Dog Piss, Or a Meditation on Territory

"Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. As Lorenz says. coral fish are posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them."(Deleuze and Guattari, a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, 316).

For Deleuze this marking, this territorialization as art, finds ultimate expression in birds. Their songs, their nests, their movements, their turnings of leaves on the ground. But as I sat, this morning, drinking my coffee on the patio, I watched dogs. There are a phenomenal amount of dogs in the apartment complex in which I live. Every morning and every evening (when I drink red wine as opposed to coffee), dogs, dogs, and more dogs prance around the green pissing on everything. I never stopped to think about their markings as art. What a concept. How can piss be art? Well, you could stick a crucifix in a vial of it...but the act of pissing? The act of dog pissing? Art? It is easy to see in the songs of birds, their movements, their nests, an act of art. Dog piss is not so easy.

And yet I think "If we can see art in dog piss, we can see art in property." Property that ultimate value in Marx encounters in Deleuze something of a higher value. Art is primary not property. And how can this be for a Marxist like Deleuze? He does this by transforming art as first, beyond human, and second, as expression. Property is thus not what belongs to humans but rather it is what belongs to actions of various sorts. As an act, as a becoming, property becomes expression as opposed to that which gives expression. And really, if we can see the art in a dog pissing to mark his place, then art becomes something much different than the paintings at the museum. Just as property ceases to be a belonging. It is not the signature that makes a subject. A signature never denotes ownership. A signature merely holds a place. This is what Deleuze claims for art And a dog pissing is all about the constant becoming of territory.

When you live in a small place filled with dogs, you can see how territory is always about marking and remarking. There is no ownership; no alpha dog to assert his authority. The dogs do not mix enough to sort out this hierarchy (although such a show down might be interesting). Instead, the dogs continually piss all over other dogs' marks. They mark their territory only to have to remark later in the day. There is a virtual grid on the green in front of my patio. A grid of dog piss that makes that green belong to no one dog but to all the dogs. It is a grid also overlaid with the scent of cats, the markings they make of their fur against the small trees. The mockingbirds constantly patrol, alert to invaders, ready to defend their piece of property. And human children, my own included, run about this piece of land, terrorizing and territorializaingwith their laughs, toys and dances. It is the ultimate communal property, and it is created through multiple acts of expression....emergences of art.

One last quote from Paul Park's A Princess of Roumania. In this novel, one of the main characters has become a dog. The following is a bit of narrative written from her dog mind."As she left the clearing and moved away through the thin woods, she felt she was pushing through a net, each cord of which was the circle of urine marks that each dog had drawn around the fire. Her instinct was to stop often, restrained by the net, but she pushed through. On the far side she filled her lungs with cleaner air, which was nevertheless scented with a myriad of small traces of animals and men. They seemed to draw glowing lines in front of her on the snow"(242).