Essays on Deleuze
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In the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari in turn develop a tripartite typology of social formations (“primitives,” States, capitalism). “In each case,” they ask, “what is the relationship between social production and desiring-production, once it is said that they have identical natures and differing regimes?” (AO 262). “It could be,” they will ultimately conclude, “that where the regimes are the closest, the identity in nature is on the contrary at its minimum [primitive and despotic formations]; and where the identity in nature appears to be at its maximum, the regimes differ to the highest degree [capitalism]” (AO 336). Social formations can therefore oscillate between two poles, depending on whether desiring-machines have a chance of causing their immanent connections to pass into the regime of the social machines (the active schizophrenic line of flight), or by contrast the social machines overcode desire through the transcendent syntheses of representation (the reactionary paranoiac investment). Yet as Deleuze and Guattari insist, “we cannot allow the difference in regime to make us forget the identity in nature … There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring-machines that inhabit them on a small scale” (AO 340). This idea that libidinal economy and political economy have differing regimes but none the less identical natures is one of the underlying threads that links together the entire socio-political analysis of Anti-Oedipus.10
Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, had shown that a similar movement from representation to production had in fact occurred in numerous domains, to which Deleuze will often have recourse. In biology, for instance, we no longer define living beings by the external features or properties of an adult organism, but rather through genetics and embryology: that is, through the process by which the organism is produced. This is what marked the historical transformation from what was once called “natural history” (Aristotle) to the modern sciences of molecular biology (or genetics) and embryology; Deleuze's notion of social coding is in part derived from the idea of the genetic code. Likewise, in contemporary geology, Mount Everest is not seen as an “object,” but rather as the result of an ongoing set of geological processes: the tectonic plate of India slamming into Asia, and the folding of the earth's crust to produce the Himalayan mountain range, as well as the forces of glaciation and erosion that are simultaneously wearing down the mountains. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze will develop a concept of “stratification” derived from geology (the book contains a chapter called, precisely, “The Geology of Morals,” TP 37–74). This, then, is the first philosophical point Deleuze derives from Marx (and, later, Foucault): the movement from representation to production.
2. Universal History. The second observation derives from the first: Marx held that, given this discovery of the activity of production in general, a retrospective reading of universal history was possible from the viewpoint of capitalism: that is, from the viewpoint of the two decoded flows of labor and capital (AO 140). Previous economies anticipate capitalism, but as something they warded off and avoided. Primitive economies, for instance, were based on codes, which operate at the level of representation, whereas capitalism is based on decoded flows, which operate at the level of production, and it was the “nightmare” of decoded flows that previous social formations were trying to avoid. But how does one go about doing a retrospective reading of universal history using the concept of flow? Marx himself did not have an explicit concept of flow; he defines neither labor nor capital in terms of flow. To understand Deleuze's concept of flow, we have to turn to the twentieth-century British economist, John Maynard Keynes. Deleuze isolates three contributions of Keynes's great book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which was published in 1936.11 First, it presented the first modern theory of flows. “Stocks and flows are the two fundamental concepts of modern political economy, as formulated by Keynes,” Deleuze comments. “The first great theory of flows can be found in Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” (14 Dec 1971). Second, it injected the problem of desire into the theory of money. “One of Keynes's contributions was the reintroduction of desire into the problem of money,” Deleuze and Guattari write. “It is this that must be subjected to the requirements of Marxist analysis,” notably with regard to finance and banking practices (AO 23). It is now a truism to say that psychology and economics are interrelated, and that stock markets are mirrors of the human psyche: “they can become depressed; they can even suffer complete breakdowns.”12 Third, Keynes proposed a new model of regulation and stimulus for the economy: in Deleuzian terms, Keynesianism was one of the laboratories for the production of axioms, during the New Deal and afterwards (TP 462). The issue of regulation is derived directly from the concept of flow: “the question is not that of freedom and constraint, nor of centralization or decentralization, but of the manner in which one masters the flows” (TP 462).
