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Machinic theory of society

Deleuze and Guattari propose an outline of ‘universal history’ which in some respects resembles Marx’s materialist theory of history. For Marx, it is the mode of production of essential goods and services which explains the nature of society in each epoch. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the abstract machines of desire and power which define the nature of a given society: ‘We define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of production (these on the contrary depend on the processes)’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:435). While they distinguish three major kinds of social machine—territorial, despotic and capitalist—unlike Marx, they do not consider these to be successive stages in a single process of evolution. Rather, they are understood as virtual machines which may be operative in a given social field. Concrete social formations are then specified by the extent to which the different abstract social machines are actualised within them in varying combinations. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari propose a form of philosophical knowledge of history which remains indebted to the structuralist Marxism of Althusser. Their aim is not primarily to describe particular societies but to present concepts, along with historical examples and illustrations, which may in turn be applied to the analysis of concrete social formations.

We noted in Chapter 4 that Deleuze and Guattari propose a concept of desire which treats it as a process of production, where the successive stages of this process parallel the stages of material production as these are described by Marx. In Part 3 of Anti-Oedipus (1977), this concept of ‘machinic’ production forms the point of departure for their theory of society as a machine. Social life is machinic in so far as it involves the differentiation and distribution of material flows, the recording of primary processes by the establishment of chains of signification, and the resultant differentiation of social subjects and ‘consumption’ of social being. In these terms, social life may be conceived as ‘a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of

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recording and the productions of consumption’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:142).

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between different kinds of social machine according to the manner in which the coordination and control of material social flows are carried out. What they call the socius is the imagined surface upon which this control and coordination take place. The socius thus appears to be the agent of the social production process: the business of the socius, they argue, is to code desire: ‘The prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:33). Capital, as Marx describes it, provides both a model and primary exemplar for this concept of the socius. In Marx’s account, capitalism is a system of coordination of the flows of social production and reproduction in which capital itself appears to be the cause of the entire process of social production: it forms a surface on which the forces and agents of production are distributed and the surplus appropriated. To the extent that capital is ‘the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:10), the socius is the imaginary body of society as a whole, the full body from which the material flows are supposed to emanate.



The socius takes different forms according to the means of codification of flows: ‘flows of women and children, flows of herds and seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:142). The first form of socius is the primitive territorial machine: ‘territorial’ not because it operates upon territories but because in these societies it is the earth itself which is the recording surface or full body of all social processes:

The earth is the primitive, savage unity of desire and production… It is the surface on which the whole process of production is inscribed, on which the forces and the means of labour are recorded, and the agents and the products distributed. It appears here as the quasi-cause of production and the object of desire (it is on the earth that desire becomes bound to its own repression). The territorial machine is therefore the first form of socius, the machine of primitive inscription, the ‘megamachine’ that covers a social field.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977:140–1)

This machine effects a collective investment of bodily organs (mouth, anus, penis, vagina, etc.) which ‘plugs desire into the socius and assembles social production and desiring-production into a whole on the earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:142). This collective social investment involves literal

 

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inscription upon bodies via marks of initiation. These transform individual biological bodies into social bodies, codifying the organs in accordance with the requirements of social existence. Following Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari call this process of enculturation a system of cruelty, but also a principal means by which humanity first forged for itself a memory. It therefore corresponds to the earliest stages of human culture. The method of codification practised by the territorial machine is primitive not only in the sense that it is characteristic of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, but also in the sense that it remains the basis of human culture: to the extent that all societies presuppose forms of collective social investment of the body, pre-capitalist social machines are ‘inherent in desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:139).

The primitive territorial socius is above all a system of organising people, and its principal mechanism for doing so is the kinship system. Kinship systems specify the classes or groups to which individuals belong and the relationships between them. Deleuze and Guattari argue for a conception of kinship systems as practices or strategies of alliance rather than structures. They argue that lines of filiation and alliance are equally important determinants of the operation of the social machine, being neither derived from nor reducible to the other: ‘it is essential to take into consideration how ties of alliance combine concretely with relations of filiation on a given territorial surface’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:147). By means of the relationships which they establish between groups and the forms of exchange between them, kinship systems determine the flows of material production within primitive societies. They establish the deductions that constitute a minimal stock or inherited accumulation of goods, as well as the detachments such as those that occur in the context of marriage: ‘A flow is coded insofar as detachments from the chain and deductions from the flows are effected in correspondence’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:149).

