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Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and

1

Becoming-Animal

Simone Bignall
Version of record first published: 03 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Simone Bignall (2012): Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal ,
Culture, Theory and Critique, DOI:10.1080/14735784.2012.749110
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Culture, Theory and Critique, 2012, 1 18, iFirst Article

Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and

Becoming-Animal1

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Simone Bignall
Abstract The film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, provides a
fruitful context for thinking about Deleuzes conceptualisation of structural
transformation as a presubjective process involving a critical and creative politics of engagement. Nina is a young dancer who has just secured the lead role in
the New York Ballets new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires
her to dance the pure and innocent character of the White Swan a role that
mirrors Ninas character in real life, and for which she is well suited but also
as the seductive and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan, a role quite
alien to Nina. The film traces Ninas desperate efforts to meet the demands of
this doubled characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her
peers, she enters into a becoming-swan that frees her from the restraints and constraints imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables
her to realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina
not only is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she endures. By considering this work of cinema in light of Deleuzes writings on cinema, on becoming-animal, and on Porcelain and Volcano, this essay
reflects upon a crucial question underlying much of Deleuzes political thought:
how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation,
without these structures of necessary coherence also cracking up and being
destroyed in the process?

How are we to rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves?

(Deleuze 1986: 66)

I wish to extend my gratitude to Teri Silvio and to two anonymous reviewers

who provided very helpful suggestions for revision. I also thank the conference organisers and participants of the 2010 Deleuze Studies Conference in Copenhagen, where
an earlier version of this paper was heard; my attendance at this event was made possible with financial support from the University of South Australia.
Culture, Theory and Critique
ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2012.749110

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Simone Bignall

The 2010 film Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, images the complex
nature of relational identity and a process of radical transformation, a becoming, connected to a critical and creative politics of engagement. It issues an
affective invitation for the filmgoer to think about the phenomenological
process of identity construction, the experience of personal crisis and the ontological significance of the protagonists drastic psychological collapse and subjective reconfiguration. The central character of this film, Nina, is a young
dancer who has just secured the lead role in the New York Ballets new production of Swan Lake. This role not only requires her to dance the pure and
innocent character of the White Swan a role that mirrors Ninas character
in her real (filmic) life, and for which she is well suited but also the seductive
and darkly erotic character of the Black Swan a role quite alien to Nina. The
film traces Ninas desperate efforts to meet the demands of this doubled
characterisation. Through new forms of engagement with her peers, she
enters into a becoming-swan that frees her from the restraints and constraints
imposed by her existing self. While this transformative process enables her to
realise aesthetic perfection in her art, this comes at a heavy price: Nina not only
is creatively destabilised, but ultimately is destroyed by the transformation she
endures.
Deleuzes most sustained exploration of the relationship between film
and philosophy is presented in two books on cinema that use the Bergsonian
language of duration and of actual and virtual modes of existence to theorise
the movement-image and the time-image (Deleuze 1986, 1989; Mullarkey
2009). As Felicity Colman notes, when one is doing film-philosophy how
that conjunctive hyphen is practiced becomes indicative of a particular aesthetic and politic (2009: 3). By considering Black Swan as a movementimage and a time-image that can illustrate and illuminate wider aspects of
Deleuzian philosophy, which are often not well understood, this essay seeks
to expand new ways of thinking about processes of change. It situates a narrative description of Ninas transformation in relation to Series 22 on Porcelain
and Volcano in Deleuzes The Logic of Sense (2004), and in relation to Deleuze
and Guattaris (1987) writing on becoming-animal. This situating permits a
better understanding about how the incremental movement-image of
Ninas change additionally gives us a discontinuous time-image, in which
she moves through virtual intervals that separate moments of her actualised
being in present time. The essay reflects on a crucial question underlying
much of Deleuzes political thought: how is it possible to privilege radical subjective and social transformation, without these necessary structures of coherence also cracking up and being destroyed in the process? I conclude with a
brief reflection on the relationship between thought and film, and between the
movement-image and the time-image, in the case of Ninas becoming-swan.

Black Swan
The film begins with a mildly erotic dream sequence in which the protagonist,
Nina (Natalie Portman), is dancing as the virginal White Swan. In the dream,
she struggles to elude capture by a lecherous Black Swan who is extravagantly
costumed and sinisterly masked. Nina is a dedicated professional ballet
dancer in her twenties. She lives with her mother (Barbara Hershey) and

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Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

