When we were discussing the PERSONAL TERRITORIES exhibition with the project team and were searching for a way to integrate it artistically and thematically into the annual program of the okk, it occurred to me that there was a continuity – which we hadn’t planned in advance – in terms of the idea and the phenomenon of the territorial. […] Outside of philosophy, ‘territoriality’ denotes the cognitive, psychophysical, and factual circumstances of land acquisition, mostly in the form of drawing borders. The territory is defined through a relationship to what has been addressed as the earth in phenomenology since Husserl. – While the earth is to Husserl the epitome of solidity, to Deleuze and Guattari it stands for something dynamic: The earth is a revolving body in the universe, with a surface that is subjected over time to geological processes of transformation such as continental drift, and is thus anything but an immutable reference value. According to Deleuze and Guattari, territoriality[1] is thus the human attempt to wrest something fixed from this dynamic entity. The earth is the entity that has a deterritorializing effect: the earth destabilizes the seemingly fixed structure of a territory. Conversely, Deleuze and Guattari speak of philosophical definitions that conceive the earth as an origin (arché) as attempts at reterritorialization […][2] In its original sense, the word territory describes a demarcated area, a clearly bordered unit that can be physical, symbolic or metaphysical in nature. Like few other concepts, ‘territory’ encompasses the complex of material disputes over power and its historical origins, comprised of economic, political and strategic parameters. This is a term from the Middle Ages, which extends beyond a physical land domain to describe a power position and the associated position of authority (structured in hierarchies). This provides a foundation for the feudal notion of fiefdom or/and freehold property. The word’s Latin origins refer to the earth (terra) as a starting point, which is, however, made subservient – that is, robbed of its status as an entity. A territory is imposed on the piece of land that it demarcates; the earth is, as it were, besieged by and overlaid with territory. On a purely material level, the term is related to dominance, violence, the creation of hierarchies, and the defense and expansion of property. On a historical level, there is a continuum in which feudalism is replaced by the nation-state (bourgeois society), but the connotation of land grabbing – that is, the territorial claiming of physical and juridical space – remains the same and the resultant claim to power is similarly structured. The power position is anchored in legal jurisdiction, in which the relationship of the individual to the state is regulated through the principle of territoriality. This stands in diametrical opposition to the personality principle. Only extra-territoriality overrides this power over and governance of the individual; its juridical equivalent would be statelessness. The territorial claims of the nation-state upon the individual are defined through citizenship and the obligations (and rights) that accompany it, while its claims upon other states are demarcated through national borders. The fact that claims to natural resources located in the territory also go along with territorial claims often gives rise to border disputes that involve diplomatic tensions in the best case and brutal invasions and territorial wars causing many thousands of deaths in the worst case. The ideology behind this is guided by materialistic and capitalist motives. (Because its tremendous psychological and hermeneutic complexity cannot be treated here, at this point I would like to just briefly mention the biological dimension of the term, as in e.g. the consideration of a “hunting territory” as potential food for thought.) With regard to both interpersonal and intergovernmental relations, the term territory is always fraught with conflicts of interest, disputes and the use of force. What prevails is the structural violence of an ethnocentric culture that marks everything that deviates from common normativity as different and exotic, and publicly exposes it. This exposure signifies deterritorialization for the subject, a “land grab” of the private sphere, of every personal territory. […] Jean Baudrillard therefore describes the contemporary culture of the information society as a pornographic culture, a culture without a secret[3], that serves all the mechanisms of obscenity. Baudrillard understands obscenity as the loss of the secret that triggers an action; accordingly, obscenity can be regarded as a tendency inherent in all information technology, which is reflected in the directness of all actions, messages, and statements that transmit it, as well as the simultaneity of all events and discourses that transmit it. […][4] If this concept of (digital) meta-territoriality is shifted into a personal context, which affects every individual equally but in very different ways due to personal experiences, a dimension of many different possibilities of interpretation opens up, which is invaluable to