Following Nietzsche and Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the economy of the primitive territorial machine is governed not by equal exchange but by the principle of fundamental disequilibrium which corresponds to relations of debt and credit. Nietzsche’s analysis of the psychic economy of punishment in On the Genealogy of Morality (1994) provides the model for their account of the ‘code surplus’ which explains the equivalence of pain inflicted for the injury experienced. The same phenomenon of surplus value of code, they suggest, accounts for the manner in which, in some societies, the accumulation of perishable wealth converts into imperishable prestige (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:150).

The second form of socius is the full body of the despot which accompanies the ‘Barbarian Despotic Machine’. By contrast with the territorial machine, Deleuze and Guattari argue that this social machine is characterised by the instauration of a new system of alliance and a new form of

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filiation. The despotic machine substitutes hierarchical castes or classes for the lateral alliances of the territorial machine and introduces a new form of filiation which connects the people through the despot directly to the deity; ‘new alliance and direct filiation are specific categories that testify to the existence of a new socius, irreducible to the lateral alliances and extended filiations that are declined by the primitive machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:194, trans. modified). There is a profound discontinuity between this social machine and the primitive, but also a degree of continuity to the extent that it retains the old territorialities of lineage and alliance, while integrating them as subordinate working parts of the new machine. As in Nietzsche’s genealogical conception of history, changes in the nature of social institutions are understood to be the result of their being overtaken by new forces and subjected to new meanings (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:196). The despotic machine does not suppress the old regime of lateral alliances and extended filiations but rather displaces their character as determinant relations of social organisation by subordinating them to its own system of alliance and filiation. For example, the forms of local alliance debt are subordinated to an ‘infinite debt’ owed to the despot, who annuls existing debts or provides credit in the form of protection and infrastructure only to create an interminable debt to himself. Marx’s analysis of Asiatic production provides a model for this analysis of a form of social organisation in which ‘the autochthonous rural communities subsist and continue to produce, inscribe and consume; in effect they are the State’s sole concern. The wheels of the territorial lineage machine subsist, but are no longer anything more than the working parts of the State machine’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:196).

Whereas the earth was the socius or full body of the primitive territorial machine, this place is now filled by the body of the despot or the deity, who in turn becomes the quasi-cause of all production and the final destination of all consumption.

What counts is not the person of the sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited. It is the social machine that has profoundly changed: in place of the territorial machine there is the ‘megamachine’ of the State, 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.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977:194)

We noted above that for Deleuze and Guattari, the essential task of the socius is to code the flows of desire and matter which make up a society. The essential mechanism and the novelty of the despotic state machine is that it introduces a system of overcoding. By this means, a new form of

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inscription is overlaid upon the forms of primitive inscription, forcing them into alignment with the new alliance of despot and people and the direct filiation of despot and deity.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Barbarian Despotic Machine implies a theory of the origin and nature of state-governed societies. They contrast their concept of the state with those accounts that represent it as the result of a treaty or contract (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:195), arguing instead that ‘overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of the State’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:199). They argue that, far from being tied to the establishment of a territory, the state is the result of a movement of deterritorialisation which substitutes abstract signs for the signs of the earth and makes the land into an object of property. Nevertheless, the despotic state machine remains a system of code: it shares with the territorial machine a horror of decoded flows. While it emerges as a result of a process of deterritorialisation in relation to the territorial machine, the despotic machine immediately reterritorialises the new forms of property on the new socius. At the same time, it introduces its own forms of deterritorialisation, such as the invention of money, which initially serves the needs of taxation rather than those of commerce (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:197). As such, money under the conditions of the despotic machine amounts to a limited deterritorialisation and corresponding reterritorialisation of the flows of product.

The ‘Civilised Capitalist Machine’ differs in several important respects from the previous social machines. First, whereas both the territorial and the despotic machines give rise to processes of deterritorialisation and generate decoded flows of various kinds, capitalism is the only social machine which is defined by ‘the generalised decoding of flows’. Within pre-capitalist societies, the development of private property and commodity production, the extension of markets and the accumulation of money all amounted to deterritorialised flows of social product and activity. A primary task of the early modern states was to contain such flows by the creation of new social institutions and codes. Capitalism emerges only once these decoded flows are brought together in a new economic and social system which effects what Deleuze and Guattari call the conjunction of deterritorialised flows. It is this conjunction of decoded flows that allows capitalism to develop and capital to become ‘the new social full body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:226). Deleuze and Guattari follow Marx’s account of the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ in describing the contingent encounter between flows of deterritorialised money and labour which gave rise to industrial capital. It is this encounter which alone makes possible capitalism as a self-reproducing and dynamic system of social production. The capitalist machine is not assembled until money in the form of capital takes direct control of the process of production itself. But this only occurs because of a series of historical accidents which bring together in the

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same place and time the necessary elements: ‘on the one side, the deterritorialized worker who has become free and naked, having to sell his labour capacity; and on the other, decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying this labour capacity’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:225). Once properly capitalist production is established and takes over the principal sectors of industry within society, capital becomes the full body or quasi-cause that tends to appropriate all the productive forces. Capital is thus the third form of socius and the one that accompanies the Civilised Capitalist Machine.

