Random header image... Refresh for more!

A Boy, His Dog, and Gilles Deleuze

by Scott H. Payne

The other night I was taking my dog for a walk and we happened upon a moderately sized, sunken field that was very well lit. As it has started to get dark at 5:30pm around here and that, often times, I don’t get home and ready to take him out for a walk until 6:45-7:00pm, this field was a pretty solid find for myself and Oliver (pictured above). The field afforded us the opportunity to let him off leash for a bit and allowed me the chance to throw the ball that I had brought on our walk for him without worrying about losing it in the dark.

The only downside was that despite the fact that before letting him off-leash I thoroughly checked the area for signs indicating what I was and was not allowed to do in the area and found nothing, I still spent the entire time looking over my shoulder. I was convinced that at some point some belligerent individual was going to come out of their lavish home (we were in a pretty well-to-do part of town) and tell me just how irresponsible I was for having the audacity to let my dog off of his leash in this park/field to play fetch with him.

I know, after stopping to think about it, that proposition seemed as ridiculous to me as it looks having been typed out. I mean, I was literally just walking my dog, with no intentions of causing any trouble for anyone. And yet I felt suspect, like I had good cause to be looking over my shoulder. What, for God’s sake, is more natural than a boy playing fetch with his dog in a field?

Which got me reflecting on all of the Deleuze with which I’ve been acquainting myself over the past little while for another project. Gilles Deleuze was a pretty well known French postmodernist who, along with Félix Guattari, coined the term deterritorialization in their 1972 work Anti-Oedipus. You can follow the link provided to see the various contexts in which the concept has been used, but in the Deleuzean-Guattarian spirit, I’m going to take the ball and run with it.

What occurred to me is how heavily territorialized our spaces have become. There is this notion not only that particular people live in particular neighbourhoods, cities, and areas (having kids? out to the suburbs with you! want an “authentic” experience? best leave that city-life behind and head for small-town America. so-on-and-so-forth), but also that particular spaces within our communities are only ever used for particular things.

Not that there isn’t a certain sense and usefulness in designating certain places, of course, but it strikes me that this kind of territorialization runs much deeper into our very conceptions of life lived and interaction between each other. Borrowing from Deleuze’s philisophy itself, it seems like we utilize this sense of the importance of territorialization and categorization in such a way as to impose a degree of sense and order on a world that, experience indicates, is in constant flux against such rigidity. And yet our need to know and need to feel certain about the world and our place in it, our need to stave off the unknown with the meager light of our philosophical/political/cultural lanterns morphs into an emphasis on the process of territorialization itself, rather than the sensible outcomes that flow from such an exercise.

In short, territorialization becomes its own Frankenstein and dictates the parameters of our lives, rather than vice versa.

What this results in, at least insofar as my experience provides, is a forced mode of being that closes off the potential vitality of those spaces we enact our very expression of existence and purposefulness. There is a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy that a systematically territorialized mode of perception enforces not just in the way that we build and operate in the our spaces of communal interaction and expression, but also in the very means by which we conceptualize those spaces. Which is where I intellectually and philosophically cross paths with a full-bodied libertarianism, insofar as a territorialization of space can be considered, and I think often is, consummate with a governmentalization of space as a means of enforcing unnecessary and, indeed, intellectually and experientially oppressive systems of order.

I’m not given to wholesale endorsements of postmodernism, but my own feeling is that thorough going Deluezean deterritorialization of our spaces is in order here. At least insofar as we seek to reassert a sense of novelty and creativity in the ways in which we conceive and enact our life intentions against unreasonable controls in this regard. It might be a bit self-serving, but just such a political statement is at the heart of my family’s unwillingness to leave the downtown core of our city in order to fashion a sustainable life for ourselves.

And, of course, Oliver and I play fetch in that park every chance we get.

Addendum: sorry, I got a bit lost in the philosophical weeds there. The point that I really wanted to make with this post and that I feel like it didn’t really circle back around to is that insofar as our territorializing tendencies in conceiving of and organizing communities creates a forced mode of being, it becomes all the more difficult for us to interact and engage one another in an authentic fashion and thereby undermining the very thing that makes our communities so important and vital.

Share and Enjoy

Related posts...

Tags | communities, deterritorialization, epistemology, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, postmodernism, Space

7 comments

1 Mike at The Big Stick { 11.10.09 at 2:41 pm }: I don’t know why I think this is relevant but I recall reading Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and he talked about how he realized that the reason he got ‘freaked out’ when he smoked pot in his younger years was because it was illegal and the drug amplified his fear of being caught. When he later smoked again in Amsterdam it was a completely different experience since he knew he was not going to get arrested.

