then you stepped in a pile of dog shit

The rhizome structure of this text is really becoming apparent to me. It seems that D&G present conclusions several pages or chapters before they provide explanations of them. Any time I think I grasp a concept and excitedly make a note of the page that opened it up for me, I get engrossed in the next line (superline?) of thought and have to continually go back to remember what it’s referring to. “We had to summarize before we lost our voice” (72). It seems like D&G come to a limit of poetic impenetrability in several places and decide that they need to sum up in a definition, which is what has made it possible for me to read the foregoing passages.

For instance: “The plane of consistency is always immanent to the strata; the two states of the abstract machine always coexist as two different states of intensities.” (57)
Also: “The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.” (69)

Taken together, these two passages are as close to definitions as D&G get. They also help me to conceive of an overall framework of D&G’s analysis. The plane of consistency, then, is something akin to the “Real” of psychoanalysis, though I’m not sure that there is a one-to-one correspondence. In any case, when D&G later seem to tend towards some kind of idealism, this conception of the plane of consistency keeps my reading in check.

The following quote seemed at first to propound a kind of spirit-of-the-world ideal: “There is no primacy of the individual; there is instead an indissolubility of a singular Abstract and a collective Concrete. The abstract machine does not exist independently of the assemblage, any more than the assemblage functions independently of the machine” (100). However, their argument corrects such a reading by emphasizing that language is not determined by the collective assemblage but that its possibility is conditioned by it, and necessarily also includes continuous variation.

D&G’s argument and terms cannot be reduced to a correspondence to real/imaginary/symbolic, but such a reading is one I turn to when I can’t seem to crack open what they’re saying, and make adjustments when I find departures in their text. This passage is the best strategic summary that I read in the text: “The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, significance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. The strata together are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract machine” (134).