Capital theory with Deleuze/Guattari or the Anarchy of Machines – 50 years Anti-Ödipus

The flow of subjective labor and the flow of objective capital. At the moment, more precisely, in the passage of time (which has extended over longer historical periods) in which intrinsically contingent encounters (those of the flows of money-capital and labor) have “taken hold” (Althusser), as soon as, that is, quasi-stable forms of commodity, money, and capital relations have been established, which, as an economic basis, determine in the last instance the social field, by indicating a pattern of self-similarity-exactly at this point the conceptual decision between the ontological conceptions of becoming and being, in order to bring about, say, a description of the capital relation, becomes insignificant, for the being of capital is from now on its becoming and becoming is from now on its being. Althusser formulates this in the context of his idiosyncratic conception of knowledge thus: “A legislation demands that the greatest weight be placed on its conditions, that is, on the circumstance that ‘there is this and not that’ [ …], as well as on the history or ‘Geworden-Sein’ of these conditions; in short, of the encounters that could not have taken place […] and yet did take place, thus constituting ‘fact’ and condition of the problem. What does this mean other than that it is not only the contingency of necessity that must be thought, but also the necessity of the contingency in which it is rooted?” (Althusser 2010: 40-41) At this point, Althusser already describes the problematic of a currently current philosophical variety, namely speculative realism, which, among other things, revolves around the conceptual bridge between the necessity of contingency and the contingency of the (apparently) necessary. Here, it is important to keep in mind that the necessity of contingency is not a necessity that traverses and governs contingency, such as a necessity that would have contingency; rather, it is the necessity that “is” contingency, its esse in alio, i. e., necessity does not consist of any abstract capacity to be this or that.

Furthermore, it can be stated with Althusser that the “there is” in capitalism points to the following, a) that, on the one hand, the flow of labor is no longer encoded in the medium of serfdom or slavery, but presents itself, as it were, naked and free in a double sense, with which the “objectively free worker” (MEW 42: 414), separated from the means of labor and food, has to rent his labor power first and foremost, b) that objective social wealth no longer arises through the medium of landed property or takes place through the accumulation of commercial capital and/or through that of money at the military and fiscal state (as in the times of mercantilism or absolutism). In the already established capitalism it comes in permanence to the formation of pure, homogeneous and in political respect independent money capital, which must be invested permanently anew, in order to produce positive production conditions. Capitalism as an objective social formation occurs historically with all its non-simultaneity in Europe first when the two flows of homogeneous money capital and the unskilled labor flow meet and interlock and combine with each other in a specific way, without encountering world empires as they were still to be found in Asia at that time. According to Kojin Karatani, this encounter of the two flows takes place within the framework of a world economy that was no longer regulated solely by political coercion, but early on by commodity exchange, money and capital (Karatani 2012: 138), although it must still be taken into account that the absolutist state also paved the way for industrial capitalism.

Capital absorbs physical and cognitive labor in the form of a symbolic inscription, as variable capital, remunerating part of the labor performed with the wage, which is a flow of means of payment, while at the same time, with the conclusion of the wage contract, it makes a use of labor that inheres a surplus. At the same time, capital generates a specific relation to itself that is essentially articulated as capitalization or as a pure flow of finance. Deleuze/Guattari summarize this as follows: “In the one case, impotent sign of exchange value, a flow of means of payment relative to consumer goods and use values, a bijective relation between money and a preset selection of products […]; in the other, sign of the power of capital, financing flows, a differential quotient system of production that testifies to prospective strength or long-term calculation-not to hic-et-nunc realization-and functions like an axiomatics of abstract quantities.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 293-294) No one is ever robbed, because everything is based, as Deleuze/Guattari say, purely on the incompatibility of two kinds of money-currents: The flow so derisively called “purchasing power,” and thus ever already disqualified, which indicates the absolute powerlessness of the wage-dependent, insofar as here money serves purely as a means of payment with which the wage- and income-earning actors buy a quantity of the commodities they themselves produce, thereby mobilizing at the same time specific forms of subjectivation and power relations, while the infinitely flowing money capital, as fictitious and/or speculative capital, contains a self-regulating and forcing financing dispositive or a financing structure that accesses virtual value production in the future or claims or borrows from the future itself.

For Deleuze/Guattari, credit and the asymmetrical creditor-debtor relation that corresponds to it de facto and de jure precede exchange, whereby quantities of different forces and their associated potentialities are negotiated and articulated in the credit relation. (Cf. Lazzarato 2012: 73) It is a power differential that is valid for all societies. And in this, money capital flows, with their commanding power, provide an enormous reservoir of options, future-oriented choices, and power potentialities that are articulated, among other things, in processes of quantifying capitalization. While money as purchasing power formulates a reterritorialization with regard to the factors of wage labor, consumption, family, etc., money-capital flows permanently produce the fact of deterritorialization insofar as they are driven by deterritorialized and deterritorializing forces that produce time as potential future, option, and possible decision. Included in this is the readjustment of space through time, which historically requires a developed transportation, information, and communication industry that allows capital to exploit itself at a consistently accelerated rate. Bodies, objects and writings must ultimately circulate with the translations of the medial in order to realize capital “in” these communications. Today, cybernetic information in the medial provides a unity as a pure abstract with which both content and expression of the economic can be algebraically quantified, and not merely as counting, measuring, or coding, but as abstract-symbolic formalization. This includes, on the technical side, the algorithmic abstraction of networks, and on the monetary side, the abstraction of derivatives or synthetic securities. Finally, it is important to note that there is unambiguously no common measure between the flow of money capital and the flow of purchasing power of wage earners, with the distinction between the two flows appearing in completely incompatible forms in the context of today’s debt problem. On the one hand, consumer debt formed an important stage of the expansion of the American economy in the last two decades, but consumer credit is and remains finite; wage-dependent or precarious individuals are socially subjugated by consumer credit because they now need constant flowing streams of income to meet their daily needs and repay their debts. Without a job, the obligations of, for example, credit card debt simply cannot be met after a certain point. On the other hand, capital-to-capital lending appears at least potentially infinite, possibly allowing the infinite postponement of any final calculation without ignoring for a single moment the problem of actualizing the products in money and the issue of security/repayment of the loans. As Karatani writes in this regard, “Credit enforces capital’s movement endlessly at the same time that it hastens capital’s self-reproduction and eliminates the danger involved in selling.” (Karatani 2003: 219)

Deleuze/Guattari are probably the only theorists whose political-economic philosophy ascribes quite enormous importance to the concept of flow, which in turn has a direct relation to Deleuze’s view of the mathematics of the differential quotient, in contrast to other political philosophies based on the contract (Hobbes) or the spirit of the law (Montesquieu), a theory of the state (Plato), or the problem of legitimation (Durkheim, Habermas). (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 299ff.) Indeed, one can imagine extraordinarily many different types of streams and rivers, which in their multiplicity and directionality, their countercurrents and turbulences – think of Lucretius’ theory of flow – always have to be controlled or codified in some way.1 Thus, there is the river and the dams or dikes that control and channel the flow; there are economic flows, such as that of money and money capital, that are subject to some control, regulation, and governance by institutions, distribution networks, and generally accumulation regimes or governmental rationalities. Material flows of substances, such as oil and electricity, require encoding by networks to make electricity flow, for example. There is a commodity flow in addition to the marketing of the commodity world, and there is the coded transportation of commodity flows. There is the flow of traffic that one tries to encode by means of highways, circulation and control of speed. Social flows of migrants, the unemployed and the homeless within the narrow framework of the control of state borders, and the regulation of flows to their fatal halt in biopolitical dispositifs. Somatic flows, bodily fluids and blood.

We will return to the notion of (economic) flow in more detail, but it may be suggested here that the notion of manifold/rhizome, in the context of a conception of flows, denotes a continuum that Deleuze, recalling the physicist and mathematician Riemann (and the shift made by Bergson), defines as a continuous manifold, which can be determined by its “dimensions and independent variables”, whereby the continuous (virtual) a-numerical manifold, in contrast to the discrete manifold, can only be divided and measured if, at the “price of a change in essence”, the corresponding principle of measurement also changes with each step of division. (Cf. Deleuze 2007: 56) In this sense, the a-centric rhizomes are also to be understood as folded, mobile and unfinalizable heterogeneities without beginning and end, and this to the exclusion of the one, i.e., under the condition of subtraction (n-1), which eliminates from every observation what wants to represent itself as one. At this point, one could also think of the manifoldness of communis, which has nothing at all to do with the social of capital.