they share a close, co-dependent relationship. Her mother babies Nina by

dressing her, feeding her and patiently pandering to Ninas egocentric ambitions and concerns. Nina appears like a fragile little girl, softly spoken, beautiful in a delicate way, perfectly coiffed and attired in pink and white, poised,
polished: insipid. In conversation with her mother, we learn she is desperately
hoping for the attention of her director, Tomas (Vincent Cassell), who has indicated he plans to feature her more in the coming performance season. In these
early scenes, we are also given a first clue that, despite her flawless demeanour, not all is perfectly well with Nina. After waking from her dream, she
notices a nasty, pricking rash emerging on the delicate skin of her shoulder,
which she hastily conceals from her mother.
Highlighting Ninas working life at the New York Ballet, the film shows
her arriving to a bitchy dressing-room and overhearing speculation that the
prima dancer, Beth, is to be replaced by someone younger who can revive
and rescue the company from its current decline. In the rehearsal space,
Tomas walks agonisingly slowly amongst the dancers, choosing or rejecting
them one by one as they practice, each subtly competing to be noticed and
picked. He narrates the story of Swan Lake, which will be the companys production for the new season, as he goes. This is the tale of a:
virgin girl, pure and sweet, trapped in the body of a swan. She
deserves freedom but only true love can break the spell. Her wish
is nearly granted in the form of a prince. But before he can declare
his love, her lustful twin, the black swan, tricks and seduces him. Devastated, the white swan leaps off a cliff, killing herself, and in death
finds freedom.
Tomas wants to make the production visceral and real; it will be original but
risky, because the same principal dancer will play the hugely demanding
double role of the White Swan, Princess Odessa, and her dark twin, Odile.
Nina is a graceful and technically accomplished dancer and is an obvious
choice for the part of the White Swan; but Tomas thinks she is too controlled
to play the role of the Black Swan, who must be unrestrained and able to
let herself go in desire. Nina, however, is desperate for the prima part,
which she has always dreamed of dancing. Arriving home that night, Nina
is anxious and despairing. She obsessively practices until her toenail is
cracked and bleeding from the constant strain of being en pointe. Her mother
comforts her and dresses her toe, puts her to bed like a little girl, and winds
her music box to lull her to sleep.
The next day Nina fortifies herself with lipstick secretly stolen from Beth
(the former prima-ballerina), and confronts Tomas, telling him she has practiced hard and deserves the part. He complains that she is too disciplined:
perfection is not only about control. Its also about letting go. Surprise yourself, so you can surprise the audience. He tests her by kissing her, and she
bites his lip in shock: while not a deliberate act of unfettered desire, this bite
is enough to convince Tomas to give her a chance. In joy, she hides in the
toilets to phone her mum: he picked me, mummy. As she walks away
from Tomas after the kiss, we again see the rash appear on Ninas back.
That night, the flesh is open, scratched and bleeding.

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Simone Bignall

Subsequent scenes trace Ninas ascension to prima-status and her efforts

to learn her part. As predicted, she finds the role of the Black Swan alien and
difficult, and Tomas is displeased. Nina is also threatened by the appearance of
a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), whom Tomas has invited to join the company.
Lily is Ninas nemesis: she is casual with an easy sexuality. Tomas describes
Lilys dancing as imprecise, effortless; shes not faking it. While Nina is
plagued by insecurities, she relishes being the star at her debut cocktail reception as the prima dancer. However, in secret, she is increasingly falling apart
and we begin to understand that her mental state is dangerously strained.
Briefly escaping the reception by hiding in the ladies room, she worries at
her fingernail and then peels off a large strip of skin from her finger, exposing
a gaping wound. Immediately afterwards, her finger resumes its perfect form,
marking this breach of her surface boundaries as merely hallucination.
Obeying Tomas instructions to go home and live a little, Nina experiments with auto-eroticism as a way of loosening up. However, she finds
herself cloistered by her home environment: she is stifled by the remnants of
her extended childhood a pink bedroom crowded with plush toys; and
she is cosseted by her mother sleeping protectively on the chair in her room.
She cant let go in her mothers controlling domain, so she seeks privacy in
the bathroom with some success. In the moments of sexual arousal Nina
undergoes subtle transformations and momentarily loses her grip on reality.
In this instance, she hallucinates blood dripping into the water, then her fingernail bleeds and her back is covered in an ugly puckered rash that she worries
at. In sexual desire, she becomes porous and uncontained; she loses control
and her highly disciplined reality shifts, leaving her temporarily floundering
in a terrifying unreality.
Despite Ninas efforts to loosen up, her tightly measured dancing technique remains. Increasingly fearful of losing her prima-status, she begins an
ambivalent relationship with Lily, whom she jealously reviles and yet is
drawn to. She despises Lilys casual attitude to dancing and her sloppy technique, yet also knows that Lily personifies the unrestrained quality that Nina
herself must develop in her role as the Black Swan. Their relationship develops
dramatically when Lily convinces Nina to defy her mother and come out clubbing. Nina enjoys a wild night of dancing and drugs, which culminates in a
sexual encounter with Lily. In the act of sex, Nina and Lily share a mutual
becoming-swan. Lilys tattooed wings become feathered, while Ninas eyes
turn swan-red and her skin becomes goose-fleshed. Their bodies merge and
become indistinct in the encounter that transforms them. It is only when
Nina wakes alone in her room, which is barricaded from the inside, we
realise that Nina has hallucinated this night of sexual liberation and selftransformation.
From this point, Ninas self-composure rapidly declines. She arrives at
work to find that Tomas has made Lily her understudy she is paranoid
and convinced that Lily is out to replace her: shes after me . . . she wants
my role. Tomas reassures her, saying he thought Nina had had a breakthrough that morning when dancing the Black Swan. She increasingly
suffers hallucinations, which reflect her character-doubling and her forced
becoming: her reflection in the mirror fails to coincide with the reality of her
movements; rehearsing alone in the studio, she has visions of Tomas as the

