Deterritorialisation and the political

We noted in Chapter 4 Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that schizoanalysis proposes no political programme. We can now see that the axiological structure of Anti-Oedipus (1977) is in many respects conducive to an anti-political stance. The theory of capitalist society outlined in the book establishes a fundamental dualism at the heart of the axiomatic and within capitalist society as a whole, between the deterritorialising tendency of capital and the necessary reterritorialisation effected by the state and its agents. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the revolutionary path lies not in the attempt to set limits to market forces and the impetus of deterritorialisation, but in the opposite direction, pursuing ever further the movement of decoding and deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:239). Some commentators, such as Nick Land, sharpen this antagonism to the point that the deepest tendencies of the capitalist axiomatic are taken to be so fundamentally at odds with the social codes of bourgeois civilisation that it appears in the guise of a ‘social suicide machine’: ‘Only by an intensification of neurotic attachments does it mask the eruption of madness in its infrastructure, but with every passing year such attachments become more desperate, cynical, fragile’ (Land 1993:68). Pursuing the idea that the political axiology of Anti-Oedipus supports a politics of alliance with the deterritorialising process of capital, Land recommends the systematic dismantling of all social codes and forms of reterritorialisation: ‘Always decode…believe nothing, and extinguish all nostalgia for belonging. Ask always where capital is most inhuman, unsentimental and out of control. Abandon all attachment to the state’ (Land 1993:67).

This political perspective is consistent with some aspects of the Nietzschean framework of evaluation which run through Deleuze’s writing.

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In Difference and Repetition, for example, we find a defence of the singular against the general, the individual against the herd, and a resistance to forms of equality and equalisation. This ‘anti-political’ theme emerges from the conception of the social field (like every other) as a field of free differences and the rejection of representation: every time there is representation there is always ‘an unrepresented singularity’ who does not recognise himself or herself in the representant. Hence the misfortune of speaking for others (Deleuze 1994:52).⁵ Similarly anti-political theses might be derived from the application of the theory of power outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze 1983) to the social and political field. This is not something Deleuze does in Nietzsche and Philosophy: there is no discussion of Nietzsche’s views on politics and the state, only comments on his theory of culture and, at the end of the book, on the implications of Nietzsche’s theory for practice. If he had done so, the argument might run as follows: power is fundamentally active and relational, appearing in the interaction between different kinds and degrees of force. In the state of nature, individual and collective bodies collide in the pursuit of their activities. However, purely chaotic interaction is not a state of social existence: at best, life under such conditions will be uncertain, at worst it will be brutish and short. Hence, it can be argued, the overriding aim of political society is the establishment and maintenance of relatively stable forms of interaction. Social relations require the stabilisation and fixation of certain forms of interaction, including the institution of forms of government which enable stable and predictable forms of action upon the actions of others.

In these terms, government is a form of action upon individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their possibilities for action. From the perspective of the forces governed, the government of individual and collective bodies is essentially reactive. Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the state as a process of capture operating upon the primary flows of matter and activity in the social field renders explicit this reactive character of the political apparatus. The state, they argue, captures flows of population, commodities, or money in order to extract from these flows a surplus which then becomes a means to maintain and enhance its own power. It is an institution whose primary mode of operation is one of limitation or constraint, a matter of separating active forces from what they can do. In these terms, the state is by definition always a secondary formation, and the political sphere is always reactive by nature. If we supposed that Deleuze’s Nietzschean concept of power implied a simple axiological priority of the active over the reactive and the affirmative over the negative, then the outcome would be a fundamentally anti-political orientation.

Much of the analysis of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus (1977) supports such a reading. For example, the authors describe the capitalist axiomatic as a system of enslavement in which all are subject to the constraint of its

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SOCIAL MACHINES AND THE STATE axioms. By contrast with the form of slavery established by the despotic state, which at least retained an apparatus of anti-production distinct from the sphere of production and a corresponding class of masters, capitalism installs ‘an unrivalled slavery, an unprecedented subjugation’ in which ‘there are no longer even any masters, but only slaves commanding other slaves’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:254). Here, there is only one class and bourgeois and proletarian alike are slaves of the social machine. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari point to ‘the revolutionary potential of decoded flows’ and suggest that the opposition to this machine, which is relevant from the point of view of revolutionary politics, is not that between capitalist and worker but that between ‘the decoded flows that enter into a class axiomatic on the full body of capital, and on the other hand, the decoded flows that free themselves from this axiomatic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:255). Eugene Holland comments that, in the terms of this account of capitalism, ‘deterritorialization looked ‘‘good” and reterritorialization looked “bad”, inasmuch as deterritorialization designated the motor of permanent revolution, while reterritorialization designated the power relations imposed by the private ownership of capital’ (Holland 1991:58). Nor are such binary oppositions entirely absent from A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Deleuze and Guattari defend the idea that capitalism restores a system of machinic enslavement. They also maintain that there is an opposition between the axioms which constitute the ‘semiological form’ of the apparatus of capture and the ‘living flows’ which are conjugated and controlled by the axiomatic: ‘there is always a fundamental difference between living flows and the axioms that subordinate them to centers of control and decision making’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:464). However, there are other elements of Deleuze and Guattari’s mature political philosophy which disallow a simplistic anti-political point of view. First, the axioms of the capitalist social machine do not simply repress a natural state of free and undirected social existence. They are also constitutive of new social forces and forms of life. Deleuze and Guattari are not romantic anarchists who believe in a realm of social being beyond the subjection to political power. It would be an error, they argue, ‘to take a disinterested stance toward struggle on the level of the axioms’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:463). The reason is not simply that the conditions of people’s lives are at stake in those axioms, but also because forcing changes at the level of the axiomatic is itself an indispensable mechanism of effecting future concrete changes. As we have seen, it is a fundamental feature of the axiomatic that it cannot reterritorialise existing flows without creating conditions that will generate new forms of deterritorialisation. Second, as Holland points out, the range and complexity of the concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation are greatly increased in A Thousand Plateaus (Holland 1991). In Anti-Oedipus, the terms were used in the 105