Fear definitely has a psychological effect on enjoyment of certain activities, be they a illicit game of fetch with Spot or smoking a doober in the safety of your own home.
2 North { 11.10.09 at 7:07 pm }: Good thoughts, it’s also worth considering how at least a portion of the blame for our urban sprawl can be blamed on such territorialization in the form of NIMBYism wielded through excessive zoning restrictions.
3 zic { 11.11.09 at 7:01 am }: I live in Maine, where there’s a unique tradition of open lands as another model. Several years ago, I wrote a piece for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston about this. A private non-profit wanted to build a hiking trail connecting back-wood huts through a state preserve in northern Maine. Pertinent point:

Maine’s private land owners have maintained a rarely formalized and highly unusual tradition of open lands. In exchange, they expected stable public policy for forestry management. It was an unwritten covenant between Maine’s industrial landowners and the public, a tradition of nearly 200 years.

What this means on the ground is that you can go anywhere, as long as it’s not posted “No Trespassing.” And you do it at your own risk; go rock climb on that cliff out yonder, fall off, and you cannot go and sue the landowner.

So the land is open; go ahead and romp with your dog or kayak or backpack. Just make sure you clean up after yourself, and do no damage. (And no, I don’t expect such a policy to work in a crowded urban environment; though the same policies apply to southern Maine, which is more surburban/urban; but the tradition was already in place.)

But as the story suggests, there is a strong vein of territory grasping, with traditional users of a spot not happy with new uses. I think it’s a human trend that dates back to our need to protect hunting/foraging grounds from interlopers. Survival of the fittest goest hand in hand with finding and claiming the best resources.

Mike at The Big Stick
November 11th, 2009 at 7:21 am
Zic,

About 6 years ago I was in Wiscasset, Maine enjoying a crab roll on the pier and this nice little old lady started talking to me. We made small talk and she asked me if I was from Massachussets because I had MA plates on my car. I told her no, it was a rental and I was from Kentucky. She then got a big smile and said, “Oh good – I can’t stand those people from Massachusetts. They come here, buy land and put those ‘PRIVATE’ signs everywhere.”

I sort of chuckled about this as I drove away a few minutes later. Now I understand why she was so ticked. That’s a great tradition you all have in Maine. I wish we had more of that here. It’s getting increasingly hard for outdoorsman to get access to quality land in my state. People just don’t want the liability.

zic
November 11th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I grew up here, and then spent 20 years on Boston before returning home to raise my kids here. For several years, I freelanced for the local weekly and other papers. I frequently wrote for the tourism industry, industrial/private land use, and the conflicts between the two.

It really helped that I grew up here and understood the traditions. I saw so many people who came here, loved the area, but didn’t understand its roots. The natives have, as your comment indicates, some pretty nasty nicknames for people from MA; people who come here to ’save’ what’s been a working forest but think it’s a wilderness. (Most of northern New England was clear cut in the 1800’s. The virgin wilderness is long gone, read “Changes in the Land” by Wm. Cronan for more.) They fail to understand the working forest has actually preserved most of northern Maine as a forest.

A forest which everyone is welcome to walk, hunt, ski, snowmobile. . . but don’t eat more than one or two of the freshwater fish; they’re full of mercury from elsewhere.

The only other place in the US I know with anywhere near this kind of tradition would be the west, but only the National Forests, not the private or park lands. Luckily, in the west, there’s a lot of National Forest.

An interesting outcome of land use here has been trail building. User groups banding together to build trails of all sorts; with a real burst of activity in urban trails recently; with a coastal walking trail in the works, I believe. But even here, you run into conflicts. The AT, on one hand, is the darling of environmental types. I love it, I’ve got a view of the Mahoosuc Mountains, where it crosses from NH into Maine out the window beside me. But for landowners, it’s a broken promise because some of the land was taken by eminent domain, some parcels the trail bisects became inaccessible because landowners couldn’t build logging roads across the trail.

Then there’s the snowmobilers, who’ve been building organized trail networks since I was a kid in the ’70’s. Each year, they get permissions from thousands of landowners; re-route trails where permission is denied, spend thousands of hours maintaining the trails and any damage a trail might have inadvertently caused to a landowner’s property. Despite their noise and gas consumption, they provided the model for the many access systems that are developing throughout the state in the tradition of open use.

As Scott points out, each of those user groups — both formal and informal create their own claim on territory.
4 Scott { 11.11.09 at 7:50 pm }: Not to thread hijack but I dated a Maine girl and she always referred to them as Massholes. She also spoke of mud season and digging potatoes.
5 doubter4444 { 11.16.09 at 7:11 pm }: Get off my lawn