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Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

masked Black Swan from her dream, passionately engaged with Lily. She visits
Beth, who has been hospitalised after a self-inflicted injury, seeking to return
the things she had stolen from her and to receive Beths sympathy and understanding: I was just trying to be perfect, like you. However, Beth offers no
solace and mocks Ninas idolatry: Im not perfect: Im nothing, she says as
she stabs herself in the face Nina struggles to stop her, and then flees. The
viewer is unsure whether this incident is real or imagined, or indeed if Nina
is responsible: Nina is shown in the hospital lift clutching a bloodied nail
file. On returning home she hallucinates seeing Beth standing evilly in the
corner of the kitchen, then hears her mother crying. Going into her mothers
painting studio, the numerous portraits of Nina all turn ugly and start screaming and moving on the canvas. Nina tears them down in terror and disgust.
She barricades herself in her room, repeatedly and violently slamming her
mothers fingers in the door as she goes. She hallucinates her legs breaking
at odd angles and collapses, unconscious. The opening performance is the
following day.
In the morning, Nina wakes late and arrives at the studio in considerable
disarray, especially when compared with how poised and polished she was at
the start of the film. However, there is something more collected about her
demeanour. She calmly applies her makeup, and seems only mildly shaken
when she observes that her toes have become webbed, like a swans feet.
Tomas issues her with a final instruction to lose yourself: the only one standing in your way is you, and Nina takes the stage as the White Swan. But here
Nina again struggles to control her hallucinations; she misses the choreography and her partner drops her. Humiliated, she returns to her dressing
room to become the Black Swan but finds Lily is already there and
dressed for the part. They argue and scuffle, then Nina stabs Lily with a
shard from the mirror they have shattered. Its my turn, she hisses. She
hides Lilys body in the adjacent storeroom and calmly continues to apply
her makeup. Her eyes are swan-red, and her skin is gooseflesh. She pulls a
black feather from one of her pores. She takes the stage as the Black Swan.
Feathers erupt from her skin as she dances. She is a triumph. She returns to
her dressing room for the final costume change back to the White Swan.
Lily knocks on the door to congratulate her: Nina is confused Lily should
be safely dead in the storeroom. She checks and finds nobody there; no
blood seeping out from under the door. In sudden realisation, she looks
down at her own stomach, and sees that a bloodstain is blooming on the
white of her costume. The nemesis twin she had stabbed was her own self,
thus eliminating the innocent Nina and freeing the dark Nina to be a successful Black Swan. She returns to the stage, dances her final part perfectly, farewells her prince and the audience, leaps off the cliff and, just like the White
Swan, in death finds freedom. Tomas says: My little princess, I always
knew you had it in you. Nina says I felt it: I was perfect. And the film ends.
Montage produces an emergent Whole that captures the movementimage of Ninas transformation from one way of being to another (Deleuze
1986: 70); thus Black Swan images the destructive-creative processes of transformation. This focus similarly constitutes a crucial aspect of Deleuzes
work in general, which returns time and again to concepts of becoming,
actualisation and different/ciation, to theorisations of shifting movements

Simone Bignall

of de/reterritorialisation, to thinking about the affective processes constituting

and transforming bodies and identities, and so forth. While Deleuze and Guattaris conceptualisations of transformation certainly aim to generate motion
rather than to preserve stability, they frequently are sensitive to the radical disablement that can occur with a too rapid destabilisation of the structures that
identity relies on:

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If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata
without taking precautions . . . then you will be killed, plunged into
a black hole, or even dragged towards catastrophe. Staying stratified
organised, signified, subjected is not the worst that can happen;
the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented
or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier
than ever. (1987: 161)
By viewing Black Swan through a Deleuzian lens, this essay will consider how
the figure of Nina not only gives us a movement-image (which traces her
overall transformation from one state of actual being to another), but also a
time-image (which involves her in a different kind of transformation, involving moments of virtual (de-)identification). Together, these illustrate and conceptualise the two main concepts of process theorised by Deleuze and permit
improved understanding of them. In particular, I consider how transformative
processes may be understood to render movement possible while simultaneously retaining necessary coherence in the structures undergoing transformation. The following section considers Deleuzes theorisation of
transformation as a movement between actual and virtual states of being,
investigated here in a reading of the Twenty-Second Series of The Logic of
Sense (Porcelain and Volcano). The subsequent section discusses transformation as the result of affective relations between bodies, investigated here
through a reading of Deleuze and Guattaris concept of becoming-animal.

Porcelain and Volcano

In the Twenty-Second Series of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze explores the corporeal effects of the transformation that occurs when the virtual and the actual
coincide, or when an individual seeks to make virtual and actual realities
coincide, to produce an alternative version of the self. He notes that there
are various ways to bring about this association suicide or madness, the
use of drugs or alcohol (2004: 178) each having a radically transformative,
yet ultimately negative, effect on the individual who cracks up. For Deleuze,
the crack is a sign of the interface between the virtual and the actual: the
crack is neither internal nor external, but rather is at the frontier. It is imperceptible, incorporeal and ideational. With what happens inside and outside, it has
complex relations of interference and interfacing (177).
As upon a dropped plate, external pressures can induce a fissure to
appear and spread upon a surface, but often this surface event portends a
deeper change; an event of radical transformation at which time the plate
will break and cease to exist as such. Accordingly, for a surface event or
impact to have a radically transformative effect on a body, Deleuze suggests

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Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

