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Territories are not phenomenological places emanating from a transcendent and

primordial subject. To repeat, territories are prior to the distinction between subject and object. Instead of phenomenology, Deleuze and Guattari refer to ‘ethology’ in order to understand territory and territoriality. In his lecture on Spinoza, Deleuze defines ethology as the “practical science of the manners of being”.³⁰ In other words, the study around the question of what one can do. Hence the petite phrase, or refrain, of Deleuze and Guattari:

what can a body do? The study of territory is concerned with the conditions of what one can do, i.e. where does the territory permit one to go.

Deleuze and Guattari’s ethology departs from traditional ethology because it does not give primacy to animal behavior; instead, the territory is primary because the territory or territorial assemblage is what constitutes or marks out the limits of what is possible. As Zourabichvili explains, “the territory marks out the relations of propriety or of

appropriation (and concomitantly, of distance) in which all subjective identification

30 Deleuze, Spinoza Lecture, 21/12/1980, webdeleuze.com.

consists” (2012: 167). One’s capacity to act, or the field of meaning, the set of possibilities, that enables one to act, is formed by territorialization. Behaviour is

determined according to the relations or assemblage [agencement] that constitute them. It is here that “all subjective identification consists” (Zourabichvili, 2012: 167). The subject is the territory or territories it inhabits. As Deleuze and Guattari assert the “I is a habit”

(1994: 105), which relates to the idea of a “having [that] is more profound than being”

(1987: 316). The subject is the territory: the expression of a particular set of spatio-temporal dynamisms or rhythms and habits within a delimited set of possibilities.³¹ The subject is, in ethological terms, its capacity to act, what it can do. As Zourabichvili clarifies, “[t]he Deleuzian cogito is an ‘I inhabit’ or an ‘I claim’” (2012: 95). Ethology in this sense is a study of spatial relations and subjectivity: the study of what one can do according to the territories one has, that one has appropriated, instead of what one is, in terms of history and typology.

Again, we can see how this concept of ‘territory’ is non-phenomenological through Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza. First, he claims that “Spinoza offers philosophers a new model: the body in order to ask the question: what can a body do?” (1988b: 17).

However, this is not the subject or ‘total body’ of phenomenology; the body is instead equivalent to a territory; it is a disposition. The body is determined by the affects that constitute it and give it power. This is the having that precedes being: what one can do is determined by the territory that one has. The ‘body’ or territory does not refer to any natural predisposition, but simply to one’s disposition, where one is in a network of relations. The body is defined, moreover, “by longitude and latitude” (1988: 127); in other words, the body is mapped.³² In order to determine what one can do one must map the territory, to survey one’s disposition, to figure out where one is. Deleuze calls the

“longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest,

31 Hence Guattari calls territories ‘existential territories’ (see his essay “Ritornellos and Existential Affects”

in The Guattari Reader or The Machinic Unconscious).

32 In his interviews with Claire Parnet, collected in Dialogues II, Deleuze says that “things, people, are made up of varied lines, and that they do not necessarily know which line they are on or where they should make the line which they are tracing pass; in short, there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight, etc.” (2002: 10).

between particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements”, and understands the latitude as the “set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force” i.e. one’s capacity to be affected (1988: 127-8). In other words, ethology studies the compositions of relations between different things that compose a territory, which also determine, not what something is, but what something can do.

Deleuze and Guattari use the example of the tick. The tick is interesting to them because it is able to contract, that is have, the habit of a limited territory (habitat) based on only three affects: light, smell, and heat. First, the tick is able to climb to the top of a branch, due to sunlight; secondly, it then can wait up on that branch for up to 18 years until it smells an animal below, whereupon it falls onto it; and thirdly, it searches a hot area where it can dig in to feed on blood (1988b: 124). This is the territory the tick

territorializes out of the given diversity of the forest: only three affects. Therefore, for Deleuze and Guattari, ethology is not interested in studying animals based on history, form, being, or organ, but rather “by the affects of which it is capable” (1988b: 124) in a particular situation or assemblage, or the territory in which it inhabits and claims.

However, as mentioned above, territories are never self-contained; they are constantly leaking. The ethical test is then not to see how long you can stay in one spot, but is to attempt to enter into relations, compositions or connections, which extend one’s power rather than decompose it. Deleuze distinguishes these as joyful and sad encounters: “we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threaten our coherence” (1988b: 19). In other words, how far can you open your territory or extend your territory without falling apart or becoming mad.

The idea of the territory here comes close to an understanding of Dasein’s spatiality in Heidegger, whose ‘here’ is determined by its ‘there’ and vice versa. The territory, whose

“interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior” (1988b: 125), is nevertheless in communication with an absolute Outside that has no relation to it. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari call it the ‘Earth’, a plane of immanence. And

as Deleuze claims, there is no sheltering oneself from the Outside; as he writes, “[a]ll that we call bad is strictly necessary, and yet comes from the outside: the necessity of

accidents” (1988b: 41-2). Therefore, there is a necessity of contingency as the territory is always bordering an Outside it cannot contain or preempt, and that it nevertheless already envelops without reducing.

As a result, ethology is also a study of limits and thresholds, of determining what a body is capable of in a certain space and time, not in order to remain, but in order to forge new connections and compositions. Limits are the products of relationships. As Claude Raffestin claims in his study of the frontier, “any action of relationship with the

environment, of rapport between beings and objects requires the creation or recognition of limits” (1986: 12). They are not only constituted by the relationship between bodies, but also mark out the limits of one’s capacity to act. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is a conceptual difference between limits and territories: where “the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change” (1987: 438). The limit, therefore, marks the point at which the assemblage “must reproduce itself”, namely it necessitates a relative deterritorialization and a reterritorialization, whereas the ‘threshold’ marks the point “when the assemblage must change its nature”, an absolute deterritorialization (1987: 438). Thus we see that it is at the borders of territories where one either tries something different within the

assemblage it is in or leaps into a new assemblage or composition. It is at these territorial limits that creativity occurs.

In regard to material, inorganic processes Theodor Schwenk explains that, “it is as though the creative, formative impulses needed the boundary surfaces in order to be able to act in the material world. Boundary surfaces are everywhere the places where living, formative processes can find a hold” (42). This is because it is at the border, where inside meets outside, that encounters occur: “[t]he encounter can be located as much at the limit of the thought-facility as within a field of radical exteriority” (Zourabichvili, 2012: 73). And Zourabichvili continues, the “contingency and exteriority of an encounter […] gives rise to an authentic act of problematization, a creation of thought (2012: 73). The encounter

spurs us to creation because it jolts us out of the territories we have, that reassure us, into a disorienting and incomprehensible exteriority.