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Mohamed Zayani
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and the total system
Abstract This paper is concerned with an aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought which has not been duly analyzed: systematicity. More specifically, it deals with their conception of the system in three co-authored major works: What is Philosophy?, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works are of renewed interest because they tease out, each in its own way, a particular type of system. Regardless of whether it has a philosophical import, a botanical reference, a social dimension, or a libidinal investment, the system that Deleuze and Guattari advocate is allegedly a hyper-dynamic system that resists closure. Thus, in an interview with Didier Eribon, Deleuze points out that philosophy is ‘an open system’ and then, referring to A Thousand Plateaus, he further observes that what he and Guattari ‘call a rhizome is also one example of an open system’. The purpose of this essay is not merely to explore how the system in the works of these two prominent poststructuralists is conceived, how it is structured, and how it works, but also to show how it is only superficially open. Paying a special attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s exegesis on capitalism, I argue that the proposed system is cynical and ultimately untenable. Key words capitalism · Gilles Deleuze · Félix Guattari · open system · philosophy · total system
If in general the question about the nature of philosophy is complex enough, when posed by a philosopher like Gilles Deleuze and a psychotherapist like Félix Guattari who distrust essences and disclaim permanent truths, it becomes an ambitious endeavor. For these two French thinkers, addressing the question of ‘What is philosophy?’ is not only insistent but also timely: ‘the time has come for us to ask what philosophy is. We had never stopped asking this question previously. . . . [T]he answer had not only to take note of the question, it had to
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94 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) determine its moment, its occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and personae, its conditions and unknowns’ (WP 2). Having established the urgency of the question at hand and having pointed out the intricacies of the problem, Deleuze and Guattari then embark on what may be described as a negative definition of philosophy: We can at least see what philosophy is not: it is not contemplation, reflection, or communication. . . . It is not contemplation, for contemplations are things themselves as seen in the creation of their specific concepts. It is not reflection, because no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything. . . . Nor does philosophy find any refuge in communication, which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create ‘consensus’ and not concepts’ (WP 6)
Philosophy does not have an essence, nor does it deal with essences; rather the reverse. For a philosophical inquiry to be sound and rewarding, it has to shake the integrity of the essence, problematize the claim to a universal truth, shatter the belief in the sacrosanctity of a transcendental principle, question the idea of an inherent reality, and put to the test the possibility of reducing meaning to a stable structure. To do so is to move away from Platonism which, according to the authors of What is Philosophy?, has sacrificed the extrinsic character of philosophy for an insistently intrinsic character: ‘With the creation of philosophy, the Greeks violently force the friend into a relationship that is no longer a relationship with an other but with an Entity, an Objectality, an Essence – Plato’s friend, but even more the friend of wisdom, of truth or the concept’ (WP 3). With these observations, we are in a better position to apprehend the nature of the authors’ dissatisfaction with the tentative definition of philosophy they venture at the beginning of their book, namely that philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. No sooner do Deleuze and Guattari make this provisional proposition than they qualify it: ‘philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts’ (WP 5). With Deleuze, philosophy loses its right to reflect on things. Philosophy is neither a reflection nor a mediation, but a process of production – a bringing-to-being, so to speak, in which the concept deterritorializes itself at the very moment it is created. This probably explains why Deleuze and Guattari’s works teem with such ‘intellectually mobile concepts’ (Deleuze in ‘Mediators’, 1992a: 282) as nomadology, deterritorialization, lines of escape, assemblage, intensity, rhizome, becoming, machinism, plateaus, heterogeneous series, body without organs, and plane of immanence, to name but a few. What lies behind these fancy and complicated words is not
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95 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system a desire to be trendy, but the realization that a concept sometimes needs a new word to express it. As soon as there are concepts, Deleuze maintains there is a ‘genuine philosophy’ (N 32). The object of philosophy, as a nomadic thought, is to create new concepts for problems that constantly change.1 The primary task of philosophy is the creation of concepts which, in turn, can be properly known only through their own creation: ‘Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature’ (Deleuze, WP 5). By aligning itself with the creation of concepts – which are valued not for the truth they may yield, but for the effect they can create – philosophy becomes a matter of production rather than reflection. Therein lies Nietzsche’s most enduring impact on the authors of What is Philosophy?: their innovativeness does not lie in having forged a theoretical paradigm – i.e. a philosophy in the abstract sense of the term – but in having relocated the thrust of philosophy within praxis. For them, meaning is not something to be uncovered, but produced; it has nothing to do with origins, but is instead a matter of production. From this vantage point, the starting-point and guiding question of a philosophical inquiry is not ‘What does it mean?’ but ‘How does it work?’ Philosophy, just like desire, ‘represents nothing, but it produces. It means nothing, but it works. [It] makes its entry with the general collapse of the question “What does it mean?” ’ (AO 109).2 The shift that Deleuze and Guattari propose is an intellectual shift from a preoccupation with questions of significance and meaning to a concern with questions of function and use, from a pursuit of static principles and ordering realities to an interest in dynamic movements and immanent dynamics, from the configuration of resultants to the mapping of flows, from a representation of essences to an experimentation with events – in fact, an affirmation of events through the creation of concepts: ‘The task of philosophy when it creates concepts, entities, is always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as events’ (WP 33). Philosophy is an alignment between creation and self-positing. The concept is not given, but created; it is not formed, but posits itself in itself. The concept is related to circumstances rather than essences;3 it is expressive and not referential, which is tantamount to saying that there are no simple ready-made a priori concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by the combinatorial possibilities of these components. The concept is a multiplicity in the sense that it has a becoming that involves its relationship with concepts situated on the same plane.4 Concepts link up with each other, support each other, and coordinate each other’s movement. Every concept branches off toward other concepts that are
