Deleuze’s central project is to invent new images of thought to put in place of the classical system of representation of theoretical thought.
For D+G, philosophy is at once the creating of concepts and instituting of the plane of immanence. (What is Philosophy?, p.41) (see also science / philosophy) According to Deleuze, “ Immanence
is the very vertigo of philosophy.” (Expressionism in Philosophy, p.
180, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence” in Potentialities,
p. 226) Giorgio Agamben, calls Deleuze’s book, What is Philosophy?, the
theory of this vertigo.Still, the plane of immanence remains one of their more ineffable concepts. Deleuze calls the plane of immanence (or of consistency) “the image
of thought.” It is immanent not to something but only to itself.
“Whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be
sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent.”
(p.45) The plane of immanence is “prephilosophical” not in the sense of
being preexisting but in the sense of not existing outside philosophy
even though philosophy presupposes it. (p.41) (Derrideans take note) The
plane of immanence appears as both what must be thought and what cannot
be thought: “Perhaps this is the supreme act of philosophy: not so much
to think of THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there,
unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside.”( What is Philosophy?,pp 59-60)As usual, Deleuze and Guattari’s figures form a continuous chain or loop. Thus: Becomings and multiplicities intersect the plane of immanence or
consistency, “the intersection of all concrete forms….It is the
abstract Figure, or rather since it has no form itself, the abstract machine of which each concrete assemblage is a multiplicity, a becoming, a segment, a vibration.” (plateaux p.251-2). The plane of consistency or of composition of haecceities which knows only speeds and affects. "There is therefore a unity to the plane of nature,
which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial
and the natural.“ (254) "This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism."