Space After Deleuze by Arun Saldanha;

Author:Arun Saldanha; [Saldanha, Arun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441179838
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

Refrains

Striation is not simply the construction of places in the geographical sense but the physical and ideological framework by which place construction becomes possible. It is specific not to the human species but to stratified society. Territorialization, meanwhile, is a more general term and refers to any activities whereby an animal makes boundaries. We can call “place” the specifically human kind of territoriality, but there are important qualifications. First, human territoriality repeats some animal territoriality through its phylogenetic line. Second, territories preexist the species that inhabit them yet are not simply programmed within its genome. Territories derive from the interplay of bodies with their environments, flows of matter and energy, deeper bio- and geophysical phyla, even the cosmos itself (think of how albatrosses are drawn into an interhemispheric territoriality). Third, and perhaps most original in Deleuze and Guattari’s rethinking of territory, boundaries are themselves assemblages. Territorialization requires a dynamic coming-together of heterogeneous components set loose from elsewhere. Something is deterritorialized only to be reterritorialized within a new configuration. Following the theorization of difference and individuation in Difference and Repetition most Deleuzians avoid calling this dynamism a “dialectic” between movement and stasis, or wave and particle, or becoming and being, because there is no higher identity that would hold the two “sides” or “poles” in mutually negating opposition. The consistency of a territory – a major concept in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? – is not a higher identity but a specific “way of holding together” in which all components play an active and complementary role, a local mannerism of reality, a symphony. What makes an assemblage like a territory hold together are its lines of flight, not its essence or structure (ATP 327–28). Deleuze and Guattari largely favor deterritorialization because it is the more basic and repressed principle. But a refrain in this book has been that it would be wrong to see deterritorialization as a straightforward ethical or epistemological objective because its creative momentum intrinsically lends itself to the return of essence and transcendence.

The refrains plateau develops this dynamic sense of territory and suggests that the place-making fundamental to human life is a local expression of a deeper and older process shared with mammals, birds, and insects. The plateau’s main target is not only phenomenology and existentialism, which define human place as fundamentally different from animal and plant territorialities, but the hegemonic obsessions with fitness and adaptation that usually inform the territory concept. While for biologists like Karl Lorenz birdsong is explained by its function to erect boundaries and advertise masculinity, for Deleuze and Guattari it is first and foremost an aesthetic process produced as part – the most deterritorialized part – of an assemblage or desiring-machine (ATP 315). Birdsong is not like music, it is music. For neo-Darwinian dogma, in a thinly veiled extrapolation from the real-world striations of markets and sovereignty, the territorialities of sex and habitat in animals are predictable phenotypical extensions of a species’ DNA. Instead, for Deleuze and Guattari, a territory only emerges contingently from the gestures and signs (urine, song, dance) in and around it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.