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96 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) differently composed but that can be connected to each other, and participate in a process of co-creation. The concept functions along a model of dissemination, bifurcation and proliferation; it engenders polyvalence, asymmetry, heterogeneity and dynamism, so much so that philosophy becomes a nomadology or, as Deleuze confides in a letter to Jean-Clet Martin, ‘a heterogenesis’ (1993: 7). In A Thousand Plateaus, this heterogenesis is emphatically invested in a vegetal model which favors the rhizome over the tree.5 The opening chapter, which forcefully sets the tone for the book, is a vehement attack against, and an adamant rejection of, the principle of arborescent descent. For Deleuze and Guattari, the tree-root, radicle model, which is wedded to classical reflection, has molded our way of thinking. The tree always designates a point of origin; it emanates out of a seed or a center, develops an axis of rotation, and branches off its concentricity according to a principle of dichotomy which evolves into a hierarchical system. In fact, the tree model is based on the binary logic of dichotomy which makes it impossible to reach an understanding of multiplicity that is not recouped within a transcendental model. To break away from the confines of dualism, Deleuze and Guattari advocate a mode of thought modeled on the adventitious growth and the propitious movement of rhizomes, bulbs and tubers. The rhizome is governed by a number of interconnected characteristics. To start with, the rhizome, which is a subterranean stem, is an a-centered, non-hierarchical, anti-genealogical network of all kinds.6 Unlike the tree which plots a point, unlike the root which fixes an order, unlike the structure which frames a set of relations, the rhizome can and must be connected to any other point. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture and offshoots, which makes it not only heterogeneous, but also multiplicitous in the sense that it always has multiple entryways. In a rhizome, multiplicities constantly change in nature and connect to other multiplicities in order to form collective assemblages, so much so that it has neither a beginning nor an end, but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills. Thus aligned with cracks, ruptures, breaks, intersections and crossings, a rhizomatic movement does not designate a localizable relation but a movement which glides between, i.e. in the middle of a path; its underlying model is not punctual, but linear; it is not about being (the indicative ‘is’), but about becoming (the associative ‘and’): ‘the tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and . . . and . . . and . . .” [which] can overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings’ (TP 25). Rather than filiation, the rhizome grows by means of expansion, propagation, occupation and contagion operating at the surface – all of which Deleuze and Guattari find encapsulated in what Gregory Bateson calls a plateau. A
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97 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system rhizome is made of plateaus, i.e. of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a point of culmination: We call a ‘plateau’ any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome . . . Gregory Bateson uses the term plateau for continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to be interrupted by any external termination, anymore than they allow themselves to build toward a climax. (TP 22–58)
Unlike the tree model in which signifying breaks separate structures, the rhizome model functions through asignifying ruptures. A rhizome may be broken at a particular point or shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again either on one of its old lines or on a new line. Each rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is territorialized and lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees. Whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, a rupture occurs in a rhizome, and the lines are bound to tie back to and to connect up with one another in an act of reterritorialization.7 At the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s project is an attempt to think through fragments whose only relationship is sheer difference – i.e. fragments which are related to each other only in that each of them is different.8 In work after work, Deleuze and Guattari call for an affirmation of pure multiplicities. Their philosophy is inseparable from multiplicity, pluralism and possibility. What pervade are connected flows, each boosting, engendering and accelerating the other. Everything is constituted of forces or relations of force which take the form of lines of escape. Implicit in this theory of production – the production of multiplicity – is a critique of the legacy of classic mechanism and vitalism which continues to weigh heavily, and an attack on idealistic philosophies and Platonic metaphysics. The multiplicity which is adumbrated in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987) is far from being a Platonic multiplicity which presumes that things are multiple insofar as they exist as the shadow of a real idea. By arguing for a logic of difference, Deleuze and Guattari put into question the essentialist claims of traditional philosophy with its emphasis on identities, foundations, essences and a prioris, and in doing so they propose to go beyond the spurious question of representation and its corollary the signifier/signified dyad.9 They are also necessarily rejecting the dialectical mode of thought with its emphasis on binarism, dualities, opposites and contradictions: ‘It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contradictions. . . . A social field is always animated by all kinds of movements of decoding and deterritorialization affecting “masses” and operating at different speeds and places. These are not contradictions but escapes’ (TP 216–20).10 For
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98 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) Deleuze and Guattari, to conceive of the social machine as a binary organization is to ignore the fact that something always escapes. They both reject the type of logical, ideal contradiction – which we find in its pure form in Hegelianism – because it reduces the complexity of the phenomena by presenting the different simply as the Janus-face of the same in such a way as to reduce the complexity of the social phenomena to the internal confrontation of a single meaning. This uncompromising position is even more boldly stated in Anti-Oedipus: We live in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or a final totality that awaits us at some future date. We no longer believe in the dull gray outlines of a dreamy, colorless dialectic of evolution, aimed at forming a harmonious whole out of heterogeneous bits by rounding off their rough edges. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 42)
