Capital Form or Flow (Session 5)

Hello and welcome to our fifth session, our seminar, Capital Form of Flow, with our instructor, Professor Ray Brassiet. So please Ray, you may take it on. Thanks, Matthias. Okay. So first, yes, so I watched, so Despina, I watched your presentation, presentation. It was excellent. I'll try to arrange a meeting with you to discuss it if you want. I haven't had a chance to watch Mistilaf. I'm probably mispronouncing your name, excuse me, but I haven't had a chance to watch the second presentation. I think,

um is it misty laugh can you correct my pronunciation if you're if you're here um okay anyway i'll i'll count i'll watch it um tomorrow or monday and uh try to arrange a meeting okay um okay so let's um i know because because time is short, so I'll get going. Okay. Right. So today, we're going to, I'm going to try to kind of, you know, get to the crux of the

account of capitalism in Antioedipus. and you know before we start focusing on marks although even once we started focusing on marks in the next you know in the final three sessions I think it would still be useful to refer back to Antioedipus so although in a way the focus will be you know primarily on marks I think it'll be useful to kind of still occasionally make comparisons to you know the bits of Antioedipus that we looked at. Okay, but today, so let's start. So I'll start today in a way by just, before I focus squarely on the discussion of the nature of capitalism, according to the

Los Angeles Horry, I just wanted to kind of to begin by summarizing their account of the nature of what they call despotic signification. And this is something that we touched on last week, but it's actually important in a way to understand the nature of the state. So it is actually relevant. So I'll just quickly kind of begin with this account of the relationship between the privileging of the signifier and the transcendence of the states. So I'll just read the passages in

bold here. Arbarian civilizations are written not because the voice has been lost, but because the graphic system has lost its independence and its particular dimensions has aligned itself on the voice and becomes subordinated to the voice. It's by the end here, it is by subordinating itself to the voice that writing supplants the voice. So we know already from our discussion so far that in a way the privileging, the transcendence of the signifier, you know, the kind of the primacy of the signifier, is inseparable from this, you know, the signifier

embodies the voice of the despot. So in a way the, you know, the argument here is that the primacy of writing in a despotic state, of recording information, and of the overcoding of all codes, depends on the privileging of the despotic voice as the source of signification, which is to say of meaning and authority. So this means that the despot's voice is the voice of what it doesn't go sorry called the new alliance, the new alliance between

the sovereign and his subjects. And writing is a function, in a way, is the index of this direct affiliation in other words the despots claim um you know to to govern by divine mandate okay so that the despot claims to to be somehow descended from god from a divinity and it's this divine authority which is transmitted through writing and they write so here here's doesn't go sorry the voice no longer sings but dictates or decrees the graphy no longer dances it ceases to animate bodies but is set into writing on tablets stones and books and the eye

sets itself to reading writing does not entail but implies a kind of blindness a loss of vision and of the ability to appraise it is now the eye that suffers although it also acquires other functions. So this is, so now the act of seeing of bodies as signs in the in the territorial machine and of you know seeing signs you know as bodies because you know signs and bodies are convertible in you know in territorial coding and it's this convertibility which is the condition for the the evaluation of surplus value, the eye extracts surplus value from the inscription of bodies,

from the inscribing of bodies. This active seeing becomes a passive registering of signification or the interpretation of meaning. So the eye shifts from an active to a passive role. And what happens here is that the territorial triangle of voicing, inscribing, and seeing. These are the aspects of what does it call territorial representation. Voicing, inscribing, and seeing, this flat, this imminent triangle becomes, is turned into a vertical pyramid whose three faces are speaking,

writing, and reading, and whose apex is the despotic signifier. So this is the idea is that what's kind of an imminent conjunction of sensory capacities becomes subordinated, becomes a vector of transcendence, which is kind of which hangs on the signifier. the signifier is a de-territorialized sign it's a sign that's become a letter and here the transition is from imminent designation whereby every sign you know every unit of code it marks a body which itself functions as a sign so that there's a convertibility between

between bodies and signs. So a sign designates a body which in turn is a sign for another body. Okay, that's eminent designation. This now becomes transcendent signification where, in a way, the correlation of signifier and signified, you know, the signifier and signified as, know, two sides of the same kind of indivisible sheet of paper in Saussure's metaphor, this relation is conditioned by the transcendence of the signifier, the master signifier, which embodies the voice of the despot. Okay. So the imminence of the signifier to the signified is made possible by the transcendence of the master signifier, which embodies despotic authority.

And the sign then becomes a sign of the sign. Instead of designating a body, which functions as a sign for another body, every sign becomes a sign of the sign. but similarly desire becomes desire of the desire of the despot so in other words this is where reflexivity kicks in with despotic transcendence you go from a flat you know field of imminent designation to a transcendent dimension of signification and meaning which is conditioned by self-reference. Self-reference. The signifier means because it's always related to itself.

Every sign is a sign of itself, and the authority of the despot is self-legitimating. The authority to say that the despot governs by divine mandate is to say that this you know this authority despotic authority is self-legitimating or self-authenticating and that's why it's transcendent according to Deleuze and Gautari. Okay now the second component in this the transition from the territorial machine to the capitalist machine is what Deleuze and Gautari describe as the eduplization of desire Okay, and I'm focusing mainly on the account of, yep, hello?

Could I ask a question before we move on? Sure, yes, yes. Can you go back to the last slide? Yes, yep. Yeah, so about this sort of move from sort of imminent to transcendent signification, Um, maybe a little more background on Saussure and their relationship to sort of structural linguistics could be helpful. Um, but sort of, uh, pairing with what we were talking about last week with how to think about what language and signification are, it seems like there are two different things here that are being sort of superimposed or mixed up, at least in my understanding. And the one is the kind of descriptive program of structural linguistics, right, which is about how describing how a language works.

And in that account, sort of, you're mistaken in thinking that linguistic signs or words directly correlate to or represent things in the world. And the way, the proper way to describe how a language works is to show the relationships between words and other words or sort of signs and other signs rather than to signifiers. and I guess this kind of historical or natural historical account of social development where we move from a kind of in this sense I keep going this sort of Heideggerian language really a

kind of primordial originary or pragmatic way of relating to the world in which our our signs are based in sort of practical activities, right? They're present to hand. And then we move into this field of representation where we sort of lose the originary connection of what the eye as an active thing does. And it moves to a passive thing that exists in this kind of social world that's been removed from its original, originary practical context, right? Does that seem like a fair characterization of it or except yes except that well in a way it's it's going to be what makes it more problematic in terms of this is that in a way territorial coding or territorial

you know kind of designation it's not according to those in gotari remember it's uh it depends there's no account of utilitarian it's it's it's a function of desire okay so it's desire and not kind of need that governs territorial designation so in other words the relation the designation relation between the sign and the body the marking the inscription of bodies remember these bodies now are not categorized yet they're not categorized in terms of you know in terms of the cognitive categories, you know, animal, vegetable, mineral, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay. This, in a way, the compartmentalization of reality, you know, has not yet kind of been instituted. So everything is simultaneously a sign in a body. and the you know the inscribing of signs the coding of bodies okay is not in this account isn't governed by there's no kind of simply functional rationale for it so it's not like it's not an instrumental relation okay so it's not just that you kind of it's it's not utility or usefulness or functionality in a way that coordinates the designation relation.

And that's what makes it more, okay, it's fine, but in a way, so it's even more, in a way, you could say it's harder to understand because of this, okay? Yeah, I mean... Because, and they say, I mean, you could say that this idea of a designation without connotation or signification is impossible. It's a kind of mythological, it's like, you know, kind of divine naming, as if you could just kind of somehow, you know, kind of, you know, append signs to things at a point where the distinction between words and things is not yet instituted because in a way that's what they're saying is that the

the very kind of the difference between words and things is not yet operative at the level of designation um and that's why they say it's all about you know it's all governed by you know by the machinations of desire um and now as we spoke we already spoke and we spoke last week about, you know, that's what, why this account is hard to kind of, it plays a role, it plays a kind of, you can see the philosophical role it plays in the whole kind of universal history they're developing, as this is, you know, the first stage is going to be followed by the kind of, you know, despotic signification. But you could say that, well, you know, they're abstracting

from, you know, territorial coding abstracts from, you know, kind of from social need, okay, from social need in, you know, there's no account of economic need, physiological need in this, you know, in this narrative. And that's why they say, well, they want to insist, because you can't understand, you know, coding in functional terms. Okay, coding doesn't kind of, it can't be understood in terms of means ends, in terms of something that allows you to kind of to realize a purpose or an intent.

So they won't abstract from all that and make it something this, yes, to make it into this, to define it negatively in terms of, you know, what, you know, a procedure where the difference between words and things, the difference between, you know, even the difference between nomination and designation isn't yet operative, because designation here is not even nomination. So it's very, okay, I mean, it's, again, it's hard to, it's a very abstract account, and it plays a role.

In a way, it's there to be contrasted to kind of transcendent signification because they want to say, I mean, you know, the obvious rejoinder is to say that this, there's no such thing as a designation. It's an abstraction. It's a complete kind of, you know, it's a philosophical fiction. They rely on bits, they use bits of Lyotard's work, Discourse Figure, but he's also attacking the signifier. But it seems, again, it's hard. I mean, the criticism or the kind of the criticism to make is that it's very hard to substantiate this account of imminent designation if it's not simply the negation of transcendent signification.

In other words, it's very hard to make sense of this idea of a level, a stratum of imminence, you know, of territorial imminence, where you code, bodies are coded, and this coding is a condition of, you know, of territorial socialization. but all the kind of all the interests okay let's say all the kinds of you know the the psychological and physiological interests in terms of which you would try to make sense or try to give an account of functional designation are removed

because it has to be purely productive and production is not um uh it's not you know as they keep on insisting it's not about satisfying a need or you know desire is not subordinated to need yeah i think an interesting comparison here is Nietzsche, right? Because this whole section is sort of working on top of and reworking genealogy too. And what's interesting, I guess for Nietzsche, this is all about the creation of a kind of psychological interiority and the concept, right? And the kind of deontic calculating of norms and obligations to one another. And at least for Nietzsche, there's this interesting

ambivalence in two senses. One is, although Nietzsche's sort of describing in a very physiological sense, the sort of torture and cruelty that creates this, he doesn't really assert a one-to-one material relation that the acts of cruelty are actually creating, right? You have to either read that in or just see it as a juxtaposition. This is who we say we are, and this is who we really are. We say we're good souls who can keep our debts and promises, and we really pull each other limb from limb. But he doesn't make that direct kind of, I don't know, he would have to make a Lamarckian kind of case for why that physically happened.

