A Deterritorialized History: Investigating German Colonialism ...

implies a deterritorialization of previous territories and peoples. 25 Such territorial entities
as land, property and nation inherently possess a force of deterritorialization. Similarly,
people’s relations with territory are demonstrably highly fluid and deterritorialized.
Territory also forms a crucial area of investigation for this study, both in the notion of
spatial power that Michel Foucault identifies and in the fact that the desire for territory
was vital to the colonial expansion. 26
Correspondingly important to their theory is the vision of deterritorialization’s
exemplification of the human social system. Social groups transform from relatively
isolated entities into socially-conditioned and amorphous multiplicities through
deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that no historical social system has
ever existed in exclusion that did not permeate its neighbours. 27 This leads the authors to
argue that there is no history except the history of the aggregate majority, for no
minorities can escape deterritorialization or assimilation. However, this is not to suggest
that difference does not dominate the populace, for the sole way minorities can escape
history and the majority is through deterritorialization. 28 Therefore, syncretic social
relations and resistance to hegemonic social codes demonstrate deterritorialization within
colonial expansion. This is critical to history since Deleuze and Guattari contend that
deterritorialization and attendant reterritorialization animate social relations. 29
The two authors have a quite negative conception of the state, chiefly because of
its despotic need to dominate other forms of social relations. 30 Deleuze and Guattari
believe that the state exists as an entity separated from the territory that it controls, an
ideological and transcendental entity above the immanent application of power that
organizes the whole. 31 By disrupting and combining forms of territorial organization that
27