to the ways in which deterritorialized elements recombine and enter into new
relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the modiWcation of the old.
On their account, systems of any kind always include ‘‘vectors of deterritor-
ialization,’’ while deterritorialization is always ‘‘inseparable from correlative
reterritorializations’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 , 509 ).
The complexity of their concepts of deterritorialization and reterritoriali-
zation emerges when they distinguish an absolute and a relative form of each
of these processes. This corresponds to an ontological distinction between a
virtual and an actual order of things: absolute deterritorialization takes place
in the virtual realm while relative deterritorialization concerns only move-
ments within the actual. It is the virtual order that governs the fate of any
given assemblage. The sense in which this ontology amounts to an ethics and
a politics of deterritorialization is apparent when they describe absolute
deterritorialization as the underlying condition of all forms of relative deter-
ritorialization. It is an immanent source of transformation, a reserve of
freedom or movement in reality that is activated whenever relative deterri-
torialization takes place. At one point, they describe it as ‘‘the deeper move-
ment... identical to the earth itself ’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 , 143 ).
In their redescription of the nature and task of philosophy inWhat is
Philosophy?( 1994 ), Deleuze and Guattari transpose this commitment to an
open future onto philosophy itself. Philosophy, they argue, is a vector of
deterritorialization to the extent that it creates concepts that break with
established or self-evident forms of understanding and description. This is
how philosophy engages with the present and fulWlls its utopian vocation.
To think philosophically about the present is to create concepts that give
expression to the pure events that animate the everyday events and pro-
cesses unfolding around us: globalization, democratization, neoliberal gov-
ernmentalization, deterritorialization, etc. To describe current events in
terms of such philosophical concepts is to relate them back to the pure
event or problem of which they appear only as one particular determin-
ation or solution. In other words, through the invention (capture, deterri-
torialization, becoming, etc.) and transformation (democracy, justice,
hospitality, etc.) of concepts, philosophy helps us to dissociate the pure
event expressed in them from the particular determinate forms in which it
has been actualized, thereby pointing to the possibility of other determinate
actualizations. When Deleuze and Guattari suggest that ‘‘the concept is the
contour, the conWguration, the constellation of an event to come,’’ they
mean that the creation of concepts opens up the possibility of transforming
136 paul patton