Deterritorialization

Deterritorialization, borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, names the process by which capitalism dissolves the fixed codes, territories, and containment structures through which pre-modern and traditional societies organized social, libidinal, and economic flows. Where traditional formations hold flows in check — binding desire, labor, and meaning to stable identities (land, blood, religion, nation) — capitalism releases these flows into a universal circulation that recognizes no intrinsic limit. As McGowan notes via Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is precisely the process of this universal deterritorialization.

The critical theoretical intervention in this corpus, however, is not simply to repeat Deleuze and Guattari's diagnosis but to subject it to a symptomatic reading. Fisher's observation — that in the decades since Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism appear to have been "confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization" — reveals that deterritorialization is not the liberated becoming it can appear to be in Deleuze/Guattari. Rather, deterritorialization and reterritorialization are co-constitutive moments: capital releases flows only to recode and capture them at a higher level of abstraction (financialization), while the cultural and subjective domain is re-anchored in conservative forms. This asymmetry is precisely what McGowan exploits: the left's identification of deterritorialization with emancipatory vitality reproduces a capitalist fantasy of unrestrained productivity, failing to reckon with constitutive alienation from pure enjoyment. Deterritorialization is thus not liberation but the dialectical motor of capital's own self-reproduction.

In enjoying-what-we-don-t-have-th-todd-mcgowan, deterritorialization appears as a diagnostic concept that McGowan uses to frame a critique of the political left's libidinal economy. The left's embrace of Deleuzian/Guattarian deterritorialization — aligned with life, flow, and productive immanence — is shown to be structurally continuous with the capitalist fantasy that loss can be overcome and enjoyment made total. This connects the concept directly to the cross-referenced canonical concepts of ideology and fantasy: the celebration of deterritorialization functions as an ideological operation in the Lacanian sense, sustaining the fiction that alienation from jouissance is remediable rather than constitutive. McGowan's argument implicates deterritorialization in the contradiction internal to capitalist ideology — capital both unleashes and recaptures flows, and the subject who identifies with the unleashing is already within capital's logic.

In zero-books-mark-fisher-capitalist-realism-is-there-no-alternative-john-hunt-publ, deterritorialization is positioned within Fisher's theory of capitalist realism as a structural feature of the present conjuncture. Fisher's observation that deterritorializing impulses have been confined to finance while culture undergoes reterritorialization maps directly onto the canonical concept of ideology as operating below the level of belief: it is not that subjects consciously accept capital's reterritorialization of culture — it is that the structural conditions of late capitalism foreclose the imaginability of otherwise. This also resonates with alienation: the subject is doubly alienated, dispossessed both of stable cultural territories and of any genuine alternative to the flows that replace them. Deterritorialization, across both sources, thus functions less as an analytic or emancipatory category and more as a symptom — a place where capital's constitutive contradiction between release and recapture becomes visible.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?Mark Fisher · 2009 (page unknown)

In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it splits the single Deleuzian concept into two asymmetric domains — "finance" and "culture" — revealing that deterritorialization is not a uniform emancipatory force but a selective and class-structured process: capital deterritorializes where extraction is maximal (finance) while reterritorializing where subjects must be managed (culture). The juxtaposition of "deterritorializing impulses" with "forces of reterritorialization" names the contradiction internal to capitalism that neither Deleuze/Guattari nor the vitalist left fully confronts.