And the second ambiguity in Nietzsche is that he says that this interiority, the creation of kind of psychological calculation, is what first make human beings interesting. Right. That cunning is what what first makes the human being more interesting than any other animal. And I don't see that kind of ambivalence here. They just seem to say no transcendence is is illegitimate. yeah yes the other thing about i mean you're completely correct the other importance actually this isn't yet interiority interiority um you know the uh privatized kind of you know the privatized you know subjective self only kicks in with this with capitalism it's a final stage

this is merely you know breeding an animal that can keep a promise is the idea is that there's no interiority which is why there's no resentment of suffering so in a way it's like at this stage at this stage of the you know the punishment inflicted on those who disobey or who betray you know a promise or don't repay a debt is there's no kind of this is not yet it doesn't generate psychic interiority that only comes at the final stage for those in the losing sorry but it's the beginning like it's the beginning yes it's the model of the super ego who later becomes incorporated into your own exactly right exactly the start of that process it's a start go on go on go on but just the final question here is a clarification because yeah i think all that

makes sense but uh just in these two senses of representation that we've been using right one is representation as a kind of move away from or this kind of transcendental mistake that that starts to create like the despot's designations of what is um of of signs to to signifiers um this idea of representation as creating this kind of yeah the sort of interior world of the superego and the ego. And the other is representation as this descriptive or description of what languages properly do. Right? It seems to me that there's a weird

confusion or the way that say someone like Brandon would talk about the shift from resemblance as sort of a master metaphor of philosophy in Plato, where concepts resemble things in the world, And second order representation where you can map, and this is the sort of Cartesian shift where you can map relations to the world that don't depend on one to one resemblance, but depend on the sort of functional isomorphy in terms of their inferential relations or reasoning relations to one another. right that that shift in in philosophy um mirrors the kind of shift in talking about language as

well so the kind of semantic holism of a caesarian language system and it seems to me that there's a there's a weird way in which they mean opposite things for for its description at representation is this kind of despotic authoritarian telling you what things mean in a one-to-one relation and representation being a description of language that describes how languages are never one-to-one representations but are always open-ended systems of kind of improvisation based on prior rules Right. And then you get two different senses of rules in both between rules that are one to one monotonic or non monotonic generalizations that allow for linguistic ingenuity and creativity.

Right. Yes. No, you're absolutely right. I think the key is remember, so Deleuze develops a critique of what he calls a representational image of thought and difference in repetition. what they're doing here remember um this is this is an account of social representation they're saying that every socius every social formation represents it has to kind of it has to code the world okay it has to code reality in a certain way so these coding practices which they are describing ultimately will become the condition for epistemic representations. In other words, what they want to say is that epistemic representation in its

pernicious Cartesian, Kantian, even Hegelian sense for Deleuze and Guattari is ultimately, you know, conditioned by social representation. This is why they say, and they will explicitly say that, you know, philosophies of the one are despotic. They align, you know, they will ultimately say that they kind of, you know, they'll align kind of, you know, Germanite philosophies of the subject and of self-consciousness and of, you know, freedom as determined by self-consciousness with this despotic this regime of despotic

representations whose origins are social okay so they're trying to kind of make epistemic representation and the philosophy of representation that follows from it um a symptom of a more kind of of a non-cognitive social representation whose stages they're kind of you know uh charting in this in this narrative but here it has a positive sign with with territorial representation this is also i mean it's also kind of questionable that you know when they say as we saw last week they say it's closer to the earth it's closer because it hasn't yet you know it hasn't yet completely kind of there's the beginning of the segmentation you know on the parceling and the

the discretization of reality, but there's still the flows of desire have greater freedom of movement. They're not regimented as rigidly as they will become with the despot and ultimately with capital, according to them. But yes, I mean, I guess the thing to say, I mean, the problem for them, or the problem with this account, or what one needs to be attentive to, is that the degree to which desire is incompatible with reflection.

and this and this the transition from territorial inscription to despotic signification shows us that everything begins to go wrong with reflection and that's a familiar vitalist trope okay whether it's Nietzsche or Bergson um philosophies of eminent you know the eminence of life they don't like you know reflection reflectivity that's all kind of that's an alienating movement for them. OK, but no, that's a good point. OK, right. So let's the next step. OK, this OK, obviously this.

This account of the mutation, the emergence of signification is tied, is part of the process of what they call the eduplization of desire, which is the other kind of, you know, central strand in the book, which, you know, we need to kind of, you know, keep track of, you know, to follow its connection with the emergence of capitalism. So, again, there's three stages, what they call the Oedipal cell is, you know, arises at each stage of, you know, the development of the socius, okay? So let's read this passage. The Oedipal cell will have to complete its migration.

It must no longer be content to pass from the state of the displaced represented to that of repressing representation rather from being the repressing representation it will have to finally become the representative of desire itself remember the three they distinguish between the repressed representative of desire the repressing representation of um desire and the displaced representative of desire okay and what they want to say what they call the oedipal cell um it migrates from you know from each of these through each of these um positions in the the

machinery of representation um so initially okay i'll read the rest of the passages um so it will it will um the unipo cell will finally become the representative of desire itself and it must become the latter by virtue of being the displaced represented the debt must not only become an infinite debt okay uh remember the infinite debt is a characteristic of the uh the despotic relationship to the to the despot um it will have to be internalized and spiritualized as an infinite debt it will have to be internalized and spiritualized as an infinite debt so in other words the infinite debt to the despot is exterior okay you are infinitely you know subordinated or

indebted to the despot as god's representative but what happens in the transition from despotism to capitalism is that this infinite debt is internalized okay so in other words it's the internalization of the infinite debt that creates the capital you know the bourgeois subject the subject of capitalism um hence desire having completed its migration will have to experience this extreme affliction of being turned against itself the turning back against itself bad conscience the guilt that attaches it to the most decoded of social fields as well as to the sickest interiority the trap for desire it's ugly growth okay so what we have here is this movement okay

um first of all and remember what they're describing is how desire comes to desire its own repression okay every socius is founded on the repression of desiring production but there are degrees of repression and it's only in the what they're trying to explain is how from simply being repressed how desire comes to be you know um you know to be to loop back on itself to desire its own repression so that the territorial stage oedipus is the displaced represented of decoded souls. And this is what they say, it's the Oedipus or incest.

Okay? Oedipus is this kind of the incest prohibition. Initially in the territorial socios, Oedipus is the displaced represented of decoded souls. The limits between nameless filiation from maternal or paternal bodies and impersonal alliance, okay, between a mother and a father, okay, and remember they say that the difference is that, you know, in territorial filiation, you know, filiation from a maternal or paternal body is not aligned with the symbolic role of mother or father, okay, in other words,

you can, you can be, in other words, it's not filiation that determines the paternal or maternal relation. It's rather alliance, and alliance can be, you know, anyone, okay, anyone who is not, you know, genetically related can play the role of mother or father, okay, because, you know, the family unit has not yet been, you know, sealed off, hermetically sealed from society. And this is the, so this, you know, Oedipus here is the limit as decoded in the earth, okay?

So every social formation is trying to stave off decoded flows, and a decoded, Oedipus in a way is the repressed representative of decoded flows, okay? The second stage in the despotic socius of the state, Oedipus becomes the repressing representation of decoded flows. The limits, it becomes a limit as the infinite debt of subjects towards the despot. And the limit now is a de-territorialized transcendence or God. So at each stage, at each stage, Oedipus figures what the social machine must repress in order to function,

in order to integrate itself. With the territorial socius, it's the earth, the full body, you know, full body without organs. With the despotic state, it's God as this pure vertical transcendence. Okay. And in capital, Oedipus becomes the repressed, represented of decoded laws, of desire as such. It becomes the limit as decoded transcendence, the transcendence of castration or lack, which is to say the interiorization of domination. So that the social repression of desire, which is the first stage,

the stage of territorial coding, is followed by the desire for social repression, which is the stage of despotic overcoding, which is then followed by the desire for self-repression, which is the stage of capitalist decoding. Okay. Now, so this is really setting up the kind of the consequences for the trajectory whereby desire comes to desire its own repression. But now, we need to look at the Toz and Qasari's accounts of what they call the Ursta, the the original states, and what they say about it is very curious.

They write, the state was not formed in progressive stages. It appears fully armed, a masterstroke executed all at once. The primordial Ursta, the eternal miracle of everything the state wants to be and desires. Asiatic production with the state that expresses or constitutes its objective movement is not a distinct social formation. It is the basic formation on the horizon throughout history. So they continue, the primordial despotic state is not a historical break like any other. of all the institutions that is perhaps the only one to appear fully armed in the brain of those

who institute it, the artists with a look of bronze. It's a Nietzsche quote. This is why Marxism doesn't quite know what to make of it. It has no place in the famous five stages. Primitive communism, ancient city-states, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. The state is not one formation amongst others nor is it a transition from one formation to another. It appears to be set back and removed from what it transects and from what it resets, either the social body, as though it were giving evidence of another dimension, a cerebral ideality that is added to, superimposed on the material

evolution of societies, a regulating idea or principle of reflection, terror, that organizes the parts and the flaws into a whole. Now, this is very curious. What they're saying here, and this why I guess you know the closing of the account of you know the Ur state is perplexing it's that it's not it doesn't kind of you know there are no material conditions of emergence for the despotic states it's an idea okay it's a pure abstraction in a way which is imposed you know from top down

