Rogério Haesbaert, El mito de la desterritorialización. Del Fin de los territorios a la multiterritorialidad. Mexico, D.F., Siglo XXI, 2011, 328 pages, $ 20.02, paper. ISBN 978-607-03-0308-1.

Brazilian geography is currently one of the richest, most dynamic, and innovative geographies in Latin America. The Critical Geography movement in Brazil started in 1978 at the Congress held by the Association of Brazilian Geographers in Fortaleza. This movement was driven by such different perspectives as Marxism, phenomenology, anarchism or existentialism. Since then, the Association of Brazilian Geographers has established bonds with social movements, including the Landless and Homeless Workers Movement. After the Washington Consensus, globalization, neoliberal policies, and resistance movements have been objects of critical discussion from a spatial perspective by a number of scholars, including Milton Santos, Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalvez, Ruy Moreira, Antonio Carlos Robert Moraes, and  Rogério Haesbaert.

Haesbaert belongs to a generation that was nurtured by the discussions held in the Fortaleza event. At present, he is Professor in the Department of Geography of the Fluminense Federal University (Rio de Janeiro). In his doctoral dissertation Gauchos e Baianos: Modernidade e Desterritorialização (Gauchos and Baianos: Modernity and Deterritorialization), he discussed the migration of settlers from the South to the North of Brazil driven by the agribusiness (soybean) expansion process. Inasmuch as this migration experience has been worked upon in terms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, I believe that his thesis has opened the way – both theoretically and empirically – for the issues that would be later discussed in  El Mito de la Desterritorialización. Del fin de los territorios a la multiterritorialidad (The Myth of Deterritorialization: From the End of Territories to Multiterritoriality).

In this book, Haesbaert questions the idea of deterritorialization advanced by Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, Bertrand Badie and Paul Virilio in the 1990s. According to these scholars the intensification of mobility (in terms of individuals, goods, and financial flows) and the development of digital technologies would challenge the bond between societies and their territories. These ideas have become embedded into neoliberal ideologies, which argue that the “end of borders” and the “end of the State” would smooth the path for the unrestricted action of market forces.

In the nine chapters which make up this book, Haesbaert  identifies the limitations of the concept of deterritorialization and emphasizes the characteristics of territory in the era of globalization. According to the Brazilian geographer, the idea of multiterritorialization more than that of deterritorialization would account for the challenges posed by the territory in the present times.

One of the key problems noted by Haesbaert in discussions on deterritorialization is that these have not offered a clear definition of territory. “Territory appears as something ‘given’, an implicit concept or a concept referring a priori to an absolute space, or is designated through a negative definition, namely, based on what it is not” (page 28). Therefore, Chapter Two identifies different ideas about territory which have been interwoven both inside and outside geography through the twentieth century. Haesbaert has grouped these conceptions into three perspectives: politics (territory is conceived of as a delimited space over which power is exerted), economy (territory is a source of resources, it has been incorporated into conflicts between social classes, or reflects and determines the international division of labor), culture (territory is seen as a product of the symbolic appropriation by a group in connection with their living space). Having critically discussed these unidimensional perspectives, as well as relational perspectives (Claude Raffestin and Robert Sack) and  Michel Foucault’s concept of power, Haesbaert develops his own concept of territory, according to which political-economical dominance (“more concrete and functional”, page 81) is conjoined with cultural-symbolic appropriation (“more subjective”, page 81).

This perspective assumes that territorial construction is not only a power of States, but of different social groups, classes or institutions can also configure territories on the basis of their exercise of a material and symbolic control over spaces. In line with this, we are subject to the territorialization processes of others, but, at the same time, we also define and redefine our own territoriality. However, the possibilities of exercising this control are unequal from the point of view of class, race, and gender. In Haesbaert’s opinion, every society should have the possibility of defining their own territoriality. It is implicit then that, for him, the relationship that a society establishes with its territory may be conceived of in terms of human rights.

Haesbaert explores two ways to deconstruct the myth of deterritorialization. The first one is epistemological. Haesbaert turns to Deleuze and Guattari in order to understand deterritorialization as an expression of movement (movement being multiple, coexisting, and supplementary) and “becoming” (in terms of orientations, directions, entries, and exits) (Chapter Three). Along these lines, for Haesbaert, as for Doreen Massey, movement is inherent to space and is not an exclusive property of time [1]. Within this framework, deterritorialization is inevitably accompanied by reterritorialization.

The other strategy used by the Brazilian geographer to deconstruct the myth of deterritorialization consists in reviewing the arguments on which the deterritorialization idea has been traditionally founded (Chapters Four, Five, and Six). First of all, Haesbaert questions the idea that free mobility involves weakened borders, as some mobility situations are encouraged (capital or goods), while others (persons) are discouraged (through the erection of borders and walls, for example). As a corollary, it is possible to build up territories in and through movement. Second, Haesbaert recognizes that the immaterial or virtual character of cyberspace is connected with material spaces and converges into the construction of new territorialities. Third, he underscores that the increase of cultural hybridization and, hence, the multiplicity of territorial identities, does not entail the end of the significance of territories from a symbolic perspective since hybridization embeds the possibility of reterritorialization.

As I mentioned above, Haesbaert considers, then, that multiterritoriality rather than deterritorialization is the real symptom of current times (Chapter Eight). The philosophical sources of his idea of multiterritoriality can be traced back to the idea of multiplicity developed by Deleuze and Guattari. Additionally, Haesbaert engages a dialogue with a vision of space as the sphere of coexisting multiplicity (as also suggested by Doreen Massey). Thus, from the author’s perspective, territories-zones, territories-networks, and territories consisting of an interaction of different scales do juxtapose and interweave with one another. Individuals, social groups or institutions, in turn, experience different territories at the same time, either moving or not (e. g., connecting with cyberspace). The territory of diasporas is among those illustrating this multiterritorial character. It  is formed through scattered, discontinuous spaces. These are linked through a network in which symbolic identity references (e.g. memory) interact with other material identity references as the homeland or the neighborhoods in countries where members of one same community come together. In this case, multiterritoriality can shape unexpected future times: it may involve deactivations and/or rhizomatic expansions.

Haesbaert’s attempt to abate the prominence of the idea of deterritorialization does not imply giving up on recognizing the importance of mobility in our contemporary world. On the contrary, the author considers movement a significant component of the configuration of multiterritoriality. The association between space control and mobility makes this book stand out against  most Anglophone books inspired by the so-called ‘mobility turn’. A portion of this literature often endows mobility with a certain emancipationist character, rendering the nomad a paradigmatic metaphor of this emancipation. According to Haesbaert, who, unlike most of the authors of these books does not write from Europe or North America, not all social groups, however, experience mobility in this way. Instead of sharing multiple territories, some of them, “wander about searching for a territory, the most elementary territory of day to day survival” (pages 16-17). This is the case of some refugees or migrants who are excluded from or precariously included in capitalist relations. These social groups configure what Haesbaert calls exclusion clusters: spaces that are fully submitted to “interests that are alien to the population that reproduces there” (page 271). However, Haesbaert attributes a certain transforming potential to these spaces; he conceives of these as settings for the creation of the new, the locus par excellence of the “lines of flight”.

In summary, Haesbaert’s book offers new elements to debates on ideas of territory and territoriality, such as the recent exchange between Stuart Elden (2010) and Marco Antonsich (2010), for example. The book stems from a dialogue between the theoretical positions developed in the Anglophone world and those discussed in Latin America (which are related to the experiences of societies in this region). Within this context, The Myth of Deterritorialization moves us away from a conceptualization of territory as a technical device that does not recognize any type of agency by social groups. On the contrary, for Haesbaert, societies produce, negotiate their territorialities and resist the imposition of territorialities by hegemonic actors.

It should also be highlighted that in Latin America since the 1990s the concept of territory has started to become extensively adopted, discussed and re-signified not only in academia, but also in the political arena. It is through this concept that peasant movements, indigenous peoples and afro-descendants have set up their own identity claims. Additionally, jointly with ecological movements, certain local populations invoke the concept of territory to defend the way in which they use natural resources against the advance of transnational capital and the consequent appropriation of lands, mines, forests, and water. Within this context, El mito de la desterritorialización is becoming a widely used tool for reflecting upon and imagining (material and symbolic) strategies that would guarantee that societies in this region can manage their own territory and their own territorialization. 

Notes

[1] Haesbaert maintains fruitful discussions with Massey, with whom he conducted his postdoctoral studies. Haesbaert (2005) fostered the translation of her For Space into Portuguese and wrote the foreword of the Portuguese edition. 

References

Antonsich M (2010) Rethinking territory. Progress in Human Geography 35: 422-25.

Elden S (2010) Land, terrain, territory. Progress in Human Geography 34: 799-817.

Haesbaert S (2005) Apresentação à edição brasileira. Massey, D Pelo Espaço. Uma nova política da espacialidade. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, pp 9-13.