To derive the whole from the part is to fall victim to a ‘dialectical totalization’ (Deleuze, AO 44); it is to fall prey to Hegelian idealism which believes in the primacy of the whole as an essence.11 Following Nietzsche’s teachings, Deleuze and Guattari refuse to submit to acquiescence; they refuse to give in to the supposition that ‘only in the totality everything redeems itself and appears good and justified’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 60). Nietzsche’s caveat leads the authors of AntiOedipus to rethink the relationship between the multiple and the one, between the part and the whole, between the fragments and the totality: ‘We believe in totalities that are peripheral. And if we discover such a totality alongside various separate parts, it is a whole of all these particular parts but does not totalize them; it is a unity of all these particular parts, but does not unify them; rather it is added to them as a new part fabricated separately’ (AO 42).12 What Deleuze and Guattari envision is the multiplication of connections in a network system which cannot be reduced to any sort of unity. The whole, Deleuze and Guattari insist, cannot be treated as an original from which the parts emanate, nor can it be said simply to coexist with the parts; it exists as a product which, although produced apart from the parts, is nonetheless related to them: ‘the Whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other paths simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between noncommunicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries’ (AO 43). The multiple is neither unified nor totalized, but simply unleashed. The whole is not anchored in a verifiable truth, but
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99 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system is instead animated by processes of becoming and acts of return. Nothing is ever multiplicitous or multidirectional enough. Everything operates within a sum which never brings its various parts together so as to form a delineated whole; everything functions at the same time, but amid hiatuses and ruptures, among breakdowns and failures. What defines the system are its disjunctions, which – precisely because they are disjunctions – are inclusive. In such a system, one is constantly confronted with gaps, divergences, dispersions and fragments that are intermittent, to say the least. What matter are lines of escape, multiplicities of dispersion, detached codes, energies of inscription, productive disjunctions, drifting flows, continuous breaks and unrelenting schizes. The example par excellence, if not the Ur-form of these unity-less aberrations, is capitalism. For the authors of Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is a ‘segmentary system’ (AO 151) which is constantly born out of its own disharmonies and fortified by its dysfunctions. It is distinguished as much by its ruptures and scissions as it is by its fluxes and intensities. Capitalism is caught up between two opposing poles of social libidinal investment which are inextricably linked and can be disengaged only theoretically: the schizoid revolutionary pole and the paranoiac, reactionary, fascisizing pole. It oscillates between a schizophrenic process and a paranoiac counter-process, between an influx of energy and the relapses that interrupt such an influx, between overcoding the flows and decoding them or, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s own terminology, between a breakthrough and a breakdown. Capitalism brings the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary potential of the decoded flows with new interior limits. In such a regime, it is hard to distinguish between decoding and the axiomatic that replaces the vanished codes. Capitalism decodes and axiomatizes the flows at the same time. The nature of capitalism is such that it is always destined to reconstitute itself on its own ruins and to be resurrected from its own ashes. It is a system whose power is drawn from its weakness, whose exertion feeds off its impotence, and whose contraction leads to its expansion. Although capitalism tends toward the limit of schizophrenia, it is constantly evading that limit and trying to get round it. In this sense, schizophrenia as a process of desiring-production is the limit of social production: . . . capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. . . . The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very
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100 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. (AO 34–35)
Capitalism axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other. The schizophrenic lines of escape, which cause capitalism to move and flow in an unstoppable schizoid process of decoding and deterritorialization, are subjected to a paranoiac axiomatic of flows, which exorcize and limit the process of production. Thus, being constructed on decoded flows that constitute its most profound tendency, capitalism finds itself intensely counteracting and purposefully repressing this tendency so as to be able to reproduce and expand itself. Capitalism produces internal dysfunctions which it cannot transcend but only solve and master. Simply put, the (re)production of capitalism is invested in a limit which is caught in a perpetual act of transgression. The word ‘transgression’ requires more than a cursory attention because, although not prominent in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, it can help enhance our appreciation of the complexity of their thought. In a seminal essay on Georges Bataille entitled ‘A Preface to Transgression’, Michel Foucault – who had a tremendous impact on Deleuze, much less on Guattari – defines transgression by what it is not: ‘Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another; it does not transform the other side of the mirror, beyond an invisible and uncrossable line, into a glittering expanse. Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world)’ (1977: 35). Embedded in this definition is a subtle though poignant attack on the hallmark of Western thought and rationality; i.e. transcendence, which, in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari disparagingly describe as a ‘specifically European disease’ (1987: 18). Transgressing a limit, as Foucault explains, is not going beyond the limit, but coming into contact with the constitutive other that is demarcated by the limit. In Foucault’s view, transgression is inextricably linked to the limit it transgresses; it has its entire space in the line it crosses: ‘transgression incessantly crosses and recrosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the uncrossable’ (1977: 33–4). The limit and transgression are caught within a curious interaction which has no life outside the moment when they exchange their being. The limit has no life of its own; it does not exist independently of that which negates it. The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess. In the same way a limit cannot exist if it were absolutely uncrossable, transgression loses its meaning if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows. Transgression does not exhaust its own nature by crossing the limit because the latter is so – i.e. is defined as a limit –
