Deterritorialisation

Definition

Deterritorialisation is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept for the process by which social and spatial formations are loosened from their fixed territories — codes, boundaries, and identities break down, freeing flows of desire, capital, and bodies. It "names the process whereby the very basis of one's identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded" (Buchanan & Lambert). Crucially, deterritorialisation is always in tension with reterritorialisation (the re-imposition of order on freed flows), and "must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality": anything can serve as a deterritorialisation by "standing for" the lost territory, acquiring a "home value." In A Thousand Plateaus, deterritorialisation operates within an assemblage of planes and lines of variation where there are "always two kinds of space" — smooth (nomad) and striated (sedentary).

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — originated the concept within the spatial vocabulary of A Thousand Plateaus.
• Ian Buchanan — applies the concept to architecture and urbanism in Deleuze and Space, reading the postmodern city as a field of deterritorialised flows.
• (Related: Gregg Lambert — co-editor of Deleuze and Space; Anthony Vidler — the Deleuzian spatial roster in Warped Space.)

Related Concepts

• Warped Space — Vidler's account of the Deleuzian spatial roster (smooth/striated, the fold, deterritorialisation) as architectural theory.
• Heterotopia — Deleuze's "other spaces" as sites of deterritorialised difference.
• Dwelling — the rooted, place-bound existence that deterritorialisation erodes; the postmodern city is "made of Teflon," repelling "old-fashioned attempts to put down roots."
• Flat Ontology — the Deleuzian/DeLanda premise of a world of intensive differences and assemblages rather than hierarchically stratified being.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Deleuze and Space
• Warped Space
• Architecture, Critique, Ideology — Deleuze as the thinker critique must absorb.
• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the design-practice counterpart: "Territory evolves from a fixed place to a nomadic system of occupation" — the interior as the vehicle of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, a kit "transferrable to any new space" delivered as "a designed timeline for use and change from location to location." The tapestry is Guattari's "home value" in furniture: any object can "stand for" the lost territory, and the Migrant Interior's glass-sphere field is commissioned as "a long-lasting investment in their notion of home because of its mobility." See liberated-interior, territory.
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the infrastructure register: the Auckland Railway Station at its conception as "a swirling manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded flows" (quoted in the chapter) — the grand station as the city's node where "trains, cars, radio signals, trams, and pedestrians, as well as money, goods, and information" converge, and "remote places begin to connect." The flow-vocabulary of deterritorialisation describing the transit building's intended function — and the concept's reversal when the flows stop: the station "stalled in its tracks a mile or two away from the center of the city," its flows re-routed, the deterritorialised node becoming "a forlorn building and a melancholic interior." See waiting-room, space-of-flows.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the home register of reterritorialization: the home neither originary nor fixed but re-expressed at each move — "So one might rid oneself of all one's possessions each time one moves, but might recreate a similar space, a similar home, with a similar feel (a sense of light, of leisure, of tension) in the next place, drawing around oneself an expressive space from a variety of markers and milieus. One makes oneself at home (and, indeed, is often asked to do just that)" (p. 393). Where Campos's register carries the reterritorialization as a designed kit, Wise's is an act of re-expression from lived markers — "home is a becoming within an always already territorialized space (the home, the house, the domestic)" (p. 395). Home and identity are "both the product of territorializing forces" (p. 391) — deterritorialisation's twin, now grounded in the dwelling. See home, milieu, territory.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's urban-political register at settlement and monument scale: territorialization as the assemblage's stabilization axis, "from the border patrol to Brecht's… chalk circle… from constructing a gated community to leaving your coat on a chair in the pub" (p. 17), with the three-step refrain of becoming at home (p. 17); "Any process which either destabilizes spatial boundaries or increases internal heterogeneity is considered deterritorialization" (DeLanda quoted, p. 18); the tenure paradox — "any attempt to formalize and legalize territories can lead to deterritorialization and reterritorialization as government land" (p. 95): instant formalization as "a form of coercive eviction with the unintended effect of stimulating new informal settlements elsewhere" (p. 83); Gondolyu as deterritorialization's creative face (visibility turned "from a problem into an asset"); Merdeka Square's fence as mass reterritorialization — the prohibited users displaced to the railway line while the square is purified (pp. 161–163). See informal-urbanism, place-identity, legitimation.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the urban-transition register: deterritorialization defined as "the weakening attachments to place, to territorially defined communities and cultures ranging from the household, the urban neighborhood, and the town or city, to the metropolis, the region, and… the modern nation-state" — "there probably has never been a period in which its effects have been so intense and far-reaching" (p. 151) — paired with reterritorialization, "creating new forms and combinations of social spatiality and territorial identity… producing human geographies that are significantly different and more complex" (p. 151); the pairing as one of the de-re word-families (deindustrialization–reindustrialization, decentralization–recentralization, deconstruction–reconstitution) that structure the postmetropolitan transition; the Dumm politics of "deterritorialization and reconnection" (pp. 321, 393); and Olalquiaga's psychasthenic camouflage into the milieu as the body-scale face of the same dissolution (pp. 150–151, 331). See glocalization, psychasthenia, postmetropolis.
• source-notes/taylor-2006-a-roam-of-ones-own

Open Questions

• Does deterritorialisation offer a critical resource against the spectacular city, or — as Douglas Spencer charges — is the Deleuzian vocabulary the very "architectural Deleuzism" that parametricism and the affective turn have absorbed into neoliberal governance?
• How does deterritorialisation relate to Kaika's "autistic architecture" and the footloose transnational elites who produce it — is their mobility a form of deterritorialisation, or its capitalist capture?