that it must wend its way down to something of a wholly different nature
the silent crack (176). Various image of Ninas cracked surface recur throughout Black Swan. In promotional posters, where her porcelain face is split by a
deep fracture, the imagery of the crack is an obvious and undisguised metaphor of psychological trauma. The film also makes use of more subtle and
prosaic imagery such as broken and bleeding toenails and a skin rash to
convey the idea that Ninas structural boundaries are unstable and shifting.
The rash on Ninas shoulder appears as the material effect of Ninas stressful
affective relationships with her work, with the masculinist and highly restrictive options for gender-identification that she is expected to embody and move
between, with her peers and with her own feelings of inadequacy and ambition. It appears like a pressure crack on her surface; however, it also signals
some deeper transformation in process. The rash not only is a surface effect
produced by Ninas relationships with actual entities and situations; it is
also a physical change that emerges from her engagement with a virtual self
and a virtual world. Deep inside, Nina is undergoing subjective changes as
her actual self confronts the virtual potential that she must draw upon in
order to meet the challenges of her new role. Ninas experience of self-transformation exemplifies Deleuzes suggestion that, in processes of change,
there are two elements or two processes which differ in nature . . . there is
the crack which extends its straight, incorporeal, and silent line at the
surface; and there are external blows or noisy internal pressures which
make it deviate, deepen it, and inscribe or actualise it in the thickness of the
body (178).
Here, Deleuze is insisting on a complex relationship between virtual and
actual causes of transformation, which necessarily must coincide within an
existing structure in order to bring about a genuine change in its nature. Had
Ninas rash remained a simple surface effect of her stressful encounters a
material sign of her situation in the world of the New York Ballet she
would have remained essentially the same limited character: a White Swan,
but with a rash. In order to extend the existing territory of her identity and
take on the role of the Black Swan, Nina had to engage in a process of radical
becoming that drew her into a new proximity with virtual forces of identity-formation. She needed to access alternative sources of self, different forces of desiring-production. To play her new role convincingly, she was required to expand
her existing self and her established modes of materialisation as an innocent
little girl with productive desires mainly defined in relation to her mother.
She struggled to counteractualise this existing and entrenched self by exposing
it to alternative forces of desire, in particular to new experiences of sexual
desire. By enacting these new modes of desire and seductive association
(with Lily, with Tomas), she was able to reactualise a new form of self: the
Black Swan. Thus, Ninas transformation in nature would be nothing
without the virtual force of desiring-production that dissolves her existing
form; but equally, the virtual Black Swan would be nothing, had Nina not
been able to incarnate alternative virtual desires in a reactualised or recomposed form of identity (177). In Nina, virtual forces and actual forms necessarily
coincided to produce changes in her nature, culminating in her new identity as
the Black Swan. In Nina, the entire play of the crack has become incarnated in
the body (177).

Simone Bignall

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Ninas aesthetic perfection as the Black Swan illustrates Deleuzes claim

that it is only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs, that
anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it
(182). However, if transformation is not to remain virtual, and therefore
abstract and ridiculous (178), relegated to the realm of speculation or of
what could have happened, the surface crack must be incarnated with
actual effects on the embodied self: crack remains a word as long as the
body is not compromised by it (182). And yet, as Nina also illustrates, to
compromise oneself in order to experience the wound of the virtual Event
requires one to court danger, to be mad or alcoholic, to risk something
perhaps even ones very existence. Thinking about the implications of this
conundrum is the primary concern of this Series of the Logic of Sense.
Deleuze asks:
If the order of the surface is itself cracked, how could it not itself break
up, how is it to be prevented from precipitating destruction . . .. If
there is a crack at the surface, how can we prevent deep life from
becoming a demolition job . . .. Is it possible to maintain the inherence
of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it into existence,
and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body? More precisely, is it
possible to limit ourselves to the counter-actualisation of an event to
the actors or the dancers simple flat representation while taking
care to prevent the full actualisation which characterises the victim
or the true patient? (1789)
While Deleuze returns to this crucial problem at many moments in later
work to offer increasingly sophisticated solutions, here he merely sketches
the contours of the approach he will develop. Accordingly, at this point, he
gives a fairly unsatisfying answer to the questions he poses. He begins by
asserting that in processes of self-transformation that rely upon the fact of
having risked the established self, of having become undone in order to set
the self in motion, the subject simultaneously embodies a present existence
as well as a past-present existence. She is the effect of an I have-drunk; or
in Ninas case, the effect of an I have seduced, an I have been sexual. The
transformed Nina emerges at the moment when she identifies as the effect
of the effect (181). In dancing the Black Swan, she becomes the actualisation
of that virtual state of being she had experienced at defining moments
throughout the film. In those moments, her sexual arousal or madness were
the effects of her letting go and losing her frigid identity, and indeed in
such moments she became momentarily other than her usual self. As she performs the Black Swan to perfection in the final scene of the movie, Nina is the
emergent effect (or actualisation) of a virtual effect (her sexualised self). She is
an actual embodiment of a subject who identifies as the effect of the effect of
her destabilisation through her engagement with the virtual: she is at once
object, loss of object, and the law governing this loss within an orchestrated
process of demolition (182). At this moment, in which actual self and
virtual self coincide, Nina achieves a perfect summit of identification, at
which point she breaks like a glass (181).

Black Swan, Cracked Porcelain and Becoming-Animal

Like Gatsby, where Nina goes wrong is that she fails to accompany
herself in this radical transformation through her encounter with a virtual
existence. Deleuze writes:

