Do not forget the concrete, return to it constantly.[i]
Gilles Deleuze, 'Letter-Preface to Jean-Clet Martin'

Language is not life; it gives life orders.ii]
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The aim of the previous third issue of Drain, dedicated to the theme of 'deterritorialization', is described - the questions that animate it, the perspectives adopted - in admirable terms by the editors:

At a time when borders appear to be collapsing with the onslaught of new technologies and the rapidly expanding forces of globalization to what degree does this signal a new, and at times ambiguous, form of blockage? On one level media and visual culture are rigorously engaging with and provoking the State machinery, but on another level institutionalized politics simply absorbs and redirects these deterritorializing cultural operations. How is culture responding not only to social territorialization but its own reterritorialization? In what way can culture pragmatically struggle against its own capture? There may be no specific solution to these problems, but what this issue of Drain hopes to do is at least shake out a few pertinent questions and explore these within the context of contemporary cultural activities.

Ambiguity is the key word here. Whatever else, we know that over the last few decades, irreversible changes have taken place within the situation of Western culture, changes that have come to bear not just on the content of our experience, but also its form.[iii] Marshall MacLuhan's slogan - that the medium has become the message - is doubtless too simple. In fact, there has been a series of slippages between the two halves, and a resultant series of new (albeit temporary) intertwinings. We are so familiar with them (even in their novelty) that often they remain at the level of the unexamined - more precisely, these kinds of changes are themselves very much a part of our contemporary intellectual and affective experience.

All of this is profoundly ambiguous. Putting aside the remaining Luddites, and the dour Left prophets of doom, our contemporary version of Kierkegaard's knights of good conscience, on the one hand, and the feeble, wilted and acquiescent interpolated consumer subject on the other, it seems clear that we are faced with the need to once again start the construction, to create concepts adequate to the events that we are a part of. The profound ambiguity of our culture, and the spasmodic state it is in, the paranoid and neurotic forms of subjectivity that it has produced, all of this can - must be - something which causes us to think.[iv]

The concept of deterritorialization, fashioned by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and beyond, is at first glance precisely what we need to come to terms with this ensemble of shifting sands. The authors themselves, employing the notorious free indirect discourse - creating an ambiguity in the reader with respect to the status of the subject who speaks - that renders reading Deleuze's work difficult, use the term in a battery of related ways, and so we should be grateful for the various discussions of the theme in Drain, which give us some purchase. Perhaps the concept of deterritorialization can be a kind of fil-conducteur - to use Carla Lipsig-Mummé's inspired choice of phrases from her moving and important discussion of activism, personal identity and belonging[v] - a guiding thread in the attempt to think through our contemporary situation.

In an interview with Robert Maggiori, Guattari explains the origin of the term: 'Deterritorialization [. . .] is a barbarous formula that I articulated, and then Gilles related it to the concept of the Earth, which, at the beginning, was not part of my perspective - but, from the moment we brought these elements together, the notion was recast anew.'[vi]

As Felicity Colman notes in "Hope: an e-modulating-motion of deterritorialization," in the background here is a number of themes drawn from anthropology.[vii] But front and centre appears a relation between a certain ground (the Earth), and a movement (deterritorialization) that carries whatever is fixed away.

Of course, we must be careful to distinguish deterritorialization from a kind of idealisation of a choice of a moving lifestyle, of a postmodern beat poet or an international IT worker perpetually in transit. These phenomena deserve to be understood too, but if we simply reduce the movement of deterritorialization to a critical or ironic subjective disposition vis-à-vis the sedentary suburban life, we will have misunderstood - not least of all because one's sense of self is itself produced on the basis of one's territory, or, to be more precise, both emerge contemporaneously.[viii] Further, as Ian Buchanan argues, we can't think that, for Deleuze and Guattari, the movement of reterritorialization returns us to the home that we'd just left, as if deterritorialization counts as a high, something that takes you out of yourself, and the consequent reterritorialization is the experience of coming down.[ix] Whatever else, we are dealing with a figure of movement, one that is not the circular path of a Ulysses returning to Ithaca via terror and delight. Deterritorialization describes the movement that replaces one territory, and its attendant habits, traditions and traffic laws (in short, its codes) with another, different territory; one that may be better or worse. It's worth noting in passing that this means we can't give deterritorialization an immediate positive valence as a political marker, because of this ambiguity; to paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari: don't think that a movement of deterritorialization will guarantee you freedom. If there is a political program intrinsic to this concept, it cannot ever be thought in terms of means and ends, since the end itself is nothing but a different version of the beginning

