Deleuze's conceptualization of the movement image relies on the Bergsonian claim about the supposedly erroneous positions, ancient and modern, of reconstituting movement from instants. The ancient position consists in movement's expressive nature as dialectic of forms, the eternal and immobile intelligible elements. The modern position, which Deleuze identifies with science, does not acknowledge any privileged instants relative to movement, but instead proposes the "any-instant-whatever."[5]
Deleuze's identification of cinema with the end point of this tradition requires particular means of translation and expression: for the ancient position, he offers the metaphor of means of transportation - train, car or airplane - and for the modern one, the metaphor of representational media - diagram, photograph or cinema. According to Deleuze's concept of the plan(e) in relation to the Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-animal, the translational and expressive elements stand at the juncture of contemporary developments of the two aforementioned traditions. The Deleuzian interpretation places cinematic movement precisely at this juncture of the ancient and the modern.
Differentiating between the abstract and the figurative, Deleuze and Guattari however admit that these are not opposed to eachother. The main difference between the two is that "the figurative as such is not inherent to any "will to art"." [2]
This is due to the Deleuzo-Guattarian definition of the abstract line as non-geometrical and non-rectilinear, which further determines what "should be termed abstract in modern art"; that is "a line of variable dimension that describes no contour and delimits no form." [3]
In their descriptions of the musical model, they point at the merging of the striated space with smooth space, where "the octave can be replaced by "non-octave-forming scales" that reproduce themselves through a principle of spiraling" and ""texture can be crafted in such a way as to loose fixed and homogeneous values, becoming a support for slips in tempo, displacements of intervals, and son art transformations comparable to the transformations of op art." [4]
The Deleuzian notion of the animal inserts the problem of natural history into conceptualizing movement. Deleuze brings forth the example of the relationship between abstract points A and B in the naturalistic historical terms of relations between places. By virtue of the notion of the animal, Deleuze introduces movement from A to B, but also, with Guattari, a productive relationship from A to x, which reconfigures the set (A, B) into the concept of the plan(e) allowing for becoming-animal. In their treatment of the notion of the animal, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the naturalistic view of nature as mimesis by applying a serialistic or structuralist approach to determining resemblances, or ordering differences, between species as variables in the structure.
Becoming-animal entails packs or multiplicities, which “continually transform themselves into each other”; as Deleuze and Guattari mention, “becoming and multiplicity are the same things.” [1]
plane: an abstract machine considered as a plateau of variation that places variables of content and expression of continuity.
plan(e): diagram serving as a translation and an expression of the change in duration or in the whole.
plane as plateau, plan(e)/plateau:
a plan(e) conceived in programmatic rather than analogical terms.
[1] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 249.
[2] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 497.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 499.
[4] Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 478.
[5] Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema I: The Movement Image, London: The Athlone Press, 1986: 4.
