Deleuze and Guattari on the State

We’ve been talking in an anthropological study group I’m a part of about the possibility of reformulating a concept of the state that would allow us to tackle problems such as non-territorially based forms of coordinating hierarchy. I’ve been rereading Deleuze and Guattari‘s What is Philosophy this last week, and came across this nugget, which I suggest proposes a good reason for retaining the notion of a territorial state. Here, they identify capitalism with the City, which seems appropriate enough to me:

States and Cities have often been defined as territorial, as substituting a territorial principle for the principal of lineage. But this is inexact: lineal groups may change territory, and they are only really determined by embracing a territory or residence in a ‘local lineage.’ State and City, on the contrary, carry out a deterritorializaion because the former juxtaposes and compares agricultural territories by relating them to a higher arithmetical Unity, and the latter adapts to the territory to a geometrical extensiveness that can be continued in commercial circuits. The imperial spatium of the State and the political extensio of the city are not so much forms of a territorial principle as a deterritorialization that takes place on the spot when the State appropriates the territory of local groups or when the city turns its back on its hinterland. In one case, there is reterritorialization on the palace and its supplies; and in the other, on the agora and commercial networks. ((1 Deleuze and Guattari, What is philosophy? p. 86))

In a nutshell, the insight is that the state binds the forces of capitalism which are always seeking extension: the result is a balance of terror, as Hunter S. Thompson might have put it, in which the leveling effects of the state preserve the duration of capitalism’s hierarchies.
Put another way, if we want to retheorize the state, as so many anarchists want to do today, and as seems necessary, do we really want to throw out territory as one of its necessary components? It seems to me that the territorial component of the state concept is crucial to understanding the state’s relationship with capitalism, which we, as anarchists, are perhaps less interested in retheorizing than, say, Marxists.

Deleuze’s notion here is that the State and the City are both deterritorializing at the same time that they are reterritorializing. The State destroys the territory of the agricultural field by relating it to a unity of territory. The city destroys the territory of its domain by extension and through the incorporation and submission of the new areas and processes to the City (capitalism).

My opinion is strongly that we ought to avoid retheorizing the state without its territorial component: the very role of the State concept is to reterritorialize the deterritorializing effects of capitalism, to contain capitalism’s orgy of production and consumption in order to stablize (or ‘statify’) the hierarchies which capitalism temporarily enables. (pure capitalism would run out of energy quite quickly, and collapse, returning a leveling effect). At the same time, the City’s role is to reterritorialize the deterritorializing effects of the state – the State levels (as does the Nation), but the City (and Capitalism) creates hierachy and function. They need each other in order to remain vital and durable.