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can never use’ (MD 487–8). Temporal and spatial subjunctives Paul Giles points to surrealism as a key influence on Pynchon’s work, a desire ‘to explore the idea of heterogeneity and dispersal’ as aesthetic strategies for refusing the conformist patterns of an organised and policed ‘reality’.34 Such a strategy of deterritorialisation, following Deleuze and Guattari, works to uncover what Giles calls ‘the blinkers of smug social hierarchies and assumptions’35 embodied in Pynchon’s description of ‘a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO
territorialising desire and production. However, Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism is a distinctive social form, which in some sense is inherent in all previous forms. This is because the capitalist machine is distinguished from other (previous) systems by its decoding and deterritorialisation of desire and production.19 Whereas previous social machines have sought to control desire, capitalism depends on liberating the flow of desire and productive power, freeing up economic and social relations to an unprecedented degree (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977: 139). This means
in ‘colonizing social life’.70 Across these theorisations, space is seen to be invaded and transformed; it is disturbed and recoded in ways that restrict and realign the uncertainties that constitute our spatial understanding. In many ways these incursions are, to invoke Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terminology, a moment of deterritorialisation that facilitates the constrictions of reterritorialisation. Like the capitalist relations Deleuze and Guattari describe, sectarian expressions haunt their landscapes – controlling them through fear and agitation, as
, one which limits, rather than extends, the possibilities of 180 Culture on drugs becoming. They claim that the ‘deterritorialisations’ produced by drugs are ‘compensated for by the most abject reterritorialisations’, such as drug addictions and compulsions to repeat (as is the case with opiates, amphetamines, cocaine), but also with reference to Artaud and Michaux (who shared a taste for hallucinogens) they recall the ‘negative effects’ of loss of control, erroneous perceptions and ‘bad feelings’: Drug addicts continually fall back into what they wanted to escape
regardless of their place of birth. In order to tap the revolutionary potential inherent in democracy’s ‘homelessness’, Genet affirms, like Deleuze and Guattari, a deterritorialised geography that erases all ideas of naturalness and propriety. At this point in Genet’s thought, spatial deterritorialisation and poetic invention fuse to become part of the same process. Both are committed to dislocating and reconfiguring space endlessly. Challenged by this infinite rewriting of space, colonialism’s desire to distribute fixed roles and to attribute proper places is rendered
1998 ). Memory work is examined at every turn, as representations of loss, insecurity, displacement and deterritorialisation occur in African literature. Much memory-work is future-oriented, as people struggle to keep traces of the past and the present alive for the sake of the future. In this way, memory can become a way of countering political nostalgia fostered by neo-colonial African governments
, however, can be prone to reductive assessments that bedevil discussions of postcolonialism: ‘While Fourth World peoples often invest a great deal in a discourse of territorial claims, symbiotic links to nature, and active resistance to colonial incursions, postcolonial thought stresses deterritorialisation, the artificial, the constructed nature of nationalism and national borders, and the obsolescence of anti
links with the rest of Europe’ (Article 9). 20 As a consequence of the Maastricht Treaty, Ireland and the UK adopted the principle of subsidiarity, which fitted well with the devolution and cross-border initiatives of the 1990s. The EU’s regional policies were conducive to a growing responsiveness to notions of deterritorialisation of politics. The partnership principle and idea
‘national and imperial’. The policies of deterritorialisation pursued by the larger settler universities in the late nineteenth century connected what had previously been locally oriented institutions into a wider world of academic scholarship. But as Chase’s comments suggest, this was principally neither an international nor a cosmopolitan world. Despite their purchase of European
scholarships or attended international conferences, they now did so not as members of the expansive British academic world, but rather as representatives of national scholarly communities. It would not be until the 1980s, when a new phase of government reform began to dismantle these national structures and replace them with another wave of de-territorialisation (this time in the form of marketised