The stilted, warm and wilted familial territories of Christmas lunch; the cramped interior of despotic taxi territories; the vampiric territories of universities; the hallucinatory territories of Starbucks and all-night copy stores; or the capitalist sheen of art gallery bookstores. Clearly, the concepts of territory and deterritorialization do come to bear upon our contemporary situation and experience. Nothing is as familiar. So my aim here is to examine the last issue of Drain, in order to find some coordinates for this creation that our thought must engage with in the face of our contemporary situation. Or, as the editors put it (in words reminiscent of Deleuze's account of thought as problematising in Difference and Repetition[x]), I would like to, 'shake out a few pertinent questions.' In particular, I want to ask myself: what value is the concept of deterritorialization? Being descriptively relevant does not guarantee its political usefulness. Does it remain useful, and if so, as a marker of what in particular?

Concrete to concrete via concept

One of the most precise axioms that Deleuze expresses anywhere in his published work for the activity of thinking is found in a short letter to his commentator, Jean-Clet Martin: 'Do not forget the concrete, return to it constantly.'[xi] An apparently simple comment which in fact evokes the shuttling movement between virtual and actual that governs Deleuze's mature work.[xii]

We see the perfect outline of just such a movement in Adrian Parr's article, 'Guerilla Tactics - culture bites back,'[xiii] which moves from the consideration of contemporary culture and politics to certain concepts drawn from A Thousand Plateaus and the work of Giorgio Agamben back to a rigorous and beautiful discussion of the art of Mike Parr. Likewise, Bianca Hester's discussion of Critical Mass (a monthly event in which cyclists take over central roads and highways during peak hour traffic) and Tom Nicholson's Banner Project, both decisive concrete affective-political or 'poetic-political' projects, opens up a meditation on the generative nature of such public and collective art.[xiv] Interruptions to the normal structure of traffic flows also creates nodes at which new irruptions can take place - a break in the flow is also the creation of a new flow.[xv]

We can say that for Deleuze, the creation of artwork proceeds on the basis of an engagement with the concrete world, and the work itself that is produced constitutes at once the formalization of this experience and the immediate return to the concrete, since as an artwork its effect is always at this level, and not (as so much art criticism would have it) abstractly intellectual.

To again take up the editor's outline, the goal of the 'Deterritorialization' issue of Drain is to question the nature of our contemporary situation, and examine the ways in which art is both an accomplice to the traps of contemporary societies and a way of hammering some cracks in it. It is, to refer to Deleuze's text on literature, a clinical and a critical goal. A political survey as much as theoretical creation and exegesis.

The lynchpin of all of this is the idea that artistic creation is in a certain sense a political act, and in one of two ways. First of all, art can be political if it attains to an irruption in the contemporary state of affairs, a rupture, that is, of a territory. Inversely though, we need to note that not only is creation political in this sense, but politics itself as a practice must be creative. If there is any meaning to politics for Deleuze, it can only be this: the creation of new ways of existence, of being and feeling. Hence his privileging of jurisprudence,[xvi] the branch of law devoted to the creation of new laws for new situations: 'Jurisprudence is all that there is [. . .] This is what it is to be Left - to create the law.'[xvii]

This provides us quite precisely with the link between deterritorialization and politics. What makes creation political and politics necessarily creative is the common work on one's territory, a work that has as its goal a rupture in the code and the creation of a movement of deterritorialization. In art, we create works that, through the evasion of both the codes of a territory, and the movement of capitalism itself, express new ways of living, thinking and feeling. In political practice, we are doing the same thing: creating new ways of living, and living together, which are only possible insofar as deterritorialisation is invoked, to some degree. We could trace the ramifications of these theses in many directions . . .

