A Mutual Becoming (or, answers)

Jamin’s recent comment on my recent post “An Assemblage” had so many interesting questions, I decided to try and answer them here, in another post.

Do the individual and the city undergo a mutual becoming?

First, for the benefit of those not studying Deleuze, a “becoming” is a sort of perpetual state of transformation from one thing to another. A good example, for those of you who have seen it, is the recent film “Black Swan” – Nina undergoes a becoming-swan, Deleuze would say. A mutual becoming, then, exists between two entities which are “becoming” eachother. Before you call me crazy and click away from this post, let me clarify one more thing – becoming is not a literal phenomenon. Deleuze writes “The human being does not ‘really’ become an animal any more than an animal ‘really’ becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself.”

So, in what way could an individual become city, or could a city become individual? Jamin suggested the use of the word “citizen,” which I like because it shares the same root as city, and seems somehow to suggest a relationship between the two which might cater to a mutual becoming.

Jamin also asked, What does a citizen consist of? Is it simply a legal term for tax collection and voting rights, or can a citizen be more transitory in nature?


citizen, n.

Pronunciation:  /ˈsɪtɪzən/

1.      An inhabitant of a city or (often) of a town; esp. one possessing civic rights and privileges, a burgess or freeman of a city.

city, n.

Pronunciation:  /ˈsɪtɪ/

1. orig. A town or other inhabited place.

[source: oed.com]

(Not to imply that dictionary definitions encompass all facets of a word. Still, I like the OED because it gives me a place to start. And it seems authoritative.)

So, a citizen is defined by that which it inhabits, a city, and in turn, a city can be defined by those who inhabit it, its citizens. This reciprocal relationship seems to be set up perfectly for a mutual becoming. But what might such a transformation look like?

As pedestrians, drivers, commuters, citizens move through city space, they become a part of the cityscape themselves. In envisioning a city, two things come immediately to mind: buildings, and people. So, as citizens interact with a city landscape, they are becoming city themselves. The city, in turn, being populated by multiplicities, being filled with diverse peoples, it broken down into fragments – in the daily motion of commutes, in the city traffic, even in the construction and deconstruction of buildings, the city is broken down into the components, the citizens, which inhabit it. Maybe that’s why I struggle to create a single impression of Edmonton – just as all the citizens are becoming one city, the one city is also becoming a multiplicity of citizens – a multiplicity that I cannot seem to define with just one word.

An Assemblage

In one of my other English courses, I’m studying the philosophies of Deleuze. It’s a lot of highly theoretical thinking that’s hard to pin down to earth, but one piece of Deleuzian theory has informed my perception of this city. He discusses literature which makes use of assemblages, an example being the work of Virginia Woolf, which I touched on in a recent post.

As a concept though, the assemblage need not be restricted to the literary world. By Deleuze’s definition, the assemblage is a whole that is not total – it is some group of entities that are brought together by a common affect which they create in their ensemble, and yet those entities remain distinct, and cannot be defined merely by the properties that they share.

That sounds abstract and completely inapplicable to an exploration of Edmonton, but bear with me here. See, as I write, photograph, map, and generally chronicle this city, I’m not finding entities that come together in a nice neat totality that can fit entirely within the name “Edmonton.” My experience of the city is more fragmentary, and yet it is not entirely unlinked. I’m not sure yet what the unifying “affect” is that this city holds for me, but I am beginning to get a sense of an assemblage.

Here is some form of illustration of that – perhaps it’s overly simplistic, but nonetheless, it creates another entity by which to examine this city. It’s a word cloud (thanks wordle), and essentially, it shows the various words from this blog, with font size indicating frequency. Common words like “a” and “the” are removed, but in an approximate way, it shows a literary assemblage of my Edmonton impressions. Make of it what you will, but at the very least, it’s kind of fun.

(click to enlarge)