IV. Capitalism, Nomadism, and Becoming-Imperceptible

“Imperceptible rupture, not signifying break”
— A Thousand Plateaus

[29] In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe—a postcolonial variation on the theme of Robinson Crusoe written by a white South-African in the face of Apartheid—there is a silence that runs throughout the entire narrative, one that profoundly disturbs the novel’s main character Susan Barton, and that deeply calls into question the ability of a novelist to narrate reality: unlike the “savage” in Daniel DeFoe’s work who happily learns the English tongue and the civilities of the English culture, the Friday of this novel does not speak. In Foe, the novelist Daniel Foe himself appears as a character in the second half of the narrative. He engages Barton in a long conversation on the efficacies of writing, and on the question of iterability. Barton has brought Friday to England in order to “save” him from a life of “idleness.” She shelters Friday for humanitarian reasons, takes him in as her burden, because to her, his inability to speak represents an essential helplessness. For Barton, speech is what Friday “lacks.” Foe, on the other hand, finds a different value in Friday’s silence, and he attempts to impart this to Barton during his struggle to write the history of her time with Friday and Crusoe on the island: “‘In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story....We must make Friday’s silence speak, as well as the silence surrounding Friday.”10

[30] In the introduction to this chapter—by way of the examples of Taylorism, Ng_g_, and parliamentary acts of enclosure—I mentioned how the State’s (and also, capitalism’s) construction of space resulted in the creation of something akin to an “indispensable obverse” of space: a domain of “meaninglessness” or “imperceptibility” that lies outside the accepted horizon of space proper. This indispensable meaninglessness is not necessarily an agentless occurrence, and need not always be reduced to a saturable lack. The Body without Organs, as a force of antiproduction, is by nature imperceptible. In other words, it is marked by a refusal, one that wards off socio-symbolic appropriation. The Body without Organs names an “ultimate” in nomadic movement, an “absolute deterritorialization.” But by absolute deterritorialization Deleuze and Guattari are not seeking recourse to a metaphysical reasoning devoid of all context, some utopian realm of an ultimate and masterable freedom. The nomad does not stand as a subjective master of absolute deterritorialization. The Body without Organs appears at the limit of the flows of production that have been named, represented, incorporated, and brought under control within the register of a sovereign law. But production is never fully mastered, never entirely brought into the perceived register of socio-symbolic meaning and reality: Ideology is not a god. The ideology of the capitalist axiomatic works by setting particular forms of production under way by deterritorializing them from other possibilities of producing. The antiproduction of the Body without Organs offers a liberatory belligerence to normalized flows of production—a refusal to submit to the way things have come to be. In this sense, the Body without Organs can be posited as the movement of absolute deterritorialization, due to its status as an influence that boycotts the disciplinary procedures controlling the realm of production. Like Coetzee’s Friday, the Body without Organs refuses to “speak,” and in doing so, refuses the language that is made already available and present.11

[31] What “appears” when normalized flows of production stumble over moments of imperceptible antiproduction are what Deleuze and Guattari call, at different moments, “singularities,” “affects,” or “haecceities.” These are unassimilated occurrences demarcated entirely by relations and having an intensive capacity to enter into further relations that have yet to be determined; they avoid being oriented toward a culminating point, a telos that would justify their existence. Singularities are what we saw in the machinic assemblages of the book in coming to terms with meaning as movement: constantly changing differential relations that are “unattributable” and “only themselves.” The unattributable nature of meaning comes to “manifest” itself when meaning is considered as flowing from a perceptible object only from the manner in which it functions when plugged into as assemblage. When these assemblages face the limits of their production, the antiproduction of the Body without Organs, they face what cannot be assimilated. Because of its inassimilable character, a singularity can never be repeated, for the relations that surround it are heterogeneous and not static.12 Singularities express the antagonism of antiproduction always underlying production. Any act of commodification reduces their intensive and differential potential to the law of isomorphy and the sovereignty of a centralizing order. Isomorphism is the greatest triumph of the new international order of free world markets: the ability to maintain sameness in difference. However, everything that comes to perception does so not out of some self-evident working of actualization, but comes to be familiarized, from being seen according to the way in which acts of seeing have been historically determined. “True” or “total” perception belies the long history of production grafted onto the “product” of perception that has come to be taken as the rule. The meaning of perception cannot be grasped outside the measure of its own occasion. It is the State that imposes an isomorphic measure upon the increasing totality of its domain.

