Becoming

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further Deleuze sources are ingested.

Definition

Becoming is the Deleuzian (Deleuze & Guattari) ontological primacy of process over state: identities, organisms and places do not pre-exist their changes but are produced out of flows of desire and difference. "Desire begins as a flow of life, an event of becoming that precedes being and identity. As desires become coded and organized they become identities, organisms, things and assemblages"; "Far from thinking of the world as a collection of beings who then have desires, Deleuze insists that life begins from flows of becoming or desire, which then produce relative points of stability" (Colebrook, quoted in Dovey 2010, p. 15). The concept's conceptual partners are the twofold pairs that run through A Thousand Plateaus — becoming/being, difference/identity, smooth/striated, rhizome/tree — which "co-exist in a mixture rather than a dialectic relation; they morph or fold into the other rather than respond to it. In this sense being emerges from becoming, identities from differences" (Dovey 2010, p. 22). The privileging of becoming is "a reversal of traditional forms of conceptual domination that see the world in terms of pre-existing unities; the goal is not to erase one side of the concept but to rethink which side comes first" (p. 22).

In this wiki the concept enters through Kim Dovey's application to place theory: "I suggest we replace the Heideggerian ontology of being-in-the-world with a more Deleuzian notion of becoming-in-the-world. This implies a break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place, but preserves a provisional ontology of place-as-becoming: there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-world" (Dovey 2010, p. 6). The thesis is not the dissolution of stability but its re-description: "Place is an assemblage that stabilizes dwelling but also encompasses lines of movement and processes of becoming. The immanence of place is a field of differences within which tree-like stabilized identities are planted" (p. 23). The everyday form of becoming is the refrain — "becoming at home" through the drawing and breaching of a circle of order — and its guarantee is that no place is finished.

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — the ontology's source: A Thousand Plateaus as "a pre-eminent philosophy of becoming, of how identities are formed and changed" (Dovey).
• Kim Dovey — the place-theoretical application: becoming-in-the-world against being-in-the-world; the binary-flip formula ("closed becomes open, interior becomes landscape, character becomes caricature, illegal becomes legal, hotel becomes brothel, public becomes private – and vice versa in each case") as the book-level statement of place identities in becoming.
• Henri Bergson — the source of the intensive/extensive multiplicity distinction Dovey uses: places as "intensive multiplicities" changed by each new ingredient (soup, not jelly beans).

Related Concepts

• assemblage — the ontological form of becoming at rest: the assemblage as the dynamic ensemble whose stabilization is territorialization.
• deterritorialisation — becoming's erosion phase: territories and identities loosened from codes.
• smooth-and-striated-space — becoming's spatial pair: "all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space."
• becoming-interior — the interior-design descendant: "room becomes interior in a molecular or atomic sense" (Taylor) — the same ontology at room scale.
• habitus — the counter-force: Bourdieu's account of why things do not change; Dovey reads the habitus's rules "as codes of the assemblage" — becoming and habituation as the two halves of one theory of place.
• place-identity — the thing that becomes: identity as provisional, unfixed, forged from connections.
• practiced-place — becoming's everyday engine: practice as the continuous re-making of place.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source in this wiki: becoming-in-the-world (p. 6); the twofold pairs and the mixture thesis (p. 22); place as the assembled mix of roots and wings (pp. 23–24); the refrain and becoming at home (pp. 17–18); the blurb's binary-flip formula as the book's thread; "This is a book about place formation, about places in states of becoming" (p. 3).
• Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — the Deleuzian spatial theory from which the place application descends (see smooth-and-striated-space, deterritorialisation).
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the becoming-ontology at interior scale: "becoming-interior is ever-changing" (p. 341).

Open Questions

• If "there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-world," what is the ontological status of the stabilized place — epiphenomenon, plateau, or real phase? Dovey's Batesonian "plateau" (stability as dynamic, sustainable intensity) is the book's answer but is stated only in passing (p. 26).
• Does the privileging of becoming escape the essentialism it opposes, or reproduce it in inverted form — "becoming" as the new essence of place? Dovey's own hedge ("the goal is not to erase one side of the concept but to rethink which side comes first") suggests the pair must be kept, not flipped.
• Can a designed place be a becoming — or does design, as Dovey's Koolhaas audit suggests, always convert becoming into image ("programmatic innovation becomes congealed into form," p. 122)?