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.