it’s seven in the evening, i’m sitting at the café, sort of exhausted physically but surprisingly fit mentally. managed to revise half of the theory chapter yesterday and i hope to finish it today. later tonight i’ll meet with alice and we’ll go see “the big lebowski” at this really intimate movie theater around the corner. they allow you to bring your own snacks & drinks, and i’ve got plenty 
okay – i’ve just stumbled over two quotations that i had filed under “left-overs” back from writing the ulmer-paper. they are from protevi’s geophilosophy, and suddenly they shed an entirely new light on my understanding of one of deleuze’s key concepts: intensities.
up to now i understood intensities as designating the quantity of a physical force of/in a body, or rather, the change of quantity of such a force. As in the quote: “These passages, becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of power [...] are signs of increase and decrease” (ECC 139). intensities = signs of increase and decrease.
remember that deleuze and guattari “define a body by longitude and latitude. A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity. We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). In this way we construct the map of a body.” (Ethology 629)
okay. so now i’m stumbling over the quotations from protevi, and he writes with respect to the body in deleuze:
“Longitude: differential rates – ’speeds and slownesses’ – of material elements of a body. As these rates immanently determine thresholds of change solely for the body in which they appear, longitude is an intensive property” (107) WOW, wait! this seems to imply another understanding of intensity, namely intensity as opposed to ‘extensity’!
protevi continues: “longitude is an intensive property, rather than an extensive property subject to metric or external and fixed measure.” (107)
so for protevi, intensity seems to designate a force/property exclusively associated with and located in a body, an immanent property. he illustrates this with the following example:
“As these thresholds are determined by immanent relations of the system (the boiling point for water is not that of oil), DG highlight the the opposition of intensive properties to extensive properties such as length and volume, which are measured by an external ‘metric’ or standard (a cubic centimeter stays the same whether it is used to measure water or oil).” (Protevi 101)
hmmmmmm! makes sense!
