Striation and territorialization found in rectangles

[u/Desperate-Case-6918]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Dd-EiJnP2Uy/?stkn%3DcG5ib2g5dWtla3Yw

This video felt awfully Deleuzian to me. Is this a good example of what striation and territorialization looks like?

[u/3corneredvoid]

It's a good example of how territorialisation can come about from some process appearing other than conscious or deliberate.

Rectangles and cuboids align, they pack efficiently, they tessellate, they tetris, a right-angle cut of a rectangle or section of a cuboid is also a rectangle or a cuboid, a right-angle join of two rectangles could have been formed in at least two ways from two different pairs once joined. Rectangles generate rectangularity. When you've cut the timbers to length as rectangles, the offcuts are also rectangles. 

Rectangles and cuboids produce more rectangles and cuboids due to this perverse compatibility of right-angles with each other. The Earth is locally flat and the perpendicular force of gravity encourages rectangles to stack to the heights. 

If you imagine some other expressive form with this aptitude in its milieu, that's also territorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari have a phrase for this: "rigid segmentarity".

Paul Virilio shows that after the Greek city-state, the Roman Empire imposes a geometrical or linear reason of State including a general outline of camps and fortifications, a universal art of “marking boundaries by lines,” a laying-out of territories, a substitution of space for places and territorialities, and a transformation of the world into the city; in short, an increasingly rigid segmentarity. The segments, once underscored or overcoded, seem to lose their ability to bud, they seem to lose their dynamic relation to segmentations-in-progress, or in the act of coming together or coming apart. If there exists a primitive “geometry” (a protogeometry), it is an operative geometry in which figures are never separable from the affectations befalling them, the lines of their becoming, the segments of their segmentation: there is “roundness,” but no circle, “alignments,” but no straight line, etc. On the contrary, State geometry, or rather the bond between the State and geometry, manifests itself in the primacy of the theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple morphological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for segmentations-in-progress. Geometry and arithmetic take on the power of the scalpel. Private property implies a space that has been overcoded and gridded by surveying.

—from TP, "1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity"

Where D&G write "the primacy of the theorem-element, which substitutes fixed or ideal essences for supple morphological formations, properties for affects, predetermined segments for segmentations-in-progress" they are saying something like "if everything looks like a rectangle, you'll know how to divide it and amalgamate it into other rectangles without regard to its particulars". 

[u/BlockComposition → u/3corneredvoid]

The moral of the story is, we need more gothic architecture.

[u/apophasisred]

Geometry, as the name clearly indicates, was the first system of substituting a representational model for the continuous and infinitely complex interactive environments of the milieu. It has been at least since the Egyptians deeply involved in the notion of property. And I think property here functions in both senses. Meaning something that belongs to someone through some state agency and also that which has an essence. In both of these, we discover the reductive character of actualization. Is of course finds its its apotheosis and the ubiquity of rectilinear conception through the abscissa and origin and on to n-dimensional notions of spatialization. It's emphasis upon visualization as mastery and its invasion of the other senses forms the basis of our notions of thought in actualization.