Abstract
The author theorises the passage from disciplinary societies to global societies of control with the rise of late capitalism as a significant moment in history to define and characterise the contemporary world’s and dystopia’s move towards the plane of immanence. The author suggests that the immanent machine of late capitalism provides us both with utterly capitalist tools of control and with revolutionary weapons of resistance in our present societies. By modelling on the working mechanism of the capitalist social machine in today’s societies of control, the author discloses the dual nature of the contemporary world and contemporary dystopia both as a dystopian territory and a distopian potentiality.
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Notes
- 1.
Deterritorialisation is a term Deleuze and Guattari first introduce in their mutual work, Anti-Oedipus (1972). Since the term is used in several different ways in terms of its functions, it would be more reasonable to clarify how it functions rather than explicating what it means, which could also be a path to follow in the explanation of other terms employed by these philosophers in this study. In its broadest sense, the process of deterritorialisation is a process of dethroning fixed points of views or perceptions, and freeing subjects, objects, bodies or relations from the trap of organisation, going beyond binary oppositions, undoing constructed forms and organisms, liberating desire to move with all the flows and paving the way for creative assemblages and revolutionary lines of flight. In the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari (1987) clear up the basic concepts crucial to the understanding of their philosophy, deterritorialisation is treated as a process or movement by which one departs from a particular territory (p. 508). Deterritorialisation is, in its most general sense, a movement that brings about change.
- 2.
“The capitalist system of inscription”, as Eugene Holland (1999) remarks, “derives from the dynamics of axiomatisation: from deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, decoding and recoding” (p. 81). The axiomatic is a determining factor that separates the capitalist machine from other social machines and makes it an immanent system. Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the capitalist social machine’s axiomatic ability for constant growth and expansion by calling it “the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialised ” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 245–246). What gives late capitalism its potential to push its limits and to become the limit of all societies is its axiomatic. It is the axiomatic that makes it move to different territories without being confiscated in any and to accommodate itself to the different economic, social and political circumstances of these new territories. As Deleuze and Guattari (1983) themselves underline, “[t]he strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones. Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to fully occupy this field” (p. 250).
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Çokay Nebioğlu, R. (2020). Dystopia After Late Capitalism. In: Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Dystopia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43145-7_3
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