states of aVairs. Redescription rather than argument is the only appropriate
method of criticism of an existing vocabulary and as a result ironists are those
who ‘‘specialise in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neolo-
gistic jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and extend that jargon’’
(Rorty 1989 , 78 ). Deleuze and Guattari agree that philosophy provides new
forms of description, thought, and action, although, unlike Rorty, they insist
that it does so by inventing new concepts. For them, the elaboration of new
vocabularies is inseparable from the creation of concepts. The prodigious
exercise of concept creation they undertook inA Thousand Plateausprovides
a series of vocabularies in terms of which we can describe signiWcant features
of the contemporary landscape (Patton 2000 ). These include the terminology
used to describe diVerent kinds of social, linguistic, and aVective assemblages
(strata, content and expression, territories, lines ofXight or deterritorializa-
tion); the terms employed in the elaboration of a micropolitics of desire
founded on the dynamics of unconscious aVect and the diVerent ways in
which this interacts with individual and collective subjectivities (body with-
out organs, intensities, molar and molecular segmentarities); an account of
capitalism as a non-territorially basedaxiomaticofXows of materials, labor,
and information (as opposed to a territorial system of overcoding); a concept
of the state as an apparatus of capture which, in the forms of its present
actualization, is increasingly subordinated to the requirements of the capit-
alist axiomatic; a concept of abstract machines of metamorphosis (nomadic
war-machines) which are the agents of social and political transformation;
andWnally a vocabulary in which to describe transformative processes such as
a becoming-revolutionary that is not reducible to the reality of past or future
revolutions, and ‘‘a becoming-democratic that is not the same as any actual
constitutional State’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 , 112 – 13 ).
Deleuze and Guattari do not provide any explicit statement or defense of
normative principles. Instead, they demonstrate such principles through the
elaboration of their ontology of assemblages. They describe a natural and social
world that accords systematic preference to certain kinds of movement: be-
coming-minor, lines ofXight, deterritorialization, and so on. The concept of
deterritorialization expresses the ethico-political sense of this ontology. In the
concluding statement of rules governing some of their most important concepts
at the end ofA Thousand Plateaus, deterritorialization is deWned as the move-
ment or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987 , 508 ), where a territory can be a system of any kind,
conceptual, linguistic, social, or aVective. By contrast, reterritorialization refers
post-structuralism and liberal pragmatism 135