artistic research. For art, the territory is like a treasure waiting to be unearthed, like a continent eager to be explored. Lithuanian artist Mindaugas Gapsevicius’s installation 0.30402944246776265, which showed an autonomous darknet[5] at work, offered an innovative approach to deterritorialization out of this digital meta-territoriality. This computer network forms an independent digital network that is protected against access or attacks from outside because its lines of communication run only internally – making it the nightmare of every data collection agency. But to get back to our exhibition concept for this year, 2014: It is astonishing that almost all of the issues that we have presented and are still presenting this year are either directly related to the concept of territory or strongly tied to territoriality. For example, the year began with Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets’ exhibition Euromaidan – Occupied Spaces, which was about the public buildings in Kiev that were occupied by protesters. Although the exhibition started with a peaceful insurrection and related to the territories occupied by the demonstrators, the conflict transformed from an internal dispute within one country to a geopolitical territorial war whose consequences and scale experts still cannot foresee today. The borders that became visible in this dispute had for many years been believed, if not to have vanished, almost to have been overcome. However, the conflict has now shown that even seventy years after the most cataclysmic war in history (and not only for Europe), territorial, nationalistic ways of thinking – and the willingness to wage war for them – have by no means given way to a reasonbased global society. The struggle for territory, as we know it from our history, has been rekindled in Europe and will continue to lead to bloody conflicts that would constitute a new Cold War with the same old concepts of the enemy – if, that is, it remains cold, which is not the worst scenario that is imaginable these days. A song that has returned to my mind during this work describes the situation simply and impressively. The song is by the Brazilian metal band Sepultura, is from 1993, and is called “War for Territories.” It tells of a forbidding, raw archaic reality that is reflected every day in the propaganda disseminated by the media. The “Lampedusa in Berlin” workshop this spring was held together with people who had entered Europe through Lampedusa. The workshop, which used screen-printing techniques to develop designs for a refugees’ rights campaign, dealt with the quintessential territorial theme of human existence – migration. The causes that ultimately trigger migration are of secondary importance in my opinion: What is important here is to address how these already disenfranchised people arrive here in our affluent society and how they are treated here! The conclusions that can be drawn from German refugee policy are disastrous. Both at the district level and at the regional and federal levels, visibly impotent policy reveals itself in instrumentalization, criminalization, and stigmatization, and unfortunately not in anything worthy of a democratic society under the rule of law. The structural violence through which (territorial) hegemonic positions are defended is taking a staggering course. And in the analysis of this wrongheaded policy we wind up back at nationalist structures that bringing back to light the long-hidden racism in this country. Border and migration policy was also the guiding theme of the performances that were presented for the MPA (Month of Performance Art) Berlin. These performances “spoke” about border regimes; existential questions in the area of tension between the individual and the principle of territoriality; and metaphysical territories.
The Krieg und Reaktion (War and Reaction) exhibition, which took place this past summer on the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, was naturally a highlight of addressing the issue territory. An attempt was made here to visualize the contested territories of the world. The listing and situating of the wars of the past hundred years made clear that the era of major territorial wars that began centuries ago with the colonial era is far from over. The struggle over areas and hegemonies forms the continuum of war. Like a perpetual motion machine, war runs through history like a common thread, and not only in a symbolic sense. War safeguards the reterritorialization of the nation-state and of an imperialist economic system, and it usually lays the groundwork for subsequent conflicts. The best example of this is the Hindu Kush region, where more or less the same “global players” have met for military showdowns at various intervals since the days of the “great game” (that is, for more than 200 years). The locations are the same; the names of the protagonists are similar; only the generations are different. The exhibition that followed was a project from Hamburg: Gefahrengebiet (Danger Zone), which was about the urban territory that the Hamburg police proclaimed a danger zone, where the police temporarily established a state of emergency.