In the thinking of Deleuze/Guattari, the concept of flow is closely interlocked with the concept of the machine. According to the two authors, machines are characterized first of all by the parameters of functionality and (exopoietic) production – and not necessarily with regard to the attainment of a certain purpose or goal by means of production, with which precisely the teleological aspect becomes secondary for the “being” of the machine. (Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 696ff.) Instead, one should assume that the respective machines always process very specific kinds of flows in order to immanently produce both their own universes of meaning and their materials – flows of energy, flows of money, flows of things and objects, flows of bodies etc., for without the flows, the machines remain at best something like sleeping machines; both in terms of their ontological relevance (being as such) and their existence, it thus seems essential that machines always couple to other machines by cutting off or extracting flows to transform them in turn, while the flows in turn modify or modulate the machines by forcing the machines to adopt new structurings or coding procedures, shifting machine parts that now function differently to readjust the machines’ unitary functions. Thus, the transmissions of the machines as translation machines or as cutting and intersecting machines find new ways in principle, so that the machines eventually produce extraordinarily novel flows to possibly also produce revolutionary subjectivities or protosubjectivities (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 15ff.) The endeavor of machine analysis in Deleuze/Guattari consists, among other things. is to show that machines continuously need at least one current or flow in order to be able to function as lubricated or as disturbed or to be able to do what they do, whereby the flows form the precondition and result of the manifold functions of the machines; machines not only couple themselves to the flows of other machines in order to extract them, but they also transform, modify and modulate the flows and thus produce new chains of flows. (Thus, the computer produces a light current on its screen that causes neuronal synapses to fire). At this point, the concept of machine differs from the concept of structure because Deleuze/Guattari compose the concept of machine in a much more sophisticated way than is already the case with the problematic interplay of elements and relations within the conceptual constellation of structure and process. And what appears here as a further difference between the concepts of structure and machine that is by no means uninteresting is simply that, vis-à-vis any coded stream, the machines themselves temporize in events, i.e., each folding of the machine is an event, whereby it modifies and translates something, and finally Guattari locates this (ontological and problematic) more of the machine vis-à-vis the structure or system in a so-called core of consistency that results in an ontological plurality. (Guattari 1995: 121) This core conditions the real (energetic-spatial-temporal) operations of the machine precisely because it insists on the opening of the machine to an outside, so that the machine always moves simultaneously on the levels of complexity, folds, and chaos.

With their operations, the machines encode any kind of heterogeneous flows, where encoding involves both shaping and schematizing as a transformation and translation of flows, and inscribing flows on surfaces, translating time points into surface points (spatializing the non-metric manifold). It would still be important to emphasize in this context that the encoding of flows can also involve their transcoding, although it is quite rare for only non-formed or unformatted flows to occur, because every flow, no matter in what way and how fast and where it flows, has at least a minimal structure (and materiality). When machines couple to the flows of other machines, most of them, especially if they are autopoietic machines, have at least a minimal sentience that operates purely selectively or gradually: One should therefore understand transcendental empiricism in the Deleuzian version as a structural genesis precisely with respect to the forms of sentience of a particular machine. Finally, the operations of a machine can never be perfectly defined or fixed, and consequently, inflexible machines in particular would be doomed, for they would eventually exhaust themselves in and with their own mindless functioning, and this in a wholly regimented or regressive manner, because these kinds of “dumb” machines usually contain a tight or too-tight coding that ironically indicates and rigidly regulates how the currents are to flow through the machine. Finally, insofar as machines always remain coupled to the flows of other machines and at the same time also produce their own flows, which in turn are drawn from other machines, one could speak of an ecology of machines.2

It can now be said that in the analytics of machines, we should primarily start from heteropoietic, problematic transformational machines that are characterized by mutually translating heterogeneous entities, aggregates, and relations, machines whose unity appears only in the deduction from each unit, n-1. (Cf. Fuchs 2001: 133) Although these kinds of machines resist the purely static identity of a structure, but rather unfold structures and are folded by them (as qualitative manifolds themselves are never traceable to a unity), one should nevertheless not conceive of these machines as un-objects, as, for instance, Peter Fuchs assumes with his definition of the rhizome. (Cf. Fuchs 2001: 127f.) Would it not make more sense to understand these machines as structuring and structuring, folded and folding (mobile) networks, in which relations in particular are integrated, which in their specific interplay produce something that acts as a stream of activity within the concatenation of events that are definitely closer to the verb than to the noun? Thus, these intensive manifolds remain marked by something that one is not able to define either by properties or by axioms, instead they are marked by their differential relations. And this means again that the relations are not only external to the terms, but are also considered responsible for the constitution of the terms, while in the course of an anti-essentialist way of thinking the structural is shifted into the ever already changeable givens or circumstances, which in turn have to be problematized and whose conditions have to be represented. (Cf. Deleuze 1997: 134f.) And finally, the conceptual constellation of differential relations defines a problem. In contrast to allopoietic machines, autopoietic machines permanently couple themselves to their environment in order to produce their own parts, constellations, and spaces (of neighborhoods and rifts) with it, as ongoing determinant processes and precisely not purely as determinate processes that finally produce a fixed product. Thus, for Deleuze/Guattari, in order to exist simultaneously as object and relation, the machine must always demonstrate a producing production, the production of production or the difference that makes a difference. And every machine is at the same time the product of another machine, always representing something like a black box for other machines. Machine processes, consequently, generate differential productions that produce wmaterial or products for other productions, whose products, in turn, serve as material for further productions. Consequently, the pure diesity of an object is permanently transformed into a new process of machine production, whereby the constitution and function of the machine is characterized by a continuous production of production plus the coagulation of production into product. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 9f.) Marx, on the other hand, introduced a strict distinction between production and product, because looking at the product (one cannot usually tell from the taste of yogurt under which conditions of production it was made) does not by itself give any indication of the production process underlying it (ibid. : 33), which in the capitalist economy has to run as free of disturbances as possible, whereas in the libidinous economy products are always productions only insofar as the product is connected with production under the condition that production is constantly disturbed and interrupted in order to finally flow even better – the phenomenon of manic depression or bipolarity as well as schizophrenia. In this, the rule of continuously disrupted production of production distinguishes Deleuze/Guattari’s desiring machine as a primary production whose program is the affirmation of the continuous through assemblages that ceaselessly flow, communicate, and connect.3

Following Deleuze/Guattari’s anti-Oedipus, the English philosopher Nick Land attempted to capture the production of production in the 1990s with the concept of materiality, insofar as he conceived of processual thought itself as a function of matter, making so-called representational thought appear only as a highly depotentiated function of matter. Matter counts to Land as productive and synthesizing at the same time, counts to him as primary process, whereas Land regards everything that unfolds on the level of the conceptual representation of a theory as secondary and derivative. To this materialist eschatology (technology dissolves into nature), already hinted at by Deleuze/Guattari, (material) synthesis in its connection and concatenation of heterogeneous terms is considered primary and productive, such that matter itself generates its very own representations, thus relegating any other representations to the status of a transcendental illusion. (Cf. Land 2011) At the same time, matter in its machinic consistency mutates into the unconditionally dark and appears enriched with sinister techno-visions, finally dissolving entirely in the nocturnal ocean of a post-capitalist technosphere. In the face of a mutual infiltration up to fusion, be it that nature dissolves into technology or technology into nature, it is still necessary to insist on the disturbed identity between nature and technology. Today, the technological object is characterized both by the substitution of natural substances and by machinic automation vis-à-vis the subjects, and yet the trans-classical machine that provides information functions like a brain: although it cannot be mapped onto matter or onto the creative subject, at the same time it makes possible, as an autonomous realm, a reassessment of logic and ontology, of nature and technology, by granting the trans-classical machine a capacity for reflection without eliminating the human entirely. What is at stake here is reflexive hyper-objects thinking beyond subject and object, referring in a way yet to be discussed to the quasi-transcendental capital and the un-object value, to that indeterminate ground that inexists and therefore makes it possible for technology and cybernetics, with their seemingly infinite feedback loops, to seemingly hijack everything and anything inculsive of nature. And so as not to fall into the fashion itself of an unadulterated affirmation of an ever-overturning technological accelerationism, which Land describes as an unceasing process of liquefaction of capitalist structures (“Meltdown: planetary China syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into a technosphere, terminal speculative bubble, ultravirus, and a revolution stripped of all Christian socialist eschatology.” Ibid: 442), the concept of deteritorialization, if it is to be understood at this point as the pure immanence of change in terms of permanent revolution, must itself be relativized. A libertarian-constructivist concept of political deterritorialization would have to be differentiated by designing at least four types of political events that accurately describe deterritorialization: 1) relatively negative processes that, strictly speaking, only bring about a change in the political situation in order to maintain the established order, 2) relatively positive processes that do not reproduce the established order but, in their ambiguity, do not create a new situation either, 3) absolutely negative processes that do not favor any political situation but undermine all social determinants, 4) absolutely positive processes that, in addition, still create new political situations.

