Territory

Definition

Territory, in Amy Campos's formulation, is the ordering relation between a located place and the life that occupies it — a relation that has flipped historically from hierarchical to reciprocal. The chapter that introduces the concept to the wiki ("Territory and inhabitation," 2018) "proposes a development from the nineteenth-century territorial idea of a politically and geographically located landscape to a more nuanced understanding of territory as a defined, but placeless, field of action. Territory evolves from a fixed place to a nomadic system of occupation." At the frontier pole, territory is ownership and self-affirmation: under "Manifest Destiny, a belief that American citizens had a fundamental right to own land and a duty to steward it," the claimed landscape was "a resource-rich, culturally blank slate," and "Territory, as a located place, became the hierarchically dominant component of a complex spatial and cultural system. In this case, the land itself provides the structure for inhabitation and the cultural context that might emerge from it." At the Çatalhöyük pole the hierarchy inverts: "The construction of habitations produced a fabricated territory upon which a public culture was defined" — the built interior (a roof-thoroughfare megastructure, entered through rooftop hatches, rebuilt in up to eighteen layers) "produces a public space that defines the territory of the city." At the placeless pole (the camouflaged Lockheed Burbank plant, the traveling tapestry, the transferrable interior kit), territory detaches from location altogether: "Territory as occupied space, and interior as defined inhabitation, have evolved into a singular field of designed action, equally and reciprocally defining each other."

The concept spans three territorial scales at which occupation stakes its claim: the landscape (the frontier claim), the building section ("The roofline acts as the territorial marker between interior and exterior – private and public – space"), and the object ("Territory is staked out at the scale of furniture rather than at the scale of landscape"). It is distinct from, though continuous with, the wiki's other spatial-ordering concepts: Ardener's partition of space treats territory as a rule-governed, gate-kept bounded category (the club, the theatre, the nation-state), and Foucault's enclosure as disciplinary containment — Campos's territory is occupation-based and increasingly unbounded, and the chapter's reciprocity thesis ("a reciprocal, rather than hierarchical, relationship between territory and the inhabited interior") is a direct challenge to both accounts' asymmetry. Its Deleuzian relative is deterritorialisation — territory freed from fixed place into a nomadic system — but Campos's version is a design program rather than a theory of flows: the interior is the vehicle by which occupation re-territorializes at will.

