A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

limited to abstract academic investigations, for both authors stress the applicability of
their ideas to the examination of human relations. 5
There are three essential elements in immanent human interaction which provide
the foundation of deterritorialization: schizoanalysis, rhizome and nomadology.
Schizoanalysis lies at the heart of the two books of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Schizoanalysis rejects Freud’s and Lacan’s psychoanalysis in favour of a varied,
fragmentary or “schizophrenic” approach to the examination of human social interaction
and power structures like colonialism. 6 This method of analysis opposes the notion of a
separated subject and object by linking the human intrinsically to society. By analysing
how social structures interact, the two authors work toward notions of un-totalizable and
indivisible entities. 7 These relationships involve a model of diverse entities in a
connective synthesis.
Connected with schizoanalysis is Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome
root system and the rhizomatic character of all human connections. Deleuze and Guattari
use the rhizome as an ideological and political structure to escape the rigid and sedentary
formations of the monad, the dialectic and the state. In the rhizome, actions occur
transversally, parataxically and non-hierarchically. 8 Through rhizomatics, there is a
perpetual “continuum of singularities” where there is no determinism, no beginning, no
end, no singularity, and no hierarchy. 9 In their rhizomatic view of the world, Deleuze
and Guattari find humans connected in multiple, inchoate and inter-connected ways;
much like the networks and power dynamics of colonial relations. Finally, the rhizome
metaphor is designed to provoke the reconsideration of relationships.
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