"Culture," wrote Raymond Williams in 1976, "is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts." Williams' remark holds a valuable suggestion for a critical examination of the concept of culture, specifically where he refers to the "use" of the term culture "for important concepts": it points to the operative character of this term.

The concept of becoming seeks to articulate a political practice in which social actors escape their normalized representations and reconstitute themselves in the course of participating and changing the conditions of their material existence. Becoming is not only a force against something but also a force which enables desire and escape. Every becoming is a transformation of multiplicity to another, write Deleuze & Guattari; every becoming radicalizes desire and creates new individuations, new affections, new diversifications. But, interestingly enough, the end of all becomings is not the proliferation of diversity and difference, it is its disappearance. Becoming imperceptible is the immanent end of all becomings, it is a process of becoming everybody/everything by eliminating the use of names to describe what exceeds the moment. We will show how migrants transform themselves and change constantly their practices and alliances in order to sustain their own subjective paths of mobility: the autonomy of migration! In this part we want to show that becoming becomes the rule when the spaces of existence cease to be pure and emerge as transit spaces of mobility. Becoming animal, becoming woman, becoming child is essential to mobility, and becoming mobile is essential to labour, and labour as their biopolitical sphere of activity is essential to the acceleration and multiplication of desire.

As a global working class, the working class of today is just as subaltern as the Italian peasants of the south in former times. Yet how can the people who are set in a transnational relation to one another by the flexible production chain of contemporary capitalism articulate their relationship to one another?

The official scripting of the Northern Irish conflict in recent years has worked to define and accentuate ethnic and linguistic difference, suggesting that only officially mediated processes of cultural translation can bridge those ‘inherent communal divides’. This produces not only absolute, reified identities, but also works against initiatives that seek to address questions of history, power and democracy. Thus, the peace process has largely continued the management of conflict without addressing the aporia of the border.