Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus includes some useful concepts to understand technologies and their relations to humans as individuals and as a society. This article provides an introduction to their notions of machine and becoming and places them in the context of technological use in general, with a special focus on the cellphone. The concept of machine exceeds the technological context, yet it can be still relevant to technologies, especially digital ones. The concept of becoming assists in better understanding co-shaping (...) processes in which a technology and its users change in tandem. Becoming is analyzed as a set of five characteristics: [1] transduction, a change process in both the user and the technology; [2] rhizome, no starting or end point; [3] molecularity, small movement or change that can create a big difference; [4] partial simulation, creating a non-identical copy; and [5] anti-memory, forgetting the past. Based on this analysis, the concept of becoming-mobile is introduced as a new way of understanding the interrelations between humans and their cellphones. Becoming-mobile can be further developed either with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts such as nomadicism or with “external” concepts such as postphenomenology’s embodiment and new mobility studies’ virtual mobility. Machine, becoming, and becoming-mobile address some basic questions in philosophy of technology, thereby enabling us to refer to Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers of technology. (shrink)

This introduces a series of articles in a themed section entitled City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention. The section concerns how we might think more specifically about how to act in domains where complexity is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action. What kinds of dilemmas do residents face and what kinds of practices do they engage in in order to continuously gather up the tools and possibilities to endure in volatile urban conditions, where volatility (...) seems a critical force in the simultaneous undoing and remaking of life, as well as in providing assets and opportunities to inhabitants? How does violence obscure the various manoeuvres and practices that keep things together or apart? (shrink)