And I think the suggestion here is that it's ultimately it's a philosophical idea. I think Plato is the target here. They're saying that the idea of the state, that the state is only ever comprehensible as an ideal abstraction for the legitimation of authority and power. and this becomes clear if we see that the every state claims to be you know a self-originating okay so they write the imperial myth of the origin

you know the origin of the state expresses the divergence of this beginning from the origin itself the divergence of the extension from the idea of the genesis from the order and the power the new alliance and also what repasses from filiation to alliance what is taken up again by filiation um Jean-Pierre Vernon shows in this way that the imperial myths are not able to conceive a law of organization that is imminent in the universe. They need to posit and internalize this difference between the origin and the beginnings, between the sovereign power and the genesis of the world,

so that in the end, one no longer really knows what comes first and whether the territorial machine does not, in fact, presuppose a despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it segments in its turn. So here the claim is that imperial myth, the imperial myth whereby the despot legitimates his authority, subordinates the imminent articulation of filiation and desire or of credit and debt, which one found in the territorial socius, it subordinates this to a transcendent filiation

by a divine creditor. So in other words, it's with the state that, in a way, authority claims a transcendent source, okay? a transcendent origin. And every figure of the state, in a way, is the codification of the transcendence of authority. And this means that the state is not just transcendent. The claim, if you follow Dozen Gotari's argument, is that they're not just saying that the state is transcendent vis-a-vis the imminent workings of power,

and alliance, etc. They're saying it is transcendence as such. They write that despotic state is the abstraction that is realized in imperial formations, to be sure, only as an abstraction, the overcoding eminent unity. It assumes its imminent concrete existence only in the subsequent forms that cause it to return under other guises and conditions. And being the common horizon for what comes before and what comes after, it conditions universal history only provided it is not on the outside, but always off to the side. The cold monster that represents the way in which

history is in the head, in the brain, the Urstat. Okay, so here there's two things going on. First of all is that the state as pure transcendence, what they call the over-coding eminent unity, is being juxtaposed to the earth as pure eminence, the surface of decoded flows, etc. But there's also a claim that history as such, or what we call history, is always, you know, presupposes the state formation because it is the state that records, you know, that narrates, you know, what happened. So, you know, the claim here is that history, you know, and the dimension

of historicity always has a transcendent origin and it presupposes the transcendence of the state and the state's over-coding of territorial codings, territorial affiliations and alliances. And why is this relevant? This is relevant because of the relationship between capitalism and the state. What they're going to say about the relationship between capitalism and the state later. Okay. Now what begins to undermine the sovereignty of the state is, according to

Rosen-Gothari again, is the institution of privatization. So they write, it's beneath the blows of private property and then of commodity production that the state witnesses its decline. Okay, and here again a pause because this sounds very puzzling at first, but I assume, if one wants to make sense of it, the idea would be this, is that in the territorial socius there's no private property, you know, there's no even property as such as an abstraction. emerges with the despot because, you know, the despot is the ultimate proprietor. But in a way,

you could say that the despot is the only proprietor. Everything belongs to the despot, which is why there's no private property, because the despot is not simply, you know, it's not one individual amongst others, okay? The despot represents, everything belongs to the despot and that belonging is not a privatization so it's only when the uh you know state property or despotic property begins to be disintegrated with the development of you know merchant capital that private property you know as we know it um kicks in again according you know i'm trying to you know that seems to be the line of thought that under

underwrites this this um this passage um so land enters into the sphere of private property and into that of commodities classes appear in as much as the dominant classes are no longer merged with the state apparatus but are distinct determinations that make use of this transformed apparatus at first situated adjacent to communal property and then entering into the latter's composition or conditioning it and then becoming more and more a determining force. Private property brings about an internalization of the credit or debtor relation in the relations of opposed

classes. Okay. So here, I think that, you know, the claim here is that with the caste relation, you know, with the barbarian caste, you have, you know, the dominating barbarians and the dominated savages, and an exteriority of the dominating creditor to the dominated debtor. Whereas with the emergence of class under capitalism, the split between dominating and dominated becomes interior to the subjectivity of so-called civilized man. So there's an interiorization of the dominating creditor, which is the law or society, to the dominated debtor, which is now the private self or subject in the modern sense.

and this is why they can then argue they can make the surprising claim that there's only one class the bourgeoisie as the class that has interiorized domination as the desire for repression and they write to reread history through the class struggle is to reread it in terms of the bourgeoisie as the decoding and decoded class it is the only class as such in as much as it leads the struggle against codes and merges with a generalized decoding of flows the page reference is missing here but a follow-up from the same page is later in the handout so i can give you

the page reference. Okay so the bourgeoisie is the class that represents this process of the decoding of flows then the transition to capitalism, you know the bourgeois class which which, you know, in a way begins to engage in trade, begins to accumulate capital independently of the state or, you know, without, in a way which is no longer simply kind of tributary

to the operations of the state are those who begin to break down the codes, existing social codes. So, what do private property, wealth, commodities and classes signify? The breakdown of codes, the appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other. The state can no longer be content to overcode territorial elements that are already coded. It must invent specific codes for flows that are increasingly de-territorialized, which means putting despotism in the service of the new

class relations, integrating the relations of wealth and poverty, of commodity and labor, reconciling market money and money from revenues, everywhere stamping the mark of the Urstaat on the new state of things. So here this, you know, the decoding of flows, which as we'll see means principally of, you know, the decoding of the flows of money and labor, according to This decoding that makes capitalism possible is bounded by a commensuration of these incommensurable forces. There has to be a way of commensurating them.

And it's this bounding that defines the capitalist socius, which carries out this bounding by what Deleuze and Goethe-Solony called axiomatisation. I think, as we'll see now, understanding what they mean by axiomatisation is quite a challenge, But I think there's a connection with the state. What they're saying is this, is that the emergent bourgeois merchant class wants to commandeer the resources of state

power to facilitate the decoding of flows, but also to prevent this decoding from going to the limits, from dissolving the source of salt together. And axiomatization is, in a way, using the power of the state and the institutions of the state to um to re you know is it to re-territorialize or to prevent um the decoded flows from dissolving um the social structure altogether okay and this is what i think we're going to you know will

become more apparent as we proceed so initially capitalism is the conjunction is defined as the conjunction of two decoded flows. Capitalism and its break are defined not solely by decoded flows but by the generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows. It is the singular nature of this conjunction that ensured the universality of capitalism. By simplifying a lot we can say that the savage territorial machine operated on the basis of connections of production and that the barbarian despotic machine was based on disjunctions of inscription derived from the eminent unity

that the capitalist machine the civilized machine will first establish itself on the conjunction when the conjunction moves to the fore in the social machine it seems on the contrary that it ceases to be tied to enjoyment or to the excess consumption of a class, that it makes luxury itself into a means of investment and reduces all the decoded flows to production. In a production for production's sake that rediscovers the primitive connections of labor on condition, on the sole condition that they be linked to capital and to the new de-territory light full

body the true consumer from whence they seem to to emanate now okay i think what what this means is that if you remember that the the synthesis of conjunction is also the moment of consumption okay it's the it's the moment where um intensities are consumed okay by a subject okay you know initially you know a molecular subject but but then some some kind of social subject um the despot you know in the state that you know the the despot is the ultimate subject of enjoyment all social production is you know belongs to the despot and the you know the the despot

is uh you know alone is entitled to enjoy the fruits of production um so in a way there's a there's a link between conjunction and you know consumption okay But with capitalism, in a way, the surplus that is generated through capitalist production, the social surplus, is no longer enjoyed by a despot. There's no longer a kind of a sovereign to enjoy it. It is the surplus becomes reinvested in production for production's sake.

So, in a way, the peculiarity of, you know, of the surplus generated by capitalism is that it's not to be enjoyed by, you know, any member of the socius. It is constantly there to be reinvested in production. And in a way, it's what they call the de-territorialized full body that enjoys this surplus or that consumes this surplus will be money as such. The true consumer from which they seem to emanate is money.

this is what this this is a sense in which money um takes over um from the despot as constituting the third and final full body um of the socius so it's now the body of money every you know all social wealth and uh social production is invested in you know in the accumulation of capital okay and capital is you know self-generating money money generating itself from itself um okay and now but then this delos and guattari's account of this conjunction um is markedly different from marx's okay um

they write at the heart of capital Marx points to the encounter of two principal elements on one side the de-territorialized worker who has become free and naked having to sell his labor power and on the other decoded money that has become capital and is capable of buying it buying the buying labor power the fact that these two elements result from the segmentation of the despotic state and feudalism and from the decomposition of the feudal system itself and that of its state still does not give us the intr- sorry still does not give us the extrinsic conjunction of these two flows flows of producers and flows of money the encounter might not have

taken place with the free workers and the money capital existing virtually side by side. One of the elements depends on a transformation of the agrarian structures that constitute the old social body, here they're referring to the enclosure and expulsion of peasants and tenant farmers, while the other depends on a completely different series going by way of the merchant and the user as they exist marginally in the pores of this old social body. Okay, now this is okay so everything for Delos and Guatari, capitalism is the conjunction of the decoded flows of money on the one hand and labor on the other. In other words,

of merchant capital and labor power. Okay, so merchant capital is no longer kind of, you know, commandeered, is no longer simply kind of, you know, beholden to the state. And on the other hand, you know, workers, laborers are de-territorialized, they're expelled from, you know, with the the enclosure of the commons, farmers and peasants are expelled from the land they were working on and they're now compelled to sell their labor to an employer, to a capitalist. But for Marx, this conjunction is necessary, not contingent.

