This move towards deterritorialization connects with Dochertyís
reading of McGuckianís poetry as problematizing ëplace-logicí.
Docherty uses Gilles Deleuze and FÈlix Guattariís reading in On the
Line of the ëRhizomeí (1983) which can be developed further in rela-
tion to the poems.^36 The rhizome is conceived of as an underground
network that branches off into infinity, continually on the move,
refusing the monolithic, substituting for binary structures, multiplicity,
pluralism and strategies of inclusion. As a metaphor for the dynamics
of deterritorialization, the rhizome refuses containment and charting
borderlands, it disclaims any stabilized space.
Graham Huggan draws on Deleuze and Guattariís description of
the map: not as delimiter but as something that can always be re-
mapped and understood in terms of the sprawling rhizome from A
Thousand Plateaus (1988). He argues: ëThe mapís flexible design is
likened by Deleuze and Guattari to a rhizome, whose ìdeterritori-
alizing lines of flightî effect ìan asignifying rupture against the
oversignifying break separating structures or cutting across a single
structureî.í^37 What is interesting is when Huggan indiciates how the
writer Nicole Brossard has adapted Deleuze and Guattariís notion of
the rhizome as a space which is ëopen and connectable in all its
dimensionsí into a feminist cartography.^38 That is, a cartography
whereby the revised spaces occupied by feminism, regionalism and
ethnicity challenge the claims of cultural centrism as shifting grounds
that are themselves subject to transformative patterns of de- and
reterritorialization.^39 This work explicitly acknowledges the relativity
of modes of spatial (and, by extension, cultural) perception in the
pursuit of social and cultural change.^40 In this way, the minority
discourses of feminism and post-colonialism are comparable in their
fight to re-map cultural or ideological spaces in an attempt to bring the
periphery to the centre.
Comparably, Stuart Hall argues that by attending to the
developmental, unfixed and plural nature of national identity space
36 Docherty, ëPostmodern McGuckianí, p.206.
37 Graham Huggan, p.125.
38 Cf. Nicole Brossard, Armantes, translated as Lovhers (Guernica Editions,
Canada: 1987).
39 Graham Huggan, p.127.
40 Ibid., p.125.