Despite Its Sharpness, A Fabulous Discussion Does Not Succeed In Penetrating The Enigma Of Capital
(Excerpts from discussions held in 1973)
Félix: There is a fundamental critique: your distinction between productive facilities - and these would not be the public facilities - and the collective facilities as non-productive, has as its consequence that you don’t see their proper nature, i.e., as production of anti-production, and fundamentally you don’t situate them as something that produces, above all produces socius, as an element of anti-production of socius. This is why your dichotomy does not work in certain cases, and it is not by coincidence that you at the end say you haven’t talked about circulation. The circulation facilities, which to me are essential, are both anti-productive-since they block circulation (customs, borders, etc) - and create circulation, which is the very essence of productive production.
You say that the collective facility is a “means of territorial inscription.” But it is an inscription only in a secondary sense, above all it is a means of production/anti-production of a differential socius. In any form of society, there is a stratification of preceding forms of society, and this law founds the pseudo-unity, let us say the body without organs, of a socius that could be the city or entities like a nation (the nation as the ideal of the nation, my country, I am a Turk). There are remains of a Neolithic organization in Oriental despotism; but in capitalism too you find a Neolithic organization at the level of the family, at any level… Why this hierarchization and stratification? The most deterritorialized flows contaminate, corrupt, and transform earlier strata into residues, so that they now become walled in to the totality. The distinction between representative public facilities (I am making a caricature of what you’re saying, but let’s assume you actually said it) and productive public facilities has no foothold, since the public facilities of the state represent the irruption of the most deterritorialized flows, which in a sense also are the most productive ones, since they articulate the preceding stratified productions. It is the production of an obligatory non-confessional education that allows the capitalist machine, the decoded flows of work, to be brought together within capital, otherwise there would be no flows of work, work would remain caught up in territories belonging to feudalism, the manufactures, the corporations. Thus obligatory non-confessional education, as a state institution, is what releases the productive industrial flows. Public facilities (learning how to write) is at the root of every production. And what is being produced, is State capitalism avant la lettre.
François: There is no essential difference between the information flows that are produced and recoded on the level of education, and the flow of machines, raw materials, and workers. The only difference is on the level of representation: in capitalist representation there is on the one hand production facilities like factories, installations for economic production, on the other hand education, child education, etc. Within representation there is a dichotomy, but in the reality of flows there is always production: flows of commodities, goods, etc, and of education and information.
Félix: It’s not on the same level. The production of education, i.e., of labor force, is the most deterritorialized of them all, the one that causes the other productions to hook into each other. Its really a super-production: the essence of production is totalized on the level of state education, in the public facilities. As what concerns productive facilities, then it is first and foremost the public state facilities that are productive in this sense, since the others are productive only in a secondary sense, and are dependent on this organization.
What produces this anti-production? I would like to suggest a general definition of this type of public institution that produces the most deterritorialized of flows: the produce the axiomatization of capitalism, and the divide the production into one part which is received and accepted within a given social order, and one part which is rejected. The schools for instance produce the dichotomy literate-illiterate, different types of technical teaching that allow the flows to be qualified and axiomatized in relation to production. Other public facilities allow other dichotomies to be established: free-imprisoned, insane-normal, village fool-city fool. It is the task of the public institution to produce a certain subject, a productive social atom put into circulation.
You write: ”the public institution is the non-family territory where state sovereignty is directly exerted (neither capital nor family)." This production takes place through axiomatization: the public facilities are the axioms of capital. This idea of axioms seems important to introduce where you only speak of coding, since you seem to be doing a kind of movement on the spot: there is a coding for primitive territories, an overcoding within despotism, and then you return to a conception of coding in capitalism. But this is not self-evident, for the role of the capitalist axiomatic is precisely to over-decode that has occurred within despotism and give it an axiomatic regulation. This is why the different element-hospital, school, road, etc-do not function as an internal coding of their sectors, but only in relation to other systems; i.e., it is only when you have a totality of axioms (production of education, of madness, of this and that) that an axiomatization of capital becomes possible, but there is no internal coding as such, which is different from a facility like for instance a medieval monastery. There you find a particular coding, one produces Benedictine monks, which might explain why the rise of capitalism demands that the monasteries be deprived of their power over child raising, education and health care-one needs an axiomatizing agency on the level of the state that homogenizes all the productions, instead of leaving those types of archaic strata as they are, like the professions in the guild in system and similar things.
I find your idea of a filiation between public facilities very interesting. If we turn back to what I have been trying to sketch, we find a key to understanding this filiation, and this is what I call a machinic phylum, i.e., when there is a flow more deterritorialized than the others that joins the dance, then you can be sure that this flow will not organize or overcode the other organizations, but run them to the ground. When there is a flow of writing or a specific military organization, this changes everything except the stratified residuums. Thus the filiation (the machinic phylum) is really what is most deterritorialized in the whole organization. There is always a vector in the organization that leads toward the most deterritorialized point, which at a given moment can be, for instance, bank capital, industrial capital, etc, virtually anything. And it is around this most highly deterritorialized point that the strongest anti-production is organized, with the purpose of fighting and reducing this risk. And there we find the ambiguity pushed to its extreme: on the one hand, we have the summit of production on the level of the state and public facilities; on the other hand the summit of anti-production to the extent that it is precisely there that things have to be stopped: in sectors like the military industry and the cops we find the internalized, œdipalizing repression...
François: On the level of economic representation we no doubt find a difference between those facilities that control the ”fluxion” of flows, their circulation (the post, etc), and facilities like the hospital: the issue is circulation of capital vs. production of capital. Capital is produced where there is a work process, and then its is made to circulate, it passes form one point to another, from one work process to another.
Félix: But we surely don't agree on this!
François: If this is the case, then it's only a question of words. The form for territorial inscription of the work process determines what type of circulation, and thus also what type of facilities for circulation, that will be created. This is a possibility a priori to avoid the kind of ideology you find in for instance Pirenne, that consists in saying that cities are placed where there is circulation, whereas we have started from the hypothesis that the inscription of cities on the territory would predetermine the axes of circulation.
Félix: I don't care about Pirenne for the moment. Production of circulation is already as such a weird expression, since production in itself is a circulation. Every production is a flow. The flow is already a circulation. When there is production of circulation, it is because a particular form of work has been caught up in a field of deterritorialization; in other words, when there is production of circulation, it is because there exists, at a certain level (spatial and social), an axiomatization of production to which all other productions are subordinated to it. The production of circulation axiomatizes production in its entirety, in a certain sense it is the root of all production. It is because if the great adventurers, the insanity of those that sought out to explore for whatever reasons, missionaries of all sorts, that the capitalist flows could get a grip and establish commercial bases. It is because of the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, because flows were created leading there, that cities began to swarm along the way. This does not mean that these flows should be understood as rivers; they are perhaps the last of all the flows to intervene, perhaps with the exception of the Nile, as you point out. But there is an axiomatization of production, at least within capitalism. In other systems there are blocks, ways of coding production that prevent it from becoming generalized.
This is why I say one should not assume one coding of production for education, another for the French Postal System, or for the preservation of artworks: the totality of these productive facilities constitute the axioms of capital, and organize the regulation of all that is produced, which also includes the pee-and-caca of the child. The pee-and-caca of the child is axiomatized in the Ministery through the pre-schools, the training of the teachers, doctors, pediatrics. You cannot overlook the Postal System, the Ministery of Education, if you want to understand the child’s pee-and-caca: this is what psychoanalysts do. But no!
François: In feudal coding and inscription all flows are inserted into certain types of relations of productions: guilds, exploitation in the family, personal dependencies, this is the real feudal coding: each man at his place, etc. Then comes capital, which in an obvious way deterritorializes all these flows on the proper sense, for instance by tearing the workers away from their small factories, their small unions, and sending them off somewhere else where they will spend all of their lives since they have no time for anything else but sleeping. The very organization of the production process in the capitalist factory, in the first capitalist schools, implies a form of hierarchy, an exertion of despotism, a territorial organization of the factory, of the school, of the hospital, that does not inhere in capital’s way of transforming into value. When the American capitalists realized that this despotic exertion of authority was not necessary for the transformation into value, and that they through management could decentralize and create facilities by saying: fuck you, the only thing that counts for us is the profit ration, the transformation to value, do whatever you like, work day and night, fuck if you want, we don’t care, then you see that the particular form of coding (for one has to call it coding, since the image one gets its undeniably that of the pyramid-shaped hierarchy of the despot is unimportant for the transformation of capital to value.
Félix: You have now given an inverted definition of what you just said