Key Thinkers

• Amy Campos — the concept's author: territory as "a defined, but placeless, field of action," evolving from frontier place through Çatalhöyük's inverted hierarchy to the nomadic occupation of the liberated and transient interior (2018).
• Shirley Ardener — the anthropological counterpart: territory as the bounded category with "a set of rules to determine how its boundary shall be crossed and who shall occupy that space" — the rule-system Campos's placeless occupation loosens. See partition-of-space, boundaries.
• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — the theoretical background: deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation and nomad (smooth) vs sedentary (striated) space — the vocabulary for "a nomadic system of occupation." See deterritorialisation, smooth-and-striated-space.
• J Macgregor Wise — the Deleuzian home-applier (2000/2006): territory as act rather than bounded place — "What creates the territory is an accretion of milieu effects… Compound these effects, but then make these effects expressive rather than functional. The resultant space is the territory"; "A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory"; D&G's "A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions)" (quoted p. 393); the home-territory as the paradigm case, differing from other territories by "the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space)" and "their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect" (p. 394). See milieu, home.
• Thomas Jefferson / John O'Sullivan — the historical ideologues of the frontier pole: the Louisiana Purchase's enculturation of place "dictated by the will and self-realization of the free individual," and "Manifest Destiny" (O'Sullivan, "Annexation," 1845) as the territorial belief-system. Not yet paged (see log).
• Colonel John F. Ohmer — the camouflage case's author: the WWII decoy landscape (Hollywood set designers deployed at the scale of an entire suburb) that proved "interiority exists independent of territory as a located condition." Not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Liberated Interior — territory's mobile pole: "an inhabited – if placeless – territory," carried by tapestry, decoy, and transferrable interior kit.
• Territorial Transience — territory's temporal evolution: "mobility and simultaneity as an evolution of territory," occupation as process rather than artifact.
• Boundaries — the territorial line itself: the roofline as "the territorial marker between interior and exterior – private and public – space"; the tapestry as the boundary that travels; the scrim as the boundary built to be misread.
• Partition of Space — the ordering-system account of bounded territory: Ardener's rules and gate-keepers against Campos's reciprocal field.
• Deterritorialisation — the Deleuzian process-name for territory's release from fixed place into nomadic occupation.
• Enclosure — the disciplinary containment of territory (Foucault); the Lockheed plant as enclosure hidden by its own decoy surface.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the territorial marker is drawn on the inside/outside division: Çatalhöyük's roofline, the frontier's land-primacy, the camouflage facade.
• Non-Places — the supermodern placelessness Campos revalues: where Augé's non-place is "inherently impersonal and impermanent," Campos's placeless interior is inhabited.
• Tabula Rasa — the frontier ideology's premise: "a resource-rich, culturally blank slate" — the clean slate as territorial claim; Çatalhöyük's eighteen rebuild-layers as its inverse.
• Flexible Interior — the furniture-scale territory: modular components "transferrable to any new space" as the partition executed at the scale of the object.
• Dwelling — the other half of the reciprocity: "interior as defined inhabitation"; the Migrant Interior's "notion of home" carried as a durable, nomadic condition.
• Milieu — territory's radiating substrate: "What creates the territory is an accretion of milieu effects" (Wise, p. 393); the territory "bites into" the milieus it borrows — the milieu radiates, the territory expresses. See home.
• Home — territory's paradigm case: "A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory" (Wise, p. 393); the home-territory differentiated by its temporalized living and its "process of identification, of articulation of affect" — "Homes, we feel, are ours" (p. 394).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the source: the frontier's hierarchical, located territory ("the land itself provides the structure for inhabitation"); Çatalhöyük's inversion ("the constructed interior produces a public space that defines the territory of the city"); the Lockheed camouflage ("a hidden, placeless island"); the tapestry ("Wherever their owners took them, tapestries marked territory"); Titlecase's furniture-scale staking; and the closing reciprocity thesis ("equally and reciprocally defining each other").
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the Deleuzian-act register, the concept's second major source: "What creates the territory is an accretion of milieu effects. Each milieu affects the space, bends it, inflects it, shapes it. Compound these effects, but then make these effects expressive rather than functional. The resultant space is the territory" (p. 393); "Territories are not milieus. 'A territory borrows from all the milieus; it bites into them, seizes them bodily (although it remains vulnerable to intrusions). It is built from aspects or portions of milieus'" (D&G quoted p. 393); "A territory is an act, territorialization, the expression of a territory" — the car "creates a territory when the space it moves through does not just react to it, but when the car and its music expresses something" (p. 393); and the home-territory's two differentiae — "the living of the territory (a temporalization of the space), and on the other their connection with identity, or rather a process of identification, of articulation of affect. Homes, we feel, are ours" (p. 394), with home's markers "not simply inanimate objects (a place with stuff), but the presence, habits, and effects of spouses, children, parents, and companions" (p. 394). Where Campos's territory is a designed, placeless field of occupation, Wise's is a lived, expressive accretion — both against located hierarchy, differing in their vehicle (the kit vs the marker-field). See milieu, home, deterritorialisation.
• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

Open Questions

• If the relation is now "reciprocal, rather than hierarchical," which term wins at which scale — the frontier made land dominant, Çatalhöyük made the interior dominant, and Titlecase stakes territory at furniture scale: is scale the variable that determines territorial dominance?
• Can a placeless territory still exert Ardener's bound-space influence ("it exerts its own influence") — or does influence require the fixed perimeter whose crossing the ground rules govern?
• The chapter marks territory by objects (tapestries), images (the decoy suburb seen only from above), and rules (rooftop entry) — is a territory that exists only at the scale of furniture a genuine territory, or a boundary misnomer for personal space?
• Is "an inhabited – if placeless – territory" a stable concept or a contradiction that names a transition — territory dissolving into pure occupation (territorial-transience) as place dissolves into the non-place?
• Çatalhöyük rebuilt in up to eighteen layers on its own demolition: is the chapter's deep-history case also an argument that durable territory is always layered, and that the nomadic interior (which moves instead of layering) loses the stratified territory the mound accumulated?