But we should also measure the reach of Deleuze's point, and realize that the human being, that figure that has always been the lynchpin of law and order in Western thought, is not included in the Deleuzean program for a liberatory politics. Deterritorialization is not just, as Ian Buchanan points out,[xviii] the dissolution of a person's identity, but a movement that must pass by way of the dissolution (a carefully administered one, to be sure) of the place of the subject and its legal stature in the broadest sense. This Deleuze who we draw upon in these attempts to undermine and question the prevalent relationship between art, commerce and the reigning order of things is the same Deleuze who tells us: 'There are no human rights - there is life, and there are the rights of life.'[xix]  There is no mistaking the challenge that this thought puts to us, the challenge to abandon both the active subject and human rights as the a priori locus for political struggle. On the side of art, we can see this as a challenge to move beyond the humanist grounds of modern artistic practice, a movement which is - again - a political one.

Translation and theory, language and life

These considerations lead us, not surprisingly, to the theme of the current issue of Drain, translation. Not surprisingly, because the term is in fact synonymous with deterritorialization itself. In this case, the territories in question are natural languages (such as English and French), but also levels of discourse (from academic philosophy to art theory, from the discourse of a desiring-economy to rallies in the street, performances in a gallery, etc.). Let us note here already that in each case, translation involves a transformation in meaning. At the level of the codes which structure any territory, every sign gains its particular affective and, secondarily, signicative force on the basis of its context - the Deleuzo-Guattarian version of the infamous Derridean il n'y a pas de hors-texte.

And translation - in the widest sense - is also what has been inter alia guiding my concern here to examine the practical value of deterritorialization as a concept: does its translation into current territories maintain this value?

Given this synonymity of translation and the deterritorialization/reterritorialization movement, why then do Deleuze and Guattari make so many peculiar and unhelpful claims about translation in A Thousand Plateaus? Take, as a starting point, the well-known claim that they make in the course of their attack on linguistics: 'Language is not life; it gives life orders.'[xx] This claim is one that no vitalist (like Deleuze) could ever countenance a priori. There cannot be any such principled distinction between any particular formed matter (like language) and its ultimate phylum (life) - isn't this precisely the lesson of that masterful and hilarious text, '10,00 B.C.: On the Geology of Morals,'[xxi] the very chapter before the language and life claim? Language is a part of life: language is life. We cannot make these kind of principled distinctions in advance, but would need, in each case, to examine the way that language, like every other flow, is working in a particular context.[xxii] To quote the sentences from Deleuze that Adrian Parr uses to open her article 'Guerrilla Tactics' in the previous issue of Drain: 'Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move.'[xxiii]

On the other end of the spectrum, we read that the multifarious coding regimes of language are eminently more capable of movements of deterritorialization than other coded flows.[xxiv] How could such a claim ever be justified? Like every other coded flow, language is at times more heavily bound into the territory of which it is a part (the grammar, spoken and written etiquette, etc. of a courtroom) and at times more loosely (the dialects of friends, lovers). There cannot be an a priori claim made about the rigidity of coding and territoriality, which is precisely why the study of language must, as Deleuze and Guattari later note, be considered a pragmatics of language.[xxv]

Likewise, it seems a naïve claim, and hard to take seriously, that when the priority of language over life is being trumpeted by certain theorists, that we are just dealing with 'imperialist pretensions.'[xxvi] The fact is that, within the humanities, the study of language itself is bound up with an innumerable number of codes, and has its own territory, which resembles the Borgesian library, full of both an infinity of common signifiers and a single transcendental one, what Borges elsewhere calls the name of God. There is a political basis for the values attached to language in academic life that exceeds a mere subjective disposition.

Finally, it seems less certain than ever that there is any, 'immanence within language of universal translation.'[xxvii] Like all the other movements that make up our world, the structure of language must be examined in terms of local and strategic issues. Such a claim posits the existence of a beyond, a transparent realm in which meaning exists, independently of any particular words which might signify, the world of the transcendental signifier. There is no theme of modern thought's various engagements with the issue of translation, from Descartes to Heidegger and beyond, that is at once more common and more spurious.

