What is Planomenology?

I pose the question only provisionally, as I hope to continue approaching it throughout my life, but it is perhaps an appropriate way to begin. The obvious cue is to phenomenology (as well as phantasmatology, a word Foucault coined to describe Deleuze's early metaphysics). Yet whereas Husserl intended phenomenology as methodological, I do not mean this to denote a method per se; rather, an approach to or prerogative on the ontological. Short of being systematic and exact, it should be anexact yet rigorous.

'Planomenon' is another word for the plane of consistency, perhaps the key concept in Deleuze and Guattari's later collaborations. The Planomenon is the Real as such, the ultimate 'object' of ontology, as the univocal Being of difference itself. It is the field of immanent difference, in which immanence is not ascribed to or said of any transcendent Identity or Actuality: immanence is immanent to immanence alone. Difference is no longer caught between the field of immanence and that to which it is immanent, thereby inscribed in the 'concept in general'. Rather, immanence differs from itself, in itself, by and for itself. This plane describes a field of pure differences or disparities, in which every term is a singularity - unique, unusual, problematic. It is on this plane that every singularity is consistent with every other, precisely as problems, as instances of a problematic field drawn in the course of questioning.

This kind of consistency is prior to and more profound than logical consistency, as contradiction has no meaning or relevance. Rather, it has a properly machinic consistency, that of the Mechanosphere: everything subsists in interconnected lines of flows and breaks, composed of a univocal flow of matter/sense (mening), a pure becoming. As such, it attains absolute deterritorialization, it is the real attaining this absolute limit. This occurs when the question, "What can this body do?", "Of what is this body capable?", is posed with its maximum force and efficacy, drawing a field that implicates and encompasses the entirety of the real. Every connection (of different to different, singularity to singularity) is raised to the height, the limit of its intensity. All of reality is constellated in a becoming-other of Being in which everything takes flight.

The machinic consistency of the Planomenon is thereby drawn not through a logical relation of terms without contradiction, but through a problematic relation of terms without limit, or whose only limit is the absolute of universal bifurcation in which everything is only as yet to come. The real becomes self-consistent in relation to what it can do, what might be coming. Therefore, planomenology will regard the real with an attention to such consistency, following the abstract lines drawn by absolute deterritorialization. Everything transcendent, every actuality, will come up against a force, a cruelty, so intense that it will attain its absolute limit, its vertigo, falling back on the plane of immanence. It is in this sense that Deleuze speaks of the 'transcendent exercise' of the faculties, in which they attain the pure immanence of a thought without image. Nothing can escape, or rather, nothing can avoid escaping, nothing can remain grounded on a substratum, as everything is carried off in a incessant and ruthless ungrounding.

'Planomenon' is literally defined as 'all free-living organisms; those organisms not rooted or attached to a substratum.' Its Greek root has the sense of 'drifting' or 'roaming', and it is related to 'planomania', meaning 'a compulsion to wander', or 'an intense desire to live free from social restraints or obligations'. It is when the question (of what are we capable?) is posed with sufficient force, that is, when there is an intense enough desire driving it, that absolute deterritorialization is attained, and the abstract line carries us off with an infinite speed. Discovering these lines and feeding them into the questioning, and thereby composing problematic machines with increasingly intense forced movements fueling them, is the aim and passion of planomenology. The object of planomenology is, therefore, the abstract line that clandestinely wanders through all of the real, connecting everything back to the univocal Being of difference, absolute Deterritorialization.