Territories, Environments, Politics

Explorations in Territoriology

Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Mattias Kärrholm, Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Mattias Kärrholm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000568462
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

This collection seeks to illustrate the state of the art in territoriological research, both empirical and theoretical. The volume gathers together a series of original, previously unpublished essays exploring the newly emerging territorial formations in culture, politics and society.

While the globalisation debate of the 1990s largely pivoted around a 'general deterritorialisation' hypothesis, since the 2000s it has become apparent that, rather than effacing territories, global connections are added to them, and represent a further factor in the increase of territorial complexity. Key questions follow, such as: How can we further the knowledge around territorial complexities and the ways in which different processes of territorialisation co-exist and interact, integrating scientific advances from a plurality of disciplines? Where and what forms does territorial complexity assume, and how do complex territories operate in specific instances? Which technological, political and cultural facets of territories should be tackled to make sense of the life of territories? How and by what different or combined methods can we describe territories, and do justice to their articulations and meanings? How can the territoriological vocabulary relate to contemporary social theory advancements such as ANT, the ontological turn, the mobilities paradigm, sensory urbanism, and atmospheres research? How can territorial phenomena be studied across disciplinary boundaries? Territories, Environments, Politics casts a fresh perspective onto a number of key contemporary socio-spatial phenomena. Refraining from the attempt to ossify territoriology into some disciplinary straightjacket, the collection aims to illustrate the scope of current territoriological research, its domain, its promises, its theoretical advancements, and its methodological reflection in the making.

Scholars interested in social research will find in this collection a rich and imaginative theoretical-methodological toolkit. Students in human geography, anthropology and sociology, socio-legal studies, architecture and urban planning will find Territories, Environments, Politics of interest.

Chapter 1

The State of Territory Under Globalization

Empire and the Politics of Reterritorialization

Stuart Elden

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196365-2

‘Mais un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien.’

(Foucault 1994: 76).

Michel Foucault’s suggestion is often misconstrued. The usual translation, found in the Language, Counter-Memory, Practice collection, is ‘perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian’ (1977: 165). Unsurprisingly, it is regularly referenced in books on Gilles Deleuze (see, for example, Marks 1998: 79, Dumoncel 1999: 67), and indeed there was a special issue of the journal SAQ entitled ‘A Deleuzian Century?’ (Buchanan 1997).¹ But as James Faubion notes, following a lead from Paul Rabinow, the double entendre is neglected – le siècle can also mean the circle of courtiers, and the phrase can therefore be translated as ‘some day, the in-crowd will be Deleuzian’ (1998: xix, xxxix n. 30). We might be content with this, laughing gently at Foucault’s prophetic irony. Deleuze himself certainly saw the suggestion as a joke, or at least as provocative (1995: 4, 88–89).² But there is yet more in this polysemantic phrase. Le siècle, especially in religious contexts, can mean the worldly life or the world as a whole, an exchange of a temporal marker for a spatial signifier.

Attempts to understand the world as Deleuzian have been widespread in recent years, with a range of studies taking up his concepts with alacrity. Of course, the ‘his’ obscures the way in which many of his most used concepts are those he developed in congress with Félix Guattari, in four important works. Indeed, in What is Philosophy? he and Guattari describe the task of the philosopher as formulating concepts (1994: 5) and, in his well-known interview with Foucault, Deleuze suggested that ‘a theory is exactly like a box of tools… it must be useful. It must function’ (Foucault 1977: 208). Does this mean that we should merely sit back and watch as the terms of schizoanalysis, hybridity, smooth and striated space, the molar and the molecular, the rhizome, the refrain and others are paraded for the entertainment and edification of the multitude? Conceptual policing might seem to go against the very nature of the Deleuzian enterprise.

1 That Dumoncel writes in French shows that this is not merely an issue of translation.

2 See also the comment made at the very beginning of A Thousand Plateaus: ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was already several, there was already quite a crowd’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 3).

