Deleuze and Guattari write a great deal about experience, especially in the manner that it is used to triangulate the individual through the Oedipalization of capitalism, but the way in which schizoanalysis as a process is a certain sort of deconstructive method, one that in fact goes further than the Derridean process of critique and moreover enables the creation of a process without time, a relation of time that is transcendent to the naming of time is paradigmatic to both understanding Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus as well as understanding the colonial, capitalist reterritorialization of time.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss the capitalist nightmare, lurking on the edge of Man’s earliest fires, and thus create a process by which they may discuss the expanse of capital: it is infinitely and moreover instantaneously expansive such that not only does it contain any given thing, but even that externality, as well as externality itself: interiority is the only way in which capitalism can operate, and indeed Deleuze and Guattari would argue that there is not a meaningful externality to capitalism existent today. The despotic character of Stalinism and the bourgeoisie structure of the Party in the Soviet Union, the manner in which the same mistakes were replicated in spite of Mao’s cautioning, and the way in which Deng Xiaoping’s heightening of capitalist contradiction in order to drive a sort of economic body that claims capitalism as an engine of socialist change is rather clearly a sort of reterritorialization, a process by which even exit from capital is in fact realized through engagement with it. Claiming externality to capitalism so long as this expanse can be remarked upon, so long as this expanse shapes the empiricism of presentist, everyday experience it cannot meaningfully be anything other than part of a body of capital. The identarian processes through which this is realized, or repressed, lead to ideology, the turns of ideology that structure politics, and so on. Even anticapitalism requires capitalism: Maoism is specifically a politics of refusing to recognize an externality to this struggle, that the struggle against capital is in fact the singular, primal metaphysical struggle of the current age.

As part of this, Deleuze offers the processes of difference and repetition as modalities for thought: by presenting them as qualities in themselves, as lacking in empirical basis, they form a basis of thought as part of forming what A Thousand Plateaus describes as an “apparatus of capture” within the relations of thought and experience. The individual paradoxically is only possible through univocality, a pluralistic monism, such that the individual loses distinction in its particularity, and is only particular as a particular of a generality. The transcendent approach to this empiricism, a sort of reversal of Kantian metaphysics that presents its contradiction as a non-answering offer in response to the contradictions of capitalism is in effect the paradigm from which Deleuzean thought operates, as a manner of profoundly negating the claims of the arboreal neurotic structure of capital rather than merely working from them.

The most vital turn of Transcendental Empiricism, as a methodology of thought and a prerequisite for schizoanalytic paradigms, is that it can be founded in an affirmation of the individual as-such, the individual encountered in particularity, while not needing the subjectivity of individualization, of humanization, in order to retain that experiential quality, the phenomena that structure experience and are thus structured by it. As a paradigm, its profound singularity in the individual, its limitation in the individual, is a marker not of a fundamental lack in its robustness but rather in its potential as a means of divesting from the individual.

The way in which rhizomal connections are characterized as schizoanalytic, as a paradigmatic representation of the schizophrenic experience, is that Deleuze and Guattari accept the construction of schizophrenia as a sort of externality, as a manner of inhabiting the body that rejects experience in the usual empirical sense and instead adopts a radical empiricism such that the difference between hallucination and experience is obliterated. There is not such thing as a “true” experience versus a hallucination insofar as the hallucination constitutes meaningful recollection in the present, how it has a quality of futuricity to it.

The way that memory, as a process, involves the repetition of an event and moreover the difference through which it is processed such that remembering an event at one moment is differentiated from remembering it at another is vitally understood as the collapsing of past and future into a singularity within the present, that the designation of past and future are merely artifices that structure a singular present. Augustinian philosophy of time relies on a presentism that contrasts itself with the “natural time” of God, while this understanding of the present is itself doing away with the present as part of attributing time to a structuring of a transcendent empiricism, a sort of network through which any given moment calls upon any other moment and is called upon by any other moment, in a specifically rhizomatic fashion. Rather than the neurotic, arboreal paradigms of classic concepts of descent, a rhizomal critique may be made, such that the relation named through time can stand even when evoked through a structured present without the need for an ontological affirmation of presentism beyond an illusory recognition of it. The present is contained in the past and future, which are contained within themselves and in each other: everything is in everything.