The state and deterritorialisation

Deleuze and Guattari allow that particular kinds of state, such as the ancient empires, city-states and feudal states, succeed one another in history. At this level, they follow Nietzsche’s hypothesis with regard to the emergence of actual states, arguing that these do not result from the internal dynamics of the territorial machine but are imposed from without. Citing Nietzsche’s remarks on the founders of the state in On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994: essay 2, para. 17), they insist that ‘the death of the primitive system always comes from without: history is the history of contingencies and encounters’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:195). Equally, in accordance with the principle of Nietzsche’s genealogical method that ‘the events that restore a thing to life are not the same as those that gave rise to it in the first place’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:261), they argue that the state is transformed and adapted to new ends within the capitalist axiomatic. Once the newly decoded flows of capital and labour converge and begin to transform European societies,

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[the State] can no longer be content to overcode territorial elements that are already coded, it must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly deterritorialized, which means: putting despotism in the service of the new class relations, integrating the relations of wealth and poverty…everywhere stamping the mark of the Urstaat on the new state of things.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977:218)

The capitalist state represents a transformation of the earlier apparatus of overcoding in so far as it has now become a key mechanism for the coordination and control of the decoded and deterritorialised flows which are coextensive with capitalism itself. The functioning of the capitalist axiomatic implies agents of decision, administration and inscription, in other words a bureaucracy and a technocracy which function as an apparatus of regulation. The state has always performed this regulatory role, beginning with the regulation of the conditions of labour, including wages, the granting of monopolies and the acquisition of colonial territories. Deleuze and Guattari also point to a more directly economic function which has been assumed by the state in its ‘military industrial’ form since the Second World War, namely the realisation and absorption of surplus value through the costs of administration and military expenditure (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:235).

Over and above these economic and technical functions within the capitalist axiomatic, there is another function of the state in which the shadow of the Urstaat continues to hover over modern societies. A principal function of the state is the reterritorialisation of the mutant flows generated by the dynamic of the system as a whole. The state reterritorialises those flows so as to prevent them breaking loose at the edges of the social axiomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:258). As a result, Deleuze and Guattari argue, modern capitalist societies are caught between the two poles of an extreme futurism and an archaism, between a deterritorialisation which, if left unchecked, might carry them towards an absolute threshold and ‘the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:260). These negative and positive functions of the modern state reflect the dual character of the capitalist social axiomatic as Deleuze and Guattari describe it, but they also point to the singular role played by the concept of the despotic state machine in their universal history. Despotism is at once the primordial form of the state, as it appeared in the ancient empires, and the figure of the state in general.³ In the terms of their account, the concept of the state is a ‘special category’, actualised in different concrete forms, but not identifiable with any of these, since it is also an abstraction which haunts all subsequent forms of sovereign power. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987) the distinction between the state as pure abstract machine

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and historically specific forms of state is made explicit by the introduction of the concept of the state-form and the distinction between this and specific forms of state, such as ancient archaic empires and early modern monarchical states.

As an abstract machine, the state-form may be rigorously defined by a specific form and a function, prior to any concrete instantiation. The essential function of the state is capture: it is inseparable from ‘a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:386). In the West, the form in which this function has appeared is political sovereignty: ‘the State is sovereignty’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360). However, the underlying abstract form of the state is an interiority of some kind, since ‘sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of interiorizing, of appropriating locally’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360). The exercise of sovereignty therefore requires the institution of borders and the constitution of a milieu of interiority. This form and this function are in fact two aspects of the same assemblage, since it is by means of capture that the state establishes a milieu of interiority. Historically, the most important mechanisms of capture have been those exercised upon land or its produce, upon labour, and upon money. These correspond to Marx’s ‘holy trinity’ of ground rent, profit and taxes, but they have long existed under other forms. All three modes of capture occur in paradigmatic form in the ancient empires, as described in Mumford’s analysis of the primitive megamachine or Marx’s account of the Asiatic mode of production. In the despotic machine, the body of the despot assumes the role of ‘full body’ and becomes the quasi-cause and the destination of all social production (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:194). To that extent this implies a form of capture of the primary social flows; Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of despotism already hinted at what they later call the abstract machine of capture.

