Last updated: 5/11/22; finished Deleuze and Guattari on Capitalism; still need to finish DeLanda section. Add knots.
Note from 31/12/24: After reading through, most of these notes are basically okay.. I think they lack substance. I might try and edit this into something a little more cohesive in the new year.
I think most basically though, in any discussion of Capitalism - it is perhaps more useful to talk about Markets and Antimarkets
The economist Manuel DeLanda discusses the necessity of this well. If we are promarket and anticapitalist. This is a good place to start. .
To take from Manuel DeLanda - we need a synthetic approach when trying to understand a system such as Global Capitalism - "analytical techniques by their very nature, tend to kill emergent properties [...] We tend uncritically to assume systemacity, as when talks of the ,Capitalist System'". (p.182-183) Capitalism, if we listen to DeLanda, influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, is not about free trade; it is rather a consistent tearing down and reconstructing of the socius stemming from the concentration of capital. What is needed to follow this logic through then is a "return to the actual details of economic history that utilises a synthetic approach".
For DeLanda, this looks suspiciously like historical materialism. DeLanda sets about constructing a historical precedent for Capitalism, primarily attempting to push us away from chronocentric conceptions of this system. He suggests that capitalism has always suggested in its current form, as have the tools for market control. He then makes a very important theoretical jump:
First of all, if capitalism has always relied on noncompetitive practices, if the prices for its commodities have never been objectively set by demand/supply dynamics, but imposed from above by powerful economic decision makers, then capitalism and the market have always been separate entities.
He uses this logic to point us towards an idea that "capitalism has always been antimarket" and that we should abandon the generalising term 'capitalism' for discussions of markets, antimarkets, and their dynamics.
Moving on from this, there is a discussion that emerges regarding the organisation of the capitalist system. I'll fill this in later, but it is all about contrasting the hierarchy that capitalism imposes as opposed to the meshwork necessarily created by markets and decenteralised models of trade. It certainly will relate to the following passage where I try and expand on Deleuze and Guattari's conception of capitalism.
In the capitalist formation of sovereignty—the full body of capital-money as the socius—the great social axiomatic has replaced the territorial codes and the despotic overcodings that characterized the preceding formations; and a molar, gregarious aggregate has formed, whose mode of subjugation has no equal. We have seen on what foundations this aggregate operated: a whole field of immanence that is reproduced on an always larger scale, that is continually multiplying its axioms to suit its needs, that is filled with images and with images of images, through which desire is determined to desire its own repression (imperialism); an unprecedented decoding and deterritorialization, which institutes a combination as a system of differential relations between the decoded and deterritorialized flows, in such a way that social inscription and repression no longer even need to bear directly upon bodies and persons, but on the contrary precede them (axiomatic: regulation and application); a surplus value determined as a surplus value of flux, whose extortion is not brought about by a simple arithmetical difference between two quantities that are homogeneous and belong to the same code, but precisely by differential relations between heterogeneous magnitudes that are not raised to the same power: a flow of capital and a flow of labor as human surplus value in the industrial essence of capitalism, a flow of financing and a flow of payment or incomes in the monetary inscription of capitalism, a market flow and a flow of innovation as machinic surplus value in the operation of capitalism (surplus value as the first aspect of its immanence), a ruling class that is all the more ruthless as it does not place the machine in its service,but is the servant of the capitalist machine in this sense, a single class, content for its part with drawing incomes that, however enormous, differ only arithmetically from the workers' wages-income, whereas this class functions on a more profound level as creator, regulator, and guardian of the great nonappropriated, nonpossessed flow, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks at every step along the way the interior limits of capitalism, their perpetual displacement, and their reproduction on an always larger scale (the movement of interior limits as the second aspect of the capitalist field of immanence, defined by the circular relationship "great flux of financing-reflux of incomes in wages-afflux of raw profit"); the effusion of antiproduction within production, as the realization or the absorption of surplus value, in such a way that the military, bureaucratic, and police apparatus finds itself grounded in the economy itself, which directly produces libidinal investments for the repression of desire (antiproduc-tion as the third aspect of capitalist immanence, expressing the twofold nature of capitalism production for production's sake, but under the conditions of capital).