For Marx, capital is simply the conjunction of commodified labor power and money capital. In other words, the separation of the producers from the means of production, production, in what Marx calls originally accumulation, is the condition for capital accumulation. Labour power is the commodity whose use value consists in converting value into surplus value, m into n. In other words, there's no way in which you can make sense of capital independently of its relation to labour power, its consumption of labour power. it's that consumption that converts money into capital m into m prime

and this is why originally accumulation you know is the condition for this conjunction for marks and class struggle because originally accumulation is um you know a symptom of class struggle um which for march is a condition of capital accumulation so it's it's very puzzling So I think we need to kind of note how the claim that this is a contingent conjunction is peculiar. Second, the second aspect of this conjunction, each of these elements brings into place several

processes of decoding and de-territorialization have been very different origins. For the free worker, the de-territorialization of the soil through privatization, the decoding of the instruments of production through appropriation, the loss of the means of consumption through the solution of the family and the corporation, and finally the decoding of the worker in favor of the work itself or of the machine. And for capital, the de-territorialization of wealth through monetary abstraction the decoding of the flows of production through merchant capital and the decoding of states through financial capital and public debts and the decoding of the means of production through the formation of industrial capital and so on um so it's only with

the final i'll just read the section in bold here capitalism doesn't begin or the capital machine is is not assembled until capital directly appropriates production and until financial capital and merchant capital are no longer anything but specific functions corresponding to a division of labor and the capitalist mode of production in general. So, the production of capitalism as the production of production, as producing the means of production, private ownership of the means of production, requires this conjunction of

of two decoded flows, the flow of money and the flow of labor. But the conditions of the conjunction don't involve this. There's no social relation provided to account for the conjunction and in the Deleuze-Gotharian accounts, which is why the claim that it's contingent, the claim that labor and capital could virtually coexist is very puzzling,

at least from a kind of a Marxian point of view. And in order to understand what's going on, we have to account, we have to see what distinguishes their account of abstract labor from the Marxian account of abstract labor. In other words, the decoding of labor, how does the decoding of labor, which is the precondition for the capitalist conjunction, How does this decoding of labor emerge? And here's what they say. Even before a capitalist production machine is assembled, commodities and money affect a decoding of flows through abstraction. But this does not occur in the same way for both instances. First, simple exchange inscribes

commercial products as particular quanta of a unit of abstract labor. It is abstract labor posited in the exchange relation that forms the disjunctive synthesis of the apparent movement of commodities, since the abstract labor is divided into qualified pieces of labor to which a given determinant quantum corresponds. It's only when a general equivalent appears as money that one enters into the reign of the quantitas, which can have all sorts of particular values or be worth all sorts of quanta. Now, what's peculiar about this is that on Deleuze and Guattari's accounts, the decoding of labor, which is to say labor is abstracted as a condition for the emergence of capitalism.

Whereas for Marx, or at least for Marx as I understand him, the abstraction of labor is only realized with the capital relation. It's only with the capitalist commodification of labor as labor power that abstract labor is socially realized. So this is why Delos and Guattari's account is peculiar. For Delos and Guattari, abstract labor or labor in general is constituted through simple commodity exchange and is prior to its quantified measure by money as general equivalent.

and if we remember Edward Ville's accounts of money which we discussed last time I mean the idea seems to be that units of labor are measured as qualified concrete labor and remunerated by a qualitative equivalent which is to say you know money as a qualitative equivalent for a unit of labor. So this is nomisma, money as measure of nomos, or what is right, or what is owed to each. That's the sense of money that Deleuze and Guattari derive from Edouard Ville.

But capitalism begins when money begins to function as a general equivalent for quantitative difference rather than as a specific equivalent for qualitative difference. And what's peculiar here is how this shift in the functioning of money. For Marx, it's the capitalist social relation that explains the transformation in the function of money in a way from concrete qualitative equivalent to abstract general equivalent. Whereas on Deleuze and Guattari's account, it's money, okay, it's this transformation in the functioning of money that explains the emergence of capital, okay, which is, you know, I think the inversion of the Marxian account.

So here's a continuation of their accounts of abstract labor. this abstract quantity nonetheless must have some particular value so that it still appears only as a relation of magnitude between quanta it is in this sense that the exchange relation formally unites partial objects that are produced and even inscribed independently of it the commercial and monetary inscription remains overcoded and even repressed by the previous characteristics and modes of inscription of a socius considered in its specific mode of production, which knows nothing of and does not recognize abstract labor. As Marx says, the latter is

indeed the simplest and most ancient relation of productive activity, but it does not appear as such and only becomes a true practical relation in the modern capitalist machine. This is why before the monetary and commercial inscription, this is why before the monetary and commercial inscription does not have a body of its own at its disposal, why it is inserted into the intersees of the pre-existing social body. The point here is that the question is whether the inscription, the capitalist accumulation,

you know, the accumulation of money as capital depends on a transformation in social relations or whether it is itself the condition for this transformation of social relations. In other words, whether money comes to constitute its own body, its own surface of inscription, or whether the conditions for money functioning as capital is always the result of a transformation in social relations.

And on Deleuze and Guattari's account, it seems to be money conditions the social transformation instead of the social transformation conditioning the monetary transformation. And if we compare this to, you know, with what Marx says about abstract labour, I think it's quite, the contrast is instructive, okay? So Marx writes in the Grundrisse, labour seems quite a simple category. The conception of labour in this general form, as labour as such, is also immeasurably old.

Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in the simplicity, labor is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. In other words, it's the relations, it's social relations which realize the simple abstraction. And if we move on to the next passage, he writes, indifference towards any specific kind of labor presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labor of which no single one is any longer predominant. And not only the category labor, but labor in reality becomes the means of creating wealth in general and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form.

the simplest abstraction which modern economics places at the head of its discussions and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society so the claim here is that the concept of labor in general or abstract labor emerges in societies where labor has low status and its varieties are restricted and incommensurable but the concept of labor in general becomes socially realized in a society where labor is compulsory for the majority a source of status highly differentiated and exchangeable or a commodity so where the

realization of abstraction is a function of social relations for marx it becomes a function of decoded flows for Deleuze and Guatari. So in other words, the point is that the abstraction of labor, Marx is very clear that, you know, the concept of abstract labor, the concept of labor in general, pre-exists capitalism, but it has no social reality. It's an intellectual abstraction. It becomes socially realized under capitalism, which is a social relation, the separation of the producers from the means of production.

And the contrast is between the realization of an abstraction as a result of social relations and Marx and the realization of an abstraction as in terms of the operations of flows in Deleuze and Guattari. Okay. Yes, I'll put yes actually this would be a good time to pause. Other people had their hands up first of all, I'll step back after that but I just wanted to say on this point that abstract labor is the social institution of the labor market, right.

Yeah, like actually existing labor markets and being able to think of labor as belonging to a market. Yes. Is what he's talking about. And that's the core idea of what makes capitalism as a social system different from, say, slavery or pre. Yes. And the claim is that this labor market presupposes a commodity market. Okay. The commodification of labor is a consequence of capitalism, but not its antecedents for Marx. Questions?

Yeah, I think Despina had her hand. Sure, yes. Arman was before me, and then I just have a small remark. Sure. Thank you, Despina. I have a question of two parts. parts. One is that if we accept the idea of necessity, necessity transformation between despotism and bourgeois society, something like that, not necessity, but I don't understand the cause of it in the account that those in the Terry

put out and I think they treat the cause of this person as the same as if it was a mutation right out of the head of zooms but something that it isn't clear in this idea then becomes really obscure in the next step in my opinion because if the if the abstract labor is the condition of possibility for capitalism. But then in your account or in the Marxian account, actually, this is the commodification of labor that is the possibility, that is the condition of possibility for a capitalist society. Both of these accounts seems like something of

of seeing labor as something necessarily relative to human body. In a history of agriculture, we can see states of societies when the breakdown of the old code becomes something of realization of a labor market as Aaron puts it. That is because there is no sovereign, there is a gap between the old sovereign that would produce for the condition of living of the slave or the serfs. The plebeian that worked for its labor time,

its labor power, then become again, a serf in a European history through the realization of a despotic regime of land owning or war for the realization of owning land. There is no gap in understanding the Los Anglothari's account, only the gap where money appears. That is the gap that states or despot becomes transcendent. But it seems before the despot becomes transcendent or the bourgeois society becomes something of a concrete abstraction, the thing is that the production becomes to a halt. The thing is that something of a famine

of not being able to live in the old order is always at the core of the moment of change. In both societies, when abstract labor becomes the condition of possibility, and then capitalism makes the labor, the body, the human body to set itself as the source of labor and commodify itself and its being as something, as a part of just production, production and production for production. This is not like just something singular to capitalism and because of a monadic system that capitalism is, that is production for production. It seems like it has always been production for production.

And the material states that it realized itself in, that is, maybe the Asiatic production or the feudal production, are actually the labels that can only explain the part of a historical contingency. not the part of the, for example, biological necessity, or for example, a social impossibility of playing social games without the presence of such a structure. The structure seems always as if imminent to what we are doing already in our history, sorry,

transcendent in what we are already doing in our history. Structure always come from outside doesn't matter how the doesn't matter how the structure ourselves, it seems like in both the Marxian account and the those in the target as much as I understand the structure of human being as Labor or through Labor is something that is. at most can be decodified but cannot be really something that we are we are freed from. Production seems something that we as biological species must do and because we must do it as a social species then we must live like such and such and such and such.

some possibility that never has been answered is why not the anti-production? What is the part that puts the anti-production as the anti-social part of the desiring machines or something like that? So you're asking, you're asking, you said what's common to both Marx and Delsingvatore is this emphasis on the imperative of production, social production, social reproduction, that human beings must are compelled to reproduce themselves. And you're asking on both accounts, whether it's the desiring production accounts or the

Marxian accounts of social labor, you're saying that the structures of production are imposed what you're saying that it's like a philosophical abstraction that is being imposed on um the uh you know the reality of uh you know i'm getting a sense i i wasn't quite getting i mean what you're saying about anti-production you're saying you don't see why the category of production is indispensable to understand human behavior, human activity, human history.

Is that broadly, is that very broadly what you're asking? Completely, yes. Okay. There's two things. One is that, okay, well, for Marx, production, social production is indispensable because human beings, first of all, human beings are social beings. So in other words, which is to simply to say that they're all, you know, no human being can, you know, survive in isolation. They have to, they can only, you know, successfully live and, you know, satisfy their basic, you know, physiological requirements through some kind of collaboration.

through some kind of social collaboration. Then the claim is that the ways in which human beings organize themselves, organize relations of production, is not biologically predetermined. It's not fixed biologically. So there's a great kind of variability in the structure and the range of human social reproduction. this is what distinguishes you know human sociality from answer termites okay if you study answer termites there's no sorry sorry i understand this i understand this part of um when we when we go to structuring our lives or productive or production or so

or social surviving then we are we are we defer from um ants um such and such and such but my really maybe naive or sophisticated question is that is the first step that okay we see that we are we as human beings are this kind of these are these kind of beings we are we are i think that the los angleterre likes to say that we are trapped in associates my question is that is this is this a trap i understand that you you say that this is not a trap this is the only condition that we are we are who we are. And I'm maybe I'm asking for you to clear this this this first axiomatic first step a little bit more because do we have a historic condition of ourselves as who we are

and who we can be or who we ought to be? All these three questions can be answered in very different ways. Maybe my question is that the sociality of our production or the way of surviving, is this our destiny? Is this our destiny? Well, I mean, for Marx, no. He's saying that the point is that um you know up until now we haven't been humans have um you know reproduced themselves and kind of socially organized themselves in ways which are blind and unconscious and you know irrational which which fundamentally restrict um their their possibilities okay

In other words, he's suggesting that there's no predetermined biological limits on the horizon of human becoming. and it's merely the blindness of our historical modes of social reproduction that have prevented us from seeing, you know, from, you know, exploring the full range of possibility available to us. So Marx, that's the whole point,

that this is what human liberation consists in, is that humans, you know, what it means to be human or how to be human is precisely not predetermined, and it's neither biologically predetermined nor socially predetermined. That's Marx's radical claim. There's nothing about the, his whole critique is of all those social theorists who say these are the necessary conditions of human social reproduction. Human beings can only reproduce themselves according to these forms and these structures. That's exactly what he rejects.