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101 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system only to the extent that it is transgressable. Transgression, Foucault concludes his essay, reinscribes the limit even as it effaces it: ‘the limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it has rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude which invades it to the core of its being. Transgression carries the limit right to the limit of its being; transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, only to find itself in that which it excludes’ (1977: 34).13 Such as it is, the system that is adumbrated in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus is a system which throbs with the tumultuous agitation of a life that knows no limits. Even if there were a limit, it is an unlimited and unlimiting one; it is a limit that is constitutively and therefore necessarily transgressable.14 Capitalism points to nothing beyond itself; it has no limit aside from and outside the frenzy which disrupts it in order to reinvent it and re-establish it. Capitalism is incessantly made and unmade by its own excess which transgresses it. Not only does capitalism recognize no limits, it constitutes its own limit, thus setting up as the law the very limit it transgresses. When Deleuze and Guattari write that schizophrenia is ‘a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression’ (AO 133), they also necessarily imply that the fulfillment of capitalism is neither desirable nor possible. The only certain thing is the continuous prolongation and ceaseless propagation of the system – a kind of jovial and endless titillation which establishes itself as the limitless limit of satisfaction.15 The nature of capitalism is such that it necessitates that its limit be indefinitely pushed back: . . . capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract qualities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flow of desire, but under the social conditions that define that limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. (AO 139–40)
The Deleuzo-Guattarian model posits no real boundaries, but only thresholds in which every end announces a new beginning or, better yet, contiguities where flows converge only to diverge. By surpassing the codes that regulate the flux, capitalism paradoxically enough drives us away from the limit through the very process that brings us to the edge of that limit. The more the limit threatens to arrive, the harder it is warded off: Concerning capitalism, we maintain that it both does and does not have an exterior limit: it has an exterior limit that is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding of flows, but it functions only by pushing back and exorcising
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102 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) this limit. And it also has, yet does not have, interior limits: it has interior limits under the specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that is, in capital itself, but it functions only by reproducing and widening the limits on an always vaster scale. The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiomatic to the previous ones. (AO 250)
The nature of capitalism is such that it never ceases to decode codes and to deterritorialize territories, nor does it ever fail to overcome its limit and to counteract its tendency. These observations lead us to what may be described as the crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought – the immanent limit which precludes any external or transcendent criterion.16 Immanence is part of a rich repertoire of key terms or concept-words which Deleuze and Guattari use, almost interchangeably, to delineate an unevenly constituted system that is defined less by its essence than by its circumstances. In Expressionism in Philosophy, Deleuze insists that ‘with immanence all is affirmation’ (1990: 174) – the affirmation of reproduction and multiplicity. The field of immanence designates a space of coordination and a field of interaction.17 Nowhere, perhaps, is the field of immanence more manifest than in capitalism. Capitalism is defined by an unrestrained tendency, i.e. a tendency that has no end and no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate: The tendency’s only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit – that is, by reconstituting it, by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence . . . is continually expanding and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being ‘the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production.’ If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it. (AO 230–1)
In capitalism all external limits are internalized, which is tantamount to saying that capitalism has no conceivable exteriority, but only a field of immanence which it never ceases to occupy. Capitalism finds in schizophrenia its own exterior limit, which it continually repels, while capitalism itself produces its immanent limits, which it never ceases to displace. No sooner is a limit displaced than it reconstitutes itself further along.18 The effusion of antiproduction within production – the fact that capitalism desires its own strength while it seeks its impotence – leads
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103 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system Deleuze and Guattari to make a distinction between absolute and relative limits: . . . capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, in so far as it brings about the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on the condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a widened scale. (AO 245–6)
Schizophrenia is the absolute limit of every society inasmuch as it sets in motion decoded and deterritorialized flows, while capitalism is the relative limit of every society inasmuch as it axiomatizes the decoded flows and reterritorializes the deterritorialized flows. In between these two tendencies lies the ‘real limit’ of capitalism (AO 176) – a perpetual displacement of the limit which prevents the coding of the flows from being decoded. To talk about a real limit is to talk about an unstable equilibrium engendered by an endless tug-of-war between two opposing tendencies and engendering a perpetual self-reinvention: ‘Far from being a pathological consequence, the disequilibrium is functional and fundamental. Far from being the extension of a system that is at first closed, the opening is primary, founded in the heterogeneity of the elements that compose the presentations and that compensate for the disequilibrium by displacing it’ (AO 150). Seen from this vantage point, what defines this system is neither its superior unity nor its pretraced destiny, but its tumultuous internal dynamics. In spite of its theoretical sophistication, the project of Deleuze and Guattari is not void of problems. A close examination of the distinction they make between alliance and filiation can lay out in some detail two key problems that plague the conception of capitalism as a system in both Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: the determinacy of capitalism (i.e. the fact that the economy is a determinant factor) and its trans-historicity (i.e. the fact that history is always already the history of capitalism). According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is not possible to deduce alliance from filiation in the primitive social machine. There, where kinship dominates, alliances are inextricably linked with filiative lines, so much so that more often than not ties of common descent disguise, not to say assimilate, structural ties that derive from marriage. Yet, what ensures the continuity of ties is not simply the transmission of a
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104 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) patrilineage name. Complementing the vertical structure is a lateral one which is maintained through economic relations – i.e. the generalized exchange and circulation of gifts. The gift extends the debt between the creditor and the debtor, since it has to be reciprocated with interest, abstract and intangible as that may be (power is one such example). Seen from this perspective, then, filiation can be said to be administrative and hierarchical, while alliance is political and, more importantly for our purpose, economic. The coexistence of these two structures leads Deleuze and Guattari to associate the primitive machine with primitive capital: Filiation and alliance are like the two forms of a primitive capital: fixed capital or filiative stock, and circulating capital or mobile blocks of debts. . . . While production is recorded in the network of filiative disjunctions on the socius, the connections of labor still must detach themselves from the productive process and pass into the element of recording that appropriates them for itself as quasi cause. But it can accomplish this only by reclaiming the connective régime for its own, in the form of an affinal tie or a pairing of persons that is compatible with the disjunctions of filiation. It is in this sense that the economy goes by way of alliance. (AO 146–7)
What this proposition means, in part, is that in a primitive commune, alliance neither depends on the manifest filiative lineages nor derives from them. Alliance is first and foremost a matter of ‘cold economy’ (AO 150). Although not based on the flow of money or anchored in a definable market, this economy is not void of surplus value; it is sustained by a surplus value of code at the level of the flows: ‘each detachment from the chain produces, on one side or the other in the flows of production, phenomena of excess and deficiency, phenomena of lack and accumulation, which will be compensated for by nonexchangeable elements of the acquired-prestige or distributed consumption type’ (AO 150). The motor of the primitive machine is relations of exchange or, to be more specific, the unsuspected dominance of relations of exchange: ‘if filiation expresses what is determinant while being itself determined, alliance expresses what is determinant, or rather the return of the determinant in the determinate system of dominance. . . . The primitive machine is not ignorant of exchange, commerce, and industry; it exorcises them, localizes them, cordons them off, encastes them’ (AO 147–53). The logical extension of these assertions is that capitalism is both our undeniable history and our inescapable future; regardless of its time and degree of manifestation, capitalism is a transhistorical system operative throughout history and present across societies. It must be emphasized that the problem with Anti-Oedipus is not to claim that ‘primitive societies are fully inside history’ (AO 151), but to equate history in general with the history of capitalism. Take, for example, Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that ‘[p]rimitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history’ (AO 153). The implication here is that
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105 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system capitalism, much like the Oedipal fear of incest, is universal; it haunts all societies all the time: ‘capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their unifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes’ (AO 140). In A Thousand Plateaus, these claims are reiterated even more forcefully and more provocatively: ‘There is no universal capitalism, there is no capitalism in itself; capitalism is at the crossroads of all kinds of formations; it is neo-capitalism by nature’ (20). To say that capitalism has a universalizing potential is one thing; to claim that it haunts all societies and that it constitutes the absolute truth of history is quite another thing.19 Interestingly enough, these claims of universality are presented under the guise of an attentive or, better yet, responsible reading of Marx. Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that it is possible to enact ‘a retrospective reading of all history in terms of capitalism’ (AO 153) contains unmistakable references to Marx’s regressiveprogressive method. For Marx, monetary economy has always existed in pre-capitalistic societies, albeit in an ‘embryonic form’ (Capital 154). As soon as two individuals come together in order to exchange their goods, the value form is present in germ: ‘it makes its appearance at an early date, though not in the same predominance and therefore characteristic manner as nowadays’ (Marx, 1977: 176). It seems only natural, then, that an account of the money-form starts with an analysis of the commodityform: ‘we have to show the origin of this money form, we have to trace the development of the expression of value contained in the value-relation of commodities from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline to the dazzling money-form. When this has been done, the mystery of money will immediately disappear . . . . The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in the simple form’ (Marx, 1977: 139). On more than one occasion, Deleuze and Guattari urge the reader to remember and to follow the teachings of Marx – ‘it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly’ (AO 140) – but provide a narrow interpretation and arguably a deterministic reading of Marx’s original formulations. Far from being an axiom about the universality of capitalism, Marx’s claim that in every society capitalism exists in nuci is a statement about the mutability of historical formations.20 More than anything else, Marx’s regressive-progressive method stresses the originality of the capitalist mode of production and emphasizes its structural difference from anterior modes of production.21 To argue otherwise is to fall prey to a deterministic perspective which assumes that the economic is an absolute principle. In Hegemony and Social Strategy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe succinctly point out the limits of such a deterministic position: ‘if this ultimate determination were a truth valid for every society, the relation between such determination and the condition of making it possible would not develop through a contingent historical articulation, but would
