The Anthropology of Becoming

JOÃO BIEHL AND PETER LOCKE

The pen between my fingers is my work I am convicted to death I never convicted anyone and I have the power to This is the major sin A sentence without remedy The minor sin Is to want to separate My body from my spirit

— CATARINA INêS GOMES MORAES, quoted in João Biehl, Vita, 2000

For how long will we have to live like it's still the war? When will we start to live?

— Marija (Maja) Šaric, Executive Director, Krila Nade/Wings of Hope

The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life.

— GILLES DELEUZE, Essays Critical and Clinical

AN EMPIRICAL LANTERN

In the settings in which we work — Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina — people are at the mercy of volatile economies and faltering infrastructures. As individuals and communities scavenge for resources and care from broken public institutions, they find themselves entangled in novel biomedical and pharmaceutical rationalities and in altered forms of common sense. We find Gilles Deleuze's empiricist reflections on the person as a provisional outcome of processes of subjectivation and his attention to the inventiveness of becoming both provocative and helpful as we address lives in such contexts of political-economic, material, and clinical precariousness.

For Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed entity, but an assemblage of multiple heterogeneous elements; not a given, but always under construction; not a product of an imagined interiority, but a folding and bending of outside forces: "it is a being-multiple, instead of beingone." In asserting this "logic of multiplications," Deleuze upholds an allegiance to empiricism that strikes us as deeply ethnographic. Subjects anticipate and invent — and anticipate because they invent — in concrete circumstances, navigating between things and relations. In this way, the constitution of subjects is imbricated in world and place making, and subjectivity is far more active and uncertain than the search for an inside would assume.

Together with his close collaborator Félix Guattari, Deleuze was particularly concerned with the idea of becoming: those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with matters of fact, contingencies, and intolerable conditions and to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants and definitions — "to grow both young and old [in them] at once." In becoming, according to Deleuze, one can achieve an ultimate existential stage in which life is simply immanent and open to new relations — camaraderies — and trajectories without predetermined telos or outcome.

In our ethnographic work, we are drawn to human efforts to live with, subvert, or elude knowledge and power, and to express desires that might be world altering. Our interlocutors in the field are more complex, strategic, and inventive than hegemonic forces and philosophical theories of the subject are able to capture. People are not stable or fixed entities, unidirectionally determined by history, power, and language, nor are they only cultural and social. How can anthropology methodologically and conceptually engage people's becomings? And how could such work challenge dominant ethical and political frameworks and technocratic or medical modes of intervention? It is time to attribute to the people we study the kinds of ambiguities and complexities we acknowledge in ourselves, and to bring these dimensions into the critical knowledge we craft and circulate.

We have no grand philosophical aspirations, and we wish neither to reduce Deleuze's enormously complicated venture to a theoretical system or set of practices to be applied normatively to anthropology, nor to suggest a new dominant analytic or coin a new buzzword. In this essay, we limit ourselves to thinking through Deleuze's insights on the relationships between power, desire, and the virtual and his cartographic approach to lives, social fields, and the unconscious. These insights help us grasp what is at stake for individuals, affects, and relations in the context of new rational-technical interventions, and vis-à-vis ingrained inequalities of all kinds.

Exploring Deleuze's ideas in light of the ethnographic realities we study — mental illness, poverty, and the long aftermaths of war — might offer openings to particular kinds of thinking, writing, and theorizing. It can, for example, highlight the limits of psychiatric models of symptoms, recovery, and human agency. It can also provide a helpful supplement to prevailing applications of Michel Foucault's concepts of biopower and governmentality in anthropology and to neo-Marxist theories of structural violence. We aim to honor and contribute to anthropology's long and productive history of exploring human matters that dominant epistemologies do not routinely account for, keeping theory unsettled and in motion. As Gregory Bateson put it over half a century ago in his classic Naven, "my fieldwork was scrappy and disconnected ... my own theoretical approaches proved too vague to be of any use in the field."

In emphasizing the potentials of desire (both creative and destructive), the ways in which social fields leak and transform (power and knowledge notwithstanding), and the in-between, plastic, and ever-unfinished nature of lives, much of Deleuze's writing can inspire ethnographic efforts to illuminate the dynamism of the everyday and the literality and singularity of human becomings. By paying close attention to concrete circumstances, and with careful observation always complicating the a priori assumptions of universalizing theory, ethnographic work can explore both the modes of power that constrain life chances and the ways people's desires reveal alternative possibilities. In learning to know people, with care and an "empirical lantern," we have a responsibility to think of life in terms of both limits and crossroads — where new intersections of technology, interpersonal relations, desire, and imagination can sometimes, against all odds, result in surprising swerves and futures, even when our liberal projects of the good life writ large have turned into "cruel optimism."

This is not to recommend giving up on attempts to discern relationships of causality and affinity in social and...