Querencia

The first page of Proust: I woke up, and I never knew in the beginning where I was, so I went through all the bedrooms of my life. The way I think of it is like a Disney film. First, you think it was better when you were seven years old, and furniture looked a certain way. Then you think, no, it was best when you were twelve, so all the chairs dance around and restructure themselves into the bedroom you had when you were twelve. Finally, you reach your current age, and, here, they find their places in yet a different arrangement. Territorialization works in this way. In music, the refrain is making that home for yourself in music by territorializing sound through repetition.

What does it mean to have a home?

I don’t know whether any of you have seen bullfights; maybe you think they are horrible, or maybe you are interested in death, like Hemingway. In a bullfight, the bull emerges out into a world which is completely unfamiliar. The bull must then territorialize this world, so he finds a part of the bull ring—it’s arbitrary, because the space is all the same-which will be his terrain. In bullfighting language, this is called the querencia, from querer.

This space belongs to the bull. None of the actors in the bullfight, and especially not the matador, will ever try to get into that place. They have to identify it, because there the bull is supreme. They have to lure it out of its querencia in order to fight it in some other place. All of this is in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, his book on the bullfight. As he says, he was interested in the bullfight because, as a writer, he wanted to know what death was, and the bullfight often results in the deaths of the bulls and also of the mata-dors. But you can see the usefulness of understanding territorialization as your querencia, the way you naturalize, normalize, make your own space, space being understood in the sense of the plane of immanence, that is to say, the connections of all these things. Some are interests or pas-sions; some are objects, tasks, or habits. All that you organize into something which I guess you call your identity, but it isn’t your identity; it is your territorialization, and you are caught in it. For the infant, that will be the parents. Why do you think Deleuze and Guattari attack Freud and the Oedipus complex? Who wants to be caught with their parents their whole life?

You want to get away from them. Kristeva and Irigaray’s description of the mother:

You have to get away. You have to deterritorialize.

And now another crucial Deleuzean ex-pression: the line of flight. You must try to invent lines of flight out of your territory, because your territory is going to be taken over by Google, by General Motors, by Coca-Cola. It will lie in the globalized world of the great corporations. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. You can try to make a little space that you call your own, and that will be what Deleuze calls your secret garden.

that from Jameson’s Years Of Theory.