community of style and becoming-molecular

"There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off." Deleuze & Guattari, 1000 Plateaus, p.292

I've been pondering the value of style lately. Style in the more common sense of aesthetic style, appreciation for art, good decorating, putting together a stylish look. For many years I had this style that was very aggressive and defined itself proudly as a deviation from the majority. This kind of approach to style did not value the common, ordinary, or everyday, and certainly did not value things that were inherited. It was exhausting. It was doomed to fail, and it was painful because I constantly had to try to live up to a standard of non-ordinariness which is pretty impossible to achieve in a day to day living kind of context.

So I was starting to wonder whether my interest in creating my own aesthetic style was merely a kind of egoistic attempt to be better than other people, to look down on them in their dreaded ordinariness, which I used to perceive as weakness, slumbering, and inauthenticity. (Which of course was a way of trying to feel better about being interested in things that other people thought were strange, odd, or otherwise aberrant.)

As I've been working it through now, as I look at it closely, I find that the aesthetics of daily life (home decor, clothing/hair/makeup, food, patterns of speech, means of transportation, writing instruments, etc) genuinely are important to me, but not because my taste sets me apart from other people. The aesthetic interests I have are not about judgment, but rather about really noticing what is going on within me and around me--really noticing the textures, shapes, colors, sounds/musics, temperatures, speeds, slownesses, traditions, innovations, pathways, walls, etc of the world that I live in, and the world as I live it.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about becomings as these creative actions and moments where we lose the rigidity of knowing exactly what things are and exactly who we are and instead we enter into a kind of sublime engagement with the world such that transformation is inevitable. This is what it is to be creative: to forget what you know through total engagement with the living reality of whatever it is that you are doing. In this sense, creativity, as 'becoming' is about deviating from the majority, and even from the established minority, and just going into experience as it is right now.

This kind of becoming is never absolute in the sense that we are able to escape all (or even most) structures of our existence--culture, personal history, biological and geological limitations are always in play. But there is an aspect of our experiencing that is free, that is fundamentally creative, and that continually makes plays for the open spaces in all of those structures that allow for transformation.

Through the development of my own style, I seek this freedom. In addition to all of the aspects of my style that are inherited and unable to be changed, the true "stylishness" of my style isn't something finished or resolved, but rather, a kind of material, linguistic, and gestural record of my responses to what my close engagement with the curious details of life that "start to swell and carry me off" such that I forget my historical identity and the rules of things....and something new appears, however small. That newness, that is "my style".

"We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don't deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off."