I am currently working my way through chapter 3, section 9 of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus one of the central chapters of the book. They've been talking about how capitalism is a territorializing machine. The mega-machine is a large collector of petty debts, and it is the internalized superego, the policeman in your head which represents the move psychologically from Feudalism, which was defined solely by the state, to the mega-machine. The mega-machine is contrasted to technical machines, for instance, a clock, vs the global market which is Leviathanic in that it has tentacles for Perlman. But while Deleuze and Guattari do not use the same tentacle metaphor, they do talk about a sort of mega-machine which is independent of the technical machines - for instance a fork (technical machine) vs the justice system (the mega-machine). One might also remember Hobbes Leviathan. In this section, number 9.
Deleuze claims that capitalism is not the disillusion of Feudalism, that is why there was so much time in between. D & G take shot at Hegel saying the only universal history is contingency, and why European history? Why not Japanese, Chinese, Islamic, etc. The schizophrenic voyage is the only kind there is, implying that one is not territorialized as an identity like a nation implies a single, stable identity? Capitalism itself represents the decoding of flows, so it represents the capture of all the meaning into something very similar to Guy Debord's Spectacle. The spectacle is an image, which consumes everything around it - in this way the significance of all semiotics, signs and symbols, becomes sucked into a capitalist adjacent lifestyle, and implication. Everything has a price or reflects on the mega-machines deterritorialization of old ways of life, which is otherwise known as colonialism. Capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari, as they say in no uncertain terms in an earlier chapter, is colonialism.
Deleuze and Guattari take aim at humanism, saying that there's a god-capital, like Lugalzaggizi Optimus Maximus from Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, the god of war which has been enshrined on the dollar. They say that humanism is cynicism and a strange piety. The strange piety is god-capital, and the cynicism is a means of extorting surplus labor. The very act of money begetting money, surplus value being extracted, is the beginning of the capitalism machine. The capitalism machine becomes "anus and vampire," saying much like Perlman that capitalism is dead labor, and sucks of the life from living labor, like the Leviathan sucks potentiality out of people and subordinates them to the mega-machine. It is anal, because the debt and creditor relation occurs early in childhood, with the giving and recieving of feces as is the beginning of the relation of giving and withholding. So in other words, capitalism codes everything through an anal drive, which holds or expels money, the equivalent of shit, and it is the Leviathan which is the arbiter of this vast array of invisible, mechanic flow of literal materials, and the implication of what possibilities are extended that shine forth through their semiotic code.
Deleuze and Guattari talk about how displacement is a core feature of capitalism. Keeping developing nations poor increases surplus value, Franz Fanon can attest to this. Investors would come to Africa and form a bourgeois class, and the poor of Africa would not actually see any benefits that the bourgeoisie said they would give them, instead the French government killed and harshly repressed the Africans. America felt Lumumba threatened US interests in Africa and that is why assassins were sent to kill him. Capitalism runs on "primitive accumulation" deterritorializing previous territories, in order to decode the flows into capital. That is why they keep attacking Palestinians, because they want land, capital. Capitalism turns code to flux, flows of code are on the interior and exterior of the machine, which form "elements of a technology, even a science." Machines do not create capitalism, capitalism creates machines. Unrealized surplus value creates unemployment and stagnation, as the machines inside of you depend on the mega-machine and its control of petty debts. There is "knowledge capital" the decoding of the minds of people, and there's the surplus value extracted from war. War is one of the primary modes of the extraction of surplus labor value for the leviathan.
There is anti production at the heart of production, the state and police who shut down whatever alternative to the economic order there is, while at the same time extracting surplus labor value for the mega-machine, which only exists because it creates surplus value. Ultimately what is produced is the Lacanian notion of "lack." This is described as the small object a, the thing which prevents full enjoyment that also drives you to seek enjoyment at the same time. Capitalism tells you you are never satisfied, you need the next thing, you need to allocate your time, which is an internal clock that capitalism instills in you around capitalism. Capitalism is as Perlman calls, the world eater. With the knowledge and capital that is produced, there is an "equivalent flow of stupidity." The military, and the production of goods no one needs, are an "anti human enterprise." Perlman describes Zeks, worker slaves, as captured in a Leviathanic machine, D & G's mega-machine. D & G say money and the market are capitalism's true police, implying the police go where capital tells them to go. It is at the level of flows, not ideology that desire is regulated. D & G suggest that we are not schizophrenic enough, schizophrenia being the foreclosure on the name of the future in Lacanian psychoanalysis, which means that we rebel against the internalization of paternalism, through the superego. Deleuze says we have not even begun to see the "process of acceleration."
The lady and I are getting back into reading. Her friend started a book club, their first read is Exit West by Mohsin Hamid. Supposedly a candidly poignant take on Israel/Palestine relations.