The concept of the state-form as machine of capture will be examined more closely in Chapter 6, in connection with the specific case of colonial capture. For the moment, it is important to follow through the consequences of this distinction between the state-form and particular kinds of state for Deleuze and Guattari’s historical and political analysis. Most importantly, this distinction enables them to posit an evolution of the state while still maintaining the thesis that, in certain fundamental respects, there has only ever been a single form of state. It is with respect to the abstract machine or state-form that they deny all evolutionary theses concerning the origin of the state, insisting instead that it ‘was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial Urstaat, the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:217). Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history is remarkable both for its level of abstraction

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and its resolute anti-historicism. The territorial, despotic and axiomatic social machines are not considered as successive stages in an evolution, in the sense that one can be regarded as resulting from the effects of another. However, this does not mean that there are not historical progressions from societies dominated by one machine to societies dominated by another, or that there are not ‘evolutionary’ developments across the successive actualisations of a particular machine. Deleuze and Guattari’s view is that all three abstract social machines co-exist in a perpetual state of becoming or virtuality. Concrete history, as they later suggest, is simply the working out of these processes in particular cases: ‘All history does is to translate a co-existence of becomings into a succession’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:430).

Within the perspective of their universal history, they introduce a typology of different kinds of state, distinguishing three major kinds. The first is the imperial archaic state, which corresponds to the despotic mega-machine described in Anti-Oedipus (1977). This is the ‘immemorial Urstaat, dating as far back as Neolithic times, and perhaps farther still’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:427). It is a type of state which operates primarily by means of overcoding and which is characterised by the absence of private property and money except as these relate to the universal obligation towards the despot. Money exists only in the form of the tax owed, while property is held only in virtue of the individual’s membership or function within the community. The net result is a form of generalised servitude of the population which Deleuze and Guattari call machinic enslavement. The second type of state is one in which machinic enslavement is replaced by a regime of social subjection. Under this type of state, property has become private and the bond that ties the individual to the sovereign has become personal. Relations of personal dependence or allegiance replace those based upon public functions and the modern form of law emerges as an important aspect of the maintenance of rule. There are many forms of state corresponding to this type, including feudal systems, monarchies and city-states. They form the immediate historical precursor to the modern nation-states which appear in the context of the emergence of capitalism. The nature of these modern states cannot be understood independently of the processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation which capitalism develops to a higher level.

The internal principle of the evolution in forms of state derives from the tendency of states to produce their own forms of deterritorialisation and decodification. Even the archaic empires did not overcode ‘without also freeing a large quantity of decoded flows that escape’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:448). In particular, their own mechanisms gave rise to flows of certain kinds of materials and agents: the construction of public works generated flows of metals and metallurgy, while the collection of taxes gave rise to flows of money which, in turn, allowed the emergence

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of merchants and banking. The statecraft manual of the Chinese Qin dynasty described these flows generated by the operations of the body politic as ‘lice of the empire’.⁴ Freed slaves, or more generally the forms of social ‘outsider’, were another deterritorialising flow which, in turn, fed into the existing flows of metallurgy, trade and commerce: what matters is that ‘in one way or another the apparatus of overcoding gives rise to flows that are themselves decoded—flows of money, labour, property’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:449).

It is against this background that Deleuze and Guattari identify a new function for the state, namely the organisation of conjunctions of decoded flows. This new function in turn leads to a transformation in the nature of the state and the development of mechanisms of capture based upon social subjectification to replace those of machinic enslavement. However, this new kind of state only performs local and ‘topical’ or qualitative conjunctions of flows through such means as the organisation of corporations in the towns or the maintenance of feudal relations in agriculture. While these inhibit the propagation of flows, the state cannot prevent new flows from continuing to escape and so in effect it prepares the way for the generalised conjunction of decoded flows that is capitalism: ‘Capitalism forms when the flow of unqualified wealth encounters the flow of unqualified labour and conjugates with it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:453). With this, a new threshold of deterritorialisation is reached.

