T
TERRITORIALIZATION / DETERRITORIALIZ-
ATION / RETERRITORIALIZATION Coined
by French poststructuralist thinkers Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, these terms
describe a concept of material change
often used in postmodern and postcolonial
theory. In A Thousand Plateaus (first pub-
lished 1980), Deleuze and Guattari argue
that the physical, biological and cultural
world is made up of layered regulatory
systems or ‘strata’. Preserving unity and
uniformity, these strata work within the
fixed elements and limits that they also
constitute and maintain. While experience
presents constant variation, these differen-
ces are always cancelled out by the strata.
Changes to individual elements cannot
transform the whole system. However, the
variable potentials and qualities of matter
itself constantly overflow the strata, form-
ing a body without organs that gives rise to
new systems and structures. And since they
do not depend upon but constitute the fixed
units they order, the strata also have a
virtual existence ‘alongside’ the actual
matter they affect. Deleuze and Guattari
therefore characterize stratified systems as
‘territorialized’, embodied instances of an
abstract function. This abstract or virtual
function differs from Plato’s unchanging,
intangible Idea, however, as it is precisely
because strata are ‘territorialized’ that they
are also subject to processes of deterri-
torialization, where differences escape
from territorialized functions, and reterri-
torialization, where new systems are
formed or, conversely, an old one is re-
embodied in a different situation. Rather
than a Platonic denial of change and differ-
ence, Deleuze and Guattari offer a novel
way of thinking its concrete reality. [DH]
260
THOMPSON, EDWARD PALMER (1924–1993)
Left-wing historian and political activist
who, alongside the critics Raymond
Williams and Richard Hoggart, played
an important role in the foundation of
‘cultural studies’ as an academic discipline.
Thompson’s The Making of the English
Working Class (first published 1963) was a
pioneering work of social history which
aimed to rescue the ordinary lives of work-
ing people from ‘the enormous conde-
scension of posterity’ (1968: 13), and to
demonstrate that the development of class-
consciousness is ‘an active process, which
owes as much to agency as to conditioning’
(1968: 9).
Thompson’s belief in the autonomy of
the individual was reflected in his politics.
Amongst the first ‘New Left’ intellectuals,
Thompson quit the Communist Party and
established New Reasoner, a journal of
‘socialist humanism’ that was later
subsumed into New Left Review. Soon
afterwards, its editorial agenda moved
towards continental theorists such as Louis
Althusser, prompting Thompson, in ‘The
Poverty of Theory’ (1978), to declare
‘unrelenting intellectual war’ (1978: 381)
against Althusserian theory, which, he felt,
presented citizens as ‘utterly passive’
(1978: 366) victims of ideology. [CRC]
See also Chapters 3 and 5.
Further reading
Thompson, Edward Palmer (1968) The
Making of the English Working Class,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Thompson, Edward Palmer (1978) The
Poverty of Theory and Other Essays,
London: Merlin Press.