I could try and give more context if needed but maybe someone has read these guys and knows the concepts

"...the struggle between the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization which Deleuze and Guattari argue is constitutive of capitalism as such. "

  • Exteriority [he/him]
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    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Here's a very quick and dirty summary:

    All social formations restrict flows in some way, they have defined territories. Feudal social relations were restricted by the caste system, the flow of traffic is restricted by the laws we write.

    However, capitalism is unique. In order to keep pace with the expansion of capital it innately needs to deterritorialize its primitive territories. Break apart the old bonds; turn all that's solid into air. However to make air salable, it must reterritorialize the broken bonds. Air must be axiomatized, made to fit capitalism's underlying assumptions. Encode new social relations, reterritorialize the masses into new compliant subjects that desire air that will purchase air. Make air homogeneous, fungible, fit into the fetish logic of exchange value.

    So capitalism is a relative deterritorializing force. What it breaks apart one hand, it axiomatizes with the other. It does this on an increasingly widening scale and at an increasingly faster rate. This is D&G's reinterpretation of the law of counteracting tendency.

    [Capitalism] effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is more pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale.

    ...

    Such is the way one must reinterpret the Marxist law of counteracting tendency. With the result that schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist field from one end to the other. But for capitalism it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits. And it is impossible in such a regime to distinguish between decoding and the axiomatization that comes to replace the vanished codes. The flows are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism at the same time. Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death.

    • Anti-Oedipus

    Incidentally we're reading Deleuze's Society of Control in /c/philosophy. It's a pretty good intro to Deleuze check it out

  • mrhellblazer [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are concepts talked about by Deleuze and Guattari in their writings, I personally don't have a great grasp on it but I found this quick conceptual guide and analogy (if you can excuse the author's mistyping of WWII with WWI) here: https://culturenet.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/deterritorialization-and-reterritorialization/