Let us return to Deleuze/Guattari’s conception of machines. Machines are always to be described more comprehensively as a sum of elements and their relations, Deleuze/Guattari report, namely as assemblages, ensembles or assemblages that are characterized less by their internal relations – relations between the various components capable of quantification – but above all by their external and non-numerical relations. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 698f.) Deleuez/Guattari define machines as assemblages formed through recursion and communication to give rise to complexes such as workers/working machines that are machinized in factories to process in redundancy. And the subsequent thesis, which is that entities relate to each other precisely when they produce singular transmissions, makes evident that the effects arising from this are always to be valued more strongly than in the case of merely monocausal effects, the reason for which may be only the way in which a single entity translates those interpenetrations which it also receives. And it would be to follow Manuel De Landa when he speaks of the fact that a relation can modify itself without entities modifying themselves. (Cf. De Landa 2006) While entities can never be completely defined by the relations they each enter into, at the same time an entity also never remains separate from specific sets of the relations, but is always integrated into a whole history of relations, so that entities are by definition determined by a multiplicity of relations and ultimately cannot change as long as these relations in the set of multiple multiplicities do not change their order, sequence and metric. Nevertheless, an entity cannot be determined exclusively by the relations it enters into, for it always seems possible that an entity moves away from one particular set of relations to integrate itself into another set of relations. One should therefore understand the machine as an empty signifier, from which an entity can indeed escape when it jumps out of a context or relation, insofar as it is itself affixed and affected; on the other hand, no entity can be imagined as absolutely isolated, it is and remains integrated into differential, problematic relations, although it ever already establishes contingent encounters with other entities over the period of its own existence, as perhaps the late Althusser would say in the context of his materialist and aleatory theory of encounter. These kinds of encounters, then, do not belong to the expression of an internal relation defined by, say, an axiomatic (set theory); rather, they remain what De Landa calls “relations of exteriority.” (Ibid.) And these external relations or encounters would be understood as necessarily contingent rather than logically necessary. They emerge from a singular history that could have been otherwise. De Landa further distinguishes between the properties of an entity and its capacities, i.e., its potential to afflict and be afflicted; capacities that depend on, but are never reducible to, certain heterogeneous forms of organization. (Ibid.: 11) In this context, the potentials of an entity remain as real as its properties.

Finally, one is forced to always assign to the specific types of the machine (cognition machine, money machine, affect machine, war machine, etc.) so-called abstract machines, which are characterized by non-formal functions and informal matters. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 706) Thus, one could also describe today’s machines of capitalization first and foremost as abstract machines. If several such abstract machines interlock or translate each other, a diagram is usually involved, which comprises a kind of plan, which, however, does not hold hypothetical, but always factual possibilities, which can, under certain circumstances, condense into algorithmic functions. On the level of the machine, the diagram thus denotes the way in which machines are ordered, rhythmized, and organized in order to subsequently couple themselves to other machines and thus themselves establish consistency, this, for example, in the sense of the mathematical group theory conceived by Abel and Galois, a configuration of fields by means of successive adjunction of symmetrical objects, which thus springs from a linkage given by the temporal successive executions of symmetries. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 231) Nevertheless, it would be wrong to conceive of the diagram merely as a drawing, a plan, or as a (problematic) structure; rather, it already contains in its germ a (material) arrangement of structurality, e.g. directional vectors, which are able to set in motion a rhythmic development, namely that of the unfolding/folding of a machine itself, which moves through time as (event): the vector space becoming of the machine and its singularities within a differential topological field, where the field of directional vectors as well as the attractors define the “virtual” trajectories (of the curves), of which never all are actualized. Thus, in order to construct the diagram of a machine, it is necessary to take into account the factual possibilities of how, when, and where a machine performs its transformations and modulations, writing each of its components as a mathematical variable: The dimensions (attractors, vectors, trajectories) of a purely topologically constructed space in which each singular point (points by which curves change direction) is “defined” by dimensions (of average points, objective zones of indeterminacy) representing a particular or possible stage of the machine; empirical studies in this context might serve to determine the various trajectories of a system corresponding to a particular path in topological phase or vector space. Diagrams would thus be understood in this sense as topological vector spaces, to which always belong specific problematics and potentials, which in turn may be influenced by certain dimensions (attractors, trajectors, bifurcation) in a singular situation. The results of non-linear processes, when summarized in a diagram, are not written as straight lines, but as curves, which again refers to non-causal relationships. On the other hand, today just a multitude of current numerical and hyperstable machines, which are dominated by powerful attractors, seem to constantly tend to form cruel mechanisms of solidification in order to mitigate any disturbances or irritations, so that one would probably have to say that the diagram always has aleatory and determinant structures at the same time, such as those of a Markov chain.4

In conclusion, there are at least eight crucial dimensions of a schizoanalytic critique of the machine. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 696ff. ): (a) there is no being that is not ever already integrated into the field of plural economic-material machines, into the economy of desire and the affective field of all possible discursivities and non-discursivities, (b) transcendence always contains an illusionary moment, which again is to be seen in close correspondence with Deleuze’s critique of naturalization and its representation, c) one would have to show that the social field is always rhizomatic or immanent and advances through repetition (intensive populations), and d) how nevertheless molar formations (statistical aggregates) can arise within this immanence, e) one should develop practices and strategies to combat these molar organizations and produce lines of flight; f) there is no concrete machine that cannot be characterized by a specific composition of its heterogeneous parts, the most abstract dimension in a structure/machine implying that of pure material and expression; g) there is a typology of processes that always involve specific components, processes that stabilize and territorialize an identity, or repetitive and differentiating processes that undermine or deterritorialize an identification. De Landa adds another dimension: h) The degree to which an expressive medium consolidates or encodes a territorial identity, or encodes it precisely.

One of the central theses of Anti-Oedipus is that the libidinous and political economies are one and the same in structural terms, which means nothing other than that desire always remains a constituting part of the political-economic infrastructure of capitalism. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 15f.) Although there is no structural difference in the functioning of the assemblages, dispositives, and machines of the two economies, one can very well make a distinction with regard to the respective active and passive syntheses of the two regimes. Already in the first two chapters of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze/Guattari develop an elaborate theory of the three syntheses of the libidinal and socio-economic unconscious: while the desire machines produce an immanent synthesis (local and non-specific conjunctions, including disjunctions and polovocal conjunctions), the socio-economic machines represent transcendental syntheses (global and specific conjunctions, exclusive disjunctions and segregative, biunivocal conjunctions). If these two types of syntheses are structurally the same machines, they are not the same regimes or the same order, which for Deleuze/Guattari means that the socio-economic machines represent at a molar level what the desiring machines produce at the molecular level. (Ibid.: 44f.) Socio-economic formations always oscillate between the two poles of integration and seperation, which in turn depends on how the desiring machines use their opportunities to produce immanent connections on their part and generate new regimes of social order (active schizophrenic line of flight). In the same breath, it must be asked how socio-economic machines overcode desire by means of transcendental representations or transcendental organizational plans. Accordingly, there is a movement from representation to production and vice versa. And it would have to be taken into account that there is always the possibility that the desiring machines can be undermined by the demands, regularities and axiomatic methodologies of the representative institutions, structures and machines, or even destroyed by their determination and dominance, indeed the desiring machines even manage to desire their own suppression.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze/Guattari develop a triadic typology of social formations within the framework of a universal history (primitive societies, state, capitalism) that, according to the authors, only exists as contingency. (Ibid.: 177ff.) While pre-capitalist societies were mainly based on forms of coding that operated purely on the level of representation, capitalism is primarily based on decoded flows of labor and money capital that operate on the levels of production, circulation, and consumption. Incidentally, Deleuze/Guattari find a theory of the decoded flow not only in Marx but also in Keynes, for for Keynes, according to the authors, the theory of stock markets on which the unleashed flows of money capital circulate was essential, Keynes having at the same time introduced desire into the economics of banking practices, insofar as Keynes regarded stock markets as reflections of the psyche of the actors. Thus, Keynes described a new model of regulation and stimulation of the economy, with the practical application of which by the political powers in the years following the Great Depression entire laboratories for the production of axioms were created, especially those of the New Deal and Fordism. However, it must not be overlooked that Keynes abysmally condemns the financial rentier and thus ultimately upholds the distinction between real and nominal economics.

