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within it, witness Quentin’s irruptions, and even a particularly distasteful scene of voyeurism and near-sexual assault when she is sleeping. These deterritorialisations contribute to the film’s fundamental notion of change and transformation, of ‘becoming-other’. However, questions arise here as to the meaning of the relationship with the theatre and acting, and of the nature of the process of change. A more conventional approach might be to set up an opposition between truth and falsehood around the metaphor of acting (the basis, for example, of Douglas Sirk’s 1959
of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. 30 The line of flight, like the line, has no beginning or end, but always a middle. And it is in this middle or ‘in between’ that everything takes place. 31 If we think about the Deleuzian notion that it is not what the line is but what it can do or be, then a line can be a mark, a trace, a contour or an outline, which is
English. The second significant process of de-territorialisation since the 1990s is the Internet, which has created a virtual public sphere where debate is conducted on all kinds of issues. New social movements have succeeded in using the Internet to further their messages, redefining politics and creating fora for a 'world opinion'. The expansion of the English-language public sphere and the Internet de facto unify the national European public spheres and create a common European public sphere by connecting Europe to global cultural and political post-Cold War
liberal regimes of power that function by making the production of life itself an operative principle for the reproduction of power relations was, as we have already discussed in the previous chapter, fairly ineffable. Foucault provides scarce means to imagine or construe what life might actually be or become outside of liberal regimes of power that command and control life to a degree of ‘omnipresence’ (1990: 93). In the context of this failure, Deleuze and Guattari’s radical theorisation of the nomadic potentialities of life for the deterritorialisation of power was
‘frontier’ in Anti-Oedipus, to designate the limit at which the organisation of societies and subjectivities undergo processes of deterritorialisation and enter upon lines of flight (2000: 281). Likewise the horizon of war, for Negri, expresses a point of, as he describes it, ‘ontological pregnancy’, where the polemical being of the multitude ‘presses for more, not satisfied with the horizontality that it has achieved, with its beautiful and animated flatness’ (1991: 119). The horizon of war, then, in this context is fairly comparable with Deleuze and Guattari
’s body glancing out’). In perceiving the furious and unthinking energy of rat life, Billy suddenly experiences a becoming-rat; in so doing, he momentarily becomes one with the differential force through which all life emerges. 15 Because Billy may no longer be imagined simply as ‘human’, Ondaatje once again deterritorialises poetic language, opening his medium up to the flow of intensities that precede and exceed its structures. This phase of deterritorialisation is disclosed in the poem’s fluid transposition of pronouns, its reversion from a world of sense into the
dangers that television might pose to such an autonomously constituted national imaginary become apparent in later, more explicitly postmodern writing (such as Pynchon’s or Don DeLillo’s or Robert Coover’s), in which the technology of television is internalised as part of a narrative cognisant of its global circuits ‘whose perimeters can never again be entirely self-regulating’.27 Vineland participates in this expansion of popular culture, in the deterritorialisation of media images via a globalised economy of brand names, advertisements, and satellite channels – a ‘24
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