Current Anthropology Volume 51, Number 3, June 2010 317 Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming by Joa˜o Biehl and Peter Locke Philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasizes the primacy of desire over power and the openness and flux of social fields. In this article, we place our ethnographic projects among the urban poor in Brazil and Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with Deleuze’s cartographic approach to subjectivity and his reflections on control and the transformative potential of becoming. As people scavenge for resources and care, they must deal with the encroachment of psychiatric diagnostics and treatments in broken public institutions and in altered forms of common sense. By reading our cases in light of Deleuze’s ideas, we uphold the rights of microanalysis, bringing into view the immanent fields that people, in all their ambiguity, invent and live by. Such fields of action and significance—leaking out on all sides—are mediated by power and knowledge, but they are also animated by claims to basic rights and desires. In making public a nuanced understanding of these fields—always at risk of disap- pearing—anthropologists still allow for larger structural and institutional processes to become visible and their true effect known. This fieldwork/philosophical dialogue highlights the limits of psychiatric models of symptoms and human agency and supplements applications of concepts such as biopolitics, structural violence, and social suffering in anthropology. Continually adjusting itself to the reality of contemporary lives and worlds, the anthropological venture has the potential of art: to invoke neglected human potentials and to expand the limits of understanding and imagination—a people yet to come. The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, and Bosnia-Herzegovina—people are at the mercy of volatile this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that economies and pay a high physical and subjective price to get is, a possibility of life. (Deleuze 1997:4) by day-to-day. As people scavenge for resources and care, they must deal with the encroachment of psychiatric diagnostics An Empirical Lantern and treatments in broken public institutions and in altered forms of common sense. We find Deleuze’s reflections pro- The late Gilles Deleuze was particularly concerned with the vocative and helpful as we address lives in contexts of clinical idea of becoming: those individual and collective struggles to and political-economic crisis. In the field, the unexpected come to terms with events and intolerable conditions and to happens every day, and new causalities come into play. We shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from determinants are drawn to human efforts to exceed and escape forms of and definitions—“to grow both young and old [in them] at knowledge and power and to express desires that might be once” (Deleuze 1995:170; 2001). In becoming, as Deleuze saw world altering. How can anthropological methods and con- it, one can achieve an ultimate existential stage in which life cepts incorporate evidence of these kinds of becoming? What is simply immanent and open to new relations—camara- would a Deleuze-inspired ethnography accomplish that others derie—and trajectories. Becoming is not a part of history, he might not? And how could such work challenge dominant wrote: “History amounts only to the set of preconditions, modes of medical and political intervention? It is time to however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ attribute to the people we study the kinds of complexities we that is, to create something new” (Deleuze 1995:171). acknowledge in ourselves, and to bring these complexities into In the urban-poor settings in which we work—in Brazil the forms of knowledge we produce and circulate. We have no grand philosophical aspirations and do not Joa˜o Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University wish to reduce Deleuze’s enormously complicated venture (116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1011, U.S.A. into a theoretical system or set of practices to be applied [[email protected]]). Peter Locke is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Wellbeing (Woodrow normatively to anthropology. In this article, we limit ourselves Wilson School, Wallace Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, New to thinking through his insights on the relationships between Jersey 08544-1013, U.S.A.). This paper was submitted 11 IX 08 and power, desire, and sublimation and his cartographic approach accepted 11 II 09. to social fields and the unconscious (see Massumi 2002; Stew- ᭧ 2010 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2010/5103-0002$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/651466 318 Current Anthropology Volume 51, Number 3, June 2010 art 2007). These insights help us to better grasp what is at engagement. Anthropologists demarcate uncharted social ter- stake for individuals and interpersonal relations in the context ritories and track people moving through them. The