All entries for Thursday 20 May 2004

Deterritorialization, nomadic ethics

Follow-up to Ted Simon and the art of deterritorialization from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

It's about deterritorialization, transmission and chaos.

As anyone who has really travelled will agree, meaning is entirely territorial, contexual. When you make an utterance, it's meaning is its effect. If you think that your utterance has a meaning that is disconnected from the world in which you are embedded, that is simply because you have constituted a territory of your own that maintains some superficial degree of seperation. On moving to a different territory, your meaning is transformed. Religions understand this process, and deal with it by providing the individual with highly portable means of rapidly re-establishing the territory anywhere (the cross, the Koran, the ritual). They employ territorial codes. That's why religion, which claims to be of spiritual origin, uses such physical means for its maintanance.

This is nothing new, humans are essentially nomadic and have evolved techniques for managing deterritorialization and reterritorialization. These techniques are the ethics of deterritorialization, the issue that has really been at the core of philosophy, and where there is no time for philosophy, of politics. For when the deterritorialization becomes intense, the ethics is sidelined for a technics of transmission, of reterritorializing immediately anywhere anytime: imperialism.

But imperialist channeling of our inherent nomadism always faces the same difficulty. It releases floods of deterritorialization, allowing millions of individuals to participate in an increasingly global movement. It's not just the conquerers that are deterritorialized, as at the same time the conquered participate in the transmission and decoding of the code. The bigger the scale of movement, the more individuals are involved, the more mutation there will be of the code. The more mutation that occurs, the more desperate the individuals are to transmit and use it before it is lost. As this activity becomes frenetic and tranmission increases, the more prone it is to fluctuations that take hold and send it off to new and unexpected directions. That's the engine of history.

Back in 73 when Ted Simon arrived in North Africa he quickly discovered the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. This was a collision of trapped third world forces trying to connect with global flows and a westerner trying to understand the powewrful effect he has on the world as he travelled. Through the journey he again and again reflects upon territory, travel and meaning.

Robert O'Toole : 20 May 2004 09:17 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Ted Simon and the art of deterritorialization

Writing about web page http://www.jupitalia.com

I recieved an email from Ted Simon this morning containing a long essay summarizing his findings on the economic, political and social developments that he observed during and subsequent to his recent RTW bike trip. Ted is a great travel writer, author of the biggest selling 'man on a bike sees world' book Jupiter's Travels, definitely the best of its genre, and a trully great consideration of the state of the world in 1973.

At the moment, Ted is trying to bring together the findings from his most recent trip (completed last year, at the age of 72 – sorry Ted, had to mention that). The essay that he posted is in many ways alarming. It concerns the effects that the growing poverty gap, urbanization, communications and political extremism (on all sides) have had since the Seventies. His message is that things have actually got much worse and much more dangerous, which considering that younger people like me look back at the days of Vietnam and the Cold War as being the danger we survived, is deeply worrying. In many ways Jupiter's Travels itself contains some answers to these issues.

It is the accumulative effect of every individuals in their own personal states of loss and confusion that takes us to this great danger. Both the poor disenfranchised and the wealthy powerful contribute in their own unpredictable way. These people are deterritorialized. As the numbers of poor people now connected to this deterritorialization increases, the potential for crisis emerging out of their interactions is escalated. Meanwhile the wealthy (of America) become increasingly able to make near random whim driven choices that have huge effects for the rest of the world. Here he expresses the way in which the wanderer, the refugee is forced to stand back from their own fate:

I looked at myself in the same light, as a monkey given my life to play with, prodding it, trying to stretch it into different shapes, dropping it and pcking it up again, suspecting always that it must have some use and meaning, tantalized and frustrated by it but always unable to make any sense of it.

In Jupiter's Travels, Ted explored how becoming deterritorialized requires an appropriate ethics of exploration. He learnt this the hard way by seeing the effects he could have as a stranger on a bike arriving in an isolated location. Near the start of the journey, in Tunis this caused trouble. And this trouble follows Ted along. But he learns how to be a stranger, an outsider, and at the same time how to fit in. Always when riding a motorcycle one must adapt to the road.

Crossing Africa, with its deserts and borders, was a miracle of good fortune. South America required perserverance in the face of military police. And India only possible through this mastery of this deterritorialization:

I was astonished by my confidence with strangers. Often I was able to talk to them immediately as though we had always known each other. For a long time I had been training myself to want nothing from others; to accept what was offered but to avoid expectation. I was far from perfect, but even the beginnings I had made were richly rewarding. I could feel that people appreciated my presence and even drew some strength from it, and in turn the feeling strengthened me. There were the beginnings of the growth of power and I was determined to persue it.

Robert O'Toole : 20 May 2004 06:53 |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem