Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze Gilles. Holland Eugene W

Author:Deleuze, Gilles.,Holland, Eugene W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-82946-0
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Capitalist relations of anti-production

In capitalist society, the forces of anti-production operate through the market; the relations of anti-production are economic rather than personal: “the alliances and filiations no longer pass through people but through money” (264/315). As in despotism, the debt remains infinite, so that filiation still predominates over alliance, but its ground, the socius, is no longer the figure of the despot: it is capital – specifically industrial capital. And inasmuch as full-fledged industrial capitalism is the sole system of social-production that always produces too much (in its own terms, at least, which take no account of glorious expenditure), the social function of the debt and of the state changes significantly as well. For the state does not disappear under capitalism, even though it no longer represents a transcendent unity imposed from above: instead, it “becomes immanent to the field of social forces, enters into their service, and serves as a regulator of the decoded and axiomatized flows” (252/300). And anti-production functions not as an external damper or limitation on consumption but as an internal stimulus to consumption in the attempt to avoid crises of over-production.

The apparatus of anti-production [under capitalism] is no longer a transcendent instance that opposes production, limits it, or checks it; on the contrary, it insinuates itself everywhere in the productive machine and becomes firmly wedded to it in order to regulate its productivity and realize surplus-value…. [C]apitalism’s supreme goal…is to introduce lack where there is always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources.

(235/280)

Capitalist anti-production thus culminates not in the transcendent glory of, say, the Palace at Versailles, but in the morbid greed of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “politico-military–industrial complex” (235/279), among other things. For what the production and especially the realization of surplus-value require, given the inherent tendency of capitalism to overproduce on a continually larger scale, is a vast system of anti-production installed at the heart of production itself to keep its wheels turning by absorbing over-production.32 Such was the intended effect, for example, of Keynesian economic policy and the New Deal, though it was really achieved only by the Second World War and the nuclear arms race; and such is the ongoing function, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, of “advertising, civil government [including] the State, its police, and its army, militarism, and imperialism” (235/279). It is only when people can be convinced that they are lacking something (anything ranging from “the latest” fashion trend to “national security”) that they can be induced to consume and produce at the ever-increasing rate the capitalist economy requires. The debt owed to capital remains, like that of despotism, uni-directional and infinite, but the system of anti-production under capitalism has become immanent to the system of production, and has as its motive force only further production of surplus-value for its own sake. Consumption as the realization of surplus-value is not an end in itself but merely the means of securing liquid capital for reinvestment in the next cycle of social-production.

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