Dune and Retrofuturism
In Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), which is based on the 1965 sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert, technological progress is juxtaposed with socio-political retrogression. There are archaisms (feudal organization, ceremonial rites, messianism) coupled with futuristic technologies (interplanetary travel, novel robotics, state-of-the-art weaponry). These two aspects might seem incongruous, but that is only because we tend to see progress as linear; moving away from the archaic past into the new future. In reality, we are moving in two directions at once — like running up a descending escalator.
According to theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this bidirectionality is a reflection of the dual-tendencies of capitalism; what they call deterritorialization and reterritorialization. As the term suggests, deterritorialization is a disruptive uprooting. It is the displacement of peoples, the extraction of resources, the dissipation of communal values. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’ (Marx). Deterritorialization destabilizes the ‘socius’ through incessant revolutionizing. Although it tends towards the ‘dissipation of all tribal chauvinism through uninhibited trade and exchange, internationalization, miscegenation, migration’ (Mackay & Brassier), it also threatens to self-destruct, exploding the socius and dispatching capitalism ‘straight to the moon’.
To forestall this ‘social suicide machine’, capitalism must inhibit itself. This is the role of reterritorialization. It is restorative. A retrenchment. It ‘sequesters kinship’ from the general tendency of deterritorialization, ‘containing it within familialism and the nation-state’ (Mackay & Brassier). This is why Deleuze and Guattari refer to the ‘fascist state’ as ‘capitalism’s most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritorialization’ (Deleuze & Guattari). The fascist state seeks to centralise power and it is this turning in, this involution that characterises reterritorialization.
Thus ‘the movement of deterritorialization that goes from the center to the periphery is accompanied by a peripheral reterritorialization, a kind of economic and political self-centering of the periphery’. This dual tendency is capitalism’s compromise:
What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit
In order to contain this ‘awesome accumulation of energy’, modern societies institute ‘violent and artificial’ reterritorializations:
what they deterritorialized with one hand, they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of “imbricating,” of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons
On the one hand we have revolutionary deterritorialization, and on the other we have reactionary reterritorialization. A similar polarity characterises Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia/ paranoia. According to their framework, these terms transcend their psychiatric application: they use the term schizophrenia to refer to a free and fluid ‘mode of psychic and social functioning’ (Holland); and paranoia to refer to the defensive countertendency inhibiting this ‘decoded flux’ (Deleuze & Guattari). As Eugene W. Holland puts it in his Introduction to Schizoanalysis, ‘paranoia represents what is archaic in capitalism, the resuscitation of obsolete, or traditional, belief-centered modes of social organization, whereas schizophrenia designates capitalism’s positive potential: freedom, ingenuity, permanent revolution’.
Capitalism tends toward (decoding, deterritorializing) schizophrenia, but resists and withdraws from this limit to maintain the stability needed to continue. Presently, the modern state is the primary agent of this paranoiac reterritorialization:
They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding — or allowing the decoding of — the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign […] and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the other. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves (Deleuze & Guattari)
In Dune, capitalism has literally ‘dispatched itself to the moon’. But this deterritorialization is sustained through extreme socio-political atavism. In the year 10191, patrilineal despotism has returned. An autocratic Emperor sits atop a ‘violent and artificial’ hierarchy that interferes and inhibits free trade and exchange. (The plot of Dune centres around the Emperor’s decision to let Duke Leto of House Atreides replace House Harkonnen as fief rulers of Arrakis — a desert planet with access to a rare and valuable resource known as ‘spice’). According to Deleuze and Guattari, the despot — whose role it is to overcode ‘territorial flows’ — is inherently paranoid. This bears out in Dune, where (spoiler alert) the Emperor stages a coup against the ascending House Atreides. Paranoia, in this context, is a defence against diminishing agency and control. Without this control, chaos would prevail.
In the context of capitalist paranoia, Ian Buchanan sums up this situation well:
Capitalism doesn’t require our belief to function, but it does require regulation. It unleashes flows that need damping if they aren’t to carry the system itself into ruin. It needs to produce anti production as well as production. The drive to innovation needs to be countered by the manufacture of stupidity (Buchanan)
