Becoming-Child

In their totemic work A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explore the idea of becoming-child. They talk about this concept through the lens of deterritorialisation, a complicated idea which is perhaps best observed in how children play. 

As the father of a son who loves Lego, reading these passages on becoming-child completely changed how I relate to what my son is trying to achieve through his play, and especially what I encourage within it. Lego is the perfect example—a new set arrives and he cleanly follows the instructions, making the predetermined structure. This provides some fun, but soon enough the established code becomes limiting, and his preference is to deconstruct or decode his Lego toy, breaking it into pieces and creating something completely new. A jeep becomes a boat becomes a plane becomes a house: the perfect metaphor for deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.

I love playing with my son in this way, seeing what may become of the established order. How far can we take it? And does he dare mix together sets, melding together distinct orders which are then difficult to separate? Engaging in these questions is fun, but also causes me to reflect on what it means, and what this sort of play serves in the wider context of building a self.

Rather than being a process of infantilization, this becoming-child is one where the adult learns to disidentify from the rigid structures which have otherwise defined them. We all know this happens: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, the stories we have been told about who we are. These things come to define us, and in the end we are often forced to discover ways of breaching these boundaries, even as doing so terrifies us.

As well as deterritorialising Lego structures, my son also loves to deterritorialise faces and characters, another distinctly Deleuzoguattarian idea. Presented with a page full of characters in a children’s book, it is a favourite activity of his to mix and match features, selecting the hair of one, the clothes of another, skin tone of yet another. Alongside these selections come stories which inevitably weave together distinct subjectivities into a newly invented one: a reterritorialisation of otherwise constraining narratives. Do we dare do the same in our own lives?

All too often I find myself trapped in stories which date back years, decades: all the way to infancy. I’ve been acting out the codes that were forced on me by my family, culture, social circles. Out of these layers a feedback loop was created which birthed the dominant narratives in my life: a silencing of my subjective experience, penetrating loneliness, and a constant feeling of being dislocated from my surroundings. I’ve always been trying to find my way home, but everywhere I go leaves me feeling that home is somewhere else.

My therapist recently suggested that I explore some of the themes in my favourite novels, to see if any of them felt relevant to my own story. I collated a list of my top five or six, and was fairly stunned to immediately find the themes described above represented to varying degrees throughout each book. From passages centred on the meaning of home in The Dispossessed, to the dislocation of time and love in The Forever War, and the impossibility of understanding each other in Embassytown, the moments that I connect to most strongly in literature always seem to be founded on this sense of being lost and misunderstood. Even my earliest memory of crying whilst reading is the moment when Lyra and Will find each other again in The Amber Spyglass, only to leave each other for their own worlds—a momentous coming home which ultimately saves the universe.

The one place where I do find myself truly at home is when I create, especially when I create music. In the world of music I find a letting go of expectation and the need for control which is alien to much of the rest of my life. For Deleuze and Guattari, creativity is a key part of becoming-child: it is what allows us to flee the confines of rigid structures and to envision something different. Just as my son experiments with his Lego and builds things the blocks were never intended for, music is a place where I can move emotions around, recontextualise them, force them into serving a different purpose. Through music, the deepest melancholy moves from something which tends towards isolating me from others, to something which binds me to them as they hear the creation and relate to it.

It is unsurprising therefore that my fledgling creativity emerged in my early twenties, as I struggled to hold onto a sense of who I was, and waded through dissociative and visionary experiences which threatened my very survival. What initially manifested as a deep urge to end my life was gradually recontextualised as a need to break down the self, to become an entirely new person, to define my own boundaries. Through poetic and musical explorations, I held onto this metamorphic process like so much light in an otherwise darkened cave, and eventually emerged into what might have been a changed world, had the addictions which I used to survive this phase not carried themselves through alongside my soul.

It saddens me, but I have a sense that I am imposing similar structures to the ones which forced this process onto my son, structures that he will one day need to break free from. I try to be playful, to allow him to be what he wants to be in a given moment, but the pressure to fit an emerging personality into the cultural puzzle which otherwise holds it is an ever present issue which I struggle to contain. At once a representative of the structural codes, and one who has tried and only partially managed to break free from them, I am optimistic that the cycle will be somewhat disrupted, but increasingly the need to get a hold on my own rigid codes and break them down, to reengage with my own becoming-child: all this is becoming of the greatest importance. 

Fortunately, this work is a key aspect of the training in Psychosynthesis Psychology that I have recently started: disidentification from such narratives is the basis of the work from which the rest is built. It excites me to feel like so much of this journey is ahead of me, and once I have succeeded in releasing the child in me, I look forward to seeing what else I may become.