So Deleuze and Guattari, it's, I mean, for Deleuze and Guattari, the problem is that it's not, you know, it's production, social production involves a repression of, you know, desiring production. and for it doesn't go sorry i mean in a way kind of you know sociality is a kind of is an impediment you know is a on the productivity of desire and you know being human is i mean human history is a is a miserable history you know it's a history of of um you know cruelty terror and cynicism

and the break that they're proposing with this kind of, you know, the break with capitalism is, but what is it exactly? It's the problem with a Dodoza Gattonian account is that it seems to entail a break with, you know, they're not, it's not clear that they're offering a non-repressive paradigm of sociality. so it's not clear how how to be human without being you know either repressing others or repressing oneself okay that's the you know the the issue with the laws and the tari I think

I don't know if this is and so if you're asking about you know but if you're asking about what it means to be human. The claim is that, of course, lots of philosophers reflect on what it means to be human in abstract, you know, abstracting from sociality. They think that that is a trivial or contingent characteristic. You know, a philosopher like Kierkegaard does not think, he thinks, has a completely negative account of sociality. That's, it's, you know, to be a human is to be a spiritual to be a spiritual creature and um you know sociality is is you know a kind

of uh an obstacle um but it's just that that's um you'd have to i mean if you reject so if you reject the idea that kind of um we can only think about humans and human possibility by taking sociality into account, then you have to explain how you're not simply abstracting. You have to explain exactly what it means, what the predicate human can mean if one doesn't factor in, if one doesn't give some account of sociality.

um i'm not sure if i'm you know addressing your question um um i understand thank you for your answer and sorry if the question was a bit irrelevant or dispersed uh if there was time at the end i would love to continue the conversation but thank you sure okay yeah we can return to this we can return to this um um okay other i'm sorry i'm not seeing all the um i can't always see what's in the chat or who's got their hands raised. So if someone, is there anyone else who had their hand raised who's been waiting a long time? Yes, it was me. Yes, there's been us, yes. Actually, it's not a question. It's a small clarification about the Greek words nomisma and nomos.

so nomisma in greek we translate it as currency or coin okay and nomos is not justice justice is it's another word but nomos derives from the verb nemo which means to distribute yes okay Which is quite important, I think. Whereas the word dhikeon, where dhikeosini, justice, derives from, dhikeon is closer to the idea of the law as a set of rules or instructions.

Okay. Yeah. No, that's very helpful. No, actually, that's very helpful. But I think the normals. So the idea of distribution is, you know, and again, this is, you know, relying on, you know, Edward Ville's account, but that what he's saying, as I understand them, is that there's a link between that money originally has this is about social distribution, but also about, but the equitable distribution. It's paying someone their due, giving someone what is owed to them. And what is owed, I mean, you're right, it's not simply kind of, you know, justice in this

completely abstract philosophical sense, but, you know, the idea of a proper due of what is, you know, rightly or properly owed to someone is indissociable from the idea, from the function of coinage okay um and his article i mean his whole article is about saying that those these two things um that the uh coin money um serves to um you know is a is an instrument of right distribution giving someone their due giving someone what is owed to them but no that's very helpful actually Thanks.

Any more questions? OK. Then maybe I can, OK. Well, shall we have a pause here? Because in a way of, yes, we should have a pause here then before continuing. OK, very good. That's a five minutes pause. Sure. So. So, I've still got quite a bit to go. So again, I'll move fast so as to try to leave time for questions at the end. Okay, so now we get to the beginning of the description of what the capital's conjunction of flows consists in.

First of all, it's capital becomes capital as filiative capital, as opposed to capital of alliance. And filiative capital is simply money generating itself, the conversion of money into capital. Capital becomes filiative when money begets money or value a surplus value. And here they simply quote Marx from the volume one of Capital. So value in process, money in process, and as such capital, or value suddenly presents itself as an independent substance endowed with a motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms, which it assumes and casts off in turn. name more. Instead of simply representing the relations of commodities,

money enters now, so to say, into relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself, a surplus value, as the father differentiates himself quite a son, yet both are one and of one age. For only by the surplus value of 10 pounds does the 100 pound originally advanced become capital that's from um you know the transformation of money into capital in uh council volume one okay now the key thing to note here is that what is an objective appearance from our say money generating itself okay that is an objective appearance you know this is how capital necessarily presents itself um but that's precisely not what it's you know

what is actually going on in reality. But what's problematic is that it seems that Deleuze and Goswami want to treat this objective appearance as a productive essence. Money becomes capital or money becoming capital without the intercession of labor power. This is a consequence of separating money and labor as two distinct flows. So here's a further characterization of their definition of capital. So we are no longer in the domain of the quantum or of the quantities, i.e. simply kind of abstract magnitudes of, you know, of of labor units of abstract labor.

but in that of the differential relation as a conjunction that defines the imminent social field particular to capitalism and confers on the abstraction as such its effectively concrete value, its tendency to concretization. So the abstraction becomes concrete through the conjunction of flows. Okay, and this concretization against is a consequence of this conjunction of flows and not of social relations. The abstraction has not ceased to be what it is, but it no longer appears in the simple quantity as a variable relation between independent terms. It has taken on upon itself the independence, the quality of the terms and the quantity of the relations.

David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David David excludes the possibility of a change in the value of its constituent parts. That's a Marx quotation. It is from the fluxion of decoded flows, from their conjunction, that the filiative form of capital, X plus DX, or M becoming M prime, results.

The differential relation expresses the fundamental capitalist phenomenon of the transformation of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux. So now this idea of a surplus value of flux is crucial. This is how they define capitalism. OK, so we have three social conjunctions. okay um with the earth we have a surplus value of code which is the conjunction of deductive filiation and alliance detachment okay then we have the second conjunct the conjunction of of the state which is overcoding which is the conjunction of divine filiation and the the new alliance you know the alliance of the sovereign and his subjects okay and finally with capital

We have the surplus value of flux, which is the conjunction of filiative credits or money, self-generating money, M to M prime, and exchange payment, or money as means of exchange, which is the other circuit described by Marx, CMC, commodity, money, commodity. you know, selling in order to buy, okay. Production as a conjunction of flows, of flows of exchange, of exchange money and credit money, eliminates labor power as a source of commodification. So what's striking, we'll see that this is what Dose and Gotari's account of capitalism

is, you know, more or less kind of willfully eliminating, is labor power as the commodity whose consumption generates every other commodity. So we can also kind of clarify this contrast between surplus value of code and surplus value of flux. Surplus value of code is the asymmetrical conjunction of codes or the productive imbalance between deducting and detaching or credit and debt. Our surplus value of flux is the asymmetrical conjunction of flows, productive imbalance between the fixed and variable capital or credit and debts.

Okay. So what Dlazenkotari calls surplus values, first of all, defined in terms of code. Okay. Despotism is the overcoding of territorial surplus value. and capitalist decoding of despotic overcoding is, again, has to be, you know, effective through what they call the surplus value of flux, okay? but this this the extraction of surplus value from the conjunction of these you know distinct flows of money on the one hand and labor on the other hand requires has to be constricted has to

be controlled and this is what they call the axiomatic the function of the axiomatic is to prevent is to permit the conjunction of decoded flows, you know, in a way, you know, in a new register, independently of coding and independently of overcoding. So finding the reduction of originary accumulation to the decoding of flows, which is what David Sloan- Those are you're doing they're saying that the conjunction of money and Labor isn't a consequence of what marks called you know originally accumulation. David Sloan- Which is the know the dispossession you know the expropriation of the means of production from the producers, this is reduced to a decoding of flows and this prepares for the elimination of surplus Labor.

and the reduction of exploitation to the creditor debtor relation in the form of the non-convertibility between two forms of money, payment money and credit money. So this is why Deleuze and Goethe now distinguish between these two forms of money. Payment debit and money, no. Money is payment debit, money is credit capital. So they write, it's not the same money that goes into the pocket of the wage earner and is entered on the balance sheet of a commercial enterprise. By the way, in what falls, the entreprise in French just means business. Okay. So enterprise, you commercial, you know, and in the also in Christian Kerslake's text, there's a, you could, whenever you see enterprise, you just replace it by business.

Okay, entreprise in French just means a business. Okay. So in the one case, there are impotent money signs of exchange value, a flow of means of payments relative to consumer goods and use values, and a one to one relation between money and an imposed range of products, which I have a right to, which are my dues, so they're mine. In the other case, signs of the power of capital, flows of financing, a system of differential quotients of production that bear witness to a prospective force or to a long-term evaluation, not realisable here and now, and functioning as an axiomatic of abstract quantity.

So, and continuing, you know, they continue this distinction. In the one case, money represents a potential break deduction in a flow of consumption. In the other case, it represents a break detachment and a re-articulation of economic chains directed towards the adaption of flows of production to the disjunctions of capital. Just a pause. So this, you know, the every case, in a way, the distinction between deduction and detachment, OK, or between affiliation and alliance reappears in every social formation.

And it's really important to see that it's now being, it's reappearing here in the account of capital. And in a way, the distinction between these two, you know, the money flow on the one hand and the labor flow on the other hand is just another iteration of this distinction between filiation and alliance, between, you know, deduction and detachment. And it's crucial to understand what they mean by surplus value of flow. The extreme importance in the capitalist system of the dualism that exists in banking has been demonstrated. The dualism between the formation of means of payment and the structure of financing, between the management of money and the financing of capitalist accumulation,

between exchange money and credit money. To understand what they mean here, we need to, and here I'm going to rely on Christian Kerslake's, really outstanding article, which I think is the only article to have done this. It actually follows up. It shows how Delos and Guattari's account here is relying on two sources. First, a Marxist economist called Suzanne de Brunhoff, and Delos and Guattari cite two works by her, L'offre de Monet, Critique d'un Concept, you know, the money offer critique of a concept

published in 1971, and Marks on Money, which is published in 67, but translated into English in 76. I think it's the only one of her works available in English. So Suzanne de Bromhoff distinguishes between credit money and payment money. Credit money is, you know, institutes a closed circuit of flux and reflux to and from individuals, okay, one individual loans money to another, you know, and then that's the flux, you know, there's a deductive flux, and then the reflux is, you know, paying back, you know, the debt, paying back the loan with interest. whereas payment money by way of contrast opens a circuit flowing from individuals to commodities

and then to individuals to commodities so payment money circulates okay in an open-ended you know series credit money is socialized in an indirect or mediated manner through the production or trading of goods, whereas payment money is socialized immediately through exchange. So here's, actually this is from Christian Kerslick's article. So he writes, and he's also citing from De Brunhoff, in a system that includes credit money, money can only assume its function of being a general equivalent of homogenous character when its convertibility

into any commodity, whatever, is in correlation with the convertibility of different sorts of money between each other. In fact, the different kinds of money only have to be actually convertible into each other under certain specified conditions, such as the mutation of loans into wages. The reference point for value is thus displaced. Money no longer has a base fixed directly by social labour.

Even if one argues that the quantity of money needed in the economy can be determined outside the monetary sphere at the level of production, the introduction of different kinds of money into the system and the guarantee of convertibility between them implies that the reference point for the value of money becomes lost in a permanent movement of confrontation and modification of equivalences. So this means two things that are important to note here, especially for de Bronhof, that money no longer has a base fixed directly by social labour, does not entail it is now wholly independent of social labour.

So even if money is not, the functioning of money is not exhausted by its being a measure of value, socially necessary abstract labor time, but it is still, it can't be entirely kind of detached from this. What fixes the monetary base over and above social labour is the political alliance between banks and states. The composition of value is determined by banks and state as well as by social labour. So that on the Brunhoff's account, class antagonism is displaced and subdivided from a straightforward opposition between social labor and capital to an opposition between social labor and capital as subdivided or decomposed into banks and states.

So here's a quotation from De Brunhoff. This is why the very notion of monetary mass can only have meanings relative to the workings of a system of credit in which different kinds of money are combined. Without such a system, one would have only a sum of means of payment that would have no access to the social character of the general equivalent and would only serve in the local private circuits. Only in the centralized banking system can the different kinds of money become homogenous and appear as the components of an articulated whole. And Kersley glosses this as follows.

So while it remains true that money is a category tied to that of commodity, the one and the other implying the socioeconomic relations proper to the commodity economy, it's in the monetary sphere, in the relations of monies between each other, that the problem of the reference value of money is settled. so for brunhoff the question of the value of money becomes subordinated to the question of how the combination of the two forms of money is affected but for you know and as kurslich emphasizes in his account for brunhoff the combination is politically negotiated between banks and states um so there's a duality the duality between the two forms of money

cannot be reabsorbed for it corresponds to the nature of money as a specific social relation dissimulating the relations of production and of reproduction of capital. And Kerslake again glosses this as follows, the duality in question cannot be reabsorbed because the two forms of money are fundamentally different. But since the duality concerns money, and money is intrinsically dissimulatory, it hides social relations, the two forms dissimulate themselves and their relation to each other. So the monetary duality, on Bernhoff's account, dissimulates the class division between

capitalist and wage laborers as well as exploitation or the extraction of surplus labor from necessary labor in the conversion of money into capital um but then deleuzes then claims that the convertibility between payments and credit money is completely fictive and that this here this is a you know, Curse quotes a Deleuze seminar from 1971, prior to Genniband's Edipus. Okay, so Deleuze claims that this, the, for Brunhoff, the duality is hiding something.

Okay. It's dissimulating the social relations, okay, and the relations of exploitation, which underwrites the functioning of money. the accumulation of money as capital. But Deleuze takes this to be a claim that the convertibility is fictive. It depends on the relation to gold. It depends on the unity of the markets. It depends on the rate of interest. In fact, it is not made in order to function. It is made, according to Suzanne de Brunhoff, in order to dissimulate the capitalist operation. The fictive convertibility, theoretical concept of one form of money to another, assures the dissimulation of how it works.

What interests me in this concept of dissimulation is that at the level that Brunhoff analyzes it, it is no longer an ideological concept, but an operational or organizational concept, i.e. the monetary circuit can only function on the basis of an objective dissimulation. the convertibility of one form of money into another in other words um this is an objective illusion and you know the uh the you know the possibility of converting you know payment money into credit money and vice versa is precisely a kind of uh you know what the laws calls an objective dissimulation. And then, but this is, you know,

Kerslake thinks that this is a misunderstanding of Bernhoff's point. Convertibility is a logical implication of the general equivalent in an economy that combines, you know, metal money and credit money. Whether the levers of monetary policy are sufficient to actualize it at any given moment is a distinct issue. So Deleuze on Kerslake's account, Deleuze takes the de facto failure of convertibility for a de jure impossibility. The convertibility is required to dissimulate the class relation and exploitation for Brunhoff.

The convertibility of exchange and credit is a political imperative serving the interests of affiliative capital failures to commensurate different credit monies are compensated for by reducing payment money um and here's um kurslich again brunshoff spheres demonstrate a clear explanatory value they point to an underlying cause of the crisis of financial crisis dematerialized speculative models to the specific character of the mechanisms used by the state to control the crisis and by virtue of her marxist position provide ways of interpreting the manner in which the expansion of the money supply is a way of protecting capitalism so it becomes easier to understand how austerity for the poor

worker students to disabled the young is the inevitable consequence of the mechanism of quantitative easing which exists primarily to support financial capital and to provide a cushion for enterprises no longer willing to risk in investing in production and here of course like it's you know the bank bailouts after the 2008 crisis okay um Austerity is used to bail out finance capital. The second source that Deleuze and Gautari are relying on when they distinguish between credit money and payment money is the French economist Bernard Schmitz.

And his book, Money, Wages and Profits from 1966, which as far as I know is not translated, maybe it is, but Kerslake doesn't cite a translation. Okay. And Kerslake's argument is that Ders and Gautari are lying Schmitt's and Brunhoff's accounts and fail to see how these are fundamentally kind of incompatible. Okay. so schmidt's here's kurslich again glossing schmidt schmidt's conception of flux and reflux is distinctive first in that schmidt treats all money on the model of flux and reflux and second in that he applies the schema to the relation of banks to the productive economy as a whole

so that the flux generated by the banks as a whole is seen as being compensated by a reflux that is channeled through production and the payment of wages as a whole. And here's a kind of a diagram from Schmidt's book, which is reproduced in Kersleek's paper. So it shows the relation between metallic stock and fiduciary payments. So you've got the metal money that's deposited in a bank account and the paper certificate for the deposits. Okay, so there's four possible cases, one in which both the, you know, the deposited metal and the, you know, the paper certificate are reserved, okay, you know, not spent.

Second case in which the deposited metal is reserved while the paper certificate is spent. The third case in which the deposited metal is lent and the paper certificate is reserved. And the fourth and final case in which the deposited metal is lent and the paper certificate is spent. And it's this fourth case which, according to Schmitt, functions as the norm. And the ratio of reserves that banks hold is calculated in reference to it. In other words, money creation is a priori built into the logic of banking. A kind of miracle is accomplished. Money acts in two directions at the same time.

As metallic money, it exercises its power of exchange to the profit of the borrower, while as fiduciary money, it keeps the same power in the service of the depositor. The same money is effective twice over since the actor and his double play at the same time. This means that the money involved is lent and spent at the same time. There is no prior fund that is loaned and banks no longer have a merely mediating function, but a creative one. The deposit is of a different nature, which Schmidt calls initial. In the latter case, one must speak of creation rather than multiplication, and of creation, strictly speaking, that is, creation ex nihilo.

Banks engage in two activities of creation by initial deposit and of mediation when it transmits a strict deposit. These two roles are distinct and one can go further. They are separated at every point. But the upshot of this is simply that the bank, the banks have this power to create money, and the bank is simultaneously the creditor and debtor to the productive economy. The lending of previously inexistent money, and this is exactly the definition of a true creation ex nihilo.

Instead of transmitting a previously existing money, the banks simultaneously induce a negative money, which is a debt inscribed on their own liabilities, and a positive money, which is the claim that the productive economy has on the banks. So here now, the difference between Schmitz and Brunholt is that instead of having two kinds of money, you've got money split in two. Money is not twofold, but split into two flows of negative debts and positive credits. Schmitz schema is as follows. The banks create money and put enterprises or businesses in credits.

The businesses then charge the money by transforming it into wages with a purchasing power calibrated to the range of currently produced goods. And finally, by selling products to workers, the enterprises generate a reflux of money to the bank and somehow at the end of the circuit yield profits for themselves. So money begets wages which beget profit. The creation of money by banks replaces the creation of value by labor. And again, for Schmidt, workers, despite being responsible for the whole product, are to be conceived merely as middlemen in the relations of credit debt between banks and businesses.

So this is why then Delazenguattari writes, you know, in a passage, you know, who steals, certainly not the finance capitalist as a representative of the great instantaneous creative flow, which is not even a possession and has no purchasing power. And who is robbed? Certainly not the worker who is not even bought, since the reflux or salary distribution creates the purchasing power instead of presupposing it. Who would be capable of stealing? Certainly not the industrial capitalist as the representative of the afflux of profit, since, and they're quoting Schmidt here, Profits do not flow in the reflux, but side by side with deviating from rather than penalizing the flow that creates incomes.