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context of Deleuze and Guattari’s historical account of the emergence of state-governed societies and of capitalism, but also in the context of their theory of desire to refer to the freeing of the ‘schizophrenic’ libido from previous objects of investment. This psychoanalytic dimension of the concept derives from Lacan’s use of the term ‘territorialisation’ to refer to the imprint of maternal care and nourishment on the child’s libido and the resultant formation of part-objects and erogenous zones out of the conjugation of particular organs and orifices such as mouth-breast.⁶ In A Thousand Plateaus, the concept is applied to a variety of different domains, such as the analysis of painting and music. Deleuze and Guattari define (European) painting in terms of the deterritorialisation of faces and landcapes, and (European) music as the deterritorialisation of the refrain and the human voice (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:300–2). These are not simply applications of the concept but also means through which it is complicated.

Ultimately, processes of deterritorialisation are the movements that define a given assemblage. Deterritorialisation is ‘the operation of a line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:508) and lines of flight are the primary elements of a given assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:531). Lines of flight or deterritorialisation are the determining elements in a given assemblage in the sense that they define the form of creativity specific to that assemblage, the particular ways in which it can effect transformation in other assemblages or in itself. In the terms of Deleuze’s concept of power, what a given assemblage is capable of doing or becoming will be determined by the lines of flight or deterritorialisation which it can sustain. Theorem Eight says that

one assemblage does not have the same forces or even speeds of deterritorialization as another; in each instance, the indices and coefficients must be calculated according to the block of becoming under consideration, and in relation to the mutations of an abstract machine…. One can only calculate and compare powers of deterritorialization.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:307)

Thus, from the point of view of personal, social or political change, everything hinges on the nature of the forms of deterritorialisation present in a given situation.

At the end of A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari outline a normative typology of processes of deterritorialisation which distinguishes four types. The result is a complex conceptual and axiological structure, not unlike the typology of expressions of the will to power outlined in Nietzsche and Philosophy, within which the character of events and processes can be evaluated. Deterritorialisation is either relative or absolute. It is relative in so far as it concerns only movements within the actual—as

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opposed to the virtual—order of things. Relative deterritorialisation can take either a negative or a positive form. It is negative when the deterritorialised element is immediately subjected to forms of reterritorialisation which enclose or obstruct its line of flight. It is positive when the line of flight prevails over secondary reterritorialisations, even though it may still fail to connect with other deterritorialised elements or enter into a new assemblage with new forces. By contrast, absolute deterritorialisation refers to a qualitatively different type of movement. Deterritorialisation is absolute in so far as it concerns the virtual—as opposed to the actual—order of things. This is the state in which there are only qualitative multiplicities, the state of ‘unformed matter on the plane of consistency’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:55–6). Relative deterritorialisation takes place on the molar dimension of individual or collective life, but absolute deterritorialisation takes place on the molecular plane of social existence.

Absolute deterritorialisation is not a further stage or in any sense something that comes after relative deterritorialisation. On the contrary, it exists only in and through relative deterriorialisation: ‘There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritorialization within relative deterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:56). It follows that, corresponding to the distinction within relative deterritorialisation between its negative and positive forms, absolute deterritorialisation also has two poles. The dangers of the line of flight which we noted in Chapter 4 are also the dangers of absolute deterritorialisation. Which way things turn out will depend on the nature of the assemblages through which these movements are expressed. Absolute and relative deterritorialisation will both be positive when they involve the construction of ‘revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:473). Real transformations in a given field require the recombination of deterritorialised elements in mutually supportive and productive ways. In this sense, social or political assemblages are truly revolutionary only when they involve assemblages of connection rather than conjugation. These are the conditions under which absolute deterritorialisation leads to the creation of a new earth and new people: ‘when it connects lines of flight, raises them to the power of an abstract vital line or draws a plane of consistency’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:510).

Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari argue that societies are defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation, they mean there is no society that is not reproducing itself on one level, while simultaneously being transformed into something else on another level. In other words, fundamental social change happens all the time. Often it happens by degrees and even imperceptibly, as we have seen with the steady erosion of myths and prejudices about sexual difference and its implications for social and political institutions. But sometimes revolutionary social change occurs through the eruption of events which force a break with the past and

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inaugurate a new field of social, political or legal possibilities. These are not necessarily violent or bloody events. May 1968 was an event of this kind, ‘a becoming breaking through into history’ (Deleuze 1995b:153). Other recent examples include the sudden collapse of Eastern European communism, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, or the belated decision by the Australian High Court to recognise a form of aboriginal title to land (see p. 126). These are all in their way manifestations of critical freedom. They are turning points in history after which some things will never be the same as before.

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