TERRITORY: A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 44

PART 4 DELEUZE AND MUSIC

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”

~ Jeff VanderMeer

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing center in the heart of chaos.

If territory is a concept, the question would be: what is the problem to which it answers? Territory: An area of of phase space under the jurisdiction of a certain temporality. A concept is a way to organize a set of patterns that would otherwise remain chaotic. Concepts are not given as part of the universe, nor are they sitting waiting to be discovered in some Platonic world of Ideas. Rather, they are invented and maybe later ossify into “common sense”

Territorial refers to the issue of individuality as an entity, identity, be it a person or a location or something else. If the territory you are familiar with is crossed by other people, the space would be crossed by different maps. There is not one map that stands out and defines space. Or is there? All kinds of things change about us: a hair turns gray, wrinkles grow, and world views change. I still see it as my body but what will secure my individuality?

to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse, components have a part in this. The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible, and the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfill or a deed to do. A wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it. Radios and television sets are like sound walls around every household and mark territories (the neighbor complains when it gets too loud)

The territory is a multiplicity of partial objects that must be brought together or combined in order to create something that will never be completely stable in itself. Territory is a part of phase space and is not granted, but created, and the organization the phase space is also created.

Even if we don’t make a distinction between nature and culture and let’s say there is a distinction between how a dog is territorializing and how a person is doing it. Nonetheless, in both situations it will be a sequence in of markings, or signs, postures, gestures etc

Finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth. One opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself. As though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters. This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.

It is only through the expansion of territory that an identity takes form. Without it, one would be in a static milieu, crystallised. The point is that the territory itself is structured by some kind of repetition of forms of behavior and their function.

The examples of the child and the housewife clearly suggest the family home as territory or safe heaven from which one launches forth to join with the world but refrains constitute territories of many different kinds, both physical and cultural: one’s house, music band, one’s office religious denomination or sports team to the role played by the signature of the artist, which is equivalent to putting a flag on a piece of land. Deleuze and Guattari explore and use deterritorialization in several different theoretical ways including: sculpture, music, literature, philosophy and politics.

The territory must have an outside, and there must be a way out of it. Multi-territoriality is based on deterritorialization. It disrupts existing modes of meaning, wiping out crystallised individuals, de-substantializing jobs and rewriting history. This creates an illusion of autonomy where the laws become flexible, but this redistribution of power also puts us all the more under the influence of other territorialities rather than only liberating us.

The definition of’ territory’ evades simple categorization because it continuously transforms into something else but at the same time maintains an internal organization, though with a center that can be located as a specific point in time and space. It does not privilege or preserve any particular homeland’s nostalgic or xenophobic protection; rather, this core vector’ communicates an experiential definition that has no defined subject or object. It is not, and does not mean, anything symbolic or representational.

The refrain TUNE WHISTLING/HUMMING

The Ritournelle has been translated in fact in English by refrain but, within the extent of my English knowledge, it seems to me that this translation does not fully unfold the same meaning. In the Abécédaire, Deleuze, as we will see below, use an onomatopoeia in order to explain this word: “Tra la la” as a kid would hum.

When do I do Tralala ? When do I hum? I hum in three various occasions. I hum when I go around my territory…and that I clean up my furniture with a radiophonic background…meaning when I am at home. I also hum when I am not at home and that I am trying to reach back my home…when the night is falling, anxiety time…I look for my way and I give myself some courage by singing tralala. I go toward home. And, I hum when I say “Farewell, I am leaving and in my heart I will bring…”. That’s popular music “Farewell, I am leaving and in my heart I will bring…”. That’s when I leave my place to go somewhere else.
In other words, the ritournelle (refrain), for me, is absolutely linked to the problem of territory, and of processes of entrance or exit of the territory, meaning to the problem of deterritorialization. I enter in my territory, I try, or I deterritorialize myself, meaning I leave my territory.

The Ritournelle is therefore a form of incantation for a claimed spatiality, but it is also a sort of song that, despite is supposed lightness is calling for the power of the cosmos.

MUSIC

Some birds use distinctive songs and ritualized behaviors to establish territories in which to live and breed. As Eugene Holland points out they are the first artists and musicians, for they transform certain components of the milieux in which they live into expressive features of their home territories

A certain species of bird will sing a song to claim a territory, another species will pluck leaves from the trees around and place them face down in a circle on earth to demarcate its territory. In fact such songs are cultural as much as they are natural. ; for even within a given species the territory song of one group can differ slightly from other groups even if both groups are sparrows.

