Deterritorialisation

Definition

Deterritorialisation is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept for the process by which social and spatial formations are loosened from their fixed territories — codes, boundaries, and identities break down, freeing flows of desire, capital, and bodies. It "names the process whereby the very basis of one's identity, the proverbial ground beneath our feet, is eroded" (Buchanan & Lambert). Crucially, deterritorialisation is always in tension with reterritorialisation (the re-imposition of order on freed flows), and "must not be confused with a return to a primitive or older territoriality": anything can serve as a deterritorialisation by "standing for" the lost territory, acquiring a "home value." In A Thousand Plateaus, deterritorialisation operates within an assemblage of planes and lines of variation where there are "always two kinds of space" — smooth (nomad) and striated (sedentary).

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — originated the concept within the spatial vocabulary of A Thousand Plateaus.
• Ian Buchanan — applies the concept to architecture and urbanism in Deleuze and Space, reading the postmodern city as a field of deterritorialised flows.
• (Related: Gregg Lambert — co-editor of Deleuze and Space; Anthony Vidler — the Deleuzian spatial roster in Warped Space.)

Related Concepts

• Warped Space — Vidler's account of the Deleuzian spatial roster (smooth/striated, the fold, deterritorialisation) as architectural theory.
• Heterotopia — Deleuze's "other spaces" as sites of deterritorialised difference.
• Dwelling — the rooted, place-bound existence that deterritorialisation erodes; the postmodern city is "made of Teflon," repelling "old-fashioned attempts to put down roots."
• Flat Ontology — the Deleuzian/DeLanda premise of a world of intensive differences and assemblages rather than hierarchically stratified being.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Deleuze and Space
• Warped Space
• Architecture, Critique, Ideology — Deleuze as the thinker critique must absorb.

Open Questions

• Does deterritorialisation offer a critical resource against the spectacular city, or — as Douglas Spencer charges — is the Deleuzian vocabulary the very "architectural Deleuzism" that parametricism and the affective turn have absorbed into neoliberal governance?
• How does deterritorialisation relate to Kaika's "autistic architecture" and the footloose transnational elites who produce it — is their mobility a form of deterritorialisation, or its capitalist capture?