Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.2 (Part 3)

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The integral mechanism of the aforementioned social breakdown is the tripartite process of ‘territorialization’, ‘deterritorialization’, and ‘reterritorialization’, as elaborated by D&G. This can be somewhat difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with the concept, but as their influence on Land’s work is undeniable, we will explore them further in this section. Before going any further, we must keep in mind that everything we are about to speak of is not always clearly defined in the literature and that not all D&G scholars necessarily agree on what these fundamental terms mean either. While we cannot promise that this investigation into their ideas will adhere to deleuzoguattarian orthodoxy, it will nevertheless attempt to wrestle with them as best we can.

Before we can untie this knot, please note that these words shall henceforth be given in the Anglish1 as ‘landing’, ‘unlanding’, and ‘edlanding’2, both in this work and all others going forwards

To some extent each of the three processes correspond roughly to the progression of the three possible forms of the ‘socius’ or “social machine” mentioned by D&G. Landing is, of course, more or less synonymous with the tribal social machine and the body of the earth. Just as the members of the tribe are inscribed with markings signifying their belonging, the earth is marked with the process of production which takes the forms of the various things the tribe erects or protects to mark their land.

In chapter three, D&G (1972/1977) do not take landing to simply mean residence or geographical distribution (as they associate this instead with the second stage of the socius), but the subdivision of the people on an indivisible earth where the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive relations of each section are inscribed along with the other relations (just as the four varṇas were subdivided upon the indivisible body of the Puruṣa and are linked to the Devas, the Earth, the Heavens, and Space, as well as domesticated animals and villages). Bonds are indeed most weighty at this social stage. D&G state that the functioning of the social machine at this stage consists of the “declension of alliance and filiation” (p. 146) which signify political or economic structures on the one hand and patrilineal descent on the other. As a result of this function, it is also “segmentary”, as it cuts up (human society into) segments of various lengths through the twin blades of tribe and lineage:

“The segmentary machine mixes rivalries, conflicts, and ruptures throughout the variations of filiation and the fluctuations of alliance. The whole system evolves between two poles: that of fusion through opposition to other groups, and that of scission through the constant formation of new lineages aspiring to independence, with capitalization of alliances and filiation. From one pole to the other, all the misfirings and failures in a system that is constantly reborn of its own disharmonies. What does Jeanne Favret mean when she shows, along with other ethnologists, that “the persistence of a segmentary organization requires paradoxically that its mechanisms be ineffectual enough so that fear remains the motor of the whole”? And what is this fear? It would appear that social formations experienced a morbid and mournful foreboding of things to come, although what comes to them always comes from without, rushing in through their opening. Perhaps it is even for this reason that it arrives from without; they suffocate its inner potentiality, at the cost of the dysfunctions that constitute an integral part of the functioning of their system.” (p. 153)

It is quite interesting that D&G note that the end of this segmentary machine always arrives from the outside (in the form of the imperial barbarian who overcodes their codes), as a result of having suffocated the possibility of being devoured from within. The parallels between this theory and certain readings of the trajectory of Indian history are probably fairly obvious to the reader. However, the outsider isn’t actually the greatest threat to the tribal society, they argue; rather, the real danger is comes from within, with the possibility of irreversible scission leading to decoded flows and a blind, dumb, unlanded socius, which is why, though it is not:

“ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them, and maintains the merchant and the blacksmith in a subordinate position, so that the flows of exchange and the flows of production do not manage to break the codes in favor of their abstract or fictional quantities” (p. 154)

Again, we see here some obvious parallels to certain simplistic readings of Hindu sociological history, although the restraint on merchants and entrepreneurs is nothing unique to Hindu civilization, either. We can similar attitudes and restrictions placed on their class and trades in Confucianist Asia as well as in Christian Europe until fairly recently.

Segmentation is also seen by Land as a byproduct of capitalism. In a 1995 article, “Cyberspace Anarchitecture as Jungle-War”, originally published in an architectural magazine, Architectural Design 118: Architects in Cyberspace, Land states that “Capitalisation segments the earth into a tightly-managed accumulative core surrounded by quasi-concentric bands of peripheral hot competition,” which binds “commerce to the meta-stationary headline of white-economy initiative­ monopolisation” (p. 58). In the core, “Economic power builds itself upon axiomatised production flows” channeled through the coding of consumption, the taming of the bourgeoise, military power, industrial power, state currency monopolies, property rights, and economic regulations. The smooth, undivided globe is covered with supposedly neutral processes that intermediate between powers, virtualized through telecommunications and coded by capital to make circulation more efficient. This leads to further segmentation as “Trends to polarisation and segregation are densely invested” (p. 58).

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