Deterritorialization

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have given the term deterritorialization the significant political-philosophical importance it has today. They used it to indicate the fracturing of and freeing from repressive fixations and despotic arrangements of a certain milieu, be it conceptual, social, affective or linguistic. The Nietzschean-based concept of freeing oneself, escape, or in their words, lines of flight, should not be understood, however, as a movement toward an a-territorial situation. The stress is on the movement itself, the process, hence the prefix de- and the use of the active form ing, as in deterritorializing. In this respect, the word deterritorialization does not form the opposite of the other word that is often used in combination with it: reterritorialization. In their view, the two words are in and of each other. Together, the words express the transformative and creative potential of making new connections, linkages, becomings, and assemblages.

Deleuze and Guattari used the term deterritorialization in many different contexts, as have the various people who followed them. In political theory, Deleuze and Guattari used the term deterritorialization to explain the workings of capitalism. Capitalism is then understood as a system that frees (deterritorializes) materiality and human interaction from a hierarchical overcoding, but then also despotically recodes, reterritorializes, into the generic axiomatic of capital.

In political theory, deterritorialization has become widely applied, especially in relationship to globalization, to describe the debordering of human spatial interaction processes, as a movement away from territorial or spatial containers and borders. In the early 1990s, some scholars even used the term to proclaim the end of the nation-state or geography and the emergence of a borderless or a-territorial world. The identification of deterritorialization with the rise of a border-free world is, [Page 377]however, very different from Deleuze and Guattari's earlier concept. As argued above, their concept of deterritorialization is not necessarily spatial and, what is more, it emphasizes rather the freeing of a certain fixation and order and nomadically moving toward different (territorial) reconfigurations and assemblages, new reterritorializations, provoking or inducing new deterritorializing desires. What the term as well as its applications and debates have made clear is that any organized milieu should not be assumed as given and fixed container, but subject to constant change and transformation, thereby opening it up for a debate as to what extent the order can and, more important, should be fixed. In short, deterritorialization poses a question rather than an answer.