The second feature which distinguishes the capitalist machine from the territorial and despotic machines has to do with its mode of coordination and control: whereas the other two both involve the extraction of a code surplus, the capitalist machine extracts a surplus of flux or ‘flow surplus’. Deleuze and Guattari rewrite Marx’s account of the origin of surplus value under the conditions of capitalist production. Whereas Marx locates the secret of the process whereby money is able to beget more money in the peculiar capacity of labour power to create more value in a given period than it costs to buy, Deleuze and Guattari confine their analysis to the sphere of exchange in order to argue that the surplus results from the conjunction of decoded flows of constant and variable capital. Capitalism is the generation of a surplus by means of the differential relation between flows of constant and variable capital. They describe the essence of capital as a differential relation in the mathematical sense, Dy/Dx, where Dy represents the fluctuation of variable capital and Dx represents the fluctuation of constant capital, and they attribute to it a generative power in a manner that recalls Deleuze’s metaphysics of the calculus in Difference and Repetition. It is this differential relation which defines ‘the immanent social field peculiar to capitalism’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:227). Understood in this manner, the generation of surplus value is in principle without limit, subject only to the conditions of the reproduction of capital which are immanent to the process.

With the emergence of capitalism, society passes from a regime of code surplus to a regime of flow surplus (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:228). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that this analysis provides a means of understanding certain features of capitalism which remain opaque to orthodox Marxist economic analysis, such as the fundamental incommensurability of money as capital or credit and money as a means of payment for consumption goods and services, which is reflected in the different treatment of these two forms of money in banking practice. This lack of common measure between the value of enterprises and the value of the labour capacity of workers is put forward as a reason why the tendency of the rate of profit to fall remains operative without ever reaching its ideal limit. Another aspect of the problem of the falling rate of profit which

 

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Deleuze and Guattari suggest their account of flow surplus can accommodate is the contribution of technological innovation to surplus value:

There is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital which develops along with automation and productivity, and which cannot be explained by factors that counteract the falling tendency—the increasing intensity of the exploitation of labour, the diminution of the price of the elements of constant capital, etc.—since, on the contrary, these factors depend on it.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977:232)

Their explanation of the contribution of technological change to capital’s expanded reproduction amounts to a generalisation of the notion of flow surplus to include the surplus that derives from the flows of intellectual, scientific and technological code. Such flows of code are the basis for the creation and adoption of new technical machines. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the condition of their adoption is the social machine which ‘organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:233). Ultimately, the crucial form in which this machine is actualised is the world market. However, as we shall see in the following section, it includes among its elements the various nation-states which play a crucial role in the regulation of capital movements and in the realisation of surplus value.

Whereas the previous social machines operate by means of the codification of social processes, capitalism is unique in that it functions by means of a formal connection of decoded flows which Deleuze and Guattari call ‘axiomatisation’. This is the third and most significant aspect of their characterisation of the difference between the capitalist social machine and the preceding machines. The concept of capitalism as an axiomatic system is a distinctive contribution which provides a privileged point of entry into Deleuze and Guattari’s political thought. As we saw in Chapter 1, their concept of philosophy allows no place for metaphor. Their use of the term ‘axiomatic’ must therefore be regarded as the invention of a new concept by means of the adaptation of elements of the concept of an axiomatic system in mathematical logic and their transposition to the socioeconomic field. They argue that it is ‘the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:461). Chief among these characteristics is the difference between an axiomatic system and a code. Whereas a code establishes a systematic correspondence directly between the elements of different signifying systems, an axiomatic system is defined by purely syntactic rules for the generation of strings of non-signifying or uninterpreted symbols. The resultant strings of symbols may be given an

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interpretation by the specification of a model and the assignment of significations to elements of the formal language.

