Becoming-Other

Paulo M. Barroso (NOVA Institute of Communication, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal)

The concept of “becoming-other” (devenir-autre) derives primarily from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and offers a productive framework for understanding literary tourism beyond representation, authenticity, or cultural consumption. This entry examines how the notion provides an alternative theoretical perspective capable of rethinking literary tourism as a process of affective transformation rather than representational consumption and interpreting literary tourism as the passive recognition of places associated with authors or fictional worlds.

In “La littérature et la vie”, Deleuze (1993) argues that writing is certainly not imposing a form (of expression) on lived experience; literature is rather on the side of the formless, or of incompleteness. Writing, reading, travelling, and learning, therefore, constitute transformative processes that traverse lived reality and produce new relations with the world. As Steven Johnson (2014, p. 65) observes, “learning is a constant dialectic of experience and becoming that emerges from experimentation with the real.”

From this perspective, literature functions less as representation than as experimentation with life, perception, sensation, and subjectivity. Literary tourism may therefore be understood not as the search for authenticity behind fiction, but as an extension of literature’s experiential and affective capacities. Reading transforms the perception of places, while travelling through literary spaces simultaneously alters the meaning of texts. The literary tourist experiences new ways of inhabiting space shaped by imagination, atmosphere, emotion, and movement.

This perspective also enables a distinction between “literary tourism” and the “tourism of literary writing.” In the latter, “the writer is the tourist himself, whereas in the former the reader becomes a traveller” (Fois-Braga, 2019, p. 149). In the tourism of literary writing, travel precedes literary creation, as lived experiences are transformed into narrative after the journey. In literary tourism, by contrast, the literary text precedes the journey and mediates the traveller’s perception of space.

The relationship between tourism and literature depends upon what Lénia Marques (2019) calls an “alliance of imaginations,” through which fictional worlds and material locations become interconnected. Literary destinations emerge not only from texts and representations, but also from institutional and tourism strategies that transform literary associations into cultural and economic value. Consequently, the “literary space” is simultaneously imaginary and material, shaped by narratives, memory, media circulation, symbolic capital, and destination marketing.

A Deleuzian framework shifts attention away from symbolic interpretation toward affective intensities and lived experience. What matters in literary tourism is not solely what a place means, but what it does: how it reorganises perception, emotion, imagination, and sensory engagement. Literary tourism deterritorialises ordinary space by reconnecting places to narrative, memory, and affect, while reading deterritorialises the traveller by transforming habitual ways of perceiving and inhabiting space. Literary tourism thus becomes an assemblage connecting text, body, movement, landscape, atmosphere, and affect.

The concept of becoming is developed extensively in Mille Plateaux. Deleuze and Guattari (1980, p. 291) insist that becoming is neither “une ressemblance, une imitation” nor identification, because “ce qui est réel, c’est le devenir lui-même”. Becoming is therefore not imitation, resemblance, or symbolic substitution, but a real process of transformation without fixed beginning or end. Applied to literary tourism, this means that the literary traveller does not literally become a fictional character or author, nor merely imitate literary experience. Instead, the traveller enters a “bloc de devenir” in which encounters with literary places transform perception and subjectivity.

This argument is reinforced in Dialogues, where Deleuze (1987, p. 2) states that “to become is never to imitate, nor to «do like», nor to conform to a model”. Becoming contains no stable origin or destination: “there is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at.” Consequently, literary tourism cannot simply be reduced to reproducing fictional worlds or consuming literary heritage. Traditional approaches often interpret literary tourism in representational terms, with tourists visiting locations associated with authors or novels to “see the real place” behind the text. Such a model assumes a stable referent and positions the tourist as someone verifying a pre-existing literary image.

A Deleuzian approach rejects this logic of resemblance. Literary tourism is understood instead as a relational encounter in which text, place, imagination, and body mutually transform one another. The literary text does not function merely as representation, but as a force capable of generating affects, movements, and new relations with territory. Literary tourism, therefore, becomes a dynamic process of “double capture, or non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns” (Deleuze, 1987, p. 2). As someone becomes, what one is becoming changes as much as one does himself.