maps of new rational-technical interventions. Exploring the utility we produce allow the navigators—the interpreters—to con- of Deleuze’s ideas in light of the ethnographic realities we sider these territories and their life force (their capacities and study—mental illness, poverty, and the aftermath of war— possibilities as much as their foreclosures). can highlight the limits of psychiatric models of symptoms In our reflections we draw from Biehl’s work with Catarina and human agency (Biehl, Good, and Kleinman 2007; Moraes, a young woman abandoned by her family and left to DelVecchio Good et al. 2008; Jenkins and Barrett 2004). It die in an asylum called Vita in the southern Brazilian city of can also provide a helpful supplement to prevailing appli- Porto Alegre (Biehl 2005). Largely incapacitated and said to be cations of Michel Foucault’s concepts of biopower and gov- mad, Catarina spent her days in Vita assembling words in what ernmentality in anthropology (Fassin 2007b; Ferguson 2006; she called “my dictionary.” She wrote, “The characters in this Foucault 2007; Lovell 2006; Ong and Collier 2005; Rabinow notebook turn and un-turn. This is my world after all.” Ca- and Rose 2006) and to neo-Marxist theories of structural tarina’s puzzling language required intense listening, bracketing violence (Bourgois 1995; Farmer 2001; Scheper-Hughes diagnostics, and an open reading. Since first encountering her, 1992). We are concerned with human matters that dominant Biehl thought of her not in terms of mental illness but as an epistemologies and interventions do not routinely concep- abandoned person who was claiming experience on her own tualize or account for. terms. Catarina knew what had made her a void in the social In emphasizing the powers and potentials of desire (both sphere—“I am like this because of life”—and she organized creative and destructive), the ways in which social fields cease- this knowledge for herself and her anthropologist, thus bringing lessly leak and transform (power and knowledge notwith- the public into Vita. “I give you what is missing.” Her ex- standing), and the in-between, plastic, and ever-unfinished family, she claimed, thought of her as a failed medication reg- nature of a life, Deleuze lends himself to inspiring ethno- imen. The family was dependent on this explanation to excuse graphic efforts to illuminate the dynamism of the everyday itself from her abandonment. In Catarina’s words, “To want and the literality and singularity of human becomings. my body as a medication, my body.” Her condition spoke of Through close attention to people moving through broken the pharmaceuticalization of mental health care in Brazil; in institutions and infrastructures in the making and with careful his ethnographic work, Biehl charts the social side effects that observation always complicating the a priori assumptions of come with the unregulated encroachment of new medical tech- universalizing theory, ethnographic work can make public the nologies in urban-poor settings. constellations through which life chances are foreclosed and Catarina’s life tells a larger story about shifting human highlight the ways desires can break open alternative path- values and the fate of social bonds in today’s dominant mode ways. For in learning to know people, with care and an “em- of subjectification at the service of science and capitalism. She pirical lantern” (Hirschman 1998:88), we have a responsibility suggests that these days, one can become a medico-scientific to think of life in terms of both limits and crossroads—where thing and an ex-human at the convenience of others. In the new intersections of technology, interpersonal relations, de- merciless interface of capitalist and scientific discourses, we sire, and imagination can sometimes, against all odds, propel are all a new kind of proletariat—hyperindividualized psy- unexpected futures. chobiologies doomed to consume diagnostics and treatments This is not to give up on explanation or the careful dis- (for ourselves and for others) as we seek fast success in econ- cernment of relations of causality and affinity in social and omies without empathy (Martin 2007). But Catarina fought medical phenomena. The question, rather, lies in our recep- the disconnections that psychiatric drugs introduced in her tivity to others, in what kinds of evidence we assemble and life—between body and spirit, between her and the people use—the voices to which we listen and the experiences we she knew, in common sense—and clung to her desires. She account for—and in how we craft our explanations: whether worked through the many layers of (mis)treatment that now our analytics remain attuned to the intricacy, openness, and composed her body, knowing all too well that “my desire is unpredictability of individual and collective lives. Just as med- of no value.” ical know-how, international political dynamics, and social Catarina wrote to sublimate not only her own desires for realities change, so too are people’s lives (biological and po- reconnection and recognition but also the social forces—fa- litical) in flux.