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the eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also
inscribed in the flesh. But each time we must double this painful
actualisation by a counteractualisation which limits, moves and transfigures it. We must accompany ourselves first, in order to survive,
but then even when we die. (182)
By this, he means that one must remain connected to the actual forms that constitute identity, even as one must let go of the safe shore of the self in order to
voyage into the virtual ocean of chaotic desiring-production. Rather than
extending the existing territory of her identification with the White Swan to
also become the Black Swan, Nina wholly abandons her little-girl self and
replaces this identity with an erotic alter-ego. For Nina, the White Swan and
the Black Swan are mutually exclusive actualisations of self; she fails to
accompany herself and to be both at once. Her embodiment as the Black
Swan entails the death of her existence as the White Swan, and ultimately of
Nina herself.
When Deleuze asks, how are we to stay at the surface without staying on
the shore? How do we save ourselves by saving the surface and every surface
organisation, including language and life? (179), he does so in order to assert
the foolishness of perspectives that insist we should choose virtual creativity at
the expense of the actual forms that sustain us and give us coherence. In fact,
as the example of the crack illustrates, a self in motion is never actually fixed or
virtually fluid, but always a combination of both. The crack is the sign of a
transformation in process: it is a complex interface of virtuality and actuality;
it is neither one nor the other, but is simultaneously actual and virtual, material
and incorporeal. The example of the crack allows Deleuze to demonstrate that
the virtual and the actual must be thought together for transformation to be
comprehensible at all. Failing to maintain a connection between the two,
between the actual self that exists and the virtual selves that are the causal
source of ones becoming, one ceases to be. Ninas error was to follow absolutely Tomas instruction to lose herself. She lost all her actual moorings in
her extreme act of self re-creation, replacing her identification as the White
Swan with that of the Black Swan; in failing to accompany herself through
the trauma of destabilisation and so to anchor herself through the process of
change, and unable to survive as a virtual and chaotic entity, she finally
ceased to exist at all.
For Deleuze, to travel into the unsettled, virtual realms of non-being is an
essential step in any process of creative transformation that seeks to create new
forms of existence: to the extent that the pure event is each time imprisoned
forever in its actualisation, counteractualisation liberates it, always for other
times (182). However, successful processes of counteractualisation take
place only in connection to an existing and problematic actuality or to new
movements of actualisation, which can sustain the shifting or newly created
structure and partially preserve its consistency and coherence even as it transforms. For Deleuze, this doubling of the newly created self with the self that is

10

Simone Bignall

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lost in transformative movements is the vital key to orchestrating creative

transformation that will not simply end in destruction or death. He writes:
We cannot give up the hope that the effects of drugs and alcohol [or
madness] . . . will be able to be relived and recovered for their own sake at
the surface of the world (1823). We must hope that the creative and transformative effects of virtual forces that decompose and recompose structures can
be experienced in the world, albeit at the very surface of the world, at those
uncertain places where identity shifts and morphs; we must hope that to
experience radical self-transformation or to reach the aesthetic perfection we
desire, does not entail that we must depart the world because only in death
[will we] find freedom. While it remains underdeveloped here, this line of
thinking is pursued in a much more satisfying way in A Thousand Plateaus
(1987) with the theorisation of affective becomings.

Becoming-swan
Despite her initial efforts to imitate the prima-ballerina Beth by stealing her
lipstick and appropriating her role, Nina quickly is swept up by a becoming-animal not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance,
on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 233). Deleuze and Guattari are careful to insist that, in their theorisations of transformation, processes of becoming are not directed towards
identification with an ideal or an end point. For them, A becoming is not a correspondence between relations, but neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or
at the limit, an identification (237). In movements of becoming, one does not
evolve towards an identity; instead, becoming is a movement that happens
between identities and beneath assignable relations (239). Accordingly,
becoming concerns alliance (238) but not of an idolatry or identifying
sort: becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something
(239). Ninas becoming-swan transformed her identity, but the process of
her transformation did not take place through her efforts to be like Beth or
Lily, or to be the Black Swan. In fact, Tomas complains she is unconvincing
and wooden in her attempts to mimic the Black Swan. Rather, the process of
her transformation takes place through the unstable alliances that remain
beneath her subjective control and do not involve a deliberate act of identification. Ninas becoming-swan takes place in the shifting affective connections
between Nina and the other characters in the film: most particularly in her
changing relationships with her mother, with Lily and with Tomas.
In order to understand adequately what is involved in becoming,
Deleuze and Guattari explain that it is necessary to conceptualise the individual as a multiplicity. In fact, their emphasis on the multiplicity of the individual form is the reason why they attach such significance to the notion of
becoming-animal, since every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack
(239). Becoming-animal always involves the individual form rediscovering
its existence as a multiplicity: it is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack,
for multiplicity (23940). In order to understand this crucial point, it is helpful
to remember that Deleuze and Guattari rely upon an ontology of emergence:
individuals appear as ordered forms of being when the virtual forces between

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the elements that compose them take on regular or habitual forms. However,
this appearance of order in the actualised form belies its true complexity and
fluidity; it is truly an unstable composition of elemental relations, contingently
bound into a coherent structure. The individual is a multiplicity because it is
an assemblage of elemental parts, arranged in complex relations. Some of
these elemental relations are internal to the individual, while some are
shared in common with neighbouring individuals and external structures.
For example, if we consider Nina to be a complex multiplicity, we will understand that she is defined by the elemental parts that compose her: dancing,
music box, shyness, broken toenail, ambition, frigidity, plush toys, being mothered, determination, obsession, and so forth. Nina emerges as an effect of the
connections forged between these elemental features, which combine to form a
contingently stable character, recognisable as Nina. However, the external
relations she forms with the individuals she encounters in her world also
define Nina: her mother, Lily, Beth, Tomas. Nina is therefore a complex multiplicity composed not only from the internal relations between elemental
parts that over time have come to define her interior character, but also from
the external relations she engages. Each elemental combination that defines
her can be considered a haecceity, an event of connection, that enters into composition with others to form an other individual (253). And Nina is herself a
haecceity, an event of composition that combines with others in external
relationships to form new and more complex forms of order for example,
a dance company.
Conceiving of Nina as a complex multiplicity, an emergent form defined
by complex and shifting relationships between elemental parts, allows us to
understand that even at the start of the film when she appears coherent and
rigidly characterised, and she is quite strictly identified with the White
Swan, in fact this apparent fixity is illusory. Like all forms of emergent
order, Nina is always-already subtly undergoing transformations at the microlevel; these transformations occur between the elemental relations that she
shares with others and which compose her, and thus also beneath the coordinated form of complex individuality that centres her awareness as a subject.
Deleuze and Guattari explain:
in short, between substantial forms and determined subjects, between
the two, there is not only a whole operation of demonic transports but
a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents
that compose individuations totally different from those of the wellformed subjects that receive them. (253)
Every time one of her composing relationships shifts for example when she
throws her toys out, or defies her mother, or when Lily joins the New York
Dance Company and becomes a new element in Ninas life there occurs
in Nina a flutter, a vibration in the form itself that is not reducible to the properties of a subject (253). While these shifts in some of her affective relations at
the microlevel do not necessarily result in the radical transformation of Nina,
they do produce the partial and piecemeal morphing of her identity. Some of
her elemental relations change even while others remain stable, giving Nina a
characteristic consistency at least in the early stages of the film.

