Deleuze: History and Science.??21
entities such as industries or sectors. A city assembles the activities of these populations in a concrete physical locale. And similarly for territorial states, from empires and kingdoms to nation-states.
Cities possess a variety of material and expressive components. On the material side, we must list for each neighborhood the different buildings in which the daily activities and rituals of the residents are performed and staged (the pub and the church, the shops, the houses, and the local square) as well as the streets connecting these places. In the nineteenth century new material components were added, water and sewage pipes, conduits for the gas that powered early street lighting, and later on electricity cables and telephone wires. Some of these components simply add up to a larger whole but citywide systems of mechanical transportation and communication can form very complex networks with properties of their own, some of which affect the material form of an urban center and its surroundings. A good example is locomotives (and their rail networks) which possess such a large mass and are so hard to stop and accelerate again, that they determine an interval of two or three miles between stops. This, in turn, can influence the spatial distribution of the suburbs which grow around train stations, giving them their characteristic bead-like shape. 22 On the expressive side, a good example is a city’s skyline, that is, the silhouette cut against the sky by the mass of its buildings and the decorated tops of its churches and public buildings. For centuries these skylines were the first image visitors saw as they approached a city, a recognizable expression of a town’s identity, an effect lost later on as suburbs and industrial hinterlands blurred city boundaries. In some cases, the physical skyline of a town is simply a sum of its parts but the rhythmic repetition of architectural motifs – minarets, domes and spires, belfries and steeples – and the counterpoint these motifs create with the surrounding landscape, may produce emergent expressive effects. 23 In the twentieth century skyscrapers and other signature buildings were added to the skyline as a means to make it unique and instantly recognizable, a clear sign that the expressivity of skylines had become the object of deliberate planning.
22 Deleuze: History and Science.
A variety of territorializing and deterritorializing processes may affect the state of a city’s boundaries, making them either more permeable or more rigid, and affecting the sense of geographical identity of its inhabitants. Two extreme forms of these boundaries stand out in Western history. In ancient Greek towns a large part of the population lived in summer months in their rural homes. This double residence and the lack of clearly-defined city boundaries affected their sense of urban identity, as shown by the fact that a town’s residents congregated into neighborhoods by their rural place of origin, that is, they maintained their original geographical loyalties. 24 European medieval towns, on the other hand, were surrounded by stone walls, giving not only a definite spatial boundary to the jurisdiction of a town’s government, but also a very clear sense of geographical identity to its inhabitants. As the historian Fernand Braudel puts it, these highly territorialized cities “were the West’s first focus of patriotism – and the patriotism they inspired was long to be more coherent and much more conscious than the territorial kind, which emerged only slowly in the first states.” 25 The development of suburbs and industrial hinterlands, starting in the nineteenth century, blurred the boundaries of urban centers with clear deterritorializing effects. For a while cities managed to hang on to their old identities by retaining their center (which became home for train stations and later on, large department stores) but the further extension of suburbs after World War II and the differentiation of their land uses (retail, wholesale, manufacturing, office space) recreated the complex combinations that used to characterize the old city’s center. This process, in effect, created brand new centers in the suburban band deterritorializing the identity of cities. 26 But centuries before residential suburbs replaced city walls another process was militating against the strong identity of urban centers: a loss of autonomy relative to the emerging territorial states. Once cities were absorbed, mostly through military force, the local patriotism of their citizens was largely diminished. In some areas of Europe strong urban identities were obstacles to the creation of nationwide loyalties. For this reason, the first European territorial states (France, England, Spain) were born in those areas which had remained poorly urbanized
Deleuze: History and Science.??23
as Europe emerged from the shadow of the collapse of the Roman Empire. The regions that witnessed an intense urbanization between the years 1000 and 1300 A.D. (northern Italy, northern Germany, Flanders, and the Netherlands) delayed the formation of larger territorial assemblages for centuries. But between the year 1494, when a French army invaded the Italian city-states for the first time, and 1648, the end of the Thirty Years War, most autonomous cities were brought under control. Indeed, the peace treaty that ended that long war, the treaty of Westphalia, is considered the event that gave birth to international law, that is, the legal system in which territorial states were explicitly recognized as legal actors through the concept of “sovereignty”. 27
As assemblages, territorial states posses a variety of material components. These range from the natural resources contained within their frontiers (mineral deposits like coal, oil, precious metals, agricultural land of varying fertility) to their human populations (a potential source of tax payers and of army and navy recruits). The frontiers (and natural boundaries) defining these assemblages play a material role in relation to other such large entities. That is, each kingdom, empire, or nation-state has a given geostrategic position relative to other territorial entities with which it shares frontiers, as well as material advantages deriving from some natural boundaries such as coastlines which may give it access to important sea routes. After the treaty of Westphalia was signed, future wars tended to involve several national actors. This implies, as the historian Paul Kennedy has argued, that geography affected the fate of a nation not merely through
... such elements as a country’s climate, raw materials,
fertility of agriculture, and access to trade routes – important though they all were to its overall prosperity – but rather [via] the critical issue of strategical location during these multilateral wars. Was a particular nation able to concentrate its energies upon one front, or did it have to fight on several? Did it share common borders with weak states, or powerful ones? Was it chiefly a land power, a sea power, or a hybrid, and what advantages and disadvantages did that bring? Could it easily pull out of a great war in Central Europe if it wished to? Could it secure additional resources from overseas?. 28
24 Deleuze: History and Science.
There is also a wide range of expressive components of these larger assemblages, from the natural expressivity of their landscapes to the ways in which they express their military might and political sovereignty. The hierarchies of government organizations operating at a national, provincial, and local scales, played a key role in determining how nationalist allegiances would be expressed in nation-states through flags and anthems, parades and celebrations. The cities that became national capitals also played an important expressive role, the best example of which is the style of urban design that became fashionable in Europe after the Thirty Years War. This style, referred to as the “Grand Manner”, transformed the new capitals into Baroque displays of the power of their centralized governments: wide avenues were built and lined with trees; sweeping vistas were created, framed by long rows of uniform facades and punctuated by visual markers, such as obelisks, triumphal arches, or statues; and all the different design elements, including the existing or modified topography, were joined in ambitious, overall geometric patterns. 29
National capitals also played a territorializing role, homogenizing and exporting to the provinces a variety of cultural materials, from a standard language and currency, to legal codes, and medical and educational systems. Territorialization also had a directly spatial manifestation: the controllability of the movement of immigrants, goods, money and, more importantly, foreign troops, across a nation’s borders. While the peace treaty of Westphalia gave frontiers a legitimate legal status, the decades that followed its signing witnessed the most intense effort to rigidify these legal borders through the systematic construction of fortress towns, perimeter walls and citadels. In the hands of the brilliant military engineer Sebastian Le Prestre de Vauban, for example, France’s borders became nearly impregnable, maintaining their defensive value until the French Revolution. Vauban built double rows of fortresses in the northern and southeastern frontiers, so systematically related to each other that one “would be within earshot of French fortress guns all the way from the Swiss border to the Channel”. 30 The main deterritorializing processes were those that affected the integrity of these borders. These could be spatial
Deleuze: History and Science.??25
processes such as the secession of a province, or the loss of a piece of territory to another country. But they could also be border-defying economic processes. As the frontiers of territorial states were becoming solidified after the Thirty Years War, some maritime cities which had resisted integration were creating commercial and financial networks that were truly international. Such a maritime city was Amsterdam, the seventeenth-century core of what is today called a world-economy: a large geographical area displaying a high degree of economic coherence as well as an international division of labor. 28 A world-economy, in fact, had existed in the West since the fourteenth century, with Venice as its core, but when it acquired global proportions in the seventeenth it became a powerful deterritorializing process for nation-states, governing economic flows that, to this day, easily cross political frontiers.
This admittedly simplified description of society as an assemblage of assemblages should serve as a reminder of how misleading it is to view human history as comprising a single temporal flow, whether the flow of multiple personal biographies or the one made of the slow glacial movements that affect a society’s structure. Indeed, given that even at the largest scale that social assemblages can take (territorial states, world-economies) we never reach a point at which we may coherently talk of “society as a whole”, the very term “society” should be regarded as a mere convenient expression. That is, the term should not be considered to have a referent the existence of which we are committed to assert. This is perhaps the way to treat terms like “the social field” or “the socius”, terms that constantly appear in the original version of assemblage theory: convenient general expressions that can be replaced when necessary by a description of a concrete assemblage. Only then will philosophy catch up with the groundbreaking research of materialist historians like Fernand Braudel.
【德勒兹研究】德勒兹：历史与科学
