Let us pause here with the synthesis of these concepts offered by
Vincent Descombes:According to the Anti-Oedipus, universal history is a process of ‘deter-
ritorialization’. ‘Deterritorialization’ defines the essential movement of
capitalism. Capitalism emerges at the end of history, and is the ‘uni-
versal truth’ of history. But what exactly is ‘deterritorialization’? It is
the transition from a codingto a decoding. Here the term ‘coding’ does
not refer to a linguistic operation ... but to the way that society regu-
lates production (which, as we will recall, intends both the Marxist
‘social production’ and the ‘desiring-production’) ... Capitalism ori-
ginates therefore in a generalized decoding ... Ancient ritual, ceremony,
every form which was once respected or held sacredmust disappear.
Capitalism is defined as a ‘cynical’ system which, in order to function,
needs no appeal to the sacred, to belief. We are confronted here with
the same aberration as before. The product of cultural training was to
have been the sovereign individual, but is in fact the man of negat-
ivity. In the same way, capitalism, as defined by the cynicism of
decoding, was to have brought liberation, since it destroyed all the
beliefs and prohibitions which had enthralled humanity; but the
reality of capitalism ... is the greatest repression of desiring-production
ever witnessed in history. By destroying all ties, capitalism should have
created the conditions for the blissful nomadism of a detached and
absoluteindividual, as a consequence of ‘deterritorialization’. However,
in this liberation of all flux, it has produced a world of nightmare and
anxiety. Why should history have failed? The reason is that ‘deterritor-
ialization’ is accompanied by a perpetual ‘reterritorialization’. Cap-
italism postpones the limit towards which it tends (nomadism) by
restoring artificial ‘territorialities’ (beliefs, forms). ‘Everything returns
or reappears – states, fatherlands, families.’ (Modern French Philosophy,
176–7, emphasis in the original; citation from Anti-Oedipus, 34)On the one hand, a general deterritorialization carrying enormous
potentialities, conditions of enrichment of experience, of collective
and individual bliss but also a frightful imbalance, a feeling of loss and
dispossession, a desperate need for identity. On the other hand, a
movement of aggressive reterritorialization, the obsessive affirmation
of identity, the blinding prevalence of the feeling of belonging, the
conformist cancellation of singularity.
On the social plane: the workers’ struggles of the 1960s and 1970s have
led capital toward a general technological restructuring that constitutes120 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_12_cha11.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 120