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106 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) constitute an apriori necessity. . . . The problem is that if the “economy” is determinant in the last instance for every type of society, it must be defined independently of any specific type of society’ (1985: 98). For the concept of the economic to be theoretically viable, it has to be considered as a historically specific claim and not as an absolute premise. If it were otherwise, the economic simply takes over the historical.22 But this is not all. In Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is not only a historically universal determinant, but also and mostly an unsurpassable and impenetrable system; i.e. a space from which nothing can free itself and a space which nothing can penetrate.23 For a critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s project to be judicious, one has to deal not only with the tenability of the idea that capitalism is a universal system of structural determination or causality, but also with the feasibility of envisaging an all-encompassing, ever-engulfing, self-enclosed, auto-generating, selfperpetuating system; i.e. a closed or total system. The problem of the total system is worthy of attention partly because it is endemic to methodological difficulties that are common in a variety of fields today ranging from cultural studies to historiography. Even in a project as far-reaching as that of the Frankfurt school, and more specifically in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this problem has not been satisfactorily resolved. What Adorno and Horkheimer saw in modern industrial society is a ‘totality’ (136) characterized above all by its exceptional ability to control individual consciousness, manipulate needs, promote obedience and include submissions: ‘the might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. . . . The industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. . . . What is decisive today is the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible’ (1982: 127–41). For Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry constitutes a seamless web in which all forms of resistance and all possibilities for change – being programmed by the system itself – are ultimately reified. However, this ‘administrative view’ of culture, as Adorno calls it elsewhere (1978: 127), poses more problems than it solves. For one thing, the type of domination described here, much like the one described in Anti-Oedipus, lacks historical specificity. The crisis that plagues industrial and post-industrial societies has its origin in man’s continuing attempt to control nature. As Rolf Wiggerhaus succinctly points out, Dialectic of Enlightenment rests on the assumption that ‘the decisive event in the history of human culture was not the development of the modern period and of capitalism, but rather humanity’s transition to domination over nature’ (1994: 334). But even if such a transhistorical premise is overlooked, the project of these two prominent members of the Frankfurt school remains vulnerable to criticism. There is something
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107 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system stultifying about the unrelenting insistence on the total domination of culture – its irreversible tendency to assemble, to evaluate and to organize. The socio-economic system evoked in Dialectic of Enlightenment – much like the philosophical system adumbrated in Negative Dialectics24 – is totalitarian to say the least; it refuses to see in the negative impulses that are likely to emerge in and interfere with the system more than an internal strategy generated by the system itself, which means that the proposed system is a total system. Fredric Jameson has aptly captured the scandalous implications of such a position: ‘the model of the “total system” would seem slowly and inexorably to eliminate any possibility of the negative as such, and to reintegrate the place of an oppositional or even merely “critical” practice and resistance back into the system as the latter’s mere inversion’ (1981: 91). Although capitalism is not void of moments of dysfunctionality, these are always already neutralized because the disruptive element is not subversive of capitalism but constitutive of its power. Although capitalism generates asymmetries, these are always recouped within a position that inflexibly emphasizes closure. Something similar is at work in Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari are content with the assertion that dysfunctions are essential to the system’s ability to function: ‘The death of the social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender. . . . Capitalism has learned this and has ceased doubting itself. . . . [T]he more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way’ (AO 151). The notion that capitalism is at once intensive and expansive, but fundamentally unbalanced and driven by internal contradictions, highlights the dynamic character of the system but does not emphasize its transformation. Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that the ‘capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality’ (AO 373) implies, among other things, that capitalism neither encounters a terminal limit which compels it to withdraw nor reaches a state of a hysterical runaway which ultimately impels it to self-destruct. Instead, capitalism relentlessly and endlessly expands, thus reproducing itself on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale. Nowhere, perhaps, is this position more provocative than in the immanent axiomatic Deleuze and Guattari propose: ‘which is the revolutionary path? . . . Is there one? To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do?’ (AO 239). From the standpoint of the immanent axiomatic, the question is purely rhetorical. Shunning or even denying the force and inevitability of the capitalist machine is a curious revival of the fascist economic solution. The alternative path is to go in the opposite direction; that is, to further the movement of the market or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, of decoding and
