Becoming is one key concept discussed in Plateau #10 ("1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ..." – so dated because of the proliferation of vampire literature which occurred around that time) of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's book, A Thousand Plateaus. It is impossible to define with words; it can only be defined ostensively, but fortunately our culture (in fact, every culture) is rife with examples and opportunities.
"Becoming" is central to many human behavioural phenomena, ranging from lycanthropy (in legend or psychosis equally) to play to music and magic and love. In becoming, one becomes the different (becoming-animal, becoming-child, becoming-woman, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-music, and the ultimate: becoming-imperceptible) while at the same time that which one becomes also undergoes becoming: a sort of becoming-abstract.
Becoming-animal, the sorcerer's relationship with a pack, is the paradigmatic case of becoming. It is not a case of someone just thinking he is an animal, nor pretending he is an animal, nor emulating an animal.
Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not "really" become an animal any more than the animal "really" becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, ... not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. (238)
Becoming is like an infection or symbiosis in that it doesn't have anything to do with descent or evolution. This is immortalized in the legend of the werewolf; you can become a werewolf by infection. Furthermore, a becoming always involves a pack or band; the sorcerer, on the fringe of the pack and who derives power from this position, makes a pact with a beast who occupies a similar position within his own pack. Hence, the possibility for a sociology/zoology of black magic. Furthermore, a sorcerer (or an animal) is a multiplicity and therefore a pack of itself, so to speak. "These combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are interkingdoms, unnatural participations. That is the only way Nature operates – against itself." (242) All sorcery, all becoming, is an unholy alliance between demons – one of whom is the sorcerer him- (or her-) self – that infects a society. And the perfect symbol of this contagion/pact is blood.
Becoming always exists in the fringes of society. "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages." (246) This is why becoming doesn't fit into conventional models of politics, despite the fact that sorcerers sometimes have a great deal of power, and are often associated with warrior societies (which usually constitute the standing army of a nation) and secret societies like criminal gangs. Also, while this becoming can be used for conservative as well as subversive ends, the sorcerer can only exist in freedom, on the periphery:
The politics of becomings-animal remains, of course, extremely ambiguous. For societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them, reduce them to relations of totemic or symbolic correspondence. . . . We have seen sorcerers serve as leaders, rally to the cause of despotism, create the countersorcery of exorcism, pass over to the side of the family and descent. But this spells the death of the sorcerer, and also the death of becoming. (247-248)
Becoming-animal is not the only example of becoming, however. There is also becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-elementary, becoming-music. Sorcerers are the ultimate pilgrims of correspondence, not limiting themselves to mere analogy or metaphor or order. Anything that can be become must be become; this is the only imperative of experimental sorcery.
This is not a science of forms, but of affects: "We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are. . . ." (257) But this, and the fact that in becoming we don't "really" change shape, means that the that-which-is-become must also become, must be abstracted from its shape. The tarantella-dancer becomes a tarantula, "only to the extent that the spider itself is supposed to become a pure silhouette, pure color and pure sound to which the person dances." (305) A man who becomes a wolf might not grow fur, but he still becomes a wolf; therefore a wolf becomes something such that it doesn't matter whether it has fur. This is the most superficial consequence; in the end, "wolf" becomes a way of thinking and acting and moving, abstracted entirely from species – it must be abstracted from species, because you can have canis lupus wolves and homo sapiens wolves.
Becoming represents a grave challenge to traditional psychoanalysis. The reductive theory of representation (the idea that a certain image or process represents a permanent psychic state) blinds the psychoanalyst.
We wish to make a simple point about psychoanalysis: from the beginning, it has often encountered the question of the becomings-animal of the human being: in children, who continually undergo becomings of this kind; in fetishism and in particular masochism, which continually confronts this problem. The least that can be said is that the psychoanalysts, even Jung, did not understand, or did not want to understand. They killed becoming-animal, in the adult as in the child. They saw nothing. They see the animal as a representative of drives, or a representation of the parents. They do not see the reality of a becoming-animal, that it is affect in itself, the drive in person, and represents nothing. (259)
When we awaken to the reality of becoming, we understand that the human being is more than just a body, and does not have an "identity" as such (any more than spring of '01 has an "identity"); personality is not a thing, it's not even a process: it's an event that involves the coming-together of forces cosmic. Man is a haeccity.
The perfect day to be noding about lycanthropy and black magic, don't you think?