We can first note at this point that Deleuze/Guattari have explicitly constructed a model that presents capitalism as a machine autoreferential system, with the authors supplementing the model with the concept of the capitalist socius, which settles itself on production as a directly economic entity, thus constituting a surface on which the forces and agents of production are distributed until the socius itself eventually seeks to absorb surplus production and attribute its products to itself alone.5 Thus, this kind of socius actually seeks to arrogate to itself the claim that it is the ultimate ground of the movement of capital itself. The capitalist socius would, however, in the sense of Deleuze/Guattari, rather be considered an effect, but once established, it functions as if lubricated, if only it succeeds in homogenizing the disparate social practices in order to simultaneously re-code and unify even the encoded flows of money capital through the permanent adjunction of axioms into something like a coherent whole. For Deleuze/Guattari, the production of the connective syntheses (of capital) cannot proceed without the circulation of the disjunctive syntheses, and this occurs precisely as a recording of the flows on the surfaces of the socius, which thus presents itself as a tremendous field of actualization – for it is there that the various products realize themselves as extensive quantities. (Ibid.: 321) The full body of capital ultimately congeals into the site of all our factual encounters as well as a social hyperspace on which desires are registered, distributed, and controlled; it is a fluid and fractal surface, but one on which money capital in particular flows. And as such, it naturally includes the time of life, clock time, working time, leisure time, but also the times that remain essentially alien to subjective experience, such as light time, the time of electronic networks, and the hyper-volatile time measures of synthetic finance. Guy Debord has spoken of how so-called “concentrated capitalism [tends] more and more toward the sale of ‘fully equipped’ blocks of time, each of which forms a single unified commodity that has a certain number of different commodities integrated into it.” (Debord 2013) Capital, in differential processes of accumulation, as a seemingly all-encompassing productive force, thus generates its very own temporal reality in the form of symptoms that are eventually supposed to encompass even the last nano-subjectivities, for example, the mobile and flexible worker of contemporary neoliberalism, who appears primarily as a product of the deterritorialization of capital, as, incidentally, the consumer is today.

Once capital is fully established as a social relation, it begins to function as the only proper quasi-ground of any kind of production, while at the same time remaining tied to a virtual entity (organless body) as its absolute limit, which Deleuze/Guattari conceive at this point not only as a concentrate of anti-production, but also as an amorphous stream of matter. (Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 365f. ) It is the organless body that functions as an abstract matter-machine of repulsion and contraction, as the virtual continuum of variation, as the dissolution or liquidation of psychosocial organization in the direction of a non-actualizable, purely virtual de-organization, in this sense of an anti-production that is, so to speak, a fatal history if capital precisely does not manage to produce, by means of the various procedures of stratification on the capitalist socius, a different kind of recording surface than that of the organless body. The organless body still operates according to the regimes of order, but it itself consists of a field of pre-actual potentialities, whereby one finds order here at most in the form of tendencies, inclinations, and forces, which, however, do not express themselves precisely by actualizing themselves. In this respect, Deleuze/Guattari can indeed speak of the organless body as anti-production, which, however, is by no means completely opposed to production. (Ibid: 425) Production, in turn, establishes selections in a social field by means of particular paths, on surfaces that capture and map the potentialities of the producing system, while the organless body continues to insist as anti-productive, as an open, as a purely virtual surface of potentialities. The total de-actualization of the organless body would, in turn, correspond to a desire that refuses to engage in any selection of pathways at all to reach the zero point of death that is pure virtuality or hyper-chaos. Not nothingness, but a vacuum that “contains all possible particles and draws all possible forms that appear to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1996: 135) The infinite velocities of autopoietic flows in the machinic phylum thus tend to involve the dissolution of all forms, although through various spatio-temporal energetic discursivities, with which the possibility of realizing principles of order is given, there are constant compressions of fluxions within the framework of an asignificant semiotics. While the asignificant discursivity represents the current mode of infinite speed, the virtual mode is characterized as a place of recomplexification through non-discursivity, i.e. the chaotic hypercomplexity indicates itself as a source of unpredictable but creative catastrophes and events and actualizes itself at the points of bifurcation, as a spatiotemporal discursivity of heterogeneous processes and semiotics.

It seems that one of the decisive moments of capital, in the context of its permanent functionalization of deterritorialized money-capital flows, is precisely to have created its own full body as a so-called correlative, constituting a surface over which the objects, forces, and agents of capitalized production are distributed, a socius, but one that now itself appears as a quasi-cause from which capital seems to emanate. But for Deleuze/Guattari, even capital never constitutes the material ground of what it produces; rather, it generates a purely social relation whereby the systems of production, distribution, and circulation, and indeed ultimately of consumption, are organized, structured, and conceptualized.6 And the hyper-transformational process of decoded money-machines in the capitalist mode remains precisely linked in a specific way to the establishment of a particular anti-production system, the representative mode, which constantly seeks to regulate and recode the unleashed capitalist money-capital flows through an axiomatics of replicative structures. For example, the state’s antiproduction constantly seeks the realization of an imaginary equilibrium between money capital flows, and not necessarily in the sense of inertia, for state antiproduction can contribute to the generalization of entirely new relations in accumulation, circulation, and distribution in a given social field, for example, in the course of neoliberal governance.7 However, there is also an antiproduction of capital itself, which no longer follows the dualism productive/unproductive, but instead is fully integrated into production, and this partly as a cruel destruction, which today reaches all areas of capitalist “socialization”, because capitalization, after all, tries to leave nothing open or to leave nothing out, be it life, wars, genes, environment, knowledge, affects, etc.

Let us now turn to the concept of flow in Deleuze/Guattari in a little more detail. First of all, any kind of flow has a specific tempo, rhythm, and directional direction, and in the process there is often a change of material. If the process is usually defined by a distance between two states or dispositions, as a line or path between two points or two nodes in a (variable) network, and moreover as a process in another process, in the analysis of flows we speak of a pure movement or a positive chaos without point of origin or destination, flows whose particular characteristics, be they rhythm, direction or tempo, are to be grasped purely relationally. Thus it seems truly possible to consider flow independently of the fixing of positions or points, independently of the lines between two fixed points, which in turn are usually characterized as unchangeable elements. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 298f.) Crucially, flows are not along lines, but according to the criteria of n-dimensional, virtual, continuous, and non-numerical manifolds, each of which has only one center. (Ibid.) And whether we are talking about vortices, spirals, or whirlpools, we are always talking about particular shapes of flows, which are inscribed by a curvilinear, continuous declination. (Ibid.: 496) Thus, currents would be understood as directed and rhythmic, as a-metric and irreversible, they can flee in all directions and they are in equilibrium and disequilibrium at the same time as dynamic-temporalized currents, they can combine or unite, they can originate from a collision or an encounter where a current collides with a counter-current and bounces off so that congestion occurs and consequently new localizations in an open topological space. (Ibid.) Pure flows have a real and at the same time ideal status, they are efficacious and effective, they escape codes, where the quanta of flows are signs and/or degrees of deterritorialization. The corresponding topological space refers to a vectorial and smooth space traversed by non-countabilities and delirious lines, corresponding to a smooth time in which the distributions, swirls and scatters are linked to contingency, to the unpredictable disbursement of events that function without centers, indeed following the lines that deviate even from the diagonal. It also seems possible that multiple currents converge in the vortex, creating a figure of multiplicity in which nature and culture mix indistinguishably; there are multiple currents, where turbulence can arise from many vortices, up to cascades, differentiating and at the same time piling up unstable vortices with blurred edges, which in turn have to be understood as branching lines of smaller vortices, which produce even smaller vortices, and this just in an open, topological, smooth space, in which the most diverse currents are distributed. In this context, the theoretical figure of the vortex always appears integrated into hypermodern dispositives of power, which today establish order/equilibrium less through measurement than through the “order of contingency,” in that, for example, the manifold discourses of financial science constantly add new axioms (stochastic models) to economic reality in order to manage for a moment newly emerging problematics, whereby this is by no means done exclusively to describe the economic, but quite explicitly to format or performatively shape the financial economy itself: Axiomatization here means that on the basis of probability theory up to the systems theory-inspired access to chaos theory or to Zipf’s power laws, new forecasting procedures and security techniques are installed in permanence at the same time. (Cf. Baecker 2011)

