"Perception will no longer reside in the relation between a subject and an object, but rather in the movement serving as the limit of that relation, in the period associated with them. Perception will find itself confronting its own limit; it will be in among things, throughout its own proximity (dans l’esemble de son propre voisinage), as the presence of one haecceity in another, the prehension of one by the other, or the passage from one to the other."
~ ~ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [15].

Perception is becoming – metamorphosis, being itself. Being/becoming is the interval of substance, the returning/repetition of component transformations, forever synchronizing periods in the passage between milieus. To become is to intercede into the middle/milieu where we are – in this zone of indiscernibility we are now reconstructing.

The Deleuzian synthesis of disjunction is a rule of anarchy. It does not mean no rules but rules that change/mutate with every move/question/formation. All identities are dissolved, individual components redistributed. The world is "constituted by divergent series (chaosmos) of events "incompossible" in the "same" identical world, where the dice throw has replaced the game of Plenitude . . . the nomad can no longer include the entire world in a closed circle modifiable by projection, but opens itself onto a trajectory or expanding spiral that distances farther and farther from any centre." (Gilles Deleuze) [16]

This is a "chaotic-cosmos" where everything returns/repeats because there is no beginning or end of time but only a mid-milieu. For "the true subject oft he eternal return is the intensity, the singularity . . . Will to Power as open intensity," in this virtual world where "each thing opens itself to the infinite of predicates through which is passes." (Gilles Deleuze) [17].

In this system ". . . the anti-God determines the passage of each thing through all possible predicates." (Gilles Deleuze) [18] This is what is happening, obscurely and distinctly now, in this indiscernible chaosmos of "history."

The terminal objective point of the film's narrative would seem to be not simply ending the tyranny of the old program, but also the insertion of a new program into the old, to thereby make a transition possible. Neo and the cyber-rebels are destined not merely to navigate and overthrow the Matrix, but actually re-configure it – to re-assemble its components into something more viable and open, something that leads to more flexibility – their work is no longer that of terrorism. The outcome is not simply an overthrowing of the regime of the AI but also an awakening of humankind. This project requires not the ruthlessness of the terrorist, but the subtlety of the artist.

A Deleuzo-Guattarian machinic strategy is the operation of the virtual implementing itself into the actual, re-virtualizing itself, and producing a reality in a circuit form. This theme for an event/scene reaches into the actual/present as well as towards virtual futures and requires that we must acknowledge, even in incompleteness, the multiplicity that affects us, in the middle/ inbetween/interbeing. This between does not predetermine a locational relation going from one thing to another, but a perpendicular direction, "atransversal", a movement that shifts one way and another, a flow without beginnings or end – this image develops the concept of "becomings" that implicate unique/different relations to other entities.

Morpheus: Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did . . . there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

End Notes:

[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (trans. Brian Massumi). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 2 (Minneaoplis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

[2] One may speak of individuated entities within a plane of consistency, but they are not persons/subjcts/substances. Rather they are "haecceities" – a term borrowed from Duns Scotus, whose "haecceities" may perhaps mean "thisness." The body of a haecceity may include any number of heterogeneous things/parts of things within it – since the plane of consistency is made up of non-formed particles and contains no "things" in an ordinary sense, and its duration may be brief of extended.

[3] Deleuze and Guattari state that the time of "haecceities" is that of the “"Aeon" which is the indefinite time of the event.