Deleuze and Gauttari

Deterritorialisation

“Psychoanalysis combines with capitalism to channel and control desire.” (Deleuze, Gauttari in Norton 2000: 1594).

Instead of the tree of knowledge, with its grasping roots digging deeper into the earth and its branches lifting ever upwards, picture just the roots.

Picture the roots growing lengthwise, in both directions. Instead of uplifted branches, imagine offshoots of these lengthwise roots, offshoots that occur wherever and whenever there is an intersection of history and culture that result in new thoughts, new tendencies – new growths.

These lengthwise roots cross over one another. They intersect each other. There is no origin of their growth, no central command or dominating structure. There is no beginning, as there would be had the grown down into the earth. There is just the fact of their being and what that fact, or intersection of facts, generates as new knowledge. This is a new way to think, Deleuze and Gauttari assert.

It is true that to follow Deleuze and Gauttari in their thinking does involve letting go of what is familiar, including its peculiarities that may render it illogical in areas, but nonetheless safe because they are familiar. This is so because despite wide protests to the contrary, there is something deeply unsettling about egalitarianism, even in knowledge, where its ability to exponentially produce new facts and chart new territories of existence is threatening. Under capitalism, control is dominant. Who would control this unbridled production of facts? Who could claim responsibility for them, and thus reap profit of them?

The Deleuze and Gauttari tree of knowledge is one in constant creation; it exists in a state of growth, of becoming. It is a state the authors say one must constantly adopt in order to avoid becoming irrelevant and overlooked by the dominating structure or culture. As fascinating as this line of thinking is, it nonetheless promotes a tired aspect of majority thinking: we don’t need to change; you do. Or better, ‘make yourselves relevant to us’. Despite Deleuze and Gauttari’s displeasure with a sense of majority and control, their admonishment to ‘become’ is thinking that is nonetheless well rooted within the dominant structure, where control is situated and from where favour must be courted.

Bibliography

Leitch, Vincent B. 2001.

The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.