From a purely economic perspective, for Deleuze/Guattari, flows represent transactions, -ductions, or -emissions within money-capital concatenations, in that money flows from one pole to the other pole (here the term flow would first be identified with that of process), to be quantified therein as flows of inputs and outputs. The term pole in this context includes actants or groups (companies, firms, associations, etc.) that act as accumulations and nodes for the incoming and outgoing flows of money, which are credited to bank accounts or offset against each other, undergo encoding on graphematized recording surfaces. Today, money capital flows circulate in topological networks in which the various poles are permanently shifting to a certain extent (but the digitized trading of financial derivatives in real time also requires spaces, global cities), whereby these are multidimensional poles or machines that record or encode the flows in order to transform them and allow them to continue flowing within the framework of flexible schemes. And with this, the process actually mutates more and more into the flow as we have described it above. We will return to the problem later in the chapter “Deleuze and the Synthetic Security”.

In this context, Deleuze/Guattari clearly affirm the hypothesis that attributes the emergence of money (beyond a money as an offering) to the (universal) state as an apparatus of appropriation, which invents money not at all as a means to strengthen trade, for instance, but to control trade through its tax system. With the legitimization of money by the state, it ultimately became possible for the state to intervene in every single commodity-money transaction in order to finally derive benefit from it in the form of taxation and to skim off money itself. This comprised at the same time the first step towards the decoding of money, which finally led in capitalism to the existence of money as a pure flow of money capital, to a pure (conceptual) abstraction. And at this point, as we have already seen above, reference is made by Robert Kurz with regard to the emergence of modern money to a “proto-industrial, military complex” whose elaborate logistics required a “rüstungbedingte Finanzbedarf” (Zinn) since the 15th century. (Cf. Kurz 2012: 119) And this eventually “led to the development of the modern tax state with a fixed civil service and economically oriented state administration.” (Ibid.) It is about the connection of manufactory, weapon technology, absolutist state as well as the mechanism of money collection, which in unison of proto-capitalist money and bureaucratic state apparatus got the free flow of money capital rolling in the first place, as the state machine detached itself from the feudal body and at the same time gradually freed money from all its former attachments, among others. The money capital, as a material capital, is a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital, a material capital. Accordingly, proto-capitalist money as the material expression of a process of buying and selling goods that took place on an ever-increasing scale in real history is to be understood in the context of a militarized state machinery that engaged in money skimming as a tax state, whereby, primarily due to this hunger for money, goods produced in manufactories from the 16th century onward became commodities until this process, which at first mainly involved circulation, eventually became self-sustaining and resulted in the creation of a new system of production (agricultural production and mining, etc.). (Ibid: 144) While the doubly free worker was a consequence of the change in agrarian structures, the circulation of commercial capital led money to increasingly lose its ties to the absolutist state, money being the most deterritorialized term that detached itself from the mutating despotic state machine and set in motion an autopoeitic mechanism based on purely abstract quantities and multilinear progressions.

Capitalism, according to Deleuze/Guattari, is to be understood as a qualitatively new stage of decoding and deterritorialization of the flows of workers, but above all of money capital. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 286ff.) These two decoded flows are expressed in two forms of money, namely payment and financing. While payment is always to be located in circulation, where money merely functions in its capacity as a means of circulation and is booked into bank accounts, so-called finance-money functions in a completely different way, for it constitutes what Deleuze/Guattari call the capitalist form of infinite debt, a monstrous deterritorialization of money itself (although finance, for example, has its own territory in the apparatuses of banks). In this, financial capital flows as a continuous flow of money capital, which banks create as debts to themselves in order to deepen it – and thus banks fund so-called negative money (debts as debts of banks to themselves) in order to generate positive money from it (inter alia, credit that banks provide to businesses). (Ibid.: 305) It is precisely this formatting of money and money capital that manifests the true economic force in the internal history of capitalism, immense deterritorialized and deterritorializing flows of money that ultimately also constitute the full body of capital. Now Deleuze/Guattari say that there is no common measure between these two forms of flows: Money in its function as a means of payment and circulation realizes exchange values, while money as a symbolization of the logic of finance or capitalization signifies a pure movement of creation and destruction of money capital that relates to itself. And finally, it is the banks that participate in both flows of money, they sit at the (digital) interfaces between payment and financing, they act as so-called transformers or as oscillators that today generate above all the flows of financing, i. e. mutating money capital in continuous variation, whereby the conditions of the constitution of the flows of money capital always include those of their return flows. Even if there is no common measure between the flows of financialization and the purchasing power of wage-earners, the banking system in particular guarantees a fictional homogeneity, which is, however, always under the dominance of the flows of money capital. At this point, Deleuze/Guattari make a threefold division of the functions of money: a) the creation of credit money by central banks (and commercial banks, one must add), b) money as a means of payment generated by the infinite concatenation of relations between banks and private borrowers, c) synthetic money-capital flows, which serve purely for self-aggrandizement and whose quantum is determined solely by the number of economic transactions. In this context, the capitalists as a class are at best able to regulate the distribution of surplus value, while they have little influence on the courses of the flows of money capital themselves.

How do Deleuze/Guattari describe the filiative structure of capital itself? For this, we should first briefly sketch Deleuze’s understanding of non-mathematics in terms of a problematic, i.e., a non-axiomatic mathematics of difference. Deleuze brings into play here especially mathematicians such as Abel, Galois, Riemann, and Poncaré. (Cf. Deleuze 1992a: 209, 230, 231, 233) He uses the differential/calculus as a model for his conception of the intrinsic idea because, in its purely symbolic form, it indicates the problem of pure change, making a strict distinction between differential and axiomatic relation that allows, first of all, to think the problem as such independently of its solutions. Finally, it is about the intrinsic conditions and constellations of the problem itself, with which its own fields of solvability are to be constructed in a progressive procedure. In his work Difference and Repetition, Deleuze uses the concept of the idea to describe a virtual multiplicity whose always problematic self-determination has its starting point in an indeterminate quantifiability that can be inscribed with the mathematical symbols dx and dy – symbols that constitute the internal character of the problem as such. It has to be stated that dx and dy as symbols neither represent a generality (concepts of understanding as variable quantities; quantitas) nor a special expression (conceptual values as fixed quantities; quantum), but rather remain upstream of those concepts. Thus only relations of the universal are conceivable, in which none of the terms is determinable by an independent variable. Dx and dy (ideal quantibilities) are regarded as undetermined and unextended, while only the corresponding differentials (if x changes to dx, then y follows to dy) express the determinability of quantities. (Ibid.: 225f.) The derivative dx/dy represents the invariant of the function. One thus resolves the parameters identity, meaning and value into the zero values of dy and dx, with which the relations have no individual value and finally no existence independent of the relation; they are at most actualized by the differential. They are essentially indeterminate elements, which Deleuze integrates into a (virtual) differential procedure with its three moments of indeterminacy, determinability, and determination, through which he finally defines them. The symbolic elements, which have neither an external identity nor an internal meaning, are finally defined solely by their reciprocal relation; it indicates that one can only represent the elements within the framework of differentialization itself. (Ibid.: 222f.) Thus, the differential dx/dy is determinable as a reciprocal relation, and this within a purely symbolic relation that implies a serial structure of differential elements: series that strive towards their interfaces, which in turn represent distinguished points through which the structure (of differential relations) reveals itself in all its potentiality. Deleuze thus introduces, in addition to the real and the imaginary relation, the third type of symbolic relation. He writes: “The third type, however, is established between elements which themselves do not have any certain value, and which, however, determine themselves in the relation. For example ydy + xdx = 0 or dy/dx = – x/y. Such relations are symbolic, and the corresponding elements stand in a differential relation. dy is completely indeterminate in relation to y; dx is completely indeterminate in relation to x: each has neither existence, nor value, nor meaning. And yet the relation dy/dx is completely determined, the two elements mutually determine each other in relation. It is this process of mutual determination within the relation that makes it possible to define the symbolic nature.” (Deleuze 1992b: 21) From the reciprocal differential relations arises the determinability of the indeterminate elements. Deleuze sees in the figure of thought of the differential a principle of reciprocal determination, which for him has the function of a reciprocal synthesis. (Deleuze1992a: 234f.) Elie Ayache summarized the crux of the calculus as follows: “The differential is such that neither of the two entities (dy, dx) that are seemingly related by the differential are present in the differential. The differential is only the relation, not the actual entities. It is only the power of producing, or generating, the co-variation of the two mathematical entities when they come to be actualized. It is a place of repetition and retrieval (extraction) rather than a finished result. It is the place where the function (to be actualized) is determined, that is to say, differentiated, the place where it could have been otherwise yet it is faceted and cut to be this way, the place where the rift separating the variables and orienting their relative differences (in other words, their future co-variation) is first opened and the function is first shaped.” (Ayache 2010a: 293-4)

