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
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Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality
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[Skip to the latest comment]Chris May
The choice of the word 'territorial' is interesting. Territory implies ownership – a territory is a piece of land over which you assert some degree of control. I'm not sure whether meaning is necessarily territorial, or whether it is simply contextual. (Maybe you mean something else though ?)
Is it necessary to feel that you belong in one particular place in order to contextualise a statement? I'm inclined to think not, it's sufficent to simply be in a place; I think this is particularly relevant when you're considering people who, through processes of relocation or migration, have no strong sense of belonging to anywhere. I might ponder this some more and post a longer follow-up.
20 May 2004, 09:32
Robert O'Toole
Thanks. I hadn't thought of territory and ownership. My idea of de/re-territorialization comes from A Thousand Plateaus by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. They have a much broader idea of territory, coming from anthropology and other areas. It includes ownership systems as one of several methods for mainaining the territorial delineation, but also mythological systems etc (which aren't entirely absent from Capitalist societies). However, it may also be that something is lost in the translation from French, and they actually used a different term.
Anyhow, I think what the ethics of deterritorialization is about is that it shouldn't be 'necessary to feel that you belong in one particular order to contextualise a statement'. One also shouldn't need to resort to imperialism. So the ethics is about finding ways to be nomadic whilst being able to operate in new situations safely and with care for others.
20 May 2004, 20:26
johneffay
The French term they use is 'territorialisation'. I don't think that 'territory' necessarily implies ownership (although it may do). Rather it points to a structuring or marking out. To put something in context is to mark it in relation to something else (that which contextualizes). Contextualization is always molar whereas some forms of deterritorialization are molecular.
Given their avowed anti-essentialism, I think that D&G would have problems with your claim that 'humans are essentially nomadic'...
21 May 2004, 19:24
Robert O'Toole
Thanks for the comment John.
OK, you got me there. The term "essential" should be avoided like the plague. That doesn't mean that D&G don't have a theory of genetic transmission. But it's far far too complex to go into here.
22 May 2004, 09:14
"As anyone who has really travelled will agree, meaning is entirely territorial, contexual. When you make an utterance, it's meaning is its effect."
True. Terms like "common sense" are often thought to refer to obvious, natural conditions or thoughts… but common sense, is just that, sense which is common. Since what is common changes across geography, culture and time, then common sense also changes. It all comes back to de Saussure and language. When you make an utterance, meaning is derived by others through social agreement. Language is not a nomenclature, a naming system of "things out there" it is merely a system of symbols which point to other symbols and never at the referent. Of course, if one never manages to become exposed to influences outside his or her "territory" or ideology, then one never understands that meaning is slippery and decentered. Roland Barthes is great for this…
24 May 2004, 16:27
m.s.
"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."
If our meaning is transformed each time we move to a different territory, then that explains how fickle minded we could get most of the time! Is it because the human mind is limited thought it flows in a linear fashion, and that the truth it constructs is based upon the milieu (one's immediate environment, one's thoughts, background, childhood, history etc…) it beholds or upholds?
There has to be some higher form of truth that transcends territories, philosophies, disciples, etc. : a truth that sets us free, one that never changes in this ever changing world. One should be able to find and have this truth even if he/she existed only in white space — no stuctures, no corners, no doors, no badlands.
Is the utterance I am making having the effect I intended or meant it to be?
I don't know.
24 Nov 2004, 16:54
Robert O'Toole
Is there a space that isn't a territory? Can a person be in a space without constituting a territory? Can a person be without a territory? Is that inconceivable and hence transcendental? Or just immanently inconcievable because we are already in a space asking this question, and being in a space, making that space as we operate in it, means that it is a permanently moving field. That's what is called immanence. There's no transcendent function, no god determining the movement, the space, its entirely self determined.
Try to think of yourself not as a loci, but as a movement or swarm, in grasping itself always already beyond itself. That might help a little.
24 Nov 2004, 17:19
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