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CHAPTER 1
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 medical phenomena, or to deny the often deadly force of social realities and inequalities. Rather, it is to urge increased focus on our receptivity to others, the kinds of evidence we assemble and use — the voices we listen to, the silences we notice, and the experiences and turns we account for — and how we craft our explanations. Our analytics must remain attuned to the intricacy, uncertainty, and unfinishedness of individual and collective lives. Just as medical know-how, international political dynamics, and social realities change, people's lives (biological and political) are in flux.
Remaining open to surprise and the deployment of categories important to human experience can make anthropological work more realistic and, we hope, better. As the political economist Albert Hirschman, an ethnographer at heart, put it, "I like to understand how things happen, how change actually takes place." People's everyday struggles for survival, belonging, and imagination exceed the categories informing experimental and statistical approaches and demand in-depth listening, dynamic mutual attunement, and a readiness to make bold analytical swerves. Ethnographic work engaged with becomings thus takes on conceptual force by building multidimensional figures of thought from the stories and trajectories of the people we engage with in the field. Tracking the intertwining of shifting material structures, uncharted social territories, and the formed and deformed bodies and senses of our field sites helps us empirically grasp what is actually happening in our radically unequal worlds and how power relations are being newly reinforced, always with an eye to how bodies also escape their figurations and forge unanticipated space-times.
PROBLEMATICS OF LIVING
In our reflections, we draw from Biehl's work with Catarina Inês Gomes Moraes, a young woman abandoned by her family and left to die in an asylum called Vita in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Largely incapacitated and said to be mad, Catarina spent her days in Vita assembling words in what she called "my dictionary." She wrote: "The characters in this notebook turn and un-turn. This is my world after all."
Catarina's puzzling language required intense listening, suspending diagnosis, and an open reading. Since Biehl first encountered her, he thought of her not as someone who was mentally ill but as an abandoned person who was claiming existence on her own terms. Catarina knew what had made her a "maimed statue" and a void in the social sphere — "I am like this because of life" — and she organized this knowledge for herself and her anthropologist, thus bringing the public into Vita. "I give you what is missing." Her family, she claimed, thought of her as a failed medication regimen. "Why is it only me who has to be medicated?" The family used this explanation as an excuse for abandoning her. Her condition highlighted the pharmaceuticalization of mental health care in Brazil and the social side effects that come with the encroachment of new medical technologies in urban-poor settings.
Catarina's life tells a larger story about shifting human values and the fate of social bonds in today's dominant mode of subjectivation in the service of science and capitalism. She suggests that one can become a medical or scientific thing and an ex-human for the convenience of others. At the merciless interface of capitalist and scientific discourses, we are all part of a new kind of proletariat: hyperindividualized psychobiologies doomed to consume diagnostics and treatments (for ourselves and for others) as we seek fast success in economies without empathy. But Catarina fought the disconnections that psychiatric drugs introduced in her life and clung to her desires. She worked through the many layers of (mis)treatment and chemical changes that now composed her body, knowing all too well that "people forgot me."
Catarina wrote to sublimate not only her own desires for reconnection and recognition but also the social forces — familial, medical and scientific, and economic — aligned against her. While she integrated her experience with drugs into writing and a new self-perception (the drug biperiden, sold under brand names including Akineton, is literally part of the new name Catarina gives herself in the dictionary: Catkine), she kept seeking camaraderie and another chance at life. Biehl discusses Catarina's creative capacity for living through things in dialogue with Deleuze's idea of "a delicate and incomplete health that stems from efforts to carve out life chances from things too big, strong and suffocating." In anticipating and imagining the possibility of an exit from Vita, Catkine's minor literature thus grounds an ethnographic ethics and gives us a sense of becoming and a style of reasoning that other analytic approaches might foreclose.
We also draw on Locke's fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter, following the standard local abbreviation, BiH), to consider collective processes of becoming and to highlight Deleuze's intriguing suggestion that one should write for the benefit of a "missing people." The collaborative nature of this coauthored chapter serves as a method of thought and an experiment in grappling with patterns across cases and scales. In the two decades since Yugoslavia's collapse and the long siege of Sarajevo, the symptoms and consequences — individual, social, and political — of the city's ordeals have been apparent. Wartime and postwar projects of humanitarian psychiatry and psychosocial support have made psychiatric diagnostics (specifically, collective depression and post-traumatic stress disorder) available for use in interpreting frustrating and persistent social ills. Such clinical-sounding assessments have the effect of emphasizing damage over possibility, painting the city primarily in terms of its wounds (which are indeed deep and still bleeding) while disregarding the hopes and desires — and resistances to neoliberal economic forms — that suffering also communicates.
