Wagner and Becoming

I've been thinking a bit about the STS field map we received a few weeks back in class - where to locate Wagner, what theories, if any, did she use, etc. She cites Foucault, of course, and uses Latour in a few areas, but the works she draws most heavily on from him is an art exhibition which asks "What would an object-oriented democracy look like?" In keeping with ANT, but further afield from laboratory studies.

Coincidentally, when searching "Wagner" in my OneNote, I found I'd already read a short piece by her. In "Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming," Biehl and Locke engage anthropologists in a dialogue about how ethnography might incorporate Deleuze's concept of becoming. As they define it (and it's as good a definition as there is out there), becoming is:

"those individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events 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” (Deleuze 1995:170; 2001). In becoming, as Deleuze saw it, one can achieve an ultimate existential stage in which life is simply immanent and open to new relations—camaraderie—and trajectories. Becoming is not a part of history, he wrote: “History amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become,’ that is, to create something new” (Deleuze 1995:171)."

Citing Wagner, Biehl and Locke explain that in post-war Bosnia:

Here, who one was before the war (what one believed and whom one loved) no longer has value amid new economies and forms of governance—but persists, all the same, in hopes and frustrations. And here, lived experience continually escapes the social categories—competing ethnic and/or victim identities—that dominate the public sphere (Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings 2007). In such a context—and many others—of routinized urgency and crisis, the human sciences are challenged to respect and incorporate, without reduction, the angst, uncertainty, and the passion for the possible that life holds through and beyond technical assessments. Perhaps this task is what ethnography does best.

I like Wagner's response, in part because although I've always liked Deleuze's idea of becoming, I've found it difficult to integrate into my own life and more difficult still not only to explain to others but to use in any meaningful way. I think Deleuze had always meant it as more of a personal philosophy, so to incorporate it into anthropology, a field which seeks to interpret personal philosophies, implies a "reading" of something that may not be there. As Wagner writes:

There is a refreshing optimism in what [Biehl and Locke] ask us to study—that amid the decay of Vita and the anxiety of Sarajevo (and beside the graves of Bosnia’s missing) lie countless moments of social interaction and expression that challenge assumptions about the limitations of life. But the question of how lingers, and my own concern is that the desire to craft a new anthropology might have the unwanted, unintended affect of eclipsing the very voices and lives we wish to open up to deeper understanding, at least among the field of policy makers and practitioners.

I haven't yet finished Wagner's text, but what strikes me is her insistence on listening (or, loaded term, "giving voice") when her text seems to be so absent from this. There are no extensive transcripts or quotes, very few individuals up the point that we've read. So while I've read attentively, I've found that much of Wagner writes feels repetitive, painting broad brushstrokes of ideas without the immersive nature and centrality of voices that makes ethnography so great. We know what DNA means to her, but I'm not sure I've fully grasped what it means to Bosnians. I hope that changes.