III. Capitalism, the War Machine, and the Body Without Organs
[21] To answer the previous questions, it is necessary to recall
Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that all production stems from
the substantive, and not simply metaphorical, action of machinic processes.
So far we have seen that this process is fundamental to all production:
flows of consumption and production, subjectivities defined by their shifting
placement within a complex assemblage of flows, objects that carry within
them the constraints of their historical development. We cannot naively
assume that only the heterogeneous assemblage of a rhizome is constituted
by the contingency of machinic flows, and that tree-root systems like
the State apparatus, or most of all the slippery artifice of capital,
are devoid of machinic influences, and by extension socio-historical contingencies.
Yet, neither can it be concluded that these processes are all the same.
We can no more clearly say that the rhizomatic act involves an effacement
of the totality of its contingent imperatives (always the transgression
of limits), whereas the State apparatus constantly expands the totality
of its contingencies (always postponing its limit). Refusing to think
any form of reality outside the process of machinic production—be
that reality a desiring-machine, a schizophrenic machine, a subject-machine,
a mouth-machine, etc.—Deleuze and Guattari complicate this seemingly
liberal and disinterested flow of productive forces with the qualification
that all acts of production necessarily come at the cost of being organized
in a particular fashion: “Desiring-machines make us an organism;
but at the very heart of this production, within the very production of
this production, the body suffers from being organized in this way, from
not having some other sort of organization, or no organization at all”
(AO, 8). Within the structure of production we find an unavoidable
suffering, a suffering ontologically essential to its movement. It seems
prudent not to annex this suffering solely to the site of the State apparatus
simply because the constraints on State disciplined bodies make themselves
more apparent. Even nomadism itself must involve at its very foundations
the suffering of becoming-organized—the struggle to deterritorialize,
to consistently and attentively ward off the possibility that a deterritorialized
flow may at any time gain supremacy over flows to come and become a “mode.”
But the ground of production cannot be attributed to some metaphysical
concept standing hierarchically superior to its movement, nor can it be
uncovered simply by drawing up a list of traits for these movements as
if they could stand as facts. The body, or more specifically anything
being produced, craves to escape from the very process of production-organization.
This dynamic—of the flow of production and the inevitable consequence
of reduction in the very act of production—points to an essential
violence at work along the entire continuum of machinic processes.
[22] This line
of argument is not governed by any form of ideology in the traditional
sense of the word (as conceiving of socio-political factors that totally
constitute reality). It involves grappling with one of the most significant
questions that haunt Deleuze and Guattari throughout their work: “Why
do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their
salvation?” It would seem that the answer to this question lies at
the heart of production. The salvation of becoming, or flowing into a
new form or line of organization that imposes new contingent directives,
brings about one’s servitude to that form: the demand for salvation
is at one and the same time a demand for servitude. But, at one and the
same time, no movement is purely tied to a single line of organization.
What unfolds in Deleuze and Guattari’s foundational critique of the
very nature of production itself is the non-positive ground that makes
all production possible, be it nomadic or capitalist. This ground they
name the “Body without Organs” (“BwO”) (ATP
150).
[23] The “Body
without Organs” and “desiring-production” (AO 139)
lie at the foundation of movement, of materiality-in-motion. We must remember
that Deleuze and Guattari think desire from the production of substantives—real
affects. They are thus opposed to the Lacanian notion of lack. This is
an subtle but important difference. Lacan’s non-traditional development
of the notion of lack in relation to desire equally entails a thinking
of production outside the logic of essentialism and positivism. “Desire”
stands in direct opposition to “pleasure.” Pleasure is based
on a law of homeostasis, of attaining satisfaction through the acquisition
of some object that fulfills some subjective need. Desire, on the other
hand, is insatiable, and thus ex-centric of any predetermined subjective
or homeostatic perimeter.7
For Lacan, the “object” of desire, the force that pulls the
subject beyond the parameters of its self-identification, is lack. To
be somewhat anachronistic, Lacan’s subject is a “nomadic”
subject, whose ex-centric movement of desire that makes of the subject
a nomad is founded upon this essential lack. The movement of Deleuze and
Guattari’s desire-production—of the machinic processes of construction—corresponds
almost point for point with Lacan’s and Levinas’ characterization
of desire—except for the following distinction.
[24] Deleuze and Guattari find much of value in Lacan, especially the Lacanian Real, but discard notions of lack and of an essential nothingness: “The body without organs is not the proof of an original nothingness” (AO, 8). Their dismissal of any notion of lack is crucial, and stems from their critique of capital, which they see as being able to expand its limits through the triggering of lack. State capital, as well as the nomadic war machine, involves the force of desire, but State capital puts desire to work differently from nomadic movements. Deleuze and Guattari situate their disavow of lack in the opening chapter of Anti-Oedipus:
We know very well where lack—and its subjective correlative—come from. Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on (se rabat sur) the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces of vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy. (AO, 28)
In this rich passage, we begin to uncover the logic that lies at the essence
of the movement of capital. Capital founds itself upon a lack created
as a result of the “pressures of antiproduction.” The pressures
of antiproduction name the antagonism of “suffering from being organized”—the
desire not to be produced. This desire—the desire to undermine
the forces of production—names a repression hidden deep within the
State apparatus and its expanding realm of capital. As an interiorizing
apparatus, these pressures of antiproduction are what the apparatus cannot
incorporate. What capital incorporates, what it needs, is lack, the creation
of “empty spaces” for it to fill. In this sense, the movement
of capital is based upon the postponing of its limit by creating a lack
still needing to be filled. Its totality is surrounded by this lack.