Keynes wrote The General Theory in the midst of the Great Depression, for which he was attempting to provide both a diagnostic and a cure. The theory of flows, and the injection of desire into economics, was part of Keynes's new diagnostic of the state of capitalism, which for Deleuze is an essential supplement to Marx's analyses. The push for regulation and government intervention, by contrast, was part of his cure; and today, the term “Keynesianism” has become largely synonymous with intervention in the economy (in 1971, Nixon uttered his famous phrase, “We're all Keynesians now”). But what interests Deleuze in Keynes's work is less interventionism per se, but rather the new analysis he gave of capitalism through the concepts of flows and stocks. In the wake of Keynes, flow and stock have now become two basic concepts in the analysis of dynamic systems in general.13 So it is from an analysis of Keynes that we will be able to grasp the philosophical import of Deleuze's concept of flow.
FLOW, CODE, STOCK
As always, Deleuze extracts from Keynesian economics a number of concepts that he will use for his own philosophical purposes, all of which can be summarized in the concept of the break-flow (coupure-flux), or schiz.
1. Flow. From an economic point of view, a flow is the transmission (or exchange) of money—or more generally, of economic value—that moves from one pole to another: that is, there is an incoming and outgoing flow. The term “pole” here simply refers to the individuals or groups (firms, companies, corporations) that function as the interceptors of these incoming and outgoing flows (for instance, in one's bank account). “We are defining flows in political economy,” Deleuze noted in a seminar, “its importance for contemporary economists confirms what I have been saying” (16 Nov 1971).
2. Code. Second, the correlative of the concept of a flow is that of a code, which is a form of inscription or recording that, in the capitalist formation, assumes the form of an accounting system; a transaction entered into the bank account of an individual or firm is the recording or inscription of this transmission of a flow (a change in assets or liabilities). A paycheck is an incoming flow; payment of a bill is an outgoing flow. Flow and code are reciprocally determined; it is impossible to grasp a flow other than by and through the operation that codes it. Strictly speaking, money is simply an inscription (only a small percentage of the monetary mass in the world exists as cash), which is why the development of the two-ledger accounting system was essential in the development of capitalism. It is important to note that, for Deleuze, a code is not something that is “applied” to a flow, as Kantian concepts are applied to intuitions; there is never a flow first and then a code that imposes itself upon it or is applied to it. What flows on the socius cannot appear as a flow except in correlation to a code; it is impossible to seize a flow other than by and through the operation that codes it. A flow is not recognizable as an economic flow, or a social flow, or a somatic flow, for instance, except by and through the code which encodes it. This is why Deleuze will say that a non-coded flow is an unnamable power; the nightmare of every society is the terror of a non-coded
or decoded flow. My salary is a coded flow, and I know its exact value; but the problem with the sub-prime mortgage derivatives that helped cause the 2009 recession was due to the fact, less that they had lost value, but that no one knew their value, or even know how to assess their value; they had become a decoded flow.
3. Stock. The third concept, after flow and code, is the concept of stock. If the flow is what moves from one pole to another, from one account to another, stock is what is related to one of these poles as its material or juridical possession: my bank account or the value of my investments—this is my portion of the flow, my share of the flow, “so it's mine.”
We have here three elementary notions derived from economics—flow, code (or an accounting system), and stock—which are all interrelated and reciprocally determined: a monetary flow is in continuous variation; we only know the flow through its inscription or coding; and stock is the portion of the flow that is mine at a given moment. Readers of Anti-Oedipus will recognize that these three notions correspond to the three syntheses: flow is the connective synthesis of production; code is the disjunctive synthesis of recording or inscription; and stock is the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. The remainder of this paper will briefly discuss each of these terms in order to examine the complex interrelations Deleuze establishes between them.
THE CONCEPT OF FLOW
Let me return first to the concept of flow. Deleuze derives the concept of flow from Keynes and links it with Marx's conception of production. We have seen that Marx held that a retrospective reading of universal history was possible from the viewpoint of capitalism. Deleuze picks up on this idea, but interprets history as a progressive decoding of flows, and the history of money is one of the primary topics in Deleuze's retrospective reading.14 Primitive economies functioned in terms of a code of barter: that is, in terms of a direct relation of exchange between objects. But the introduction of money as a “general equivalent” into these economies during colonialism was enough to destroy these codes (e.g., cargo cults). What money showed was that the objects being bartered in primitive economies were themselves simply qualified pieces of labor to which there corresponded a given quantum of value; they were qualified flows or forms of stock. In other words, primitive codes were already operating in conjunction with these flows, but they warded off these flows: primitive societies kept merchants and blacksmiths in subordinate positions, and cordoned off exchange and commerce, precisely because the “abstract or fictional quantity” of money was enough to break the primitive codes.
