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 con