we may say that “percepts” are related to the passive selves involved in the synthesis of living presents at all scales of reality, in the organic and inorganic world. Even though these presents are constituted by “contemplations” or “contractions of past and future instants,” they do not refer to a psychological reality. As Deleuze writes: “The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it originates – light, carbon, and the salts – and it fills itself with colours and odours that in each case qualify its variety, its composition: it is sensation in itself. It is as if flowers smell themselves by smelling what composes them … before being perceived or even smelled by an agent with a nervous system and a brain” (WIP [What is Philosophy?], 212). On the other hand, affects refer to state transitions which must be understood as “becomings,” in the sense of a becoming-animal or becoming-plant […]. The artist must reach that intensive state where one can leave one individuation field to enter another, where one can reach “a zone of indetermination, of indiscernability, as if things, beasts, and persons … endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation” (WIP, 173). Finally, having reached the very being of the sensible, the artist must place these percepts and affects in their own plane, a plane of composition, a bloc or compound of sensations whose “only law of creation is that the compound must stand on its own” (WIP, 164).
– Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Coninuum, London, 2004, p. 217