[25] A recent
essay by Frederic Jameson can help to flesh out the possibilities opened
by the Body without Organs, and the efficacy of its alternative to a postmodern
notion of lack. Jameson’s article “Culture and Finance Capital,”
examines Giovanni Arrighi’s recent work The Long Twentieth Century
alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of capital expansion. Arrighi
explores the paradox of how—in our current late capitalist, or post-Fordist
era—the market is able to make a profit without producing anything
tangible. In the wake of massive downsizing, Regan-Kemp and Thatcher incentives
to increase production through deregulation and privatization, the market
no longer finds as much value in tangible sources of production stemming
from factories, “skilled” laborers, and heavy industry in general.
This, coupled with the habitual manner of identifying political freedom
in the “new world order” with market freedom, has resulted in
the highly abstract production mode of “finance capital”: the
stock market arena of gaining profit from financial transactions themselves.
Generally referred to as “speculation,” the production enacted
on the abstract register of finance capital signals a shift away from
investments in the concrete territories of geographically locatable industries
of “cotton money, wheat money, textile money, railroad money, and
the like.”8 In
this way, capital, says Jameson, “becomes free floating” and
“separated from the concrete context of its productive geography”
(“CFC” 251). This is the same mode of deterritorialization we’ve
seen before with the imposition of State or royal science, but in a more
global, abstract form. Instead of the skills of stone cutters being dequalified,
geographically specific factories and their workers are being deterritorialized
and dequalified.
[26] Jameson
situates this shift into an abstraction—governed by the absence of
contextual ties to a “physical reality” (what Deleuze and Guattari
would see as a shift from a “primitive” territorial assemblage
to an “axiomatic”)—alongside the cultural shift from modernism
to postmodernism: “just as in the cultural sphere, forms of abstraction
that in the modern period seemed ugly, dissonant, scandalous, indecent,
or repulsive have also entered the mainstream of cultural consumption
(in the largest sense, from advertising to commodity styling, from visual
decoration to artistic production) and no longer shock anyone” (“CFC”
256-57). As Deleuze and Guattari claim in Anti-Oedipus, capitalism
works in part by dismantling the great social machines that come before
it. Pre-capitalist social machines enforced heavy codes that gave them
a distinct territoriality. Capitalism comes on the scene by deterritorializing
these multiple territorial machines, “substituting for intrinsic
codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money” (AO
139). The deterritorializing, or territorialess axiomatic of finance capital
turns out to be, for Jameson, another example of postmodernism’s
tendency to disable subjects by wrenching them out of a concrete context
and fragmenting their bodies upon the free-floating surface of commercialized
“pastiche.”9
In this sense, both capitalism and postmodernism tend to be more general
than local because they both deterritorialize local territories. They
both tend to function as universals. According to Jameson, this means
that we have lost the local contexts that once defined modernism: “the
languages of postmodernity are universal, in the sense in which they are
media languages. They are thus very different from the solitary obsessions
and private thematic hobbies of the great moderns, which achieved their
universalization, indeed their very socialization, only through a process
of collective commentary and canonization” (“CFC” 257).
[27] There is
much one can say about this statement, but I want to focus for the moment
on how (and why) Jameson mentions as important, but moves quickly past,
this erasure of a local territoriality. His focus in this essay is to
urge theorists to take more account of the new abstract, axiomatic logic
of capital brought to light by Deleuze and Guattari: “What is wanted
is an account of abstraction in which the new deterritorialized
postmodern contents are to any older modernist autonomization as global
financial speculation is to an older kind of banking and credit”
(“CFC” 260). The theorist’s role is to maintain an account
of abstraction. Jameson concentrates on what happens to the lack that
was opened in the modernist era: “it can be said that the scandal
of the death of God and the end of religion and metaphysics placed the
moderns in a situation of anxiety and crisis, which now seems to have
been fully absorbed by a more fully humanized and socialized, “culturalized”
society. Its voids have been saturated and neutralized, not by new values,
but by the visual culture of consumerism as such” (“CFC”
257).
[28] I do not want to downplay in any way Jameson’s significant insight that postmodernism has come to commodify the lack that initially opened during the age of high modernism, a lack that once formerly contributed to postmodern’s own praxis of liberating constituents from the hegemony of essentialism. And it is for this very reason, as we have seen, that Deleuze and Guattari think in the place of lack the material surface of the Body without Organs as a foundational, but socio-symbolically empty, totality. Jameson’s insight, via Deleuze and Guattari, offers substantial possibilities for cultural and literary studies. Extending this awareness to an analysis of canonical logic itself would take us beyond the purview of this chapter, but we can being to glimpse at least one major implication here: that in the consumer culture of late capital, the disciplines no longer need to canonize in order to establish the dominance of a master narrative. Unlike modernism, which needed to work at turning a local creation into a canonical production by creating communities of like-minded peers, the consumer culture of postmodernism enables works to be produced immediately as universals. No longer marked by “skills in variation” and “itinerant territoriality,” works are deterritorialized the moment they enter the register of perceptible phenomena. In other words, it’s not so much the canon we should be destructuring at this moment (though this is not to lessen in any way its continuing hegemony in the forms of conservatives such as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, and E.D. Hirsch, Jr.); it is, rather, the axiomatic of capital that has learned to feed upon and universalize a lack that formerly called into question the justifications for the very concept of universalization. In his concentration on the need to critique abstraction, what Jameson tacitly urges us to reconsider is how a capitalist axiomatic has covered over our ability to keep active an engagement with local interests and their “contingency” to a more “fundamental meaninglessness” (“CFC” 264). It is this locality, contingent upon a fundamental meaninglessness—what I have been calling “territorial itinerancy”—that I would want to focalize as the next step in an “account of abstraction,” a step that Jameson only gestures towards in his article.