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Simone Bignall

Ninas becoming-swan noticeably begins when she starts to be confronted

with images of herself as a multiplicity seething beneath the apparent unity of
her coherent self. The rash of inflamed pores on her shoulder evidences the
actual cellular multiplicity of her skin, which usually appeared to be a flawless
and unified boundary between her and the world. In the bathroom at her
debut reception, she peels back the skin of her finger to reveal a gaping
wound, a hidden cellular depth. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that in a
way, we must start at the end: all becomings are already molecular (272)
and you become animal only if, by whatever means and elements, you emit
corpuscles that . . . enter the zone of proximity of the animal molecule. You
become animal only molecularly (275). The existence of this hidden molecularity within Nina was the condition for her becoming-animal: animals are
packs, and . . . packs form, develop, and are transformed by contagion (244);
they continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each
other (249). They do so because their composing parts combine, break form,
and recombine in complex patterns of molecular interaction.
However, becoming-animal does not only involve the dissolution of the
individual into its internal elements, its composing molecular parts, but also
proceeds by way of a special alliance with an exceptional individual (243).
The alliance with the exceptional individual is a phenomenon of bordering
(245) and of assemblage; in entering into new relations with others, the individual forges new complex connections, taking into the existing self new
elements introduced with the new relationship. Deleuze writes: multiplicities
enter certain assemblages; it is there that human beings effect their becominganimal (242). In Ninas case, her becoming-swan proceeds particularly
through her important new relationship with Lily, forged in the context of
her new role dancing as the Black Swan. Lily introduces Nina to new experiences: clubbing, drugs, defiance. These become new dimensions of selfhood
that combine with her existing form to destabilise and transform the composition that is Nina. Parts of Lily combine with parts of Nina; this is the
sense in which becoming is the process of desire (272), and sexuality is the
production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings
. . . an emission of particles (2789). In their new proximity, Lily affects Nina
but not in entirety. Nina is affected at the molecular level, bit by bit, as parts of
her existing form combine in new and unexpected ways with parts of Lily.
Initially, her involvement with Lily transforms Nina in minor and imperceptible ways: a feeling of jealousy, a puff of Lilys cigarette. But increasingly Nina
is destabilised through the affects provoked by her encounter with Lily. For
Nina, the affect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is an effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it
reel (240).
Some feeling of vertigo or upheaval is perhaps inevitable in the destabilising processes of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari comment: who has not
known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant . . . giving one the [red eyes of a swan]? (240).
However, Ninas transformation ultimately is radically disabling, not only compromising her subjective experience of herself and the comfort of her worldly
belonging, but finally destroying her bodily form in injury and death. Becomings are unpredictable; we dont know in advance how multiplicities will

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combine. They may combine in mostly positive ways that overall add new
dimensions of complexity and richness to the existing individual; but a
meeting of multiplicities might alternatively diminish or destroy one or
both, if too many of their elemental connections are incompatible. Deleuze
and Guattari point to two dangers associated with becoming-animal: on the
one hand, the process may be stifled by the capturing of new forces and
their reterritorialisation by existing forms; the second occurs when the
process is so disruptive of ones existing set of affective relations that one
spirals into a line of abolition. Because we do not know in advance how
becoming will transpire, Deleuze and Guattari insist we must proceed cautiously, we must experiment according to criteria: there are criteria, and
the important thing is that they not be used after the fact, that they be
applied in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through
the dangers (251; see also 160ff).
What, then, are these criteria that might safeguard the self through its
creative becoming-animal? I think we can identify two. The first is to engage
molecular becomings at the complex affective surfaces where bodies meet,
rather than wholesale molar transformations that completely undo an existing
form of identity and seek to replace it with another. Because transformation is
relational, the clue to preservation of consistency lies in the piecemeal and
partial nature of relationships. It is always possible to selectively engage multiple relationships and to meet with others bit by bit, in partial and selective
ways, to make piecemeal insertions into each others lives, rather than to
wholly succumb to anothers will or to attempt to wholly dominate another
(Deleuze 1990: 237; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 504). To conceive of this possibility requires one to consider oneself, not as a unified and stable entity, but as
a multiplicity, a pack: a transient and morphing, though relatively consistent,
form of identity composed of elemental parts arranged in complex internal
and external relations. Nina was not able to do this; rather than welcoming
her molecular self as the creative key to partial and selective transformations
that could assist her to become the Black Swan, Nina did her best to deny, discipline and repress the evidence of her true multiplicity (which nonetheless
surfaced repeatedly and insistently: her doubled reflection in the mirror, her
porous rash). Rather than welcoming an inner complexity and fluidity that
could allow her flexible accommodation of the new forms of identification
she needed in order to take on the role of the Black Swan while also retaining
the characteristics and relations that made her perfect for the White Swan,
Nina struggled through a wholesale transformation. She sought to entirely
reject one identity and the set of mother-daughter relations it depended on,
and replace it with an entirely different one built from a new set of relations
with Lily. Ninas becoming was sudden and catastrophic: not piecemeal and
selective, proceeding carefully and experimentally, but clumsy and radical.
She could not develop a relationship with Lily except by wholly abandoning
her relationship with her mother; her final triumph as the Black Swan could
not be accomplished without her failure as the White Swan.
Careful experimentation with ones relationships at the molecular level of
engagement allows one to learn what the body can do for example,
whether it is capable of dancing as the Black Swan and as the White Swan,
or how it might combine with surrounding elements to compose an individual