In these terms, capital may be supposed to function as ‘an axiomatic of abstract quantities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:228). As a universal equivalent, money is a purely quantitative measure that is indifferent to the qualitative character of flows of different kinds. Commodity production under capitalist conditions generalises this formal equality of all social goods and relations. Factors of production appear in the balancesheet of an enterprise simply as units of monetary value. Objects produced under non-capitalist regimes of code may also be drawn into the global market, where they are exchanged equally as items of value alongside capitalistically produced goods. To the extent that they are subsumed under the exchange relation, objects produced under the most diverse regimes of code, such as artefacts of indigenous handicraft, and products of fully automated production systems, may be ‘formally united’ within the capitalist axiomatic.1

Whereas capital is a directly economic means of regulating the production, circulation and consumption of social goods, pre-capitalist economies operate through codes that are extrinsic means of regulating the flow of economic materials and forces on the socius. Social codes determine the quality of particular flows, for example, prestige as opposed to consumption goods, thereby establishing indirect relations between flows of different kinds. They also determine the manner in which, within certain limits, a surplus is drawn from the primary flows: in code-governed societies, surplus value invariably takes the form of code surplus. Finally, because they are extrinsic to the processes of production and circulation of goods, systems of codification imply the existence of forms of collective belief, judgement and evaluation on the part of the agents of these processes. By contrast, capitalism has no need to mark bodies or to constitute a memory for its agents. Since it works by means of an axiomatic intrinsic to the social processes of production, circulation and consumption, it is a profoundly cynical machine: ‘the capitalist is merely striking a pose when he bemoans the fact that nowadays no one believes in anything any more’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:250).

Deleuze and Guattari speak of the capitalist axiomatic in both a restricted and primarily economic sense, and also in a broader sense where this refers to a social machine that includes a juridical and a political as well as a technocratic apparatus. It is as though there were two aspects of capitalism, or a distinction to be drawn between capital understood as ‘a general axiomatic of decoded flows’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:453), and capitalism understood as a mechanism or set of mechanisms for the maintenance of a relatively stable assemblage of the social factors required to sustain the extraction of flow surplus. Capitalism as an economic system forms an axiomatic but so does capitalist society:

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The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1977:233)

This points to a second distinctive feature of axiomatic systems which justifies this adaptation of the concept. Subject to certain overriding constraints such as consistency or the generation of surplus value, there is considerable scope for variation in the axioms that may be appropriate for a given model. The history of capitalism has involved experimentation and evolution with regard to axioms. Its successive crises each provoke a response which may take the form of the addition of new axioms (the incorporation of trade unions, centralised wage fixing, social welfare, etc.) or the elimination of existing axioms (the elimination of trade unions and currency controls leading to the deregulation of banking, finance and labour markets). None of these axioms is essential to the continued functioning of capital as such, any more than are the axioms of bourgeois social life. Economic activity is increased when family members dine individually at McDonalds. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism threatens to sweep away all the values of civilised social existence and replace them with the ‘cash nexus’. The circulation of capital through the differential relation between the flows of finance and the flows of personal income, along with the circulation of information through the electronic circuits of mass communication, propels the entire world towards a society in which all the signs of the past are detached from their origins and written over with new signs, and the motley representatives of the present appear as ‘paintings of all that has ever been believed’.2 Capitalism constantly approaches this limit only to displace it further ahead by reconstituting its own immanent relative limits. The capitalist axiomatic generates schizo-flows which are the basis of its restless and cosmopolitan energy while at the same time setting new limits on the socius. In this sense, the capitalist axiomatic is a machine that represses the very social forces and flows of matter and energy which it produces: ‘it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:246).

Like Marx, Deleuze and Guattari propose a universal history written from the standpoint of a present which provides a privileged point of view on the past. In this sense, they argue that ‘capitalism has haunted all forms of society’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:140). As the only social machine that operates by means of a generalised decoding of flows, capitalism reveals the secret of the earlier forms of society, namely their

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abhorrence of decoding and their commitment to ‘coding the flows and even overcoding them rather than allowing anything to escape coding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:153). The Civilised Capitalist Machine thus haunts the earlier forms of social codification not as the inevitable endpoint of a single process of development but as their other and their absolute limit. The absolute deterritorialisation of social life also haunts capitalism in the form of a limit that is continually approached but never attained. This external limit is the end-point of the process of decoding and deterritorialisation. Were it ever realised, it would amount to a form of social schizophrenia, the point at which the flows of desire ‘travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:246). However, just as schizophrenia is an unsustainable and unlivable mode of personal and social existence, so absolute deterritorialisation remains an ideal and unattainable state of social existence. Capitalist societies simultaneously reterritorialise what they deterritorialise, producing all manner of ‘neoterritorialities’ which may be ‘artificial, residual or archaic’ but which have the effect of resuscitating or reintroducing fragments of earlier social codes, or inventing new ones: examples range from the more virulent forms of religious or nationalist fundamentalism to the relatively benign constitutional monarchisms or civic nationalisms. Capitalism as a distinctive form of social organisation has a limit which is the absolute decoding of flows ‘but it functions only by pushing back and exorcising this limit…the strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977:250).


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