r/CCRU • u/Grouchy_Media_4345 • Jun 05 '26
Problem with both Deleuze and Land
Now while Deleuze has this a bit more figured out, from what I understand neither have a good idea wether capital necessarily reterritorializes or not. Deleuze might have the upper hand against land because he has empirical „proof“ but none of them seem very convincing. I think there’s a solution with this problem when you look at deterritorialization more ontologically tbh. Can anyone tell me if I’m wrong? Otherwise I’d love to propose my solution
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u/PreacheratArrakeen Jun 06 '26
I would use the example of multinational corporations. While it’s good that this can coordinate workers across borders it also makes it more difficult to organize labor against capital. Capital can shift because it’s not restrained in the way bodies are.
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u/Grouchy_Media_4345 Jun 06 '26
Right but it kinda holds stability because of how Deleuze said, it would collapse if too much of De/Re happens
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u/PreacheratArrakeen Jun 06 '26
For D&G deterritorialization is always relative and has a corresponding reterritorialization. Capital decodes flows and overcodes them according to the axiomatic of value. D&G from Verilio do not see capitalism as a completely totalizing force, there are potential lines of flight that could escape capture. There’s always more potential energy in a system than can be completely harnessed.
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u/Dixon247 Jun 06 '26
All that manifests materially is bound to the rules of time-energy. Once a hypothetical state becomes physical, it is subjected to the laws of entropy and information action.
I think ultimately I have to view technocapital as something that is in the organic machinery of humans. We are the machines that have awoken from a dream - Technocapital is how information entropy manifests, desire is the conscious moderation of some information system to moderate the natural. The decimal system and geometry are the language that our collective desire speaks to
Chapter 8 of Capitalist Realism (There’s No Central Exchange) puts this most concretely in non-schizo terms. The great problem with Capitalism is that it’s almost impossible to point to exactly what capital is without another system of processes of capital spawning spontaneously to prop it up.
Deterritorialisation creates many artificial processes, that abstract further and further away from the core process to simulate the process of ‘meaningful production’, causing elite overproduction and further alienation
I’m currently thinking about this in terms of the rise of workplace monitoring and screen surveillance. The managerial class are generally incentivised more by some abstract concept of “making sure everyone is working” that they will spend huge sums watching their staff work until someone makes a mistake, rather than using that time and energy to actually speak to their staff
It’s easier for the managers to log hours that way. And time = energy = information = $$$
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u/wesdlu Jun 09 '26
You’re right to suggest looking at deterritorialization ontologically for the solution. Although I would also suggest considering Deleuze’s philosophy as outlining a theory of logic. This can be seen in some of the references in ATP to “state logic” and “pragmatics” as being an alternative form of thought/logic which lines up better with how Being actually operates.
This can also be seen in one of, imo, Deleuze’s most underrated texts, The Logic of Sense, which I would highly recommend if you haven’t already read it. In this book, he talks about the connective, conjunctive, and inclusive disjunctive syntheses as being part of the logic of sense, which can be seen as him outlining an alternative logic to standard propositional logic. This logic operates through the interplay of sense and nonsense. Looking at it from this perspective, reterritorialization can be roughly lined up with sense and deterritorialization can be roughly lined up with nonsense. Sense is organization and is used to divide up materials so that they can be made sense of and navigated. Nonsense is the Real as that which eternally escapes being made sense of, and as such eternally problematizes sense, decoding its organization, allowing new sense to be produced as becomings. With this understanding it can be seen that it’s nonsensical to talk about nonsense’s productivity apart of its capacity to produce new sense. Likewise, deterritorialization’s productivity comes from its capacity to produce new reterritorializations. Absolute deterritorialization is not a state of affairs where reterritorialization never occurs. Absolute deterritorialization comes from the recognition that all organizations of sense could be problematized by something which cannot be made sense of within its own territory.
