by Daniel Smith
What, then, does Deleuze mean when he says that desire “is a matter of flows and stock” (AO 105), or that “every object presupposes the continuity of a flow” (AO 6)? Consider the fact that I first delivered this paper at a conference in Italy. The money I used to purchase my plane ticket came from my paycheck, which is derived from my university's endowment, a flow that is in turn linked to student's tuitions, investments in various corporations, perhaps illegal sweat shops. I subtracted from this flow to pay for my ticket, the coded price of which was fluctuating until I bought it, when it became my stock (“it's mine”). The flight was itself a material flow, as was the meal I ate on the plane (chicken salad, rice, chocolate cake), which was assembled at the airline's hub city from flows arriving from elsewhere: the red wine flowed from Napa Valley, the coffee from Central America. These flows are assembled in my meal; I break into these flows when I eat; it produces in me a wave of satisfaction (voluptas)—the portion or share of these flows that falls to me. Even thought is a flow: I receive the flow of opinion and received ideas, there is even an incoming flow from my reading of Deleuze's texts, and I cut into these flows, producing both breaks and captures, in order to produce this text. For Deleuze, persons are the interceptors of flows: I am the point of destination for numerous flows, which I intercept; and I am also the point of departure for the production of new flows, and it is precisely this synthesis and production of flows that Deleuze terms desire. Even our loves are interceptions of flows:
Desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therein breaks and captures … The persons to whom our loves are dedicated, including our parental persons, intervene only as points of connection, of disjunction, of conjunction of flows whose libidinal tenor of a properly unconscious investment they translate. (AO 292–3)
THE CONCEPT OF CODE
We have seen that flow and code are reciprocally determined: it is impossible to grasp a flow other than by and through the operation that codes it. Coding operates through a process of inscription or recording: in other words, by means of signs, whether these signs are numbers on a bank statement or marks inscribed directly on the body. These signs are non-signifying: that is, it does not matter what they “mean” or “symbolize” per se. What matters is how they function in the determination of a flow. The difficulties one encounters in comprehending Deleuze's concept of a code is that the very term brings to mind phrases like the “Morse code” or the “civil code,” where everything is given in advance; you use the Morse code to send a message, or consult the civil code to see if an infraction has occurred. But the model that lies behind Deleuze's use of the term is primarily the biological notion of the genetic code: the concept of a code is “a common characteristic of human cultures and of living species,” of social reproduction as much as biological reproduction (AO 289; cf. 248: “the general traits characterizing a code have been rediscovered today in what is called a genetic code”). There are at least three parallels we can point to between biological and social coding.
1. Inscription (or Information). In both cases, the code is what allows for the transmission and reproduction of information, which is why Deleuze terms it a synthesis of inscription or recording. This information, however, is never pre-given, but is produced with each transmission. Already in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze had noted that the significance of sexed (rather than asexual) reproduction in biology lies in the fact that it entails “the incessant production of varied individual differences” (DR 249). In asexual reproduction, the parent simply reproduces itself, whereas in sexual production the mixing of the genetic material of two parents produces a new individual, a mutation. The information contained in the genetic code of the parents is indeed transmitted, but exact nature of the new individual is not determined in advance; every coding is the production of the new.16 The same is true in social reproduction. Even in so-called “primitive” societies, kinship systems are not structures that simply need to be applied, but practices that entail an entire strategy or praxis; no one knows in advance who they are to marry. “Ethnologists are constantly saying that kinship rules are neither applied nor applicable to real marriages: not because these rules are ideal but rather because they determine critical points where the apparatus starts up again” (AO 151).
2. Molecular and Molar. Second, we find in genetics the same distinction between production (what goes on at the molecular level) and what we see represented in the product (the molar organism). The code operates at a molecular level. For Deleuze, this was one of Lacan's shortcomings: he discovered the code in what he called “signifying chains” (functioning via metaphor and metonymy) in the domain of the symbolic. But language, or the symbolic, is a molar organization, like the organism. The inverse side of the symbolic is what Deleuze at several points calls “the real inorganization of desire.” As Jacques Monod says, the genetic code is not a structure, but a domain “where nothing but the play of blind combinations can be discerned”: the molecular domain of passive syntheses is a domain of “chance or real inorganization” where everything is possible, and nothing is given in advance (AO 328, 289; cf. 39, 289, 309). Every coding, in other words, entails a constant decoding of what came before it: “The genetic code points to a genic decoding” (AO 328). This, then, is the primary sense of Deleuze's distinction between molecular and the molar: social formations
effect a unification, a totalization of the molecular forces through a statistical accumulation obeying the laws of large numbers. Thus unity can be the biological unity or a species or the structural unity of a socius: an organism, social or living, is composed as a whole, as a global or complete object. (AO 342)
But desire necessarily functions at a molecular level.
