile situation, with bodies moving in all directions at cross-purposes, in maneuvers of capture and escape that only increase the chances of collision and mutation. Successful becoming-other concerns the entire body politic, precipitating a hyperdifferentiation that exponentially multiplies the potential bodily states and possible identities it envelopes. Becoming bears on a population, even when it is initiated by a single body: even one body alone is collective in its conditions of emergence as well as in its future tendency.” p.102