At this point, the use of the Leibnizian calculus becomes possible only because of the fact that Deleuze separates the logical structure of the calculus from the being of infinitesimal quantities assumed in Leibniz. This anti-quantitative reading of the calculus only enables an understanding of the differential(t)ial relation as the basis of the problematic nature of ideas beyond the limitations of a Kantian subject-oriented thought. The reciprocal synthesis of the differential quotient does not possess a reflexive-logical component; rather, Deleuze traces the synthesis back to the question of genesis; he also conceives the reciprocal synthesis of the differential quotient as a source for the production of real objects, which immediately leads to the question in which form real objects can be determined at all in order to be able to speak meaningfully about the world of phenomena and events. At the same time, however, the differential allows to think less about the objects themselves, but more about their relations and transformations in time (dx/dt, where x can stand for anything.) Thus, objects are defined as quasi-objects by determining that relationality.

Now, the processual of capitalist machines releases complex, differential, and problematic relations that have historically emerged through the contingent coincidence or external conjunction of generally decoded flows, capital-money flows with labor flows. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1974: 287ff.) Ever since capitalism has been generating its internal history, a continuous conjunction of money-capital flows can be observed, taking place in ever more violent thrusts of deterritorialization, while today the “doubly free” workers and employees are comprehensively decoded in favor of the modes of operation of the informational machines. With Deleuze/Guattari, the currently given capitalism would have to be understood as an effect of the differential relations of capital itself, which have just sprung from the historically singular conjunction of money capital and labor flows. Only with the interaction (of the differentials dx/dy) are the two flows determinable within a symbolic relation, in that they, as decoded flows, constantly pursue their conjunction at the threshold of smooth space and thus drift towards their “true” determination, which Deleuze/Guattari finally describe as the filiative form of capital, to designate it with the mathematical symbol x + dx. (Ibid.: 292) This formula symbolizes the production of surplus value, which must not only be produced but also always realized or absorbed. Just as the reciprocal synthesis of the differential quotient within the constitution of the immanent idea is also meant to express the genesis of relations, the capitalist differential quotient reflects the flows of money capital and labor in capitalist processes of reproduction: There is a direct transformation of surplus value in code, the differential quotient of capital, into pure surplus value in flows, the differential quotient of production.This functioning of the capitalist differential quotient, as Deleuze/Guattari assume with Jean-Joseph Goux, is not heading toward any end of capitalism, so that every rupture, incision, or crisis only ever shifts the internal limit of capital itself (after which it runs like clockwork again, Deleuze/Guattari write), which thus manifests itself in the variations of the differential quotient. (Ibid.: 293) Deleuze/Guattari write “This the differential quotient Dy/Dx, wherein Dx derives from labor power and constitutes the fluctuation of constant capital, Dy derives from capital and constitutes the fluctuation of constant capital.” (Ibid.: 292) The abstract capital machine appears as an immanently flowing system that performs its operations in: time, where this can be represented on the mathematical level as a differential quotient, the gradual rate of change of the two flows in their relation to each other, and this under the dominance of the continuously flowing money capital flows. Accordingly, capital does not represent an object, but is to be written as a relation of flows, velocities and moving quantities. The flows can be cut into discrete units, but in themselves they form continuously flowing, intense quantities, which are initially able to swell and diminish without external control of apparatuses, and precisely because of this, new problematics to be mastered by capital constantly emerge, which, according to Deleuze/Guattari, requires a permanent reterritorialization of flows, by means of stratagemized axiomatics enforced by centripetal capture apparatuses that have historically developed via the inflation of the Hegelian state apparatus to the Foucaultian governance machine to the power mechanisms of central banks. According to Deleuze/Guattari, the abstract capital machine possesses a real/virtual status and determines any actualizations-in-the-last-instance, which of course also means that the real cannot be equated with the actual, because the virtual-real never quite arrives in the actual. With the introduction of new technologies or new compositions of technological codes, the extraction of machine surplus value has been added to the extraction of human surplus value in the course of the internal history of capitalism. In this process, the relation of equivalence that characterizes the commodity form always requires supplementation by the non-equivalent conjunction of capital, the relations between decoded flows of money capital that construct first and foremost current qualities (outside this relation, the flows remain purely virtual). “This conjunction is at the same time the disjunction of abstract quantity, wherein the latter becomes something concrete.” (Ibid.: 320) The parameters dy and dx represent, in the mutually conditional relations, the pure quantities of the flow of labor and the flow of capitalization, the latter, however, having a disproportionately greater potency than the flow of labor, so that at this point Deleuze/Guattari speak precisely of a relation between potency (capitalization) and given quantity (labor).

Let us now turn to the notion of code. In their account of code, Deleuze/Guattari often refer to the functioning of the genetic code, conceiving of it less as a structure than as a kind of blind combination, a passive synthesis that, under certain circumstances, also forms a domain for opportunities or, precisely, functions as a medium of real de-organization. Code, in the economic context, initially denotes a (binary) scheme and/or a form of graphematized inscription or symbolic recording of money flows. (Ibid.: 318f.) In capitalism, this occurs in companies in the context of double-entry bookkeeping, for example, as a money-money transaction that takes place in the bank accounts of two companies. The payment check is an incoming flow, while a check issued to pay an invoice is an outgoing flow. In this context, the (asymmetric) code serves to translate flows; it is necessary in order to control the systems of the flow communicatively, and both semiotic and probabilistic components come into play here. Thus, it can first be stated in general terms that the relation between flow and code is subject to the rule of reciprocity, for it is impossible to have access to a flow other than by means of an operation that precisely encodes the flow, while conversely the flow challenges specific encodings. There are no flows without extractions, disconnections, and incisions, without the associated machinic poles that encode the flows using their specific recording surfaces, while codes themselves are transformed as the machinic poles create new conjunctions to make the flows flow further and differently. In this context, the operation of decoding refers to the respective translation performances, however, the process of decoding can also imply the complete annihilation of codes that until then have secured the translation or mediation of flows. Coding thus operates through processes of recording, and this takes place in capitalism within the framework of economic mathemes, whether these are numbers on a paper bank statement or charts/formulas/marks on a computer screen.