3. Surplus Value of Code. Finally, the genetic code implies not only the dimension of filiation (x begets y), but also that of alliance. Deleuze often cites in this case the relation of the wasp and the orchid: the wasp is an essential element in the reproductive apparatus of the orchid because it transports its pollen. There is here a “capture of code, a surplus value of code, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp” (TP 10). Rémy Chauvin speaks here of “the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.”17 Such transfers are in fact the basis for what we call genetic engineering, and they have results analogous to those of “the abominable couplings dear to antiquity and the Middle Ages.”18 This is also why Deleuze can claim that evolutionary schemas have abandoned the arborescent models of descent (the schema of a tree and its branches) in favor of rhizomatic models, which operate in the heterogeneous and jump from one already differentiated line to another. Such is the distinction between filiation and alliance: genealogical trees (filiation) are scrambled by “transversal” communications between different lines (alliance). Whence the threat of viruses: “We evolve and die more from our polymorphous and rhizomatic flus than from hereditary diseases, or diseases that have their own line of descent” (TP 11).
Deleuze and Guattari make use of the same distinction in discussing social reproduction, stressing the notion of alliance (marriage) over filiation: socially speaking, debt is the unit of alliance. But here too, they stress the need for a retrospective rereading of history. In so-called primitive societies, social reproduction passed through human reproduction (x begat y), whereas in capitalism social reproduction passes through capital (money begets money) and human reproduction, and relations consequently become privatized. Relationships become primarily private matters. Moreover, if capitalism entails a movement from codes to what Deleuze calls an “axiomatic,” it is primarily because codes deal with objects (already qualified flows) whereas capitalism operates in terms of the abstract quantities of capital and labor, which can only be subject to an axiomatic treatment. Finally, the term “decoding” can mean two things: either to decipher the secre
t of a code, or to undo a code. When Deleuze and Guattari use the term, they are referring to the latter. Yet for Deleuze and Guattari, an uncoded flow is a limit-concept or an Idea: that is to say, a problematic. It is not an ideal to be attained, but a problem that constantly demands resolution. The notion of “chaos” that one finds in ancient creation myths, as well as the retrieval of that notion in What is Philosophy?, are both harbingers of the apocalyptic state of purely decoded flows.
THE CONCEPT OF STOCK
A brief word, finally, on the concept of stock. Once again, we must note that stocks and flows are one and the same thing, but that they relate to fundamentally different units: stock is the attribution of value at a given point in time, whereas flow is what changes the value of stock over time (an inflow adds to stock, an outflow subtracts from the stock). Stock is any entity that accumulates or depletes in value over time, whereas a flow is the rate of a change in a stock. Stocks have a certain value at each moment in time, whereas a flow (incoming and outgoing) is what changes the values of a stock over time (appreciation and depreciation). In mathematical terms, the stock is the integral of the flow, while the derivative is the flow of changes in the stock. This is one of the fundamental principles of accounting: “only the study of flows allows one to realize the role of the incoming and outgoing movements involved in stock variations” (14 Dec 1971).
The stock–flow relation is what lies at the basis of what today is called “dynamic systems theory.” Although I have drawn from the example of economics, the two notions can be applied to any dynamic system. The population of an animal species could be considered a stock; the inflow would be births, the outflow would be deaths, and these flows would vary the value of the stock (i.e., the population) over time. The guests in a hotel could be considered a stock; the inflow would be guests arriving, the outflow would be guests departing, and the stock would measure the guests at any given moment, whereas the flow variable would measure the guests over a period of time—say, a year. The water in a bathtub could be considered a stock; if a gallon of water drains out of the tub every minute, while at the same time a gallon of water is added from the faucet, the stock will remain the same, even though there is a constant flow. In short, a stock is the term for any entity that accumulates or depletes over time, while a flow is the rate of change in a stock; flows accumulate in stock. Identifying the flows and stocks in a given system is not always easy; a “deficit,” for instance, is a flow (spending in excess of revenue), whereas a “debt” is an accumulated stock. Moreover, by their nature, one of the characteristics of stocks is that they interrupt or “decouple” flows.
Deleuze's socio-political theory is constructed on the basis of three interrelated concepts, which are derived from contemporary economic theory, and particularly Keynes: flow, which is the production of value; code, which is the inscription or recording of flows; and stock, which is the portion of the flow that belongs to me at a given moment in time, which I can spend and consume. To be sure, these are not the only concepts at work in Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze in turn links these three concepts with the three passive syntheses derived from Kant (connection, disjunction, conjunction) and the three types of production to which they correspond (the production of production, the production of inscription, the production of consumption). The three are summarized by Deleuze in the concept of the schizz or the break-flow (or more literally, the flow-cut, “coupure-flux”), which is the operation involved in every coding of flows.19 The sole aim of these reflections has been to give a content to the unexpected claim that lies at the basis of the entire Capitalism and Schizophrenia project: namely, that in the contemporary situation an adequate socio-political theory must take the form of a theory of flows.