This relational process is evident when literary landscapes modify the perception of readers while material environments simultaneously alter the meaning of texts. The tourist does not encounter the “same” London of Charles Dickens or the Dublin of Ulysses. For example, a visitor walking through Dublin during the annual Bloomsday may experience the city not simply as geographic space, but through the affective intensities, memories, and narrative associations activated by Joyce’s text. Instead, new assemblages emerge between fiction, memory, sensory experience, and movement.

The notion of assemblage is central to this framework. Literary tourism may be understood as an assemblage composed of texts, bodies, memories, landscapes, media images, mobility practices, emotions, and cultural imaginaries. Meaning and experience emerge through the interaction of these heterogeneous elements, avoiding the reduction of literary tourism either to textual interpretation or tourism consumption alone. As François Zourabichvili (2003, p. 29) writes: “Devenir est le contenu propre au désir (machines désirantes ou agencements): désirer, c’est passer par des devenirs.”

The concept of deterritorialisation is equally significant. Literature deterritorialises space by charging landscapes with alternative rhythms, affects, and perceptual intensities. At the same time, readers and tourists themselves become deterritorialised because literary experience alters habitual ways of moving through and interpreting space. Literary tourism consequently becomes a spatial process in which distinctions between fiction and reality, imagination and geography, reading and travelling become unstable.

Unlike traditional theories centred on heritage and authenticity, this perspective emphasises molecular experience. Zourabichvili (2003) explains that becoming operates through intensities, sensations, singularities, affects, and speeds rather than stable identities or forms. In literary tourism, what matters are often the sensory and emotional variations produced through encounters with literary space: atmospheres, sounds, textures, rhythms, fleeting impressions, and affective resonances that escape fixed interpretation.

This emphasis on affect also transforms methodological questions within literary tourism studies. Rather than asking “What does this place mean?”, a Deleuzian approach asks: “What is happening?” and “How does it work?”. The focus shifts from symbolic interpretation toward experiential analysis: how literature reorganises perception, produces affects, and generates new relations with space.

This framework is especially relevant for contemporary literary tourism, since literary places are increasingly mediated through cinema, digital culture, fandom, social media, and algorithmic visibility. Visitors often travel not to recover an “original” literary place, but to participate in networks of affective and mediated experience. Literary tourism thus becomes rhizomatic rather than linear, operating through flows, connections, and associations rather than direct correspondences between text and location.

A Deleuzian perspective also challenges romantic assumptions about literary authenticity. Literary places possess no stable essence to recover because they are continuously reterritorialised through interpretation, tourism practices, commercialisation, adaptation, media circulation, and personal memory.

Finally, the concept of becoming-imperceptible (devenir-imperceptible) offers an additional insight into literary tourism. Zourabichvili (2003, p. 31) suggests that the most intense experiences of becoming occur when fixed identities and symbolic expectations dissolve. This implies that the most significant encounters may arise not from recognising literary references but from immersion in atmospheres, affects, movements, and sensory flows that reorganise perception itself. Literary tourism consequently becomes less an act of recognition than a process of experiential transformation through which literature enables alternative ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world, and “becoming might be conceived as the eternal productive return of difference” (Stagoll, 2005, p. 22).

From this perspective, becoming-other refers to the traveller’s openness to new modes of perception and subjectivity generated through encounters with literary texts and places. Literary tourism is therefore not primarily representational consumption but an affective and processual assemblage in which traveller, text, and place enter into mutual transformation.

How to cite this entry: Barroso, P.M. (2026). Becoming other. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Deleuze, G. (1993). Critique et clinique. Les Éditions de Minuit.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Les Éditions de Minuit.

Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues. Translated by H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. Columbia University Press (Original work published 1977).

Fois-Braga, H. (2019). Tourism of literary writing: The Brazilian author as an international tourist in the Amores Expressos Collection. In Jenkins, I. and Lund, K. A. (Eds.), Literary Tourism: Theories, Practice and Case Studies (pp. 149-178). CAB International.

Johnson, S. (2014). Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and its implications for ALL practice. Journal of Academic Language & Learning, 8(1), 62-69.

Marques, L. (2019). The making of the literary city: Edinburgh, Barcelona and Óbidos. In Jenkins, I. and Lund, K. A. (Eds.), Literary Tourism: Theories, Practice and Case Studies (pp. 57-70). CAB International.

Stagoll, C. (2005). Becoming. In Parr, A. (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 21-23). Edinburgh University Press.

Zourabichvili, F. (2003). Le vocabulaire de Deleuze. Ellipses.