From binaries to ontogenesis in tourism encounters: A clarificatory note on Deleuze and assemblages

Following on Eriksson's (2025) critique of tourism scholarship's impulse to “transcend” host–guest binaries, this commentary uses Deleuzian concepts to shift analysis from taking binaries as starting points to examining how they arise in situated encounters through stabilisation. We distinguish the actual organisation of an encounter (roles, routines, rules, and material arrangements currently holding) from its virtual field (differential pressures, expectations, tensions, and shifting moods conditioning what happens next). On this basis, assemblage is treated not as a checklist of elements to be inventoried, but as an ongoing process through which binaries and boundaries are made and remade. We close by outlining how categories take hold in tourism situations and how shifts in arrangement and atmosphere make them negotiable.