PART III
Five Deleuzian Concepts
ESSAY 11
Desire
Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Toward an Immanent Theory of Ethics
M
y title raises two questions—What is an immanent ethics? and What is the philosophical question of desire?—and my ultimate focus concerns the link between these two issues: What relation does an immanent ethics have to the question of desire?1 Historically, the first question is primarily associated with the names of Spinoza and Nietzsche (and behind them, Leibniz), since it was they who posed the question of an immanent ethics in its most rigorous form. The second question is linked to names like Freud and Lacan (and behind them, Kant), since it was they who formulated the modern conceptualization of desire in its most acute form: that is, in terms of unconscious desire. It was in Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972, that Deleuze (along with Félix Guattari, his co-author) would attempt to formulate his own theory of desire—what he would call a purely immanent theory of desire. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault would claim, famously, that “Anti-Oedipus is a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time”—thereby making explicit the link between the theory of desire developed in Anti-Oedipus with the immanent theory of ethics Deleuze worked out in his monographs on Nietzsche and Spinoza (AO xiii).
My approach to these questions falls into three parts. In the first, I want to isolate two issues that lie at the heart of an immanent ethics. In the second part, I would like to examine in some detail two sets of texts from Nietzsche and Leibniz, which will flesh out some of the details of an immanent ethics. I will conclude with some all too brief comments on the nature of desire and a number of themes found in Anti-Oedipus.
ON THE NATURE OF AN IMMANENT ETHICS
Let me begin with my first question: What is an immanent ethics? Throughout his writings, Deleuze has often drawn a distinction between morality and ethics. He uses the term “morality” to describe any set of “constraining” rules, such as a moral code, that consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent or universal values, while he uses the term “ethics” to describe any set of “facilitative” [facultative] rules that evaluates what we do according to the immanent mode of existence that it implies. According to Deleuze, this immanent approach to the question of ethics was developed most fully, in the history of philosophy, by Spinoza and Nietzsche, whom Deleuze has often identified as his own philosophical precursors.2 Both Spinoza and Nietzsche argued, each in his own manner, that there are things one cannot do (or say, or feel, or think …) except on the condition of being weak, base, or enslaved, unless one harbors a vengeance or ressentiment against life (Nietzsche), unless one remains the slave of passive affections (Spinoza); and there are other things one cannot do except on the condition of being strong, noble, or free, unless one affirms life, unless one attains active affections (SPP 22–3; EPS 269). A pluralistic method of explanation by immanent modes of existence is in this way substituted for the recourse to transcendent values: the transcendent moral opposition (between Good and Evil) is replaced by an immanent ethical difference (between noble and base modes of existence, in Nietzsche; or between passive and active affections, in Spinoza). “Beyond Good and Evil,” wrote Nietzsche, “at least that does not mean ‘Beyond Good and Bad.’”3
In Spinoza, for instance, an individual will be considered “bad” (or servile, or weak, or foolish) who remains cut off from its power of acting, who remains in a state of slavery with regard to its passions. Conversely, a mode of existence will be considered to be “good” (or free, or rational, or strong) that exercises its capacity for being affected in such a way that its power of acting increases, to the point where it produces active affections and adequate ideas. For Deleuze, this is the point of convergence that unites Nietzsche and Spinoza in their search for an immanent ethics: modes are no longer judged in terms of their degree of proximity to or distance from an external principle, but are evaluated in terms of the manner by which they “occupy” their existence—the intensity of their power, their “tenor” of life.4 It is always a question of knowing whether a mode of existence—however great or small it may be—is capable of deploying its capacities, of inc
reasing its power of acting to the point where it can be said to go to the limit of what it “can do” (DR 41). The fundamental question of ethics is not “What must I do?” (which is the question of morality) but rather “What can I do, what am I capable of doing (which is the proper question of an ethics without morality). Given my degree of power, what are my capabilities and capacities? How can I come into active possession of my power? How can I go to the limit of what I “can do”?
What an ethics of immanence will criticize, then, is anything that separates a mode of existence from its power of acting—and what separates us from our power of acting is, ultimately, the illusions of transcendence. (We should immediately point out that the illusions of transcendence go far beyond the transcendence of God; in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had already critiqued the concepts of the Self, the World, and God as the three great illusions of transcendence; and what he calls the “moral law” in the second critique is, by Kant's own admission, a transcendent law that is unknowable.) When Spinoza and Nietzsche criticize transcendence, their interest is not merely theoretical or speculative—exposing its fictional or illusory status—but rather practical and ethical.5 This is no doubt the point that separates Deleuze most from the ethical thinking of Emmanuel Levinas—the great philosopher of transcendence, in so far as the Other is the paradigmatic concept of transcendence—as well as Jacques Derrida, who was much closer to Levinas than Deleuze on these matters. The ethical themes one finds in transcendent philosophies like those of Levinas and Derrida—an absolute responsibility for the Other that I can never assume, or an infinite call to justice that I can never satisfy—are, from the Deleuzian point of view of immanence, imperatives whose effect is to separate me from my capacity to act. From the viewpoint of immanence, in other words, transcendence, far from being our salvation, represents our slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point.