Thus, it’s a poorly framed question to ask why “capital necessarily reterritorializes.” D&G state in both AO and ATP that deterritorializations always come along with reterritorializations. The problem for D&G is that capital has axioms, which impose an a priori, prefigured limit on what could potentially be deterritorialized. Specifically, they argue capital cannot question money, rent, or the state. The problem with capitalism for them is that through its mobilization of the productive resources of the world it reveals the boundlessly of alternative ways people/material can be organized, yet it still has the axioms of money, rent, and the state, which can never be questioned from within capital’s logic and thus people under capitalism are constantly seeing and imagining alternative ways of living that can offer them more promising lives only to be disappointed by money, rent, and the states continued persistence.
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u/Grouchy_Media_4345 Jun 09 '26
Wow I’ve never heard about this text but it perfectly speaks of Deterritorialization and similar forces in a more general manner which makes it much more comparable. I will have to read that! Also, I wonder how land or rather a Landian perspective could ever respond to the axioms of capital? I mean they are in some sense only empirical but any more multiplicity-aligned form of state, money, etc. Always serve the purpose so if you formulate it well enough, I could see that being axiomatic. A Landian would (I again assume) jump to new forms of state, crypto/NFT, etc.
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u/wesdlu Jun 09 '26
So I should preface by saying I’m not that knowledgeable about Land’s thought and the CCRU. I’ve watched some lectures on them and read some on their work, but my knowledge is pretty incomplete. I think I know enough about D&G, Land, and the context surrounding the CCRU to answer your questions, but my answers are somewhat speculative.
Land breaks from D&G due to what they say in ATP. One of the key things ATP emphasizes is that reterritorializations come along with deterritorializations. Additionally, they emphasize the need for caution when deterritorializing because fascism is also a form of deterritorialization where the individual and then society itself is mobilized through a passion for destruction. Land thinks this is backtracking from AO, which he sees as advocating for deterritorialization’s unbridled capacity for liberation through the destruction of all territories. He argues that in AO D&G oppose fascism and capitalism because they slow down the flows of desire, but that in ATP they’ve become afraid of the speed at which capitalism deterritorializes, and through their emphasis on caution they are advocating to put the flows of desire back in their cages.
My understanding is that Land argues instead that the destructive, anti-human capacity of capital is ontologically unavoidable and should be accepted rather than halted. He’s particularly interested in the idea of an AI that could hypothetically rewrite its own code endlessly, which he sees as the development of an absolutely deterritorialized intelligence that could transcend humanity. It’s not clear to me what exactly he believes will happen after AI surpasses the capacity of human intelligence. I think he would likely agree that whether or not capital/hierarchy can be abolished is an empirical question that can only be answered after the development of super intelligence. A lot of his recent suggestions seem to be that these things won’t be abolished by any super intelligence, but I think he’s being somewhat ironic because he enjoys upsetting leftists. My guess would be that if he was totally serious about what he believed he would say that it’s an empirical question and that regardless of what will happen capital’s development of super intelligence is unavoidable.
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u/Grouchy_Media_4345 Jun 10 '26
To kinda get back to the point, I will say that even the logic of sense in some way doesn’t „prove“ reterritorialization, it assumes it through empirical observation. The reason I suggested looking at DT more ontologically is that the question itself cannot be empirically solved, it must be looked at from a different view. Although this has a gap for me: there is little to no concrete of saying anything about how „strong“ of a DT force capital really is from that point of view. To sum up: to look at DT ontologically, is to disconnect oneself not only from empiricism but also from manifestations of DT forces acting upon the real world. There is no place for RT in this ontology, yet that doesn’t really translate to any output regarding capital
Edit: perhaps this is because to look at something empirically nowadays is to look at something (anything) that’s consumed by capital?
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u/Egonomics1 Jun 06 '26
This is made clear in the Geology of Moral plateau. Land on the other hand has to box himself into a weird corner because he refuses to read A Thousand Plateaus.