Society’s primary function is to dam and channel desire flows.

Evidence

Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Young notes their contention that the ‘prime function incumbent on the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly damned up, channeled, regulated.’ Capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari theorized, requires the territorializing of desire that Freud assumed was an individual process when he described the Oedipus complex. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 173

Categorization

• DEFINE: States Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis that the socius codifies desire at a collective, not individual, level.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does this territorializing-of-desire frame shed light on modern surveillance and data collection as flow-regulation?