The reason for such a conflicted set of claims which are, each of them, indebted to certain uncritical presuppositions, is complicated, relating perhaps to the dimly marked-out internal movement of Deleuze's thought, and beyond our interests here. But the essential is put by Deleuze and Guattari themselves later in A Thousand Plateaus: 'there is no general semiotic,'[xxviii] no universal level to which particular languages could have reference in order to ground the possibility of universal translatability. Furthermore, they recall that: 'The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language [. . .]'[xxix] On this score, perhaps there is value in supplementing the views about translation in A Thousand Plateaus with those of Jacques Derrida - for whom 'the prosthesis of origin' plays a decisive role in the socio-political grounding of translatability.[xxx]

In any case, these two statements allow us to develop two hypotheses. On the one hand, we can see that translation (and hence an active engagement with a territory) must be considered as a political activity that engages in a specific territory, a specific set of codes.[xxxi] This means in turn that, like all political activity for Deleuze, translation must be a veritable creation of a new way of using particular fragments of language. And these fragments of language, of discourse, contra Foucault, cannot be considered as, 'precarious splinters of eternity.'[xxxii] They are continually in flux.

'Translations can be creative.'[xxxiii] Indeed, they must be. Each time a translation takes place, the grid of both the home language and the target language are shifted - perhaps a little, perhaps a lot, depending on the particular role that is being played by the languages involved in a translation. Witness the mistranslation of Leonardo da Vinci that gave Freud the basis for his famous analysis,[xxxiv] the English advice to be found in the lift of a Parisian hotel ('Please leave your values at the front desk'), the gradual demise of the second person verb form in English, all the questions pertaining to the translation of the books central to the monotheistic religions that form such an important part of the structure of our cultural worlds . . . each of these examples constitute a revealing index of a set of social and political relays in which we live. And, for the same reason, the possible sites for political action.

On the other, what Deleuze and Guattari give us in their more progressive remarks about translation and language is a way of examining critically the value of the term deterritorialization, and any theoretical term, itself. In the world of theory, words like deterritorialization, the Other (big or otherwise), homo sacer [etc, etc . . .] are themselves tokens of power, nodes in networks of inclusion and exclusion, part of a code.

So, the answer to the question 'does the concept of deterritorialization still have a pragmatic and political value?' finally cannot be answered with an in principle 'yes' or 'no'. Precisely because the answer itself must be determined pragmatically in each case. However, what the previous discussion should have made clear is the nature of the grounds for such a pragmatic determination. They are threefold:

The value of deterritorialization as a concept must be assessed

1. Locally: both the concept itself and the movement which it names have value only in the particular context that they take part in.

2. In terms of its creative potential: the grounds upon which we can make any assessment, from a Deleuzean point of view (one that I have here been trying to more or less rigorously lean on), is in terms of its creative potential. When the concept of deterritorialization, or any other theoretical concept, no longer offers the force for a creative movement that ruptures with the contemporary context, then it is no longer of any interest. The nostalgia proper to theoretical positions has no place in art or politics.

3. Beginning with the concrete and returning to it: this local assessment of the term deterritorialization must also take into account the privileged - indeed, sole - locus at which creative political acts take place, and that is on the very surface of the concrete, at the heart of the movements of our collective lives. The speculative or abstract regime of thought provides nothing in and of itself for art or politics. The concrete always grounds our practice, and if we ignore this, we are doomed to be determined by it.

Conclusion

Singing a paean to the deterritorializing effects of Babel is in the end as mistaken as becoming a priest of the Law, an actuary of the soul - falling into the black hole or blending into the white wall are equally ineffectual and dangerous. Avant and arrière garde are both facing in the wrong direction, since they still orient themselves with respect to the great misleading and conservative figure of transgression. What we need to do rather is create, that joyful activity.

The term 'deterritorialization' itself is of ambiguous value. But the movement it tries to describe is nothing other than the grounds for artistic and political practice, both creative acts. As Anne Michaels puts it, in her beautiful and elegiac novel Fugitive Pieces, it is a matter of 'opening the window a crack.'[xxxv] We must be as creative in theoretical pursuits as we demand of our artistic practice. Only then will deterritorialization - the movement of freedom - stop being another foreign-sounding word, and have a real force in our everyday lives.

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