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The Territory is not Map: Place, Deleuze and Guattari, and African Philosophy

2001; DePaul University; Volume: 45; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5840/philtoday200145426

2329-8596

Bruce Janz,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

At the beginning of 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari contrast chess with Go in terms of the relation between the pieces and the kind of space they create. Chess, they maintain, a game of state ... chess pieces coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive:1 Go, on the other hand, has pieces that are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: 'It' makes a move:' Chess has a of interiority, in other words, it takes its of meanings from the previously defined essence of each piece. space it creates is striated. Go, on the other hand, has a milieu of exteriority. space in Go is smooth. It is a war without battle lines, without boundaries, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. Chess codes and decodes while Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a in space, consolidate that by construction of a second, adjacent territory...):' Deleuze and Guattari here follow in the theme of other plateaus, tracing nomadic subjectivities and exploring the contingent, multifarious ways they come into themselves. Treatise on Nomadology, while perhaps the most famous plateau, focuses on the contrast between the inferiority, or essentialism of the State versus the exteriority or nomadic qualities of the war machine. But this is set (to the extent that anything is really up for Deleuze and Guattari) by the plateau immediately preceding, 1837: Of the Refrain. This plateau does not concern the social-philosophical problems of the emergence of subjectivity in the face of a coercive nation-state, but rather begins by considering the roots of the experience of territory. concepts of the refrain and of nomadic philosophy give us a clue to a way to rethink African philosophy. project of this essay is to consider ways in which we might think of African philosophy outside of the metaphors of maps used by both modernist and also some postmodernist writers, the first to delineate and define area and establish ownership and citizenship, the second to clear space and allow for possibilities. first project of mapping, which has been the explicit or implicit project of the majority of African philosophy, leaves African philosophy forever at the edge of Western thought, defining its by that already claimed. second project, meant to resist that sense of entitlement, ends up avoiding discussions of subjectivity even as it tries to avoid any hint of essentialism. We find out what we might choose, at the expense of knowing what we do choose. result in the first case is a map that has little legitimacy, and in the second a map that has little use. alternative, I would like to suggest, is to rethink both the metaphysical and the postmodern addiction to the notion of space, and instead suggest that the concept of place holds more hope. title to this essay is an obvious play on words. The map is not the is a common expression that indicates the limits of representation. It suggests that we can never fully nor properly represent or capture the world. Jorge Luis Borges imagines a map that is a 1:1 representation of the it is supposed to represent! Of course, if we broaden our conception of a map, we can imagine maps that much larger than the territory-maps of subatomic reactions, the genome, and so forth. These maps define the boundaries, internal interactions, and identity of the in question. Maps, at least the ones common in the modern age, start with abstractions, and fit the territory into a numerical or conceptual grid. To suggest that the map is not the is to recognize that the is more than the abstractions of the map. …