There are many examples of human refrains or musical genres, the ancient greek modes, Hindu Decitalas and Indian ragas. The evolution of life for Deleuze and Guattari is not about the survival of the fittest through cutthroat competition in conditions of ecological scarcity, but about self differentiating life overflowing with experimental self-organizing life forms, forms that survive and thrive just as they sufficiently fit for the environment they occupy.

Art does not wait for human beings to begin

They suggest that human voices and the refrain (ritournelle) are what is deterritorialized in music. A good example would be the composer Olivier Messiaen, who used birdsong in his works from about 1955 onwards. He did not merely mimic the birds ‘ songs in these works; rather, he linked birdsong to the piano in a way that transformed the domain of the musical instrument (piano) and the birdsong itself.

An example of this proximity is Olivier Messiaen who transcribed the songs of different bird species before incorporating them into his musical compositions. The territorial codings between and across certain bird species and their environments (transcodings) are carried over into the music in the use of birdsong, such that there can no longer be a binary or hierarchical distinction drawn between the productions of ‘culture’ and those of ‘nature’.

Here the distinctive tone, timbre, and tempo of birdsongs were fundamentally altered as these elements were related to musical organization. Similarly, the compositional style of Messiaen also changed when it entered into a birdsong relationship, allowing these compositions to be described as becoming birds.

But is it just territorial, as the bird sings its song? Deleuze and Guattari use the biological understanding of’ territoriality’ as discussed in bird studies; however, they are pushing this work in another direction.

These studies of bird activity understood territoriality as a biological drive pitched towards the preservation of species. Bernard Altum, Henry Eliot Howard and Konrad Lorenz all suggested male birds aggressively defend a particular territory as a way of socially organising themselves.

Deleuze and Guattari consider music as one of the most creative parts of nature. In this context, how does music figure as a metaphorical territory, subject to the processes of capitalist deterritorialization and reterritorialization? In response to these pressures, musicians have tried to open a space releasing “lines of flight” from the interdisciplinary territories in the hope of connections and new productions rather than repetitions of the closed circles of capitalist conjugations.

Music becomes nature and nature becomes music and their resulting indiscernibility is the product of a philosophical labour: to select terms best suited to the task of thinking and describing process.

For Deleuze, contracting habits, perceptual as well as behavioral was a way of creating order out of chaos, a way of introducing stability through repetition so as to be able to make one’s way in the world. Habits (based on passive synthesis) are constitutive of the subject, not expressions of it. One contracts the habits of saying I, and it is habits that define subjectivity rather than the other way around. Also habits become stale so a truly human existence involves overcoming habit, moving from mechanical repetition to creative repetition.

So let us turn back to the sense of refrain as an habit and start again in order to repeat with difference — repeating with a difference being one of the definin g features of improvisational jazz

One ventures from home on the thread of a tune…One launches forth, hazards an improvisation, to join with the world

Repetition is either conservative or is it creative. Repetition is in one case a reaparative reaction to trauma, a compulsive repetition of the same while the other repetition is a creative response to some of life’s little complexities, tha chance to hazard an improvisation, what Deleuze would call creative repetition or repetition with a difference

BIOLOGY AND THE UMWELT

Alternatively, Deleuze and Guattari approach territoriality from the perspective of biology, arguing that the functions are essentially controlled by territoriality. They use the understanding of territory advanced by the ethologist Jakob von Uexküll. Von Uexküll proposed that there is no meaning outside of a milieu (Umwelt). For him a ‘territory’ refers to a specific milieu that cannot be separated from the living thing occupying and creating the milieu, so that the meaning of a milieu for Von Uexküll is affective.

PSYCHOANALISIS

The word ‘ territorialization’ was inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Lacan,’ territorialization’ refers to the way an infant’s body is structured around and defined by erogenous zones and their relations with part-objects. As the infant undergoes a process of territorialisation its orifices and organs are conjugated. In the psychoanalytic sense, to deterritorialise is to free desire from libidinal investment.

This reconfiguration of Lacanian ‘territorialisation’ is that the subject is exposed to new organisations; the principal insight being: deterritorialisation shatters the subject.

POLITICS

Leaning on Karl Marx, they argue that the moment it is liberated from the means of production, labor power becomes deterritorialised. That same labor power can be defined as reterritorializing when linked to other means of production.

A pattern of deterritorializing flows existed during the early stages of industrialization as capitalism was actually gaining momentum: economies were expanding, social activity was experiencing radical change, and people were moving from rural to urban environments. Rural labor force (peasant and landowner) was deterritorialized in one way but reterritorialized in another (factory worker and commercial capitalist).