So the upshot of this Schmittian account of self-creating money is that capital is not exploitation of workers by capitalists, but social domination through an axiomatic designed to correlate monetary fluxes and refluxes and psychic domination through Udipoli's self-repression. Okay. So capital, then, when capital is described as a moving limit, because it conjoins the David Schmitt, The disjunction of credit money and payment money as a surplus value of flux.

David Schmitt, And is compelled by the incommensurability to reproduce itself as the surplus value. David Schmitt, But Brunhoff's points. Schmitt is that it is not capital, a surplus value of flux that affects the fictive convertibility of credit money and payment money, but the political, which is to say the class alliance between banks, businesses, and states. So when the Doss and Gossary will write, there's no common measure between the value of the enterprises and that of the labor capacity of wage earners. That's why the falling tendency

of the rate of profit has no conclusion. A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labor flow on which the surplus value of flow depends. And so this means the reflux of money from debtor to creditor, the reflux of money to the banks, which create money, is the source of what does not go to really call machinic surplus value. There is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital

which develops along with automation and productivity and which cannot be explained by factors that counteract the falling tendency, the falling rate of profit. The increasing intensity of exploitation of human labor, the diminution of the price of the elements of constant capital, etc. On the contrary, all these factors depend on it, on the production machinic surplus value so if investment money creates wages money then value is eliminated and the price of labor correlates with the price of goods the discrepancy between the value of labor and the value of its products disappears

so now on de leuze and qataris account capital is the moving limits between the flow of production or credit money and the flow of labor or payment money whose fictive convertibility is perpetually deferred and displaced the difference is not cancelled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature the tendency has no end it has 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 between credit money and payment money, that is by reconstituting it,

by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement. and axiomatization is the displacement of the limits okay what does in the tori called axiomatization is what allows the constant in a way the the fictive conjunction of these incommensurable flows or the fictive convertibility of credit money and payment money and as they may clear so the true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefits of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends.

capitalism then conjoins incommensurable flows by extracting a new kind of surplus value which is the surplus value of flux comprising both human and machinic surplus value or labor and money and the capitalist axiomatization serves the surplus value for it keeps the limit moving And in this sense, there's a, I think, a stark contrast between the two senses in which capital is limit or capital is organized around its own inherent limits.

For Marx, capital as moving contradiction is defined as a moving contradiction between the maximization of surplus labor and the minimization of necessary labor. Capital is the moving contradiction in that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum while it posits labor time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth. Hence, it diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the surplus form and hence posits the surplus in growing measure as a condition, question of life or death, for the necessary. So the contrast is between capital is moving contradiction between increasing surplus labor time and decreasing necessary labor time.

this moving contradiction creates an unemployed proletary you know creates the conditions for its own dissolution whereas capital as the displaced limits of the fictive convertibility between money and labor creates decoded flows that must be axiomatized okay this axiomatization is the condition of their conjunction. But Marx rights, so I mean, so that doesn't go through any late great stress on the way in which capital is capable of constantly displacing its limit, which is why it's not fundamentally disabled

or why you know the um it simply won't die this contradiction it won't be um you know exploded by its internal contradiction um whereas for marx from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it and since every such barrier contradicts its character its production moves in contradiction contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited a certain stage of its development it will allow itself to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency and hence will drive towards its own suspension

So it seems that there's an objective inversion. Deleuze and Guattari are taking the objective inversion whereby capital becomes self-generating, okay, and is always capable of, you know, ensuring the kind of defective convertibility of credit money and exchange money with its productive essence. Okay. Doesn't go, sorry, right. The apparent objective movement of capital, which is by no means a failure to recognize

or illusion of consciousness shows that the productive essence of capitalism can itself function only in this necessarily monetary or commodity form that controls it and whose flows and relations between flows contain the secret of the investment of desire but the apparent objective movement which is you know money simply you know self-creating money m m prime for Marx is the objective inversion whereby capital presents itself as unique source of wealth. For Marx, the occluded productive essence of capital is labor and self-creating money is an objective inversion transplanted in the place of a productive essence.

Need finance capital is the ultimate fetish form of capital. It's, you know, M becoming M prime without the commodity labor power. So the question, two questions is, on what basis do Deleuze and Guattari take this objective inversion to be a productive essence? And this has far-reaching consequences because it also goes hand in hand. In a way, the kind of the elimination of labor power as the necessary condition, as the indispensable component for capital accumulation, also eliminates the class antagonism.

The idea that class is defined as a division, OK, as a division between producers and, you know, appropriators of production. So when they say that this is this is a continuation of the early quote, when they say that the bourgeoisie is a decoding and decoded class, The bourgeois is justified in saying not in terms of ideology, but in the very organization of his axiomatic, because it's the bourgeois that wants to convert credit money into, you know, money, payment money. Okay, so there's a bourgeois class that, you know, axiomatizes.

There's only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow, cut off from goods, and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the casts and the statuses, and that draws from the machine an undivided flow of income convertible into consumer and production goods, a flow on which profits and wages are based. okay there's a single flow which splits into two you know into debit and credit in short the theoretical opposition is not between two classes for it is a very notion of class insofar as it designates the negative of course that implies that there's only one class one class split between decoding and recoding um which is why i'm not going to read all this but the fundamental

opposition is between class and those who are outside class okay there's no class struggle there's simply kind of the struggle between the coding and the you know and the decoding of flows between the social machines regime and that of the desiring machine but remember that the desiring machines are precisely that which is the operations of design production is what is necessarily repressed by social production. So the question is on what basis can capitalism be overcome? How is the overcoming of capital and of capitalist repression compatible with

with the institution of a new socius? That's the question. Once again, I've gone on a long time, but we've still got a few minutes for questions. So I think we can have one or two questions on this lab. want to start uh okay thank you um just a small question concerning the concept of surplus labor to whom should this concept be credited and um i thought i think i didn't get it fully since i have thought uh firstly that the context refers to the surplus labor uh force versus necessary

labor force so i mean the popularization of something like that but i think i have missed something can you please specify this concept of surplus labor sure okay so for marx the distinction between necessary labor and surplus labor um necessary labor is the labor you have to do to be able to live to reproduce your you know to reproduce yourself okay so in other words you exchange your labor power for a wage and the value of your wage you know the price of your labor power corresponds to the the value of the commodities required to reproduce it okay so now so necessary labor is the labor that you have to do to stay alive okay

It's also the labor for which you are remunerated by your employer. It's a labor, it's paid labor. Surplus labor is the labor that you do, which is not remunerated. It's a labor that produces value in excess of the value of your labor power. and in a way capitalism works always by extracting surplus labor from necessary labor in other words a capitalist wants to make sure that the value of your labor power is always less than the value

of the commodities that it produces that how the capitalist makes a profit if he doesn't do that The capitalist will not make a profit. So surplus labor in the production process is simply kind of unpaid labor. And it's the source of surplus value. Surplus labor is the source of surplus value, which then is converted into profit. And Marx also talks about the reserved army of the unemployed. But he also talks about as the, you know, because of this, the contradiction in a way, because capital seeks to extract more and more surplus value from less and less, you

know, labor, it wants to kind of increase the quantity, it wants to increase the ratio of surplus to necessary labor. It wants to be able to get more and more surplus value. from less and less no wage labor. And in doing so, it means it has to, you know, it's always trying to pay workers, you know, less and less for more and more productive labor, you know, value producing labor. That means that in the long run for Marx or according to Marx's account, it creates unemployment. His manuscript of 1944 from the actual fact that the more

valuable and the more in quantity commodities the worker produces, the less he gets, the poorer he becomes. Yes, in a way because... I have noticed this concept since when I was preparing a presentation on this manuscript, I have come to thought, I have recalled the feminist critique of Marx when the women's unpaid duties are equalized to the surplus labor, something like that. Yes. It was in the article masculine Marx or something like that I have read once before.

Yes. So I guess domestic labour, yes, is also because it's unwaged labour. So it's another kind of, you know, it's a variety of, yes, it's also a variety of surplus labour because without this unwaged domestic labour, the wage labour can't go to work, can't return, you know, labour power can't reproduce itself and can't, you know, produce more value for the capitalist. But the second sense of, you know, so that's kind of surplus labor within the production process. Also, as you rightly pointed out, in the domestic sphere, there's surplus labor going on in the form of like domestic labor.

But then there's also the other sense I think that you alluded to was simply what Marx calls the surplus labor army or the reserve army of the unemployed, which is to say, as capital kind of develops, it wants to create more and more profit by employing. And with automation, it wants to reduce, in other words, it wants to reduce the ratio of constant capital to variable capital. It wants to kind of diminish variable capital, the money reserved for wages in the production

process. It wants to employ fewer and fewer workers while getting more and more kind of surplus value out of them. while getting more and more kind of, you know, surplus value out of them. So there's more and more people who are wage laborers, in other words, who depend on selling their labor power to exist, but who can't find work. So then they become, you know, they become surplus labor in the second sense, where they don't succeed in selling their labor power. And in fact, they're no longer employable. They become effectively unemployable.

There is no labor available to them in the capitalist economy. So they become a surplus population. This surplus population. So details to capitalist machine to ensure that the cobaltists would be productive without interventions. So they. As a details which can be used in any moment when when capitalism would need these. Exactly. Yes. So that's because there's a reserved army of the unemployed. That's where it weakens the position of the employed, because if you don't accept a low wage, you're employed. They can get rid of you. There's 10 people waiting for a job. So if you complain about your wage, the capitalist can replace you with like, you know, 10, you know, there's 10 other people waiting in line who will work for less than you're willing to work for.

Thank you. So, Aaron, perhaps? Yeah, I think there was a bit of a problem in that description of labor and surplus labor when Mitzlav brought up the feminist critique of unrecognizable. I think, I don't know, maybe this was just a bit of a bit, but the idea that the concept labor is sort of central to production value

implies that the labor relation is a form that only recognizes a certain kind of labor as labor. And so in a really important sense started to be true to the feminist critique of say something like wages for housework you have to say that housework right it's not Aaron there's something going on it's very with your microphone I heard most of what you said, except the bit at the very end when you said about labour.

