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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Of course not. But rectifying the flawed structure of the human mode of existence is the work of others.

My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.

Both are ways of rejecting being lame forever.

My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.

??

deterritorialize

What does that even mean?

It means I'm reading "A Thousand Plateaus" by Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari and now I'm going through the classic 'throwing its concepts at everything' phase of eating a new intuition pump.

Really, I don't think the concepts they bring up require the coining of a whole new set of words over it. And yet... I do find the jargon appealing. Deterritorialization is the process of moving away from the old context of something, and then Reterritorialization is the process of giving that thing new meaning. These steps can be nearly one in the same, in the context of continuous change and evolution, or they can be more discreet.

Examples:

  • Moving away from traditional notions of human limitation (deterritorialization) and redefining what it means to be human in a context integrated with technology (reterritorialization).
  • Removing a toilet from it's normal context in a bathroom (deterritorialization) and putting it in an art museum (reterritorialization).
  • In a Thousand Plateaus, one of the first examples is that of the orchid and the wasp. In the relationship between the orchid and the wasp, both are taken out of their original roles, the orchid having the role of a flower, and the wasp having the role of a wasp, and they are placed in this new productive context, where the orchid takes on aspects of the role of a female wasp, producing her scent, whereas the wasp is reterritorialized as a reproductive organ of the orchid.