Territorien des Widerstandes. Von Ver-ortung und Ent-grenzung der Demokratie. | Territories of resistance. The smooth places of democracy

„Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces“ (A Thousand Plateaus, 500).

“Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather thinking takes place in the relationship between territory and the earth“ (What is Philosophy?, 85). When observing the current social movements, one has therefore not only to analyse their practices, but rather one has to focus on the relation between the movements and their territories, namely the occupied places. Exploring this relationship seems to be inevitable to understand the movements and their way to think a new form of democracy. This presentation should give a glimpse of how a deleuzian analysis of social movements and the squatted places could look like. The first part of the paper will try to clarify some important deleuzian terms like the nomad, smooth spaces and control societies. In the second part of my paper I will try to exemplify the theoretical input with some remarks on current social movements, especially the Direngezi movement in Istanbul.

Therefore I will argue, that the social movements of today create smooth spaces, when they squat certain places and that this intrinsic connection to the occupied space has a tremendous influence on the way these social movements think radical and revolutionary politics. The new form of democracy, these movements try to think and live at the same time, cannot be theorized – so my thesis – without theorizing the territory of these movements, namely the squatted places. Social movements “deterritoralize” places, by squatting social movements delete these places from the pattern of the city, they set these places in motion, they change these places so that even when the movements are gone these places are never the same they were before. The processes of the places “becoming smooth” and the movements “becoming democratic” cannot be thought separately. Social movements are trying to think about new ways of democracy, trying to live new ways of democracy, trying to start the process of becoming democratic, so the social movements are not only acting upon places, they are places themselves, places of trying, places of becoming, places of thinking the new.

The aim of my paper is to outline this very intrinsic connection between new ways of thinking democracy and the squatting of actual and virtual public places.

MMag. Christoph Hubatschke studierte Politikwissenschaften und Philosophie an der Universität Wien und schreibt derzeit an seiner Dissertation zu Gilles Deleuze und Sozialen Bewegungen. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Poststrukturalismus insbesonders die Arbeiten von Deleuze und Guattari, Politische Theorie, Demokratietheorie und Technikphilosophie.