In the Conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), deterritorialisation is defined with deceptive simplicity as the movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:508). In fact, as Deleuze and Guattari go on to point out, the concept is complex in a number of ways: ‘deterritorialization is never simple but always multiple and composite’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:509). First, it always involves at least two elements, namely the territory that is being left behind or reconstituted and the deterritorialising element. A territory of any kind always includes ‘vectors of deterritorialisation’, either because the territory itself is inhabited by dynamic movements or processes or because the assemblage that sustains it is connected to other assemblages. In the case of Marx’s account of primitive accumulation, the development of commodity markets is one such vector of deterritorialisation in relation to the social and economic space of feudal agriculture, encouraging the shift to large-scale commercial production. The conjugation of the stream of displaced labour with the flow of deterritorialised money capital provided the conditions under which capitalist industry could develop. Second, deterritorialisation is always ‘inseparable from correlative reterritorialisations’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:509).

Reterritorialisation does not mean returning to the original territory, but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialised elements recombine and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the

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modification of the old. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between the connection of deterritorialised flows, which refers to the ways in which distinct deterritorialisations can interact to accelerate one another, and the conjugation of distinct flows, which refers to the ways in which one may incorporate or ‘overcode’ another, thereby effecting a relative blockage of its movement (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:220). It is significant that capitalism is born as the result of a generalised conjunction or conjugation of deterritorialised flows of capital and labour, since the conjugation of flows implies a different form of reterritorialisation to that found in the case of connection and a less positive outcome of the prior deterritorialisations. In effect, this concept of conjugation introduces a ‘zone of indiscernibility’ through which the concept of reterritorialisation is connected to the concept of the state-form as an abstract machine of capture.

Unlike capitalism, capital is not in the first instance a machine of capture but a nomadic and ‘universal cosmopolitan energy which overflows every restriction and bond’ (Marx 1964:129, cited in Deleuze and Guattari 1987:453). Capital is one of those non-territorially based organisations which have always formed part of the external environment of states, a polymorphous machine of deterritorialisation which exists only in its own metamorphoses (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:360). For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that from its inception ‘capitalism has mobilized a force of deterritorialization infinitely surpassing the deterritorialization proper to the State’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:453). This superior power of deterritorialisation may be glimpsed in the form in which capital appeared in the aftermath of financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s, namely as an enormous monetary mass which circulates ceaselessly through foreign exchange and stock markets around the globe, beyond the control of any one government or organisation and subject only to the vicissitudes of the market. Unlike all existing forms of state hitherto, capital is not a territorially based machine since its object is neither a portion of the earth nor a people but value pure and simple, the commodity form of private property where this has become a type of convertible abstract right, an entitlement to profit share, a futures contract or a financial derivative. As a result, ‘it could be said that capitalism develops an economic order that could do without the State. And in fact capitalism is not short on war cries against the State, not only in the name of the market, but by virtue of its superior deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:454).

At the same time, capitalism is inseparable from the state since it is the state which codifies the conditions under which the axiomatic can operate and regulate the flows of capital. As such, modern nation-states function as models of realisation of the immanent axiomatic. This is the third type of state within Deleuze and Guattari’s typology: no longer transcendent apparatuses of overcoding or subjection but models of realisation of an axiomatic of decoded flows. They define the modern nation-state as a

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territorially based group of productive sectors among which labour and capital circulate freely, without barriers to the homogeneity of capital or to the conditions of competition between capitals. Just as the purely economic relations of capital are realised in the relations between ‘factors of production’ in diverse sectors of economic activity, so nation-states group together a certain number of sectors of production, according to their wealth, natural resources, population, level of industrialisation, etc. Thus, ‘States under capitalism are not canceled out but change form and take on a new meaning: models of realization for a worldwide axiomatic that exceeds them. But to exceed is not the same thing as to do without’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:454). Equally, not to be able to do without is not the same as to be wedded to the existing forms of state. We can see in this definition the possibility of the kinds of supra-state association already beginning to emerge in Europe, North America and South-East Asia.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 764