Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T11:06:55.924Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Allegories of Creativity and Territory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Extract

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.

Type
correspondents abroad
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. Ed. Jardine, Lisa and Silverthorne, Michael. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Gilles, Deleuze, and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Sweem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977.Google Scholar
Ricardo, David. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 3rd ed. London: John Murray, 1821.Google Scholar
Serrat, Jordi. “El negre dissecat de Banyoles, traslladat en secret fins a Madrid.” Avui 13 Sept. 2000: 24.Google Scholar
Swift, Jonathan. The Battel of the Books. The Writings of Jonathan Swift. Ed. Greenberg, R. A. and Piper, W. B. New York: Norton, 1973. 372–96.Google Scholar