Eugene Holland states that when the English Enclosure Acts (1709–1869) enclosed common land for sheep-grazing purposes, the peasants were subsequently expelled (or ‘ liberated ‘) from one means of production only to reterritorialize their labor power onto other means of production, such as factory workers in the textile industry.

We could say that since the explosive deterritorialization of May 1968, a social democratic economic consensus has been deterritorialize and reterritorialized by neo-liberal regulation of the market. Desire and the social unconscious are now subject to the deterritorialization processes of increased micro management and regulation whether in schools, welfare policy and the work place and now, for counseling, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, state regulation.

LINES OF FLIGHT

‘home territory’ together and sensed as a ‘whole’.

Deterritorialization can be followed by Reterritorialization, the formation of new combinations of the elements that made up the original territory. The directions in which these movements tend are called ‘lines of flight’ leading to ‘productions of desire’ that enable transformations in society.

A’ flight line’ is a mutation path precipitated by the actualization of relations between bodies that were previously only latent (or’ virtual’) that releases new forces in those bodies ‘ ability to act and react.

Deleuze and Guattari create a language that emphasizes how things interact rather than how they ‘ are ‘ and think about patterns that might turn into imaginative transformations rather than a ‘ fact ‘ that is a reversal of the past.

They would rather consider things not as objects, but as groups or multiplicities, concentrating on events rather than static essences and their capacities to influence and be influenced.

Every assemblage is territorial in that it sustains connections that define it, but every assemblage is also composed of lines of deterritorialisation that run through it and carry it away from its current form

Flight lines may lead to interactions that lead to new ways of thinking and feeling or conjugations. At the same time, other lines will make a connection but close in on themselves, closing possibilities. Music’s purpose is to facilitate a’ phase’ in which flight lines can be released within these numerous interdisciplinary territories to communicate with each other.

Deterritorialisation can best be understood as a movement producing change. In so far as it operates as a line of flight, deterritorialisation indicates the creative potential of an assemblage. So, to deterritorialise is to free up the fixed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new organisations.

It is important to remember that both Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with overcoming the dual structure of Western philosophy (Being/nonbeing, original/copy and so on). In this respect, reterritorialization must not be viewed in a negative way; it is not the polar opposite of territorialization or reterritorialization (when a territory is re-established).

Guattari offers capitalism as an example of a’ permanent form of reterritorialization’: There are a variety of ways in which to describe this process of deterritorialisation. The capitalist class attempts to control and submit to the reproduction of capital all of the mechanisms of deterritorialization in the order of production and social relations. In Anti- Oedipus they speak of deterritorialisation as ‘a coming undone’ . In A Thousand Plateaus deterritorialisation constitutes the cutting edge of an assemblage.

In their book on the novelist Franz Kafka, they describe a Kafkaesque literary deterritorialisation that mutates content, forcing expressions to ‘disarticulate’ while in their final collaboration — What is Philosophy? — Deleuze and Guattari posit that deterritorialisation can be physical, mental or spiritual.

Philosophy is an example of absolute deterritorialization, and capital is a relative deterritorialization example. Put succinctly, absolute deterritorialising movements are virtual, moving through relative deterritorialising movements that are actual.

ASSAMBLAGE

Assemblage (from French: agencement, “a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled”) is an ontological framework that provides a bottom-up underlying structure for analyzing social complexity by emphasizing fluidity, exchangeability, and multiple functionalities through entities and their connectivity. Assemblage theory asserts that, within a body, the relationships of component parts are not stable and fixed; rather, they can be displaced and replaced within and among other bodies.

On the one hand an assemblage (for example, an assemblage of the book, A Thousand Plateaus, and a reader) is a ‘machinic assemblage’ of actions, passions and bodies reacting to one another (paper, print, binding, words, feelings and the turning of pages).

On the other, it is a ‘ collective assemblage of enunciation, ‘ (the meaning of the words of the book emerges in terms of the implicit assumptions that occur in the social field about variables in language use.

Both elements of the book-reader assembly produce different results in their interaction with other assemblages

assembly of book and hand tearing out pages to feed a fire or assembly of a reader inserted into esthetic assemblages inspired by the notion of ‘ becoming imperceptible ‘ to create an art work

Deleuze and Guattari deliberately designed A Thousand Plateaus to foster lines of flight in thinking — thought- movements that would creatively evolve in connection with the lines of flight of other thought-movements, producing new ways of thinking rather than territorialising into the recognizable grooves of what ‘passes’ for philosophical thought.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, representations follow already defined patterns; maps seek links or flight lines that are not readily perceptible to the prevailing majority. As such, Deleuze and Guattari wrote their book as such a map, hoping to elicit further maps, rather than interpretations, from their readers.

