Volume 057 min read
Deleuze and Guattari II
Module I · The Foundation
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand the concepts of territorialisation and deterritorialisation and the double-edged role capitalism plays in Deleuze and Guattari's thinking. You know why capital dissolves fixed orders and releases flows, and you grasp the famous provocation at the end of Anti-Oedipus from which the CCRU and later accelerationism drew their most dangerous idea. Here the passage from the philosophy of desire to the theory of capital takes place.
Exposition
In the last volume desire ran as flow through a net of machines. Now the question arises of what happens to those flows, how they get tamed, channelled, released again. Deleuze and Guattari answer it with a conceptual pair that belongs to the core of their political thinking, territorialisation and deterritorialisation.
Start with the image inside the word, the territory. A territory is an ordered area, a field with borders, rules, and fixed assignments. Territorialisation then means binding flows to fixed places, inscribing them into orders, assigning them a meaning and a position. Desire, which in the last volume still coupled freely, gets caught, channelled, tied to institutions. The family, the tribe, the state, religion, all of these are territories that enclose the flow of desire and tell it where to run. Territorialisation is the force of binding and fixed form.
Deterritorialisation is the counter-movement. It loosens those bindings, tears flows out of their fixed orders, blows borders open. Where territorialisation pins down, deterritorialisation releases. A flow that gets deterritorialised loses its assigned place and runs into the open. Deleuze and Guattari connect this movement with a related concept, the line of flight. A line of flight is the path along which something escapes an order, the crack through which a flow breaks out of its territory. The thinking of both authors is fascinated by these movements of escape. Their interest lies less in the fixed structures than in the lines along which something slips away from them.
Now capitalism enters the picture, and here lies the real point. For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is the great deterritorialising force of history. No earlier system has dissolved, unbound, set in motion so thoroughly. Where older orders chained desire to sacred bonds, to tradition, rank, and eternal truth, capitalism turns everything into commodity and everything into flow. It knows no sanctity it wouldn't translate into a price. It tears the peasant from the soil, the craftsman from the guild, the believer from the fixed cosmos, and throws them all onto the open market. Fixed estates dissolve into mobile relations. Capitalism in this sense is the most revolutionary, most unleashing force there has ever been. It deterritorialises the world.
But here Deleuze and Guattari add their decisive refinement, and you have to get it exactly, because it carries the whole later dispute. Capitalism doesn't simply deterritorialise into the open. With one hand it loosens the old bindings, with the other it immediately binds the released flows anew, to money, to market, to profit, to the state. They call that second movement reterritorialisation. Capitalism is the machine that unbinds without cease and recaptures in the same motion. It drives dissolution forward and erects new borders, new fences, new orders at the same time, in order to make what has been released usable for itself. Its essence lies in that double movement. It is dissolution and re-enclosure in one, a force that constantly deterritorialises further than its own gearing demands, and that continuously brakes that movement in order to preserve itself.
Out of that diagnosis grows the provocation at the end of the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, which became the germ cell of all accelerationist thinking. Deleuze and Guattari raise a question aimed against the revolutionary instinct of their time. If capitalism is the dissolving force that also brakes and recaptures without cease, is the path of resistance to pull the brake, or does it lie the other way, in driving deterritorialisation still further, accelerating the process until it overshoots the limits the market sets for it? They suggest the way out lies not in retreat, not in longing for the old territories, but in intensifying the movement, in going further in the same direction. Not back, but through.
Get the character of that question exactly, because it is ambivalent and was later fiercely contested. Deleuze and Guattari formulate it as an open provocation, not a closed programme. They play with the thought without making it doctrine. Their own work is richer and more cautious than the one line that became famous. But precisely that line, the thought of not putting a brake on the process but driving it further, is what the CCRU will take up and Nick Land will pull to its extreme. What was a tentative suggestion in the French becomes, in Land, the radical thesis about capital as a force to be unleashed rather than braked.
Now connect this volume with the physical foundation of Volumes 2 and 3, because here the thinking joins up. Deterritorialisation is the philosophical shape of what you earlier learned as positive feedback. Both describe a movement that departs from a fixed state and does not return to it. Capitalism, read as a deterritorialising machine, is a system far from equilibrium that continuously exceeds its own limits and yet keeps setting new ones. The CCRU will fuse these two languages. From cybernetics it takes escalation, from Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialisation, and out of both it forms its image of a capital that drives itself and comes rolling in from the future.
Core Claim
Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as the great deterritorialising force that dissolves fixed orders and releases flows, only to recapture them in the same motion. Their provocation, to accelerate the process rather than brake it, became the germ cell of accelerationist thinking, which the CCRU and Nick Land radicalised.
The Critic
The provocation this volume revolves around runs to a few lines in the original. They sit in a book of several hundred pages, at a point where the authors are discussing schizophrenia, and they have been contested in the scholarship for decades. Whether a recommendation is being made at all, or whether the passage plays through a possibility the book then discards, cannot be decided from the text. What all of later accelerationism treats as its founding site is a marginal remark of open meaning.
The appropriation happens against the authors. Deleuze described capitalism all his life as what captures lines of flight, and in his late work diagnosed the control society as its continuation. Guattari worked on ecological and political alternatives. Both would have rejected the reading that capital is to be unleashed. The CCRU takes the right to read a work against its author, and nowhere justifies that right.
The concept itself carries less than its career suggests. Deterritorialisation describes a movement so generally that almost any process falls under it, from rural depopulation to digitalisation. What explains everything explains little. Its strength lies in making connections visible between distant fields. Its weakness lies in the fact that it distinguishes not one case from another.
Bridge to the Next Volume
Deleuze and Guattari supplied the flows and their unbinding. A third French voice added something still more disturbing, the pleasure taken in one's own dissolution. Jean-François Lyotard asked in his libidinal economy whether the subject doesn't secretly enjoy its own decomposition by capital. Volume 6 introduces that thought and closes the French foundation, before the journey returns to the CCRU itself.