Coding is to be understood as assignments where any content or context is erased. Payments or non-payments take place, regardless of who makes them and for what; what remains decisive is purely the actualization of the schemata themselves, which set the either/or. Binary codes function as overarching schemata with which operations are treated in such a way that functionality is established by necessity. (Cf. Fuchs 2001: 159ff.) And these tertium-non-datur schemes exclude contextures, such as Gotthard Günther has investigated, i.e., third possibilities by definition. Thus, these kinds of semioses function as nonsignifying signs; what matters is not what they mean, but that they release meanings at all, so that in their indifference to all specifics they can functionalize the respective flows according to the rules. Consequently, the code itself does not release any content specificity, it does not resort to something like conceptual consistency, yet the code in its function as an economic mathem always also reckons with regularities presupposed to it, without paying attention to content specific meanings at all. If binary codes do not fix one of the two sides, but rather introduce contingency into the systems with their records, which they in turn inhale by functioning as pure yes/no oscillation machines, they nevertheless always remain related to and dependent on the respective systems and their preferences. Thus, the decisive code through and with which the economic system in capitalism functions is the profit/non-profit code, with which one quickly understands that the capitalist system must constantly process and filter its environment with regard to the question of whether there are profits to be made or not. And so it seems only logical that today the structural processes of capitalization encompass almost everything imaginable – money, credit, labor, institutions, knowledge and opinions, energy, genetic code, bodies, wars and friendships, etc. – which ultimately also means that the economic system remains in a certain sense blind to other systems as long as they do not serve pure exploitation. In fact, the coding here is increasingly shifting to one side, so that we tend to always be dealing with the reproduction of the same profit production, sheer production and circulation of capital, sheer positivity of the ever-same. And with the symbolic money, which is structured quite differently from other symbols, the number of apparently equally probable money-capital flows and their relations is regulated with the help of an algebraic syntax, which is equivalent to a quantifying computation of the value creations, whereby in this the code itself again indicates an entropy, which is expressed, among other things, in the fact that in the derivative markets there tend to be as many prices as derivatives.

Money capital flows are coded in financial regimes via the models of stochasticity, in addition to binary digital codes, by permanently calculating volatilities in the markets, and insofar as money functions via these codes, we are dealing here with objective functionalities. At this point, the discursivity is clearly dominated by the economic mathem, whose actualization-virtualization-circuitry remains unpredictable, so that with regard to the futurization capacities of capital, an open outcome is to be expected permanently, as long as the synthetic money is valid. The code, as a symbolic algebra, permits the transmission, transformation or reproduction of information, it enables its syntheses. Payment systems function in a similar way, although here the information is not predetermined, but is produced anew with each recording. As capitalism drives decoding on the one hand, so it must permanently encode or axiomatize on the other, because in general the nightmare of every society remains an uncoded stream. Finally, one must not imagine the relationship between stream and code in such a way that first the stream appears and then the code follows, for instance by superimposing itself on the stream, but it must be assumed from the outset that that which in each case streams on and through the capitalist socius, can only ever appear in correlation with the code, whereby capitalism actually manages – this is its essentially new quality today – to substitute the codes by constantly replicating and expanding axiomatics, so that the machines are able to interiorize themselves into their own structure as a field of forces. (Cf. Deleuze/Guattari 1972: 299)
According to the classical definition, the axiom means an operative statement that does not require proof or derivation by other statements. Following this, axiomatics contains a system of axiomatic propositions. (The provability as a property of axioms is questioned for philosophy at the latest since Kant). In modern mathematics, for example, the theory of extensional sets (Cantor) and its rigorous axiomatization by Zermelo-Fraenkel is considered an outstanding achievement, which Badiou, among others, uses for the explication of ontology in his book Being and Event (Badiou 2005); for Deleuze, however, this is a thoroughly “royal” mathematics, against which he sets a quite different kind of mathematical deduction, namely problematic deduction. With respect to the former, consider, for example, the “royalist” definition of the line as the shortest distance between two points, whereas in Archimedean geometry the straight line appears as a case of the curve (in Euclidean geometry, too, the line is purely static without any reference to curvature). In a minoritarian or problematic geometry the figures appear inseparable from their immanent variations, affections and events. Or one thinks of the history of the differential calculus, the problem of which Leibniz and Newton had recognized in the hypothesis that the integral with respect to the determination of a space was to be understood inversely to the question of the determination of the tangent by curves, before then the problem was rigorously retranslated into arithmetic terms in the 19th century. (Cauchy, Weierstrass, for which see: Smith 2013b) At the same time, continuous manifolds were transformed into discrete sets of numbers, and the geometric idea of approximating a limit was arithmetized and axiomatized. The set theories of Cantor and Dedekind up to the definition of set theory by Zermelo Fraenkel (set as a finite set of axioms) also move in this framework. However, it is also important to see that the non-quantitative view of the differential calculus reaches its limits today, when a new level of abstraction is reached with the numerical digital code.

Deleuze/Guattari base their analysis of modern capitalism on the term axiomatics, among others, by showing how capitalism emerges as an “axiomatics of decoded flows.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 628) This is done with the permanent addition or subtraction of operative statements that concern “purely functional elements and relations” and remain essentially unspecified, so that the choice of an axiom with respect to economic analysis initially means that essentially important, e.g. technical, terms remain undefined, since the attempt to define all terms would supposedly lead into an endless regression. Axiomatics, as an operative method that does not require justification or proof, tries to produce stable structures or systems with the addition or subtraction of hypotheses, norms, commands, or just further axioms, which can be managed with unspecified elements and relations within the framework of a functionalization, whereby this kind of pure functionality is always accompanied by further deductions of theorems and axioms. (Ibid.: 630) One should read axioms in economics at the same time as operational statements in the context of the immanent virtualization-actualization interconnections of capital, but they are also to be considered in relation to external models of realization such as the state. In doing so, axioms do not offer any surfaces or points of reference for exegesis, interpretation, or commentary; rather, as money scripts, they indicate the “immanent semiological form of capital” (without a totalizing instance or transcendent institution). (Ibid.: 640) They comprise a set of propositions, computations, and rules that enter into all the machinery of capitalization in order to calculate, control, and structure economic procedure in and with it.

Especially in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze/Guattari demonstrate axiomatics as an essential operation of contemporary capitalism (within their construction of a contingent universal history and a general semiology, see ibid.: 640ff.). Constantly repairing or regenerating itself with the help of axioms, capitalism tries to overcome its antagonisms by adding more axioms, for example: “Thou shalt believe in the market system so that capital accumulation can continue unceasingly,” which, however, involves rather simplistic axiomatics; or when, for example, Keynesianism or the gold standard falls into crisis, outdated axioms of economics are replaced by those of neoliberalism, or more complex axioms of neo-Keynesianism are added, which in no way modify the basic axiomatics of capitalism, but mainly complicate its operations. Axioms include that capitalism deals extremely flexibly with the quantities of money and social labor, with which we are dealing today with the tendency that codes are comprehensively replaced by axiomatics, because the latter represent a much stronger force in terms of their power of appropriation than the codes, which are nevertheless always subject to reductions, for example by reducing them to a higher unity through transcendence or externality. The limitedness of the political codes, which always bring about the regulation of the relations between the money-capital flows and the labor flows only indirectly, by producing control and conflict regulation through qualitative withdrawals, recordings and steering of the flows – this limitedness is nowadays being enacted and overcome by the hyper-capitalist form of neo-liberal axiomatization, namely by politics paying homage to the pure market-relatedness of all social institutions and conflicts, and this precisely with the help of axioms, i.e.., of a set of equations, variables and parameters that have no reference to fixed definitions or quantities, which precisely allows the respective variables and coefficients to be permanently recombined and thus fixed, at least in the short term, whereby it may well happen that a current becomes the subject of several axioms or has no axiom of its own at all and feeds on external axioms, so to speak. And every parameter which is supposed to allow a secure or standardized foundation of values can also be dissolved again, see just the dissolution of the gold standard after Bretton Woods. And this happens as a continuous temporalization of axiomatics in the economy itself. Therefore, there is a constant demand for the addition/subtraction of axioms, because without the flow of axiomatics it would hardly be possible to establish the manifold relations and connections between the different flows of monetary capital. Despite the enormous power to deterritorialize the flows of money capital, which works precisely because of the extremely supple axiomatization, there are constant tendencies toward reterritorialization, for example, through the formation of control functions of all kinds, through processes of subjectivation and state governance, the latter as part of the “realization models of a world axiomatics that goes beyond them.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1992: 630) And Deleuze/Guattari wisely add that in capitalism one cannot get rid of the state even if one tries to transcend it. However, and it is important to point this out, the impression must not be created here that axiomatics is the moment determining capitalism in the last instance; rather, capital/capitalization itself is and remains not determinable by any single axiom or set of axioms and, precisely for this reason, constantly demands new axioms.