Despite this, it seems to me to be instructive to slow down, to hesitate, to read and to think, before such an appropriation. That was certainly the way that Deleuze approached his thinkers in studies of, among others, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Leibniz. Here, I am particularly concerned with thinking about the notion of deterritorialization, developed in some of the collaborative works with Guattari. This term has been widely used in recent literature on globalization (for a critique see Elden 2005), but there it is usually divorced from its conceptual partner of reterritorialization. What is interesting about these terms in Deleuze and Guattari is the way they function in both a linguistic medium and in terms of organisms and their movement. Metaphoricity and mobility are therefore intertwined in important and complicated ways. Perhaps the most important recent study utilizing these terms has been Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, where sometimes they are used together and at times separately. The separation raises a number of problems, but in utilizing and developing these terms in a much more explicitly political way, they make space for potential utilizations. Taking this forward, the conclusion of the essay stresses not the politics of deterritorialization, but the politics of reterritorialization. It suggests we can see this at play in recent events, but that before we speak too freely of either deterritorialization or reterritorialization we need to think much more carefully about territory itself, conceptually, historically and politically.

Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization

There are a number of ways in which these terms are used in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. As Ronald Bogue has usefully cautioned, the concept of territory is discussed ‘in its narrow ethological sense in Thousand Plateaus,’ but ‘is inseparable from the general notions of territorialization, reterritorialization and deterritorialization, which play through their thought in a wide range of contexts’ (2002: 114). These contexts have been helpfully discussed in some of Bogue’s own works, but in the wider literature they can often seem to be largely run into each other. Bogue notes that the first use of the terms is in 1966, in Guattari’s work on group psychology (Guattari 1972, Bogue 1997: 466). As Holland has also noted, the use of deterritorialization/reterritorialization ‘derive from Lacanian usage’ (1996: 241).³ Territorialization, in Lacan, describes the way in which parental care structures and organizes the child’s body, where feeding and cleaning focus behavior to specific zones or sites of the body (the mouth, the genitals, the anus, etc.). As Holland notes, in Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization shows how this centering on particular sites can be made elsewhere. Holland gives the examples of movement from the mother’s breast or the Oedipal complex (1996: 241–42; see also 1991).

3 We should remember that Guattari was trained by Lacan.

The point though, for both Bogue and Holland, is that this is not just a move in the psychological register, but also one in the social, where the terms can describe something going on within capitalism, ‘the disconnection and reconnection of working bodies and environments – for example, the disconnection of peasants from grazing land by the Enclosures Acts in England, and their reterritorialization onto textile looms as wage-labor in the nascent garment industry’ (Holland 1996: 242). For Bogue, the aim of Guattari’s early work ‘is to extend to the domain of the social Lacan’s essentially psychological use of “territorialization”,’ a process which is continued in Anti-Oedipus, when ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘reterritorialization’ ‘figure prominently in tandem with the concepts of “decoding” and “recoding”’ (1997: 466). In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari discuss different ways in which the world has been configured, as primitive-territorial, barbarian-despotic, civilized-capitalist (1984; see Marks 1998: 95). What is significant about the capitalist machine is that it ‘seeks to multiply deterritorialised schizophrenic flows, never reaching a limit’ (Marks 1998: 96). For Marks, following Lyotard (1972), ‘Marx was the first to locate the fluidity and deterritorialisation which is axiomatic of capitalism,’ but it is Deleuze and Guattari who are able to reveal this (Marks 1998: 97). As Marx and Engels famously proclaimed, ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (1973a: 70).

But although the term deterritorialization is found in places of Anti-Oedipus, it is in the book on Kafka (1986, originally 1975) that it takes on a central role. Here Kafka’s writings in German are seen as disruptive because of his position outside of Germany itself, as a Czech Jew. Kafka himself, in a diary entry from Christmas Day 1911, discusses these issues: the springboard for the reflections of Deleuze and Guattari (see Kafka 1964: 148–153; Bogue 2002: 114–115). Other studies that Deleuze in particular undertook emphasized these disruptive tendencies in writers such as Marcel Proust, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville and Henry Miller (1993, Deleuze and Parnet 1987; see also Goodchild 1996: 55, Bryden 2002, Buchanan and Marks 2000). Some of Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche functions in a similar way. Indeed here, in a piece written a couple of years before the book on Kafka, he explicitly relates the two: ‘The only parallel I can find here is with Kafka, in what he does to German, working with the language of Prague Jewry: he constructs a battering ram out of German and turns it against itself’ (1985: 143; see Marks 1998: 58–59).

This is a distinct understanding of the concept of deterritorialization, based on the notion of a minor literature (1986: 16–17; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 97–98, 104–105). The notion of minor literature, which rather than coming from a minor language is that which “a minority constructs within a major language” (1986: 17), has been developed in recent work in the areas of sociology, literary and cultural studies (for example Appadurai 1996, Papastergiadis 2000). For Papastergiadis, for example, ‘the concept of deterritorialization has been a useful mode of understanding the fissures within language and cultural identity’ (118). As he notes,

the cultural dynamic of deterritorialization has decoupled previous links between space, stability and reproduction; it has situated the notion of community in multiple locations; it has split loyalties and fractured the practices that secure understanding and knowledge within the family and social unit.

(117)

It is essential to note that these are quite narrow understandings, interesting in their own right, but limited to specific issues. Bogue notes it is only really in ‘1837: Of the Refrain’ in A Thousand Plateaus that Deleuze and Guattari discuss ‘territory per se, engaging the subject via an analysis of music’s relation to animal ethology’ (2002: 125; see also 1997: 466). Bogue then leads us through a range of discussions of animal territoriality, touching on the work of Henry Eliot Howard, Bernard Altum, J. S. Huxley, Konrad Lorenz, Jacob von Uexküll, and Raymond Ruyer among others, spending most time on the last two, because of their importance to Deleuze and Guattari (Bogue 1997: 466–475). It is worth citing Bogue at length here:

In essence, what Ruyer is describing at such length are biological instances of de/reterritorialization, of the detachment or unfixing of elements and their reorganisation within new assemblages. Ruyer’s work, then, supports Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that a territory, in the biologic sense of the term, is created through the general process of deterritorialization, whereby milieu components are detached and given greater autonomy, and reterritorialization, through which those components acquire new functions within the newly created territory.

(1997: 475)

In this we can stress one key thing: the continual process of de- and reterritorialization. In other words, the reconfiguration of spatial relations rather than their end. This is often missed: deterritorialization is part of a process. We find this insisted upon in several places in A Thousand Plateaus. They are ‘always connected, caught up in one another,’ deterritorialization ‘always occurs in relation to a complementary reterritorialization’ (1988: 10, 54; see also 181, 508; 1994: 67–68). Indeed, they make this point more strongly when they stress the territoriality that is the condition for the change: ‘we must therefore take a number of factors into consideration: relative territorialities, their respective deterritorializations, and their correlative reterritorializations’ (1988: 303; see also 203). In this we see that deterritorialization, in spite of its name, does not mean the end of the importance of territory. Indeed, far from it, as territory is both its condition of possibility and, in some newly configured form, its necessary outcome.

In this light, it is worth turning our attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: The Stake of Territories
• 1. The State of Territory Under Globalization: Empire and the Politics of Reterritorialization
• 2. How the non-human turn challenges the social sciences: The case of environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France
• 3. Commercial drones and the territorialisation of the air: Towards an aero-volumetric understanding of power and territory
• 4. Inhabiting Together: Manure Contracts and Other Territorial Compositions Between Pastoralism and Agriculture in Western Burkina Faso
• 5. Territory Glimpsed Through Lache Eyes: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically Authentic Excursions in Liminal Space
• 6. Affirmatively reading deterritorialisation in urban space: An Aotearoa/New Zealand perspective
• 7. Rendering territory (in)visible: Approaching urban struggles through a socio-territorial lens
• 8. The Territorialisation of the Grocery Shopper: Eco-ethical asceticism and environmental nostalgia
• 9. The territories of music in public space: Scenes from Warsaw and Lisbon
• 10. Passage Territories: Reconstructing the Domestic Spatiality of an Indonesian Urban Kampung
• 11. Dodging rocks and baseball bats: Stories of territory, tourism and trespassing in Detroit neighborhoods
• Index