Deleuze holds to the thesis—following Édouard Will—that money was invented by the State, not as a means of encouraging commerce, but rather as a means of controlling commerce through taxation. The introduction of money meant that the State was able to insert itself into every transaction and siphon off a portion for itself in the form of a tax. This was the first step of decoding: the introduction of money as a pure flow, a pure abstraction, even if it initially remained tied to precious metals. But a second step of decoding followed: primitive societies operated with blocks of mobile and finite debts, but “money—the circulation of money—is the means for rendering the debt infinite” (AO 197). In other words, money initiates the duty of an interminable service to the State. One will always be indebted to the State; taxes are a debt that one can never finish paying off. Christianity, at least in its Pauline form, effectively “spiritualized” this concept of infinite debt: the wages of sin is death, a debt I can only pay off by eternal damnation; God, in his mercy, decides to pay off the infinite debt to himself by dying in our place; he redeems us, just as the Romans redeemed slaves by paying for them. In this sense, one could say that Christian theology is a spiritualized form of economics.
But in and of itself, the introduction of money, or monetary inscription, was not enough to form capitalism; money does not yet have a “body” of its own, and was simply inserted into the interstices of the pre-existing social bodies (the Earth, the Despot). Capitalism appears only when money ceases to be merely an abstraction that “formally unites … objects that are produced and even inscribed independently of it”, and itself becomes a filiative capital, that is, when money begets money (AO 226–7). Capitalism, in other words, marks a new threshold of decoding or deterritorialization. What does this mean? In the capitalist formation, the two decoded flows of labor and capital are expressed by two forms of money, namely, payment and financing. The first has its roots in a simple circulation in which money is used as a means of payment: I receive my paycheck and pay my bills with it. Finance-money, however, is completely different. It constitutes what Deleuze calls call the capitalist form of infinite debt, a vast “dematerialization” or “demonitarization” of money (although the structures of finance have their own territoriality). Rather than transferring a pre-existing currency as a means of payment, finance capital is a flow that the banks create ex nihilo as a debt owing to themselves; it hollows out a negative money at one extreme (as a debt entered as a liability of the banks) while projecting a positive money at the other extreme (as a credit granted to the productive economy by the banks). It is this second form of money that constitutes the true “economic force” of capitalism, “the immense deterritorialized flow that constitutes the full body of capital” (AO 237). “Today we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions.”15 This is the full body of capital into which the desire of each one of us is plugged.
Strictly speaking, there is no common measure between these two flows of money; money as a form of payment has an exchange value, but money as a structure of finance is a pure movement of creation and destruction. Whence the importance of banks: banks participate in both these flows, they are situated at the pivotal point between financing and payment. They function as exchangers or oscillators that convert the flows of financing—which is a mutant flow in constant variation—into segments of payment. Even though there is no common measure between these two flows, it is the banks that guarantee their “fictive homogeneity,” which Deleuze calls a “profound dissimulation” (AO 229). In our time, States have become immanent to the capitalist system; and one of the primary functions of the State, as a regulator, is to ensure the convertibility between these two forms of money by guaranteeing credit, a uniform interest rate, the unity of capital markets, and so forth. This is why Deleuze insists that Marx's analysis of capital has to be supplemented by Keynes's analysis.
It is unfortunate that Marxist economists too often dwell on considerations concerning the mode of production, and on the theory of money as the general equivalent as found in the first section of Capital, without attaching enough importance to banking practice, to financial operations, and to the specific circulation of credit money. (AO 230)
But it would be absurd to postulate a world super-government making the final decisions regarding this monetary mass, for there is no power that regulates the flow of capital itself, and neither the banks nor the State are even capable of predicting the growth in the money supply.
Now to say that libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same thing is tantamount to saying that
the desire of the most disadvantaged creature will invest with all its strength, irrespective of any economic understanding or lack of it, the capitalist social field as a whole. Flows, who doesn't desire flows [capital], and relationships between flows, and breaks in flows? (AO 229)
This is why Deleuze can say that, in a sense, “it is the bank that controls the whole system and the investment of Desire” (AO 230):
It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers … There are socioeconomic ‘complexes’ that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and they communicate a voluptuous
wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy … For it is a matter of flows, stock, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations. Hence the goal of schizoanalysis: to analyze the specific nature of the libidinal investments in the economic and political spheres, and thereby to show how, in the subject that desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression. (AO 105)