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THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS

 

bringing it into a set of aleatory relations with the exterior, the more 

deterritorialized it is. That is why degrees of development must be under-

stood relatively, and as a function of differential speeds, relations, and 

rates. Deterritorialization must be thought of as a perfectly positive power 

that has degrees and thresholds (epistrata), is always relative, and has 

reterritorialization as its flipside or complement. An organism that is 

deterritorialized in relation to the exterior necessarily reterritorializes on 

its interior milieus. A given presumed fragment of embryo is deterrito-

rialized when it changes thresholds or gradients, but is assigned a new role 

by the new surroundings. Local movements are alterations. Cellular migra-

tion, stretching, invagination, folding are examples of this. Every voyage is 

intensive, and occurs in relation to thresholds of intensity between which it 

evolves or that it crosses. One travels by intensity; displacements and 

spatial figures depend on intensive thresholds of nomadic deterritoriali-

zation (and thus on differential relations) that simultaneously define com-

plementary, sedentary reterritorializations. Every stratum operates this 

way: by grasping in its pincers a maximum number of intensities or inten-

sive particles over which it spreads its forms and substances, constituting 

determinate gradients and thresholds of resonance (deterritorialization on 

a stratum always occurs in relation to a complementary reterrito-

rialization).

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As long as preestablished forms were compared to predetermined 

degrees, all one could do was affirm their irreducibility, and there was no 

way of judging possible communication between the two factors. But we 

see now that forms depend on codes in the parastrata and plunge into pro-

cesses of decoding or drift and that degrees themselves are caught up in 

movements of intensive territorialization and reterritorialization. There is 

no simple correspondence between codes and territorialities on the one 

hand and decodings and deterritorialization on the other: on the contrary, 

a code may be a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization a decoding. 

Wide gaps separate code and territoriality. The two factors nevertheless 

have the same "subject" in a stratum: it is populations that are deter-

ritorialized and reterritorialized, and also coded and decoded. In addition, 

these factors communicate or interlace in the milieus.

 

On the one hand, modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the 

milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their 

compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularized. 

Deterritorializations and reterritorializations do not bring about the mod-

ifications; they do, however, strictly determine their selection. On the other 

hand, every modification has an associated milieu that in turn entails a 

certain deterritorialization in relation to the milieu of exteriority and a cer-

tain reterritorialization on intermediate or interior milieus. Perceptions

 

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0,000 B.C.: THE GEOLOGY OF MORALS □ 55

 

and actions in an associated milieu, even those on a molecular level, con-

struct or produce territorial signs (indexes). This is especially true of an ani-

mal world, which is constituted, marked off by signs that divide it into 

zones (of shelter, hunting, neutrality, etc.), mobilize special organs, and 

correspond to fragments of code; this is so even at the margin of decoding 

inherent in the code. Even the domain of learning is defined by the code, or 

prescribed by it. But indexes or territorial signs are inseparable from a dou-

ble movement. Since the associated milieu always confronts a milieu of 

exteriority with which the animal is engaged and in which it takes neces-

sary risks, a line of flight must be preserved to enable the animal to regain 

its associated milieu when danger appears (for example, the bull's line of 

flight in the arena, which it uses to regain the turf it has chosen).

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 A second 

kind of line of flight arises when the associated milieu is rocked by blows 

from the exterior, forcing the animal to abandon it and strike up an associa-

tion with new portions of exteriority, this time leaning on its interior 

milieus like fragile crutches. When the seas dried, the primitive Fish left its 

associated milieu to explore land, forced to "stand on its own legs," now 

carrying water only on the inside, in the amniotic membranes protecting 

the embryo. In one way or the other, the animal is more a fleer than a 

fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations. Territorialities, then, 

are shot through with lines of flight testifying to the presence within them 

of movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. In a certain 

sense, they are secondary. They would be nothing without these move-

ments that deposit them. In short, the epistrata and parastrata are continu-

ally moving, sliding, shifting, and changing on the Ecumenon or unity of 

composition of a stratum; some are swept away by lines of flight and move-

ments of deterritorialization, others by processes of decoding or drift, but 

they all communicate at the intersection of the milieus. The strata are con-

tinually being shaken by phenomena of cracking and rupture, either at the 

level of the substrata that furnish the materials (a prebiotic soup, a 

prechemical soup ...), at the level of the accumulating epistrata, or at the 

level of the abutting parastrata: everywhere there arise simultaneous accel-

erations and blockages, comparative speeds, differences in deterrito-

rialization creating relative fields of reterritorialization.

 

These relative movements should most assuredly not be confused with 

the possibility of absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight, 

absolute drift. The former are stratic or interstratic, whereas the latter con-

cern the plane of consistency and its destratification (its "combustion," as 

Geoffroy would say). There is no doubt that mad physical particles crash 

through the strata as they accelerate, leaving minimal trace of their pas-

sage, escaping spatiotemporal and even existential coordinates as they 

tend toward a state of absolute deterritorialization, the state of unformed

 

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