AAG 2008 PANEL SESSION: ON TERRITORIALITY AND THE POLITICAL
Organizer:
Oliver Belcher, University of British Columbia
With regards
to the oft tense theoretical coupling of "territoriality" and the
meaning of the "political," there has recently been two provocative
responses by major social theorists. In her set of lectures entitled
On the Political1, Chantel Mouffe posits the following:
"Against those who celebrate the virtues of 'deterritorialization'
and advocate 'nomadism,' I am convinced that radical politics cannot
avoid 'territorialization,' and that all forms of territorialization
should not be perceived as machines of capture. It is a mistake
to believe that reference to territory is by nature backward-looking
and reactionary and that it has fascistic tendencies."2
Commenting
on the use of Deleuze and Guattari by the Isreali Defense Forces (IDF),
Slavoj Zizek offers a similar critique: "It was recently made public
that, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians,
the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari,
especially to Thousand Plateaux
One of the key distinctions
they rely on is the one between 'smooth' and 'striated space,'
which reflect the organizational concepts of the 'war machine' and
the 'state apparatus.' The IDF now often uses the term 'to smooth
out space' when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it
had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as 'straited'
in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road
blocks, and so on
"
Zizek goes
on to ask: "So what does it follow from all this? Not, of course,
the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of militaristic
colonization but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated
by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply
'subversive,' also fits the (military, economic, and ideologico-political)
operational mode of today's capitalism."3
This panel
will critically evaluate the connection between de/territoriality and
the political. The implications of this debate are far-reaching
considering the conceptual influence of Deleuze and Guattari on contemporary
debates within geography, especially with regards to critical geopolitics/geoeconomics4,
as well as the calls for "flat ontologies" over theories of scale.5
The following questions will be considered: What is the state of "territoriality" within geography? What is the relation between de/territoriality and the political? If, following Carl Schmitt, the political is constituted by antagonism and the naming of an Other, how can a deterritorialized politics be possible? Further, what does a deterritorialized politics look like, both institutionally and pragmatically? How should geographers negotiate the disparate views of Deleuze and Guattari, and those of Mouffe and Zizek? What can geographers add to this debate?