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Simone Bignall

that is capable of doing so (Gatens 1996). Referencing Spinoza, Deleuze and

Guattari write:

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we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other
words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to
destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange
actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more
powerful body. (257)
Learning about the capabilities and capacities of the relational self requires a
constant vigilance concerning actual embodiment and, simultaneously,
careful attention to the creative virtual potential associated with the forms
one might yet produce through new compositions. This, then, alerts us to
the second criteria needed for creative becomings that can sustain a self
through transformation. In becoming, one inhabits a plane of consistency,
which is not best conceived of as pure chaos or the point at which order has
been counteractualised into a pure form of virtual potential. Rather, while
the plane of consistency, in itself, is virtual and immanent to actual forms of
order, it is also the intersection of all concrete forms (251) in a zone of proximity. To inhabit the plane of consistency is not to dissolve in virtual non-existence, but to experience the complex actuality of existence, as a relational
multiplicity that potentially intersects with diverse others in a zone of affective
proximity. Thus, inhabiting the plane of consistency, one is simultaneously
actual and virtual; both embodied in an ordered form and shifting at the
uncertain points of contact where actual individuals meet and virtual individuals are being formed. This complex co-existence of actual and virtual being
characterises multiplicities, which are by their nature becomings. Through
cautious experimental learning what the body can do in its affective encounters, individuals may come into selective contact at the molecular sites of their
engagement, and they may then partially transform one another, without
being destroyed in the process.

Conclusion: movement-image, time-image and affect-image

An expanding field of inquiry links film with philosophy. For some, this link
takes the form of an illustrative methodology through which cinema furnishes
material for philosophical investigation; for others, film is a thinking (Frampton 2006: 193; Sinnerbrink 2011; Tuck and Carel 2011). For us, Black Swan does
both. While it is clear that this film provides content for the philosophical
analysis we have engaged, it is perhaps less obvious how it is a thinking.
What are the qualities of (this) film that give it a capacity for conceptual
activity? In his two books on cinema, Deleuze explains that film has a
special relationship with thought because it is capable of constructing a movement-image and a time-image, each of which constitute shocking ideas of an
unthinkable Whole that forces the becoming of thought (1989: 158; Flaxman
2000).
We have seen how Black Swan images the movement of Ninas transformation as she passes from the poised and polished dancer at the start of

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the film, through various stages of crisis and undoing, to her final perfection
and death. The movement-image describes the actual progression of Ninas
transformation: her embodiment of various actualisations of being, which
incrementally shift her through a process of change that is ultimately radical
and destructive. The camera images this movement from a perspective external to Nina. We (as the camera) watch her from a position nearby: on the
train, practicing in the studio, talking with her mother, drinking in the nightclub, and so forth. From this outside perspective, the camera depicts Nina
through various moments of actual existence, which are linked together
through montage to create an emergent picture of Ninas overall transformation from one state to another: to describe is to observe mutations
(Deleuze 1989: 19). In this way, the developing story of the film creates an
image of a Whole the overall movement of Ninas transformation which
is itself a concept of movement over time. While narrative is a descriptive
device shared across artistic forms, the movement-image is particular to
cinema in the way that it connects static images to movement by linking
them in series, and subsequently by connecting series to a moving Whole
via the cinematic technique of montage; it is through the movement-image
that cinema thinks the actual nature of processes, and that we have the
idea of the film (1986: 179).
However, Black Swan additionally constructs a time-image, which does
not simply correspond to the realm of actual figures, their shifting relations
and our perceptions of the characters as they transform and so produce the
story of the film, but properly extends into a virtuality that can only be conveyed by images of hallucination, such as mirror-doubling and molecularity
(Deleuze 1989: 70). The time-image is virtual, in opposition to the actuality
of the movement-image (41). Indeed, for the time-image to be born . . . the
actual image must enter into relation with its own virtual image . . .. An
image which is double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual, must be constituted (273). Accordingly, unlike the external camera shots that convey to us
Nina in her actuality, the camera images this realm of virtual existence from
a perspective internal to Nina. Through her eyes, we see the troubling rash
on our shoulder; we observe, from Ninas perspective, the skin peeling
back from our finger to expose the seething molecular depth within; we
stand in Ninas position before the studio mirror to see our reflection slide
into a menacing doubling of figures that haunts us. Increasingly, Aronofsky
interjects these images of virtual existence between shots of Nina carrying out
her actual activities until, in the final scenes of the film (following Ninas incessant hallucinations the evening before the opening-night performance),
we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in
the situation, not because they are confused but because we do not
have to know and there is no longer a place from which to ask.
(Deleuze 1989: 7)
In this way, Black Swan creates a time-image that is, like the movement-image,
an image of a Whole. However, because it encompasses not only actual beings
but also incomprehensible depths of virtual existence, this Whole is a more
profound unity, immense and terrifying, like a universal becoming (115).