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108 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) deterritorialization. In other words, short of a viable solution, the only course of action is to further deterritorialize capitalism because the flow is not deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, and therefore not schizophrenic enough. However, the fact that capitalism has no limit – because its limit is impassable, or so goes the argument – is a limit in and of itself. The reproduction of capital, as Alain Bihr succinctly puts it in L’Économie fetiche, necessarily leads the economic towards its limit; that is, ‘it pushes it both and at the same time towards its finish (finition) – its realization, fulfillment, and completion – and its finitude (finitude) – its borders, its limits’ (1979: 126). A system’s movement toward completion is interestingly enough ominous because this same movement brings with it the threat of dissolution. As Jean Baudrillard rightly reminds us, ‘a system that approaches the threshold of perfection is a system that lies on the brink of its collapse’ (1976: 11). For the Deleuzo-Guattarian model to be theoretically viable, it has to reconceive immanence. The deployment of the system produces unpredictable conditions which call for a special attention not only to the reproduction of the system, but also the movement of its elements. As Henri Lefebvre reminds us, ‘reproduction does not occur without undergoing changes’ (1976: 90–1). What this means, in part, is that the continuity of the system does not reside in its identity, but in the relation of its elements to their environment. Capitalism is an inherently unstable system which engenders a continuous interplay of its elements, but the structural imbalance is not the only thing that defines the system or determines its outcome. At least, systems theory teaches us that the play of elements within a given system does not occur without consequences. In attuning its internal contradictions and replacing its elements, the system necessarily transforms itself. To say that the system purges itself of its excesses, overcomes its problems, and reproduces itself on a larger scale is also to say that the system moves towards greater complexity and organization which not only revitalize it but also alter it. The system feeds, as it were, on its own problems, but in the process it changes. According to the central paradigm of systems theory, open systems are living systems which are continuously interacting with their environment; they are continuously breaking down components and shaping up others. In the process of reproducing itself, the system undergoes modification, and transformation. Accordingly, one may say that there is a tight connection between the reproduction of capitalism and its transformation, between invariance and change. Repetition of the same eventually leads to the introduction of difference, which is tantamount to saying that the survival of capitalism means continuity with a difference.25 The dysfunctions of capitalism sharpen the system and perfect it, but they do so only to the extent that they change it. In What is Neostructuralism?, Manfred Frank prompts us to sophisticate our
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109 Zayani: Deleuze, Guattari and the total system understanding of organic equilibrium by drawing our attention to the innovativeness of organicity which he relegates to the interaction between simple essence and chaotic difference, between the repeatability of the identical and the same, on the one hand, and the occurrence of difference and innovation, on the other hand – a repetition in which unity is partially displaced: ‘Without a minimum order, the organism that relies on its environment could not survive; without minimal predictability of recurring (and thus regulated) experiences, none of us would have the courage to begin the day. Now, all organic production is accomplished within orders; however, this does not mean that it does not constantly alter, challenge, and rework the status quo of these orders’ (1989: 340). By definition, a system can be controlled only within limits.26 This is the essence of the open system as Lefebvre unravels its lineaments: ‘The fulfillment of the system implies a limit the attainment of which is impossible. . . . Society stands as an extremely complex whole, as an open totality. . . . How is it ever possible to seize a system or a sub-system without a critical distance, without an entry and an exit, without an opening?’ (1971: 122).27 The emphasis on the openness of the system makes it possible to propose a more viable understanding of capitalism, namely that capitalism has not only a tendency to envelop the entirety of the social body, but also a proclivity to develop dysfunctionalities, to create deficiencies, to provoke deviations, and to generate counter-processes which are both tendentious and consequential.28 Simply put, the logic of capitalism is neither static nor circular; it is a logic that is both ascending and spiral.29 University of Bahrain, English Department, Sakhir, Bahrain
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Notes For easy reference, the following abbreviations of works by Deleuze and Guattari have been used: (AO) Anti-Oedipus (1983), (D&R) Difference and Repetition (1994), (EP) Expressionism in Philosophy (1990), (N) Negotiations (1995b), (TP) A Thousand Plateaus (1987) and (WP) What is Philosophy? (1994). 1 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze observes that ‘concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with problems’ (1994: xx). 2 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze describes the dynamics of desire in comparable terms: ‘Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered set up rich in interactions, a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 215).
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110 Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1) 3 Philosophy, as Deleuze puts it in an interview with Didier Eribon, is ‘an open system’ (N 30). 4 In Negotiations, Deleuze observes that he sees philosophy as ‘a logic of multiplicities’ (N 147). 5 In the aforementioned interview, Deleuze points out that what he and Guattari ‘call a rhizome is precisely one example of an open system’ (N 32). 6 The connection is far from being imposed. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: ‘Transversal communications between different lines scramble the genealogical trees. . . . The rhizome is an anti-genealogy’ (1987: 11). 7 For more on the rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, see Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (1989: 347–9), Buydens, Sahara (1990: 24–6), Parnet’s collaboration with Deleuze in Dialogues, 25–6, and Grossberg, ‘Experience, Signification, and Reality’ (1982: 85–8). 8 Roberto Machado is right to point out that ‘Deleuze’s philosophy is not the announcement of a new thought as much as it is the sum of the thought it brings together in order to articulate, at one level or another, difference’ (1990: 225). 9 In an essay on Deleuze entitled ‘La “Grande identité” ’, Pierre Zaoui argues that the common thread that runs through these critical endeavors is an attack on identity: ‘Pour Deleuze, il s’agit donc avant tout de briser le primat de l’identité et de ses avatars (le même, la représentation, le sense commun, etc.) à sense fin de faire émerger le fond et la surface de l’être comme différence pure et comme répétition complexe de cette différence, c’est-àdire comme multiplicités hétérogènes et comme devenir de ces multiplicités’ (1995: 64–5). 10 Likewise, in Dialogues, Deleuze writes: ‘A Marxist can be quickly recognized when he says that a society contradicts itself, is defined by its contradictions, and in particular by its class contradictions. We would rather say that, in a society, everything flees and that a society is defined by its lines of flight which affect masses of all kinds. A society, but also a collective assemblage, is defined first by its points of deterritorialization, its fluxes of deterritorialization’ (1987: 135). 11 In a review essay on Costas Axelos entitled ‘Faille et feux locaux’, Deleuze further writes: ‘La dialectique hégélienne et encore marxiste évoluent dans les catégories de l’être, du non-être et de l’Un-Tout. Et que peut faire le Tout sauf totaliser le néant, et nihiliser le néant non mois que l’être? . . . Le tout n’est jamais conçu comme totalisation: ni à la manière platoncienne, comme l’action ordonante d’un principe un sur le chaos, ni d’une manière hégélienne-marxiste, comme le processus d’un devenir qui recueille et dépasse ses moments’ (1970: 347–9). 12 Equally pertinent is Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the concept: ‘The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole’ (WP 16). 13 For Bataille’s original thoughts on Transgression, see his discussion of the transgression of prohibition in The Accursed Share (1991: 89–119), his anecdotal essay on limits and transcendence in Œuvres complètes (1970: VII, 445–52), and his elaboration on the notion of expenditure in Œuvres
