Territory and Metamorphoses

Definition

Territory and metamorphoses are the paired concepts through which Baudrillard reads the animals (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981/1994, "The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses"). Against the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist recuperation of the animal as metaphor, model, or figure of desire, he argues that animals are the image of "all possible metamorphoses" and that "their law is that of the territory." Territory here is explicitly not a subject's or group's relation to space, not "a sort of organic right to private property," nor "an environmental bubble" of needs. "The unconscious is a 'buried,' repressed, and indefinitely subdivided structure. The territory is open and circumscribed… The territory is the site of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges — without a subject, but without exception… there is no subject and everything is exchanged. The obligations are absolute therein — total reversibility — but no one knows death there, since all is metamorphosed." The thesis follows: "Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory." Against Deleuze's "becoming-animal," Baudrillard insists the animal is "the territorial being par excellence," so that the modern imagination of deterritorialized, wandering desire "directly translate[s] the progress or the ravages of this culture" — "the demand of 'liberty' is never anything but going further than the system, but in the same direction." The animals' specific challenge is their silence — "in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning" — and the essay tracks, via Foucault, how the mad, children, and "primitives" were successively given speech in order to be annexed to reason. The concept is Baudrillard's counter-ontology to the unconscious and to deterritorialization. See territory, symbolic-ecology, becoming, unconscious.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: territory without a subject, metamorphosis without death, the animal's silence as challenge (1981/1994).
• Gilles Deleuze — the theory contested: "becoming-animal" and deterritorialized desire, which Baudrillard calls the system's own imaginary.
• Michel Foucault — the genealogy Baudrillard borrows: the mad, children, "primitives" made to speak.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss — the totemism Baudrillard partially accepts ("animals served as a language") and partially resists (the "structural opposition is diabolic").
• Ágnes Heller / Michel de Certeau — the everyday/symbolic-exchange horizon.

Related Concepts

• Territory — the concept's keyword, defined here as open cycle rather than property.
• Symbolic Ecology — the order of cycle and exchange in which the territory consists.
• Becoming — Deleuze's register, criticized as "the system's own imaginary."
• Deterritorialisation — explicitly rejected as a projection of capital's logic.
• The Unconscious — the concept's structural opposite: born "since [men] lost a territory."
• Animal Architecture / Nonhumans — the wiki's adjacent animal registers.
• Otherness / Mutedness — the exclusion-and-silence cluster the animals share.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the defining source ("The Animals"): "Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory"; territory as "a completed cycle… without a subject"; "the cycle, itself, is symbolic"; the critique of "becoming-animal"; the animal's silence; the industrial-breeding somatization report.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the adjacent Deleuzian place-theory and its own reservations about smooth/deterritorialized space.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is Baudrillard's "territory" essentially the same as the wiki's territory (Dovey's territorialized assemblage), or is it the pre-modern symbolic cycle specifically? The two must be distinguished.
• The essay is markedly hostile to Deleuze; is the hostility substantive or a matter of the "becoming" of desire failing to escape capital's own imaginary? The wiki's becoming page takes Deleuze seriously — does Baudrillard's critique land?
• The animals' silence is treated as an ethical and theoretical challenge. Is this an animal-philosophy claim (human exceptionalism dissolved) or a metaphorical use of animals to describe the masses' silence (compare implosion-of-meaning)?