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Simone Bignall

The time-image reveals the coexistence of sheets of past and the simultaneity
of peaks of present (101), and transformation is revealed as a movement
between actual or present states by means of virtual engagement. The timeimage is cinemas special contribution to thought. With the time-image of
Ninas complex existence as simultaneously actual and virtual at once
past, present and future the viewer is confronted by something unthinkable
in thought (169). Black Swan shows us the impossible and inexpressible
concept of being in time as universal becoming.
There is at least one other way in which Black Swan thinks transformation, and this is by way of the affect-image, which is in fact implicated in
the construction of both the movement-image and the time-image. Deleuze
describes the affect-image as quality or power, it is potentiality considered
for itself as expressed (1986: 98). The cinematic technique of the close-up
shot corresponds particularly with the affect-image (1986: 98103). As we
have seen, affection is a crucial dimension of becoming-animal, which proceeds in partial and piecemeal fashion through complex molecular engagements between neighbouring bodies when they come into close-up contact.
Black Swan is a fine example of a cinema of the body (Deleuze 1989: 189).
Throughout the film, we are confronted by close-up images of bodies in
extreme states of physicality and discomfort: the gruelling rehearsal regime;
Ninas broken toenail; her angry rash and gooseflesh; Lily and Nina entwined
in the act of sex. The close-up shot and the affect-image is, for Deleuze, another
form of the cinematic shock that prompts thought. In the case of the affectimage, the thought that is provoked is the idea of relationality. This is an
idea of what happens to bodies in close proximity, which touch each other
and transform each other in the process of their encounter. It can include the
relation between actual images in sequence, or series of actions created by
the techniques of cutting employed by the director, or interaction between
characters and situations, or the relation between the image and the viewer.
However, the affect-image, in its expressed potentiality, is also an image of
the virtuality experienced in encounters, when they draw bodies into shared
becomings as they combine and transmit parts. For example, by juxtaposing
affective imagery of the unstable molecularity of Nina her rash, her
doubled reflection with affective imagery of her complex and uneven
relationships, which are revealed through dialogue and scene-situations in
which she is combined with other characters, Black Swan thinks the ways
in which Nina is affected when she enters into partial relations at particular
sites of elemental engagement. The film images the ways in which Ninas
complex affections at once enable, constrain and force the process of her transformation. Through the affect-image, which combines virtual forces and actual
forms of relational embodiment, we learn what Ninas body can do: we can
imagine what it is capable of doing and how it may (or may not) combine
with neighbouring bodies to produce new kinds of affective subjectivity for
Nina. This concept of relational becoming is properly philosophical, but is presented in film through the affect-image.
Through the movement-image, the time-image and the affect-image,
cinema unconceals the real world by rethinking a film-world (Frampton
2006: 193). As a philosophical activity, the political nature of a film is determined by the ways in which its concepts are gathered to produce a particular

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effect: the filmic event may simply reflect and illuminate a worldly reality,
but may also or alternatively create images affecting viewers who may
become redirected in our aesthetic awareness of the critical and qualitative
dimensions of the world (Colman 2009: 14; Cox 2011). Film has a special
relation with the brain, with thought, in so far as it opens up, within the
innermost reality of the viewer, a fissure, a crack (Deleuze 1989: 167);
this crack reveals a virtual world with the capacity to sweep actual
worlds, real worlds, into processes of becoming-otherwise. It is especially
in its capacity to create the virtual time-image that film displaces our
world, and shows us another world (Frampton 2006: 202), which projects
the possibility of unsettling certain established patterns of thought and disturbing some entrenched configurations of the real (Deleuze and Guattari
1994). The conceptual scaffolding of a present actualisation thus being partially revealed and selectively undone, the thoughtful filmgoer may potentially think concepts anew, carefully reassemble them to form new
philosophical understanding, and so begin to creatively enact the world
and invent the practices of worldly being and virtual becoming that Deleuzian philosophy endeavours to think.

References
Aronofsky, D. 2010. Black Swan. Los Angeles: Fox Studios.
Colman, F. 2009. What is Film-Philosophy?. In F. Colman (ed), Film, Theory and
Philosophy: The Key Thinkers. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 119.
Cox, D. 2011. Thinking through Film: Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies. London: WileyBlackwell.
Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and
B. Habberjam. London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta.
London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. 1990. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by M. Joughin.
New York: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. 2004. The Logic of Sense. Translated by M. Lester with C. Stivale. New York:
Continuum.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
Volume 1. Translated by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by G. Burchell and
H. Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso.
Flaxman, G. 2000. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Frampton, D. 2006. Filmosophy. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
Gatens, M. 1996. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London and
New York: Routledge.
Mullarkey, J. 2009. Gilles Deleuze. In F. Colman (ed), Film Theory and Philosophy: The
Key Thinkers. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 17990.
Sinnerbrink, R. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London & New York:
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Tuck, G., and Carel, H. (eds), 2011. New Takes in Film-Philosophy. New York and
London: Palgrave MacMillan.

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Simone Bignall

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Simone Bignall is Vice-Chancellors Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Philosophy at

the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism (2010), which conceptualises postcolonial transformation in terms of Deleuzes philosophy of difference and desire. She is also
co-editor of Deleuze and the Postcolonial (2010) with Paul Patton and of Agamben and
Colonialism (2012) with Marcelo Svirsky, all published by Edinburgh University Press.