Securities, with their integration into the flows of money capital that constantly flow from one pole to the other pole or multilinearly in multidimensional networks, are to be understood, among other things, as stock, i. e. as legally codified property (we will see that this need not be the case with derivatives) that implies the availability of an account or the “value” of an investment. Stock defines the current value/price of, say, a derivative at a given point in time, while the flow of monetary capital is characterized by the constant fluctuation of the stock over time. (Cf. Smith: 2013a) With an input one adds a quantum to the respective stock, while with the output one subtracts a quantum from the stock. A security as a stock invites accumulation or destruction of its value in time, it rises or falls in price, while the flow indicates the rate of change of the stock. And securities have a price at any point in time, which can be written down as a number, while money capital flows change the price of the stock in time. In mathematical terms, the security as a stock forms the integral of the money capital flow, while the differential quotient denotes the variation of the money capital flow. (A flow variable such as the gross domestic product indicates in the dimension of billions of euros per year how large the goods and services produced in a year are in an economy, which, however, says nothing at all about the already existing wealth of an economy – stock variables. The interest rate, for instance, is the ratio of a payment flow to a stock size: interest of an accounting period to the size of the credit at the beginning of this period. In this case, those who confuse flows and stocks do not mix pears and peaches, but they do mix pears and pear trees. The fact that flows and stocks are not directly comparable, however, does not mean that they cannot be put into a relation). In particular, the analysis of money capital flows today allows us to understand more precisely the role of synthetic inputs and outputs in stock markets: While money capital flows are in continuous variation, we know about them only through special recording systems. Finally, the flow-code-stock relation can be summarized once again in the words of Deleuze/Guattari: The flow promotes the connective synthesis of production, the code involves the disjunctive synthesis of recording or inscription, and the security as stock represents the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. (Ibid.)

"Turbulence refers to a state of motion of fluids or gases in which there is
which, at any point (described by the position vector r) at any time t, the velocity
v (r, t) has the character of a vortex; [...] the location, size, and orientation of the vortices (are) here in constant change. This changeability makes it impossible to predict v precisely; turbulence is a matter of random events." (Entry "Turbulence." In: Serres/Farouki 2004: 997)
"For the machine, the subject of the story is in the structure. To be precise: If the subject of structure is considered in its alienation context of a system of detotalized totalization, it would rather have to be referred to an 'egoic' phenomenon, the ego being opposed to the subject of the unconscious, insofar as the latter corresponds to the Lacanian principle: a signifier represents the subject of the unconscious in place of another signifier. As such, the unconscious subject belongs on the side of the machine, next to the machine: breaking point of the machine; incision on this side and beyond the machine. The human being is caught in the intersection of the intersection of machine and structure. Related to this is the paradigm shift between machine and computer." (Guattari 1976: 43f.) Subjectivity, whose definition does not go beyond the principle of reciprocal determination of the I, is and remains enclosed in structure. According to Guattari, the structural process of de-totalized totalization encompasses the subject and does not allow it to escape, while the machine, by its very nature, eccentrically relates to subjectivity
to subjectivity. And if, it can be further concluded, the factory is a form of organization that the capital relation can assume, then, according to Guattari, with today's processes of horizontal displacement and outsourcing of production would be in particular. Individualization processes, but not necessarily such processes that grant the subject the status of autonomy, but when these nevertheless take place, capital will leave nothing undone in order to integrate them ceaselessly, for instance by transforming individuals qua factory participation into solid property individualists.
Deleuze gives three conditions for the existence of a structure in general, a) at least
two heterogeneous series, one of which functions as a signifier and the other as a signified, b) each of these series consists of elements that coexist through their relations to each other, and c) the two heterogeneous series, when they converge to a paradoxical element X, are, according to Guattari, to be related to the order of the machine. (Cf. Deleuze 1993: 62f.) Machines, then, cannot be defined merely as a sum of individual parts, but always assemble whole ensembles - relations of different objects or components - that permanently absorb, transform, and produce flows without ever being able to reduce them to objects or components themselves. Such relational function of interlocking objects/elements can by no means be conceived only in the context of mechanical or electronic machines; instead, they could well be extended to cognitive, affective, and social machines as well. And according to Guattari, almost all (autopoietic) machines harbor a kind of liveness or protosubjectivity, a kind of expressive capacity in the form of a reserve or potentials that one discovers only when one is oneself on a specific machinic level.
The history of technology is characterized at each level by a specific type of machine
 characterized. In contrast, dispositifs should be understood as social machines; they, in turn, are not primarily dependent on techne, because technological machines represent only a very specific case of machinism. Deleuze/ Guattari see the definition of a machinic indienstnahme, which is guiding for capitalism, as guaranteed with the coupling of the subjects to the machines, whereby these themselves function as elements of the machinic dispositifs, as input/output elements or, today, as relay stations or of the computer, which stores, processes, and transports information, communications, and signs, whereby, as Hans Dieter Bahr also correctly writes with regard to the (informational) machines, "the most enormous economic, social, legal, bureaucratic, cultural, natural, historical functions are among their inputs, but also among their outputs" (Bahr 1983: 281). Functions that can by no means be reduced to the binary distinction usable or unusable. Thus, the mode of functioning of machinic indienstnahme also does not know any distinction between human and nonhuman objects, between subject and object, or sensual and intelligent, whereas, on the other hand, the type of social subjection formulated with Deleuze/Guattari presents both the individuals and the machines as totalities (subject and object) closed in themselves, whereby here the so-called molar access to the subjects consists primarily in the discursive mobilization of memory, conscience, and imagination; think of the guilty subject feeling at fault. In contrast, the functioning of machinic enslavement inheres the permanent mobilization and modulation of preindividual,precognitive, and asignificant components of subjectivation; it allows affects, perceptions, and sensations, which are far from individuated and therefore cannot be attributed to any subject, to function as molecular components and elements of the machine. If social subjugation addresses the molar, individuated dimension of subjects, machinic enslavement activates the molecular, pre-individual, pre-linguistic and pre-social dimensions of subjectivation, which of course also implies that today, quite in contrast to industrial capitalism and to the times of disciplinary society, not only bodies but also consciousnesses are controlled by specifically industrial and postindustrial time objects and thus the acts of judging, evaluating, and deciding attributed to sovereign subjectivity are industrialized. Thus, with regard to the permanently indebted subject, Maurizio Lazzarato has vividly described the machinic indienstnahme that replaces trust-building processes with sociotechnicaloperations, using the credit cards or ATMs that integrate dividends into the sociotechnical dispositif of the banking network(Lazzarato 2012: 123), where dividends connect to sociotechnical machines as operators by dialing in and inscribing themselves in the texts of electronic networks via secret codes and keystrokes, thereby activating their programs and written commands, which in turn use them as components, programs that, among other things, also perform data collection. programs that, among other things, also perform data collection, which serves as input for machines for marketing analysis, which in turn feed machines for product innovation.
to feed new products to the dividends in feedback loops. Dividends are thus incessantly controlled qua machine recurrence as well as the cybernetic mechanisms of feedback.
In this respect, one should also be wary of the current euphoria in academic circles.
 In this respect, one should also be very cautious about the euphoria for any concepts of emergence and self-organization that can be observed in academic circles at present, because they have nothing liberating about them at all, because complementary to the overemphasis of the Deleuzian moment of self-organization, as Massumi or De Landa, for example, practice this at times, there is always also the reactionary counterpart of a Hayek or Kelly, authors who both conceptualize the market as a miraculously self-organizing system, whereby these theologies of self-organization of course turn out to be nothing other than the postmodern version of Adam Smith's invisible hand.
In Capital vol. 1, commodity ,money and capital forms belong to the level of expression, while the complex relations of labor belong to the field of content. For Deleuze, the reality of content as well as expression possesses its own logic: there is a form and a substance of content, just as expression possesses a form and a substance. The correlation of the two real levels implies a model in which content is articulated and enunciated by a given code or axiomatic (expression), in such a way that both levels continue to exist independently of each other as differentiated levels.The correlation of levels, including their elements and relations, is never to be understood as the effect of a totalizing structure, but rather as that of a virtual structure, which is not, however, everything possible, but rather "what is possible, was possible, or will be possible at a given time in a given place" (Zechner 2003: 103).

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translated by deepl. .

Foto: Syvia John

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