Just as psychiatry helps silence Catarina's struggle to understand and reclaim her experience, in BiH, the psychologization of war's aftermath can sometimes "vitiate the moral and political meaning of subjective complaints and protests." In this way, each of our cases addresses a struggle (individual and collective, respectively) to navigate public and private imperatives that have been remade by intersecting scientific and economic rationalities. In each case, a void is engineered in place of older modes of self-assessment — which nevertheless, and by circuitous paths, continue to thrive.
The strict application of a Foucauldian theoretical sensibility — seeking out, for example, the ways that fear-mongering nationalist politics, neoliberal market reforms and concomitant corruption, and years of humanitarian services and international supervision have newly disciplined bodies and normalized subjectivity and social relations — would miss the anxious uncertainty and open-endedness that inflect life in Sarajevo. Symptoms are, at times, a necessary condition or resource for the afflicted to articulate a new relationship to the world and to others. Catarina's family used her supposed madness to excuse themselves for her abandonment — even as she assimilated her experience of psychiatric treatment into a new identity in her struggle to anticipate a more livable reality. By the same token, Locke's work in Sarajevo suggests how the availability of psychiatric drugs and psychosocial services has enabled hybrid ways of remaking lives, families, and social roles.
Psychiatric rationality is enmeshed, to varying degrees, in the worlds we engage with, and it alters people's lives and desires — sometimes deleteriously, cementing foreclosures, and at other times allowing for new openings and forms of care. Anthropological work is well qualified to understand this tension, bringing us closer to the politics and ethics involved in the on-the-ground deployment of psychiatric categories and treatments — which increasingly takes place outside the clinic, in homes and people's solitary relationships to technology.
Both anguish and vitality simmer beneath Sarajevo's scarred — but slowly brightening, rejuvenating — surfaces, and the work of Deleuze is helpful in finding an analytic approach that can illuminate the interdependence of these twin intensities: the ways symptoms may simultaneously index darknesses and dominations past and present and the minor voices of a "missing people" that speak within alternative "universes of reference," capable, perhaps, of one day unleashing unforeseen social transformations in BiH. While aspirations for a better life and widespread frustrations with the status quo harbor the kinds of destructive potentials unleashed in the 1990s — the ethnic fear and violence, politics of scapegoating, and paranoia that come with chronic economic insecurity — they may also fuel unexpected solidarities and reveal alternative political pathways.
Sarajevo's "missing people" is composed of layers, each with its own intertwined violence, grief, and aspiration. The wartime dead (thousands of whom remain literally missing) continue to inhabit political claims and keenly felt grievances. Who one was before the war (what one believed and whom one loved) no longer has the same value in new economies and forms of governance, but persists in people's anger and hope. And lived experience continually escapes the social categories — competing ethnic and/or victim identities — that dominate the public sphere. In such a context of routinized urgency, the social sciences are challenged to respect and incorporate, without reduction, the ambiguity of political subjects, the uncertain roots and productivities of violence, and the passion for the possible that life holds in its passages through and beyond technical assessments. Performing this task is what ethnography does best.
MOVING IN THE DIRECTION OF THE UNFINISHED
We read Deleuze together with our ethnographic cases to reassert the symbiotic relationship between close empirical engagement with people and their worlds and theoretical inventiveness in anthropology. We recognize that "nobody needs philosophy for reflecting," as Deleuze himself noted, and are certainly not advocating for another philosophical scheme to be confirmed by the figures encountered in the field. As John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi argue, the "tendency for anthropologists to deploy their work only as illustrative cases for philosophical trends or concepts threatens to make anthropology into a sterile intellectual exercise." The point is well taken. In their relentless drive to theorize, anthropologists run the danger of caricaturing complex realities; neglecting key realms of experience; and missing lived figurations, ironies, and singularities that might complicate and enrich their analyses.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Unfinished"
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