(Un)becoming

I guess it is only fitting that my first official blog address what I mean by (Un)becoming-Human, which is the rather clunky name of my graduate work and has become a kind of defining principle for me in all that I do. We spend so much energy trying to "be" something or someone, as though one can hit pause and just hold it all still in time and space. But life is a dynamic, unruly business...things are constantly in flux moving between form and formlessness. We never arrive anywhere or locate ourselves entirely in an identity, because even as we move toward something, we are always already moving out of it, too. Like an inhalation becomes an exhalation, and every exhale carries the promise of the next inhale, life is moving, changing, and shifting into infinite lines of possibility.

This is an argument for a less violent human identity. It is a challenge to the assumption that humans are naturally or inevitably violent toward those nonhumans we farm for flesh and other by-products. In particular, it is a critique of the practices wherein certain bodies are commodified, forcibly bred, confined, slaughtered, dismembered, and consumed. I like to explore the ways in which discourse and power have privileged certain ways of being over others. Rather than accept that exploitation (of farmed animals, of one another, of anyone or anything we consume and dismember and fragment) is "natural," I argue that such brutality is the result of a particular conception of what it means to be human. Therefore, I attempt to re-think that identity in hopes of a less violent possibility.

Gilles Deleuze referred to infinite lines of becoming--the way two bodies, seemingly separate and disconnected can actually join together in a new articulation, a new way of "being." But we are so trapped and defined by who and what we think we are supposed to be, and we expend so much wasted energy trying to keep it all still, we begin to conflate stagnation with stability. Because so much of what we do in each moment, breath by breath is mere unconscious reproduction of habits and conditioning, it takes actual work to wake up and show up...and when we find that the categories and their respective roles no longer make sense, we have the choice to articulate something new with our lives, weaving our seemingly singular experience together in infinitely beautiful and unexpected ways with so-called "others."

From my thesis:

This is an invitation. It is a call for thought and reflection. This is a love poem. It is a labor that blooms from a deep and unapologetic commitment to peace and compassion. It is an opening door, behind which is an infinite maze of other shadowy passages. Passages down which you yourself may venture in search of new questions. This is a reminder. It whispers that who we are, and what we do, matters. We are each a momentary realization of our potential. We are ripples in an infinite plane of possibility. And this is the liquid plunk as a shiny thrown stone disrupts the calm. This is suspicion of the calm.

This is a warning. A tooth-baring, hackle-raised admonition that “others” are worth fighting for. Their lives are not forfeit or meaningless just because our prejudiced habits tell us so. This is a cautionary tale about a girl who didn’t think the arbitrary border of species should determine when violence is legitimate.

We can create instead of only ever reacting out of habit--and this, in my experience, has the auspicious and exciting potential to give space and breath to new ways of being...infinite lines of becoming, intersecting with infinite lines of becoming, a dance of identity that allows me to relate to you with a kind of awareness and presence and artistic delight because we no longer need to play by the rules.

Because we are told from a young age that "human beings" are necessarily or inevitably something or another (violent, exploitive, etc), it is worth challenging the very notions that there are in fact generalizable and universal human "beings" --identities that hold true across time, space, and culture...for in every voice we herald as the "truth" about who and what we are, there are infinite voices that have been silenced, oppressed, and snuffed out of our collective consciousness. Just as Judith Butler's theory of performativity gave us a way of challenging normalized gender roles, we can ask ourselves if humans are really just animals in drag.

I'd like to think there is nothing necessary or inevitable about violence, greed, cruelty, and exploitation of those we deem "other" and thus less than. I would like to think that there are infinite ways of being, infinite perspectives on oneself and on one's place in this life...and so I seek unbecoming what I have been told I must be, and in those everyday acts of rebellion I find there is a kind of social pressure to conform that renders one, literally, into something unbecoming, unflattering. And I guess I would rather be unbecoming in even the tiniest ray of light than to "be" a patchwork of social conditioning and automatic unthinking behavior.

So, whether it's gender, species, age, race, or whatever other clean little category one feels we must inhabit to stave off the fear that it's all really nebulous and moving and pulsing and breathing and changing...the roles are not Truth, and by seeking new lines of becoming (and unbecoming) we could savor and relish and create experiences and relationships that transcend the smallness that keeps us so stuck.

Though most of my work has explored this in terms of myopic categories like Human vs Animal, I am increasingly interested in how the unraveling and unknown can play out in our everyday relationships with one another...intimately, creatively, and consciously. What does it offer in terms of considering sexual partnerships, business endeavors, or how we place ourselves in the context of this planet....