I got most of it until the very final point about domestic labour. Oh, just that unless it's recognized by wage, it's not labor under capitalism. It can't create surplus value, right? So despite the fact that we all depend on domestic labor to reproduce our lives, it's not, the point of the feminist critique is it's not considered labor because it's not compensated with a wage. Yes. Right. And so all of the activity that we do doesn't create value for capital and therefore isn't rewarded with a wage. And it's simply this formal relation of getting paid with a wage that is surplus value.

Sure. Right. And so trying to reincorporate more and more other activities outside of formal work is part of this way of creating more surplus value. And I guess the feminist critique of wages for housework is to try to recognize this contradiction and incorporate it in the hopes that it will cause capitalism to collapse, but we could see it not. Sure, yes. Not doing that, right? Yes, because the point is, if the point is, you know, overcoming capitalism and abolishing the commodification of labour and the wage relation, then obviously, you know, simply kind of simply including, you know, domestic labour is not socially valorised as productive labour, although it's indispensable, it's an indispensable precondition for the productivity of labour.

It's not, it's another form of like, you know, surplus labor because, you know, the capitalists don't have to pay you for it. So they just rely on it. And it can be, you know, it's like, yes, it's indispensable for the functioning of the capitalist economy. but it's another kind of free resource, a free kind of resource for the capitalist. But then the question is, I mean Marx's point is that I think what Marx means about labor, when he says that the abstract labor in general becomes socially realized only under capital because it's only under capitalism that all sorts of

of hitherto absolutely qualitatively incommensurable activities. Things are all kind of now counted as varieties of labor. But the point is that labor, for an activity to count as labor, it must be value creating. It must create an exchangeable commodity. This is, in a way, part of the problem. In a way, all human activities become subordinated to value-creating labor.

This is a form of the abstract domination of value. This is why, you know, some Marxists like Postone can say that labor, the category of labor, is an avatar of value. So the point is not about the liberation of labor, but the abolition of labor as this fundamental organizing social category, as this, you know, as this condition of social validation. So that would be the, against those who say that the communism is the liberation of labor. No, communism is the abolition of value and labor as co-constitutive, because it's only kind of socially valorized labor that counts as desirable activity under capitalism.

So, um, um, two follow-up questions to that. I'll be brief. The first is, I'm sorry, if we got, um, an account of rent in this, right. And the second is related to, yeah, this, I, what you were just talking about. I fully agree with this account that the way capitalism works is to force everyone to prioritize the creation of surplus or abstract value in all of their activities, but specifically as labor, right? And so the question then becomes still is a Guittarian account of the bourgeoisie as the only class kind of moving forward history in that if we're looking at the sort of real subsumption of that human activity by capital, everyone is

prioritizing value, right? What is it that makes the bourgeoisie special as a class or constitutes membership in the class? What concrete activity is doing more to prioritize the creation of value than other, right? Yes. Yeah, if everyone is sort of changing their behaviors and actions in the way they work in this process of subsuming their life activities to generate, to be a better worker, to generate more human capital? What is it that makes the bourgeoisie as the investor class special? Don't all workers do this? Yes, two things. Okay, I mean, that's a very interesting

observation. There's two things. One, I think there's a clear tension in Deleuze and Gouchari's account. You know, the endorsement of Schmitt's account, as Christian Kerslick rightly points out, it's completely anti-Marxist. It's a complete kind of, I mean, it's explicitly, you know, anti-Marxist. And it implies the elimination of value and exploitation. So Schmitt, there's no, you know, there's no value. You know, labour is not the kind of the substance of value, and money is not a measure of value anymore on schmidt's accounts that just so therefore there's no kind of exploitation uh there's no surplus labor or anything like that all that goes out the window and yet doesn't go sorry still talk about you know exploitation they still talk about

surplus human surplus value as well as machining surplus value although there's no such on that It's hard to see how that category, there's any room for that category if they wholly endorse Schmitt's account of money as the self-creation of money. And secondly, I mean, I think that the claim that the bourgeoisie is the only class is, well, the claim that the, in a way, because the bourgeoisie are both dominating and dominated. The bourgeoisie, you know, the relation of, you know, dominating to dominate has become entirely internalized,

and the capitalist subject is the bourgeois subject. The bourgeois subject, you know, the edipolized bourgeois subject that, you know, kind of has, you know, succeeded in repressing his or her, you know, desires. And this repression is the condition of, you know, investments. It's a condition for the, you know, the flux and the reflux of money, okay, which is, you know, central to the, you know, the functioning of the capitalist economy on this account. So, in a way, the bourgeoisie are the single class not because they are the source of value.

It seems that there's no value is no longer in the picture at all, but nor are they the exploiting class. They are simply the class in a way that embodies the self-repression of desire, the self-repression of desiring production, which defines capitalism. But, you know, in a way, the claim is that the, look, here, you have to remember the context in which this book is written. So this book is written in the fall of 68, when the claim that the, you know, the working class, you know, a revolutionary subject has, you know, has become implausible.

kind of you know there's a crisis in kind of you know in marxism and leftism because it seems that the working class no longer are no longer in there was a revolutionary agency and why because they're more content with you know they've been provided with all the kind of you know the luxury commodities you know that they would otherwise you know the standard of living to be raised so that there's no sense in which they are kind of, you know, downtrodden and depressed in the way in which they were previously. So the claim is that, you know, the working class is no longer the seat of revolutionary subjectivation and of opposition to capital. So in a way, it's only that only the

only the bourgeoisie in so far as that they are the kind of the um you know the class that embodies the the self-repression of desire they're also the ones that can kind of facilitate the decoding that subvert the axiomatization of capital that inhabits the decoding of flows. And this is why, so in this claim, the opposition division class and those who are outside class, is that it's the bourgeoisie. It's the critique of the bourgeoisie is the only vector of revolutionary critique.

And this is a problem, okay? Because it's the claim that the only thing there is to criticize in capitalism is kind of bourgeois subjectivation, okay? You know, bourgeois habits, bourgeois tastes, bourgeois codes. And you don't do this in the name of a positively valorized, you know, proletarian class or kind of, you know, proletarian subjectivity. You do in terms of, you know, the dissolution of bourgeois subjectivity and the subtraction from class, okay? So the ones who are, you know, the servants of the machine and those who sabotage our cogs and wheels,

who would, well, these are the kind of, you know, the schizos, you know, the mad, all the marginalized, okay? All those who are, you know, déclassé, which is all those who are kind of unclassed, okay? So those who are, you know, neither, who are not bourgeois but not working class, certainly not proletarians. And it's, in the context in which this book is written, that claim had a, you know, you know, had lots of echoes, okay, had a wide resonance, because it's, the claim was that capitalism isn't about exploitation and domination. It's about the problem of capitalism,

the problem of consumption. And they say this at the end of the book, the problem is how to distribute the social surplus, how to consume the social surplus. And it's, in a way, axiomatization is a way of consuming the social surplus capitalist wealth in a way which reinforces you know the you know self-repressing the self-repression of desire so the claim is that there must be new ways of enjoying okay new kinds of new ways of you know producing enjoyment that will subvert this capitalist, you know, the capitalist codification of enjoyment and of production.

And although Deleuze and Guattari will later contrast kind of desire to pleasure, it's Foucault who will talk about pleasure, and you know, Deleuze and Guattari, you know, they don't like that, they want to talk about kind of production or joy, it's really a similar problematic that motivates them. The problem is ultimately of, you know, what to do with kind of, problems of surplus enjoyment, okay, what to do with, to find a way of consuming this, you know, the excesses generated by capitalist deterritorialization in a way

that would somehow kind of destabilize the capitalist axiomatic. And here, you're no longer talking about class struggle. It's no longer class struggle. It's about coding and decoding. It's a struggle between codes, not a struggle between classes. I don't know if that addresses your question. I think so, for now at least. I mean, I think we'll have to leave off, but it is helpful. It just doesn't seem to me, I mean, I'll go back over my typical point, which is that communism as an ideal doesn't, I don't know how you reframe what, what communism could be in the

this situation without purposive subjects doing things for reasons. Yeah, but you don't, and which is why, as Kerslake rightly points out, by the time of, you know, a thousand plateaus, they've completely ditched, you know, Marx is gone. They've ditched Marx, and they've completely endorsed kind of Schmidt's schema. And it's all about, it's all about micropolitics. This is, you know, the beginning, the inception of the micro political micro political struggle which is about the struggle of desire just you know the struggle to kind of to liberate desire um as the replacement for you know for class struggle okay for um you know struggles over property okay and etc etc

um all right and i think i think we should probably wrap up by now i'm a bit late already so um yeah i don't know anyone that wants to make questions perhaps we can save it for later or as we usually suggest we can send him by email i don't know so um yeah Yeah, I'm sorry. Do you want to just say anything, Ray? Just about this, it's very difficult. I apologize for this because I know that people are like, you know, typing in the chat. I find it very difficult to kind of concentrate and monitor what's going on in the chat at

the same time. So, and I realize that this means that people are saying things that I'm not picking up on. And I apologize to that. and i know that there's lots of you who haven't had a chance to kind of you know to say anything or to ask questions but please if you have you know if you have something that you want to say and you're frustrated because you haven't had a chance to say it um you can you know let me know you know let me know at the beginning of the next session or whatever and um you know you can email if you don't if you're not comfortable emailing me you know you can let me know in some other way but But yeah, because I know it's difficult to give everyone a chance to speak when it's such a big class.

So yes, if you feel you haven't had a chance to speak and would like to, just please let me know. So next week, we don't have classes. And then we go back to? Yes. So next, yeah. I can't do so next Saturday is the 12th so there won't be a class next Saturday the next class will be on the 19th the same time the 19th and we'll start with Mark's but I'll send the the reading for that for that session okay and in the meantime yes I'll meet with Despina to talk about

her presentation and miss sorry is it i'm mispronouncing can you tell me how to pronounce your name um because i'm sure i'm not pronouncing it correctly um you you also submitted a presentation is uh mislove are you there you yes i'm here i have uploaded my presentation already okay but how do i pronounce your first name mstislav mstislav okay i'll get it right i'm sorry i'm sorry for a man even natives sometimes misspell it okay okay okay okay um okay thanks um shall we stop there for today yeah all right then see you everybody in

Okay. Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you.