[32] In opposition, the nomad adheres to the skilled measure of territorial itinerancy, one that gains its meaning only from its heterogeneous relationship to other measuring machines, and by their antagonism in relation to the non-measurable Body without Organs. The nomadic itinerant measure partly involves the act of bringing something into the realm of the symbolized and known way of perceiving. But it also does not come to prioritize a particular manner of perception above all others, or above no perception at all. This is precisely the non-measurable agency initiated when the war machine refuses to take war as its direct object, and only presumes its possibility as a supplementary “Idea.” Direct, perceptible war must “exist,” for any act of warding off must anticipate to some extent the very object seeking to be averted: “It is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action in a different form than that of its existence” (ATP 431). The overwhelming marker of the State is its incorporatizing of flows, the centripetal movement of heterogeneity into a partial homogeneity described as isomorphy. This centripetal movement must already be in existence in itinerant territories, but must cancel itself out at the point of inversion where the territory would cross the threshold into a new assemblage, into a State assemblage. It is the essence of this “threshold” that begins to take on significance, the degree at which, or beyond which, what has been anticipated and then prevented for so long ceases to be “conjured away” and consequently “arrives” as a direct and perceptible object (ATP 432). For this reason, it has been important to be wary and not blindly take for granted the efficacy of even the most marginal of anti-State forces like the war machine, and acts of deterritorialization—especially when such resistant machines begin to phenomenalize their antiproductive essences. It is not so much a matter of unveiling the logic of a dominant center imposed upon an oppressed periphery; for this assumes that all power originates from the center and flows outward. The moment at which domination is decided is at the threshold, the matrix in which very different orders are placed in communication (ATP 435).

[33] Territorial exchange thus involves a profound power: the refusal to be reduced to the logic of a single territory—to the exchange value of any particular field of interests, any territory that might “ultimately” come to impose its interests on top adjacent territories, and thus set in motion the structure of colonization. When a particular mode of perception comes to dominate over others, isomorphism is set under way, and the resistant force of antiproduction comes to be seen as a lack having a potential for “development,” an empty site that invites “speculation” and the fulfillment of finance capital. With this subtle shift, the techniques of profiting and the surpluses of “stockpiling” come to be the norm. Profit comes to be a dominant mode when lack comes to be organized in and integrated throughout social production. The production of lack is a function of the market economy that wishes to graft the homogeneity of capital onto a heterogeneous population. But the appearance of lack always suggests that the antagonism of some antiproduction has been repressed, some singular event that has yet to be measured, named, and incorporated: an imperceptible existence lying underneath the accepted field of perception. Against the stockpiled profit that comes from an institutionalized lack, the nomad hallows the debt owed to an existence that can only be founded upon relation and the concealing of antiproduction.

[34] Deleuze and Guattari’s praxis of becoming-imperceptible accentuates an extremely important strategy of capital: the constant engendering and fulfilling of new perceptive potentials. This fulfilling of new perceptive potentials is what occurs when the war machine takes war as its direct object: a movement of antiproductive, non-symbolizable resistance has allowed itself to come to the register of perception currently in power. The space of this register is the ordered space of the chessboard, with its perceivable front and rear battle lines and vanguard assaults. When the war machine’s antiproductive nomadism shifts reductively to a perceptive resistant method, it exposes itself to a State apparatus that can now incorporate its resistance. In becoming a resistant “movement,” imperceptible, antiproductive nomadism, comes to be seen in either a politically reactionary manner (the movement is demonized as “deviant,” “immoral,” etc.), or it is “benevolently” accepted (the movement is liberally “tolerated,” but ultimately viewed as an unfortunate occurrence), or it is counterproduced as a lack denoting an essential helplessness. By saying that antiproduction is imperceptible, Deleuze and Guattari are not implying that “no one will ever see it” and that because of this lack of visibility it has no efficacy. Rather, becoming-imperceptible names that moment in nomadism when movement effaces previous imperatives, when discursivity stumbles upon what its perception cannot bring to the realm of existence, to the register of socio-symbolic ordering. Choices of resistance made available by the governing register of perception are choices only in the most limiting way. They are the choices of a vanguardism that has come to command the field of battle when war machines of resistance take war as their direct object. The imperceptible by nature refuses being brought to a determined way of lighting. The imperceptible points to the agency of continuous refusal. Only with this refusal can it be realized that the modes of production that have come to be are not sanctioned from on high. The nomadic, postcolonial novelist Salman Rushdie speaks of this refusal in all his works. His characters face constantly the direct choices offered by the discursive rules and regulations of two geo-political worlds—East and West, India and England. Shackled to a long history of Western colonial violence and oppression, and growing up in the wake of that history, with the new possibilities enacted through India’s rejection of England when gaining its independence, Rushdie and the characters he creates face a moment in the development of postcoloniality marked by the unavoidability of mutual exclusion: in “decolonizing,” the English and the Indians supposedly return to their separate spheres, to their separate cultures and their differing perceptive fields of meaning. Opposing this mutually exclusive state of affairs, Rushdie’s works not only highlight the neocolonial lines of power still in place in the nature of First World/Third World relations; they engage the extra-ideological “unspoken silence” that both worlds cast off, the antiproductive possibilities of “refusing to choose” that lie hidden beneath two predominate cultures of perception: “I have ropes around my neck, pulling me this way and that, East and West, commanding, choose, choose. I buck, I snort, I rear, I kick. Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.”13 A nomadology, as a warring movement with that which has come to hold dominion in the perceptible world, with the modes of production that have become available, would speak of the silence that points to everything uniquely inexplicable, the abundant interests that refuse to be contained within any isomorphic apparatus of capture. A nomadology would offer in place of the global free market and its axiomatic logic of deterritorializing singular diversities so that “all may speak” on a common planetary playing field, the extra-ideological democracy of singular diversity itself in the movement of an itinerant territoriality.