For many years I’ve been fascinated with Deleuze and Guattari’s triad of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and territory. Truth be told, when I first encountered these concepts I was repulsed. I found the language to be trendy and understood “deterritorialization” to refer to some romantic notion of “escape” from a territory. While there are indeed elements of this in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, the concept, I believe, is much more profound. For me, the concept was really driven home when, somewhere in A Thousand Plateaus, I came across Deleuze and Guattari’s remark that “a club is a deterritorialized branch.” The territory of a branch, is, of course, a tree. The branch serves the function of extending leaves across an area so as to capture sunlight. Perhaps the best definition of deterritorialization is the decontextualization of something or a theft of a bit of code that then resituates that thing elsewhere. Here “code” is to be understood as formed matter that serves a particular function. When code is stolen it is separated and isolated from its original milieu or territory, liberated from its original function, and then resituated in a new territory. When the branch is separated from the tree it becomes something else, it takes on different functions, such that it has been deterritorialized from its original territory (the function of gathering sunlight in the process of photosynthesis) and reterritorialized elsewhere (the function of warfare or violence). Deterritorialization thus proceeds through subtraction. As Deleuze and Guattari remark in their famous rhizome essay, deterritorialization “…begins by selecting or isolating…” (13).
Thus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari will write that “[t]he crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any more than the chameleon reproduced the colors of its surroundings. The Pink Panther Imitates nothing, it reproduces nothing…” (11). What the crocodile and chameleon do is steal a bit of code– formed matter –the former stealing the texture of tree bark, the latter bits of color. Codes are always functional. The tree bark serves a particular function for the tree, the greenness of leaves serves a particular function for leaves or is a bi-product of functions like photosynthesis. In stealing a bit of code, quality is divorced from function and takes on a new function for these animals. There is not representation, resemblance, or imitation, but rather the formation of a new set of functions.
read on!
The concept of deterritorialization is already foreshadowed in The Logic of Sense. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze speaks of the mime in relation to the pure event and distinguishes the pure event from what happens. The event, as Deleuze understands it, is not what happens, but rather the sense that inheres in that which happens. The mime allows us to understand just what Deleuze might have in mind by the difference between the event and the happening. Everyone, of course, hates mimes, yet what is the mime if not the artist of the pure event? As the mime is buffeted by rain and wind, there is no wind, there is no umbrella, there is no rain. The mime deterritorializes the event from the happening, the action scheme, from its context or territory, turning into pure expression. The mime bears witness to the eternal possibility of deterritorialization or the possibility of stealing a bit of code from the context in which it exists. The mime does not imitate, but rather liberates a pure affect– capacity from acting and being acted upon –from its territory such that it might land in all sorts of new and different territories.
Here, I believe, we encounter the rationale behind Deleuze and Guattari’s endless insistence that “becoming-animal” animal is not an imitation of animals. If, in Anti-Oedipus, they are so troubled by Melanie Klein’s interpretation of Little Han’s “becoming-horse”, then this is because Klein perpetually tries to trace poor Han’s becoming-horse to the model of resemblance: first as a resemblance to horses and then as a resemblance to the paternal figure and the absence of castration. What Klein refuses to understand is Hans’s becoming-horse as a deterritorialization, and invention, that allows him to escape an intolerable situation and invent a new form of life for himself. Indeed, her interpretations actively interrupt and function to inhibit the formation of this new form of life.
In this connection, we encounter the root behind Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the unconscious as a theatre and the unconscious as a factory. In this context, the theatre is a milieu of representation that perpetually strives to trace the formations of the unconscious back to some model: the familial structure. Interpretations of the unconscious based on the model of theatre literally domesticate the formations of the unconscious, reterritorializing them on the family structure. One’s relationship to one’s boss becomes a relationship to one’s mother or father. By contrast, a factory is something that produces something other than itself. Deleuze and Guattari take Freud and Lacan seriously when they claim that the symptom is a solution to a problem. Their aim is to examine the manner in which the symptom, the formations of the unconscious, are inventive deterritorializations that strive to solve a particular deadlock of jouissance generating a new possibility of life and existence. Rather than inhibit the symptom by tracing it back to some sort of familial drama, they adopt a functional approach to the symptom, asking what sort of machine it is, what it is doing, how it functions and what new possibilities it offers for the agent. This is why they forbid the art of interpretation. “Do not interpret, do not seek a signified, do not ask what it means,” they say, “but rather ask what it does!”