While Deleuze and Guattari clearly value flight lines that can connect with other lines in creatively productive ways leading to social transformations, they also warns us of their dangers. A flight line can become inefficient, result in regressive transformations, and even become highly rigid. And even if it succeeds in crossing the wall and getting out of the black hole, it may pose the danger of becoming just a line of destruction.

NOMADICISM

In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant lamented that

whereas dogmatists had maintained a certain despotism of reason — giving reason fixed but unjustifiable rules — a certain barbarism had allowed for ‘a kind of nomads who abhor all permanent cultivation of the soil’

(K 1998: 99).

Deleuze is anything but a Kantian philosopher, because the intention of Kant to restrict the concepts of reason to a valid and harmonious is here used by Deleuze’s goal allowing values to be driven to their fullest expression.

Kant’s rejection of nomadicism, which would be precipitated by a lack of rule that is set and defines space in advance — is warded off by an appeal to the proper domain of any concept; when reason, for example, tries to think beyond its own realm (trying to learn the unknown) it should be contained within its theory.

Reason has a proper domain, just as the power of emotion has a proper domain (art). They should not be converted into morality. Deleuze, expands on this and rejects the idea that some notion of common sense and sound distribution should regulate a theory, or our power or ability to think. Nomadicism allows the maximum extent of principles and powers; if something can be thought, then no law outside of thought, no containment of thought within the human mind should limit the power of thinking.

“Such texts are traversed by a movement that comes from without, that does not begin on the page (nor the preceding pages), that is not bounded by the frame of the book; it is entirely different from the imaginary movement of representation or the abstract movement of concepts that habitually take place among words and within the mind of the reader.” -

Deleuze speaks of conventional philosophy (and, by extension, traditional writing) as something that tries to encrypt the world and operates within those encriptions: it works within a system of law that interprets the world by rules and wants to reform those rules (in its more progressive states). Laws, contracts and institutions are the primary instruments of the encryption.

If, as Deleuze insists, we can’t have a hierarchy of beings — such as the dominance of mind over matter, or actuality over possibility, or the present over the future — this is because being is univocal, which doesn’t mean that it’s always the same, but that each of its differences its part of the same.

A philosophy would be a great philosophy, not if it could be placed within a specific and limited territory of reason (such as a correct and consistent logic) but if it maximized what philosophy could do and created a territory: creating concepts and styles of thought that opened up new differences and paths of thinking.

The artwork would be perfect not if it met current standards for what counts as beautiful, but if it took the power to build beauty, the power to inspire us to bathe in the vulnerable-and created new and different ways of affecting.

So we can understand nomadic space, not as a space with intrinsic properties that then decide relationships (in the way chess pieces determine how movements can be enacted), but as a space with extrinsic properties; space is generated from movements that give that space its peculiar quality (just as in the Go game, the pieces are not coded as kings or queens but enter into relationships).

Nietzsche’s writing breaks down the frame, the division between text and the world, through its own style and through drawing attention to the ways in which these frames have been drawn around text (or ideas, or styles) in history.

Through multivalent meanings and juxtaposition, Nietzsche asks for the reader to “find the force that gives a new sense to what I say, and hang the text upon it.

There is a nomadism in these shifting intensities that are “a continuous flux and the disruption of flux.”

Deleuze exemplifies this with the use of names in Nietzsche’s texts,

proper names that are “neither signifiers nor signified.” “The signifier,” writes Deleuze, “is really the last philosophical metamorphosis of the despot.”

The signifier holds no sovereignty over interpretation in this account, for intensity of experience is more important than meaning. The signifier is not the determinant of what is signified, for the significations of the text change with the placement of the text in context.

In this sense, nomadic space is smooth-not because it is undifferentiated, but because its differences are not those of a chessboard (cut in advance, with defined movements); the differences establish positions and lines by movement.

A tribe dreams about, crosses and dances a space and thus fills the territory from within; the real territory— the material extension held by this tribe which could then be measured and quantified — would be different from (and dependent on) the abstract, nomadic territory, for if the tribe went on, danced and dreamed elsewhere, the original territory would have been already there.

And if the first territory was crossed by other people, the space would be crossed by different maps. There is not one map that stands out and defines space. Or is there?