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complètes (1970: I, 302–20). For a brief discussion of transgression in Deleuze and Guattari’s project, see Lyotard, ‘Capitalism énergumène’ (1972: 952–3). Again, Foucault’s depiction of the complexity and even idiosyncrasy of the mutative dynamics which transgression entails is worth quoting at length: ‘Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it. Perhaps it is simply an affirmation of division; but only insofar as division is not understood to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment of a separation or the measuring of a distance, only retaining that in it which may designate the existence of difference’ (1977: 35–6). On this point, see also Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972: 130–1). The tendency of capitalism to transgress its own limits, to deterritorialize, so to speak, is already present in Marx’s original formulations. In Capital, Marx uses a telling metaphor to convey the inherent tendency of capitalism continuously to transgress its limits and constantly to deterritorialize: he who accumulates money for the sake of money ‘is in the same situation as a world conqueror who discovers a new boundary with each country he annexes’ (1977: 231). If for Marx capitalism is a system that is defined by the constant search and insatiable desire to accumulate value, for Deleuze and Guattari it is a system that thrives on the continuous generation of machinic surplus-value. To say that ‘it is not for himself or his children that the capitalist works, but for the immortality of the system’ (AO 346) is to say that capitalism serves no need other than its own need to survive and, further, that capitalism is a (de)coded and therefore unhampered flux. In ‘What is a Dispositif?’, Deleuze argues that ‘modes of existence have to be assessed according to immanent criteria, according to their content of possibilities, liberty or creativity, without any appeal to transcendental values’ (1992b: 163). For more on immanence, see Deleuze’s ‘L’Immanence: une vie . . .’ (1995a). For Éric Alliez, the immanent in Deleuze is closely associated with the virtual. See in particular his Deleuze: philosophe virtuelle (1996: 12–13). For Lyotard, Anti-Oedipus – as a book or a theoretical object in and of itself – is conceived around this same law of value: ‘Dans la figure du Kapital proposé par Deleuze et Guattari, on reconnaît bien ce qui fascine Marx: la perversion capitaliste, la subversion des codes, religion, pudeur, métier, éducation, cuisine, parole, l’arasage de toutes différences “fondée” au profit de la seule différence même: valoir pour être échangeable contre-. Différence indifférente. Mors immortalis, disait-il’ (1972: 936–7). On this point, see Girard, ‘Système du delire’ (1972: 961). See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977: 121–4). See Goux, Symbolic Economies (1990: 64–87). Deleuze has been confronted on the question of history. In an interesting interview, Eric Eribon criticizes him for refusing to ‘give history any decisive role’ (N 30). To this charge, Deleuze replies: ‘History is certainly very important. But if you take any line of research, for part of its course, at
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certain points, it’s historical; but it’s also ahistorical, transhistorical. . . . “Becomings” are much more important than history in A Thousand Plateaus’ (N 30). For Deleuze, as for Guattari, what define capitalism are the lines of escape that traverse it and the becomings that run through it (see A Thousand Plateaus; 1987: 90, 216–27). The mainspring of their philosophy is a multiplicity that has no unity. Thus, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that ‘universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity. For great accidents were necessary, and amazing encounters that could have happened elsewhere, or before, or might never have happened, in order for the flows to escape coding and, escaping, to nonetheless fashion a new machine bearing the determinations of the capitalist socius’ (1983: 140). Equally noteworthy is Deleuze and Guattari’s claim, in A Thousand Plateaus, that ‘History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a nomadology, the opposite of history’ (1987: 23). This problem is all the more insistent because the system that Deleuze and Guattari envisage is more than merely an economic one. As early as Proust et les signes, Deleuze invokes a system which nothing can escape – ‘un système qui ne laisse rien hors de soi’ (1976: 64). See in particular Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1973: 33–57 and 135–207). In L’Économie fétiche, Alain Bihr observes that the ‘survival and continuation of capitalism are contingent on its transformation. . . . Through a process that is at the same time complementary and competitive, even contradictory, the reproduction of capitalism involves invariance, change, repetition, difference and repetition, from minimal difference (i.e., introducing a variety to the dominant order) to maximal difference (i.e., the disruption of existing forms)’ (1979: 41). In A Reader’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi rightfully argues that no system is a closed system: ‘Stability is not fixed. It is variation within limits. . . . A structure is a regularized unfolding of an aleatory outside. The closest thing there is to order is the approximate, and always temporary, prevention of disorder’ (1992: 57–8). In The Survival of Capitalism, Lefebvre reiterates this same basic premise even more forcefully: ‘Those who believe in the system are making a mistake, for in fact no complete, achieved totality exists. However, there is certainly a “whole,” which has absorbed its historical conditions, reabsorbed its elements and succeeded in mastering some of the contradictions, though without arriving at the desired cohesion and homogeneity’ (1976: 10). For a more elaborate discussion of the concept of totality, see Best, ‘Jameson, Totality, and the Postmodern Critique’ (1989). For a discussion of the open system with a specific emphasis on Deleuze, see Mengue, Gilles Deleuze ou le système du multiple (1994: 66–9). See Bihr, L’Économie fétiche (1979: 35–44). This is the essence of what Michel Serres calls ‘semi-cyclic causality’ (1968: 20).
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