fuzzy boundaries
in in defense of Apophis, i wrote that in A Thousand Plateaus the structures erected in Anti-Oedipus are deterritorialized, such that the arborescence of Anti-Oedipus is opposed by the rhizome; conceptual argument by faciality; smooth spaces by striated spaces — here i present some elaboration.
in chapter 2 of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari develop the schizoanalytic “deconstruction” from the unconscious logic of non-global connection and inclusive disjunction — not from closed binary couples and binary alternatives, as Derrida does with his deconstruction. in Anti-Oedipus,
the connective synthesis produces an open-ended series “this and then that and then this and…”; and
the inclusive disjunction generates an open-ended series of alternatives “this or that or this or…”
thus where Derrida rewrites a binary opposition such as speech/writing in terms of a single, broader non-concept like archécriture (tracing), Deleuze and Guattari instead defy any binary closure by multiplying terms.
for example, the binary pair molar/molecular is remapped (or extended) in terms of varying degrees of segmentarity (from rigid to supple) and in connection with the line-of-flight.
another example: despotic overcoding and civilized decoding are remapped in terms of signifying and post-signifying regimes, which exist alongside pre-signifying and counter-signifying regimes. and finally, the fundamental opposition in Anti-Oedipus of paranoia/schizophrenia is remapped on the body-without-organs, of which there are at least three different kinds.
territorialization is registered as deterritorialization (deT) and reterritorialization (reT), which are circumscribed terms with a very specific function:
as hinge terms to connect Marx and Freud in order to articulate the concepts of libido and labor-power.
though it is derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, there territorialization refers to the imprint of material nourishment and care-giving on the child’s libido.
for Deleuze and Guattari, deT in the psychological register designates the freeing of schizophrenic libido from pre-established objects of investment: for instance, from mother’s breast or from the family triangle of the Oedipus complex. in the social register, deT designates the freeing of labor-power from the seigneurial plot of land, the assembly line, or other means of production.
thus in terms of territorialization, the process labeled by Marx as “primitive accumulation” beginning with the Enclosure Acts privatizing common land for sheep grazing in England, simultaneously labels the process of peasants becoming deterritorialized from the land and reterritorialized onto textile looms in the growing textile industry.
schizoanalysis extends this dual-register of the notion of territorialization to include the investment of human energy of any kind in the libidinal field: perceptual and physical, cognitive and productive, desire and work.
hence capitalism is not the only mode of socio-libidinal production that deterritorializes: all power societies do so.
why or how? despotism deterritorializes by forcibly transferring the focus of desire and production from local territories to the transcendent figure of the despot (the sublime object of ideology) — representatives and representations of the despot prosecute such transference by overcoding the local codes of “savagery” and redirecting them in their favor. for example: despotic Christianity overcodes ritual pagan observances of the winter solstice and the vernal equinox with celebrations of Christ’s birth and resurrection.
capitalism, specifically, is an economic power society so it deterritorializes not by overcoding via representation, but by decoding representation altogether—by substituting a calculus of abstract quantities for the codes and overcodes that defined concrete qualities under savagery and despotism.
instead of overcoding, capitalism axiomatizes: it joins the deterritorialized and decoded flow of pure liquid wealth (invested as capital in a means of production) with another deterritorialized and decoded flow: pure labor-power conditioned to match its given task on the “assembly line” or in some other manufacturing/production process.
so it should come as no surprise that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall will then force the addition of more axioms: production processes are continually transformed by the input of technical information from the hard sciences.
and of course, crises of overproduction will force the addition of even more axioms: consumer preferences are continually transformed by advertising so that consumption is reterritorialized onto the pre-existing commodities, thereby realizing profit on invested capital.
this is why some say capitalism is metaphysics realized.
in this context, reterritorialization is “the dead hand of the past that weighs upon the living.”
the “constant revolutionizing of production and uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions” that for Marx “distinguishes bourgeois epoch from the earlier ones” (Communist Manifesto), entail cycles of divestment and re-investment: capital is extracted here (e.g. Rust Belt) and re-invested there (the Global South, the Pacific Rim); through this, specific labor skills are valorized here and now, only to become worthless a few years later; consumer taste is programmed to suit the commodities of one production cycle, then deprogrammed and reprogrammed for the next.
with this mapping, deT is “good” and reT is “bad” inasmuch deT designates the motor of permanent revolution, while reT designates the power relations imposed by the private ownership of capital.
