percept

is a non-human landscape (the oceanic, the urban) which, we might say, 'sees'. It is a sensation created by a great writer (i.e. The oceanic in herman melville or the urban in virginia woolf) which is capable of preserving in itself, for example, the hour of a day, or a moment's degree of warmth.

The novel has often risen to the percept not perception of the moor in Hardy but the moor as percept... oceanic percepts in Melville... urban percepts, or those of the mirror, in Virginia Woolf. The landscape sees. Generally speaking, what great writer has not been able to create these beings of sensation, which preserve in themselves the hour of a day, a moment's degree of warmth (Faulkner's hills, Tolstoy's or Chekhov's steppes)' The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. (Deleuze and Guattari 'precepts, affects, concepts : 467)

is inseparable from the concrete situation in which it appears whereas a concepts requires thought that put its projects 'in brackets'.

The elements of mythical thought similarly lie half-way between percepts and concepts. it would be impossible to separate percepts from the concrete situations in which they appeared, while recourse to concepts woudl require that thought could, at least provisionally, put its projects (to use Husserl's expression) 'in brackets' (Levi-strauss 1962 : 18)

is a way of describing how we become what we perceive. While it is of course a human who, say, 'perceives' a town, it is only accomplished by one becoming imperceptible oneself, by giving oneself over to the nonhuman becoming of the landscape.

It is Mrs. Dalloway who perceives the town but because she has passed into the town like 'a knife through everything' and becomes imperceptible herself. Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts including the town are nonhuman landscapes of nature. Not a 'minute of the world passes,' says Cezanne, that we will preserve if we do not 'become that minute.'6 (Deleuze and Guattari 'precepts, affects, concepts : 468)

is that which goes beyond the subjects that pass through them. Affects are impersonal, even inhuman.

percepts are not ways of presenting nature to an eye, but are rather like landscapes, urban as well as (Rajchman 2000: 134)

is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.

The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man. Gilles Deleuze

percept, n.All

percept