This also means that in the future people can be stopped, ID’d or arrested on the basis of mere suspicion, as the state of emergency can be redeclared at any time. The stated reasons for this random despotism are the security of the state and the preservation of public order, but it uses tools of the police state to intervene in urban civic life. A state of emergency generates reterritorialization on the part of the state, as is familiar from military dictatorships and repressive autocratic systems far removed from civil democracy. The upcoming exhibition is entitled Hidden Agenda, and will feature Korean artist Jae Hyun Yoo’s exploration of the effects of the political and ideological border dispute between North and South Korea. This is a geopolitical and territorial fracture line that emerged in the most heated phase of the Cold War, persists unabated to this day, and extends its field of tension across the entire globe. It is the most prominent historical territorial issue of our era, and it remains appallingly current today. In contrast to these major geopolitical and political issues, work that concerns the territorial can also be connected to the personal, private sphere. One example of this is the kitchen as a symbolic arena of the battle of the sexes. This is the theme that Finnish artist Jaana Kokko pursued in her experimental project “How to show?, Lab for research and art”, a project organized by the EGFK (European Society for Research and Arts) in which she investigated the sociological ramifications of implementing the model of the “Frankfurt kitchen,” a pioneering 1920s design for an efficient and rational kitchen. The kitchen is a territory where the private and the public are at least perceived to strongly overlap. Nonetheless, here too the boundary is once again diluted, broken and redefined when we regard the kitchen as a site of disputes about power and subservient roles in the gender debate. The term is also interesting from a philosophical perspective if we start from the idea of abolishing that which we understand as territory. The term deterritorialization, as shaped by Deleuze and Guattari, contains certain ethical formulas that can by all means be applied practically. This is a matter of deconstructing forms of nationalism (as representative hierarchical systems) and ultimately combatting forms of racism that arise from hermetic, ethnocentric entities of power. Deterritorialization means weakening a culture’s situatedness in a specific geographic location, while at the same time weakening the concept of the nation. Deterritorializing culture opens the borders and overcomes the barriers that alienate people from one another. But the idea of a Marxist redistribution of resources must always be included in this thinking, because deterritorialization in accordance with the wishes of multinational business interests would mean total biopolitical control of the planet and of human society – which is the direction in which we are currently well on our way. This deterritorialization in the interest of progressive metanationality can be formed through the (dualistic) dynamic of the very process that underlies deterritorialization, that is, the reterritorialization (deconstruction and repositioning) through the individual of what is the norm for mainstream society. This concept provides the foundation for personal territories in that each person lives out, describes and marks their own sovereign territories, as is in fact enshrined in Article 5 of the German constitution. This would be a sort of reconquest of public space. The rhizome of many personal territories forms something akin to Hakim Bey’s description of the Temporary Autonomous Zone[6] where a critical mass can generate a temporary juridical and hierarchical free zone, an anti-territory so to say, where responsibility passes from a state entity to the broad mass of participating individuals. This dualistic dynamic appears paradoxical at fist glance, but if observed more closely it makes sense, for the drawing of one’s own borders, which necessarily means closing and opening them (that is, a fluctuating and dynamic process of exchange), allows for the development of sensitivity to the lines and borders of other people and other cultures, without engaging in exclusion. Personal territories oscillate between the private and public realms, always in rhizomatic motion and in a constant polylogue[7].The task for a progressive perspective is to develop intersectional awareness, to think beyond one’s own borders.
Notes:
[1] Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Penguin, 2009.
[2] Stefan Günzel, “Deleuze und die Phänomenologie,” in Phainomena. Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, XXII/84-85, eds: A.T. Komel and H.R. Sepp. Lubljana: Nova Revija Press, p. 163
[3] Jean Baudrillard, The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977-1984, trans. David Sweet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.
[4] Karl Anton Fröschl, seminar on “Ökonomie der Informationsgesellschaft – Territorien und Fluchtlinien,” Universität Wien. http://homepage.univie. ac.at/karl.anton.froeschl/ts_zgwi_material/muehlbergerco/Territorien_und_Fluchtlinien.htm
[5] Darknet: In IT, darknet describes a peer-to-peer network in which participants (in the case of the installations, the computers themselves) manually create connections with one another. This concept stands in contrast to conventional peer-to-peer networks in which connections to clients are initiated by strangers automatically and indiscriminately. The result is that a darknet offers a higher degree of security, given that an attacker cannot readily gain access to the network – or, ideally, does not even know that the network exists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_%28file_sharing%29
[6] Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Automedia, 1991. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporary_Autonomous_Zone
[7] The term polylogue describes the process of critical, intercultural theorizing. It foregrounds the fundamental questions that make it possible to arrive at authoritave knowledge and to give it a form that can be expressed. This includes interrogating and altering previously dominant ways of thinking. The concepts and systems of European/Western theory prove to be contingent, and their claim to unversality can no longer be justified. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercultural_philosophy
Additional literature (in German):
– Robert Seyfert, Territorium: Terra, die Erde; Webblog, Dresden 2002 http://www.dasgefrorenemeer.de/no2/terra_de.html
– Prof. Dr. Niels Werber: Lehrstuhl Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft I, Universität Siegen, Abhandlung: Intensitäten des Politischen,Tausend Plateaus von Gilles Deleuze und Felix Guattari und Kontrolliert von Rainald Goetz. http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/niels.werber/Goetz.htm