ABSTRACT
The notion of the fluid or fluidity will here be used as a root metaphor for all processes of becoming that transcend the ideas of unity, coherence and solids.
The notion of the fluid thus contains a series of related notions, concepts and models that all share the quality of being in opposition with unity and coherence. Another important concept is the philosophical notion of “becoming”. Becomings are the things-in-the-making, the transitions, “coalitions” (Michaels, 2000), and events that construct new subjectivities and assemblages (see Grosz, 1999). Although the notion of becoming is of pre-Socratic origin (employed by Heracleitus), and was later used by Plato in his metaphysical dialogue, Timaeus (Plato, 1977: 68), it remains a most contested concept. In this chapter, it will be used as a general model for processes unfolding and changes outside of teleology and finalism – becoming is here fundamentally anti-Aristotelian in terms of rejecting entelechism and finality. In contemporary thinking, the process philosophy of Henri Bergson (1998), Alfred North Whitehead (1978) and William James (1912, 1996) has reinstated the notions of process and becoming in the philosophical debate. For instance, William James (1996: 253), commenting on Bergson’s thinking, points to the need for a vocabulary apprehending what is intrinsically fluid and changing:
The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed, and the only mode of making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrests therein. With such arrests our concepts may be made congruent.