This is basically one sentence???
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 'Introduction to Schizoanalysis' in AntiOedipus, 1972.
“The emperor, the god — what did he mean?” For Deleuze and Guattari, it was the emergence of the despot that constituted the emergence of the state - the apparatus by which they stratify, recode, and maintain power; organising the earth, populations, and production to form “a functional pyramid that has the despot at its apex, an immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as its working parts”. It is the desiring-production of the despot that creates the state: it begins by drawing alliances through the overcoding of desire of an inner circle, continuously expanding, flow after flow, person after person, until an assemblage large enough to constitute a state emerges. In this assemblage, “He is the sole quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the apparent objective movement […] all the flows converge into a great river that constitutes the sovereign's consumption”, and it is upon the shared surface of these channeled flows, constituting a socius, where the reorientation of the populace’s desire towards the despot’s may occur; for there is no flow they touch, no action they can manifest, necessarily through desire, that has not already been touched by the original despotic desire. Resources emerge as the immanent strata of the Earth are overcoded to define resources for the furthering of the despot’s desire, and the individual becomes articulatable only in their relationship to the despot - proximity to the power centre, proximity to overcoded strata of the Earth, proximity to the production of the despot’s desire. Politics understood here constitutes the organisation of flows of conditional subjects and land in the shape of the despot’s desires.
Politics is best understood as the organisation of individuals into the arrays of power that constitute society. It constitutes a conditional subjectivity upon individuals. That is to say that any individual living inside society is, in fact, an object; they are articulated in the terms of another. These terms are never just the terms of another individual, they too are interpellated in the terms of another: the despot. In a word, the Political Mode is the Despotic Mode.
Deleuze and Guattari draw a separation between Imperial and Capitalist eras in the second chapter of AntiOedipus, but this is not to say that these different regimes constitute different modes. Capitalism is an interesting adversary within this project, oftentimes seeming more friend than foe, undertaking much of the work that seems to be necessary in freeing desire from the constraints of a despotic socius: “the decoding of flows and the deterritorialisation of the socius thus constitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism”. But, as we said: whilst Capitalism departs from the Emperor’s regime, it does not depart the despotic mode; for under the regime of capital there is always “the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other”.
But why deterritorialise in the first place? Capitalism ensures its growth by coopting the reality production capacities of its subjects; to allow for the production of objects to be brought under the domain of capitalism, to be recoded in the name of value so as to yield more capital, the supportive metastrata ensuring Capitalism’s sustenance. However, this loosening of desire requires that Capitalism loosen its grip on power; hence the genius double-articulation: all is subsumed back under the image of Capital, we reterritorialise with our left. This act of reterritorialisation is what keeps Capitalism within the definitions of the despotic mode; capitalism is constructed on the ruins of the territorial and the despotic”, yet it “re-establishes them in its own service and in another form, as images of capital”. Capitalism still desires, in essence its desires are that of the imperium: immortality; to ensure its persistence must expand its borders, overcode flows, instigate a politics.
And whilst Deleuze and Guattari hesitate to directly articulate any workable alternative, it is clear that this is a problem for them: for any limiting, channelling, repression of desire inhibits access to the real. The closing paragraph of the book denotes the positive task of schizoanalysis: “completing the process [of desiring-production] and not arresting it, not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. […] For the new earth […] is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorialisations that arrest the process or assign it goals”. So whilst no political program will be proposed within AntiOedipus or schizoanalysis, it is clear that the politics of the Despotic Mode cannot allow antioedipal ethics to properly, fully, proceed. An opposition appears: a necessity for Antipolitics begins to emerge.