in Anti-Oedipus, libidinally and economically productive investment is tied down against the flow of deT to pre-existing capital-stock in order to realize profit on previous investments; reT thus appears as the dead hand of the past, weighing down upon the deT of the future. hence the “celebration” in Anti-Oedipus of schizophrenia (not the clinical entity) as the movement of permanent revolution freed from power relations.
but in A Thousand Plateaus, deT/reT lose any trace of humanism and even anthropocentrism, for the terms there are extended beyond the sphere of human history and psychodynamics to characterize everything from geological sedimentation, to “symbiosis” between species, to the constitution of protein chains within the genetic code.
the opposition between deT and reT no longer registers the interplay of social forces (such as permanent revolution and private appropriation).
instead, deT becomes a double-becoming where one deterritorialized element serves as a new territory for another deterritorialized element, and “the least deterritorialized element territorializes on the most deterritorialized.”
deT and reT are thus considered immanent to the diverse semiotic processes themselves i.e. not imposed from without, as catatonia was imposed on the schizophrenic by the institution of psychiatry. the black hole of the catatonic becomes considered to be a danger inherent in the process of schizophrenia, and deT as well as the BwO are considered to have similarly inherent dangers.
so the binary opposition privileging schizophrenia over paranoia no longer holds.
this is because the oppositions between overcoding/paranoia and decoding/schizophrenia are remapped as the difference between two regimes of signs, the signifying and post-signifying; and two regimes of faciality, the full-face/averted-face.
the signifying regime retains the overcoding and paranoia of despotism, as well as the full faciality (full-face) wherein the face of the despot (Christ, the White Man) overcodes the primitive body.
the post-signifying regime is not characterized by decoding and schizophrenia, but by subjectification/subjection and the averted-face. whereas the transcendental signifier of the despot imposes stable meaning from the center of a signifying regime, meaning in post-signifying regimes is instead forever open to subjective interpretation: the despot has turned his face away, the center no longer holds, no transcendental signifier reigns supreme.
yet it remains, without the guarantees and prospect of completion once promised by a centered, fully signifying regime, interpretation is pointless—though it continues unabated, ad infinitum: post-signifying regimes promotes endless “interpretosis” in a vacuum.
A Thousand Plateaus thus distinguishes between three degrees of deT with respect to the regimes of signs and faciality:
signifying regimes are characterized by merely relative deT, for although discourse can be produced endlessly, it is only assigned meaning by the despot or his priests, always pinned to the white wall of the despot’s face.
deT becomes absolute in post-signifying regimes with an averted face, inasmuch as there is no common measure by which to compare and judge subjective interpretations; it remains negative insofar as interpretation ultimately leads to the unproductive black hole of “just one man’s opinions.”
deT becomes absolute and positive only when the search for meaning is abandoned in favor of experimentation, and when such experimentation intersects and connects with the experiments of others in a depersonalized, collective form of enunciation, such as suggested by the indeterminate “we” in prose or poesy.
with this, we find ourselves far from the notion as it appeared in Anti-Oedipus where the term designated merely the revolutionary potential of human history, because on this plateau human history is presented as an abstract typology of sign regimes.
post-signifying subjectification may as well describe, say, romanticism at the fall of the Old Regime, but it characterizes equally well the Protestant Reformation, the Jewish exodus from Egypt, and so on.
hence the two moments of territorialization which in the Anti-Oedipus grounded in the dynamic of capital expansion are now redistributed over transnational capital as locus of high-speed deT, and various forms of State as the loci of reT.
therefore any enthusiasm for the para-personal, the molecular, the schizophrenic should be considered with caution: “it is time once again to multiply practical warnings” (ATP 188).
for the new post-signifying regime of subjectification and its mode of subjection to classical market capitalism has been on the wane, and is being replaced by an even newer mode of machinic enslavement to the axioms of advanced monopoly capitalism which bypasses subjectivity altogether.
for instance, market/operation research these days no longer bothers to interview sample subjects for their personal responses to test ads — instead it hooks up machines to measure galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, eye-tracking to measure time spent looking at certain objects/regions on a screen, heart rate, etc.
that is to say, conscious subjective responses become increasingly irrelevant as the axioms of high-speed capital plug more and more directly into the body and the unconscious, creating ever-new artificial organs to respond to the objects it has produced to satisfy them (temporarily).
in this light, some degree of reT is good if only for defensive purposes. as Deleuze and Guattari recommended,
[…] you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own system when circumstances demand it […] and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (ATP 160)