And here too we might discern the nature of literature. Deleuze and Guattari heap endless scorn on the idea that literature and writing resemble the world or seek to model the world. Rather, for Deleuze and Guattari, literature is not simply about something, it is something. It is a machine that has, like the crocodile and the mime, deterritorialized certain elements of the world and that functions as a machine hooked into all sorts of other machines– physiological, affective, social, bureaucratic, etc. –functioning like a factory so as to produce certain effects. Like the mime literature releases pure events and separates them from their happening. It proceeds by selection and isolation. In proceeding in this way, like any good factory, it produces something new through subtraction and becomes an entity that itself acts in the world.
July 2, 2011 at 2:36 am
for homo rhetoricus one might think of sublimation in terms of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage
July 2, 2011 at 2:59 am
Nice except: Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo, you meant little Hans.
July 2, 2011 at 3:01 am
“The mocking bird copies
no one
everything it sings
it makes its own”
How would you relate this to Levi Strauss on ‘bricolage’ in the Savage Mind? Isn’t that deterriotorializaion par excelence?
July 2, 2011 at 3:35 am
Gregory, is it Little Hans? I thought so too, yet in the Rhizome essay they talk about Little Richard.
July 2, 2011 at 7:54 am
Interesting how deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and territory somehow call out to the NOMAD.
Any thoughts on Deleuze and Guatarri’s discussion of the nomadic in connection to territory?
July 2, 2011 at 10:29 am
[…] Deterritorialization (via Larval Subjects.) Posted on July 2, 2011 by Cengiz Erdem For many years I've been fascinated with Deleuze and Guattari's triad of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and territory. Truth be told, when I first encountered these concepts I was repulsed. I found the language to be trendy and understood "deterritorialization" to refer to some romantic notion of "escape" from a territory. While there are indeed elements of this in Deleuze and Guattari's thought, the concept, I believe, is much more … Read More […]
July 2, 2011 at 3:07 pm
I’m a fascinated by-stander & outsider when it comes to philosophy—but poetry is something I can at least pretend to know a little about… and deterriorialzation is—and has been from the earliest modernists—perhaps the single most consistent thread among the many ‘poetries’ since (excepting perhaps that stream Silliman labels the ‘school of quietude’… poetry that works to reassimilate itself into an imaginary mainstream) —from L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets to Flarf to ‘new confessionalists’ like Dottie Lasky to poets like CA Conrad—who’s made a wonderful kind of queer/surreal mutant form all his own (do check out his Book of Frank!).
You’ve gained an appreciative and probly pretty unruly following from at least a few poets I know… long live interdisciplinary miscegenation!
July 3, 2011 at 10:05 am
Nice gloss. Your analogy with moving blocks of code brings out affilations between Derrida’s iteration and D&G’s deterritorialization.
There are interesting parallels also with some of Dennett’s work on the evolution of meanings. Here’s Dennett saying, in effect, that the semantic indeterminacy of mental representation, which other philosophers see as a problem, is a condition of possibility for meaning as such:
Unless there were “meaningless” or “indeterminate” variation in the triggering conditions of the various frogs’ eyes, there could be no raw material (blind variation) for selection for a new purpose to act upon. The indeterminacy that Fodor (and others) see as a flaw in Darwinian accounts of the evolution of meaning is actually a precondition for any such evolution. The idea that there must be something determinate that the frog’s eye really means — some possibly unknowable proposition in froggish that expresses exactly what the frog’s eye is telling the frog’s brain — is just essentialism applied to meaning (or function). Meaning, like function, on which it so directly depends, is not something determinate at its birth. It arises not by saltation or special creation, but by a (typically gradual) shift of circumstances.
(Darwins Dangerous Idea, London Penguin 1995, p. 408)
July 4, 2011 at 1:15 am
The best example of deterritorialization I can think of is restaurants. In ancient times the dinner meal served the specific function of solidifying the family, giving praise to God, giving contemplation and reflection on daily events, and so on. In modern times not only can one eat a dinner without a family present, one can eat dinner at any hour of the day! Do I want to eat a Triple Whopper at 2100 at night or 0500 in the morning? It doesn’t matter, it’s dinner all the time and unlike those crude Byzantine ‘codes’ known as silverware, I can eat the damn thing with my hands. :)
July 8, 2011 at 1:50 pm
[…] do not represent, but rather create new ways of feeling, and experience. Not only is the art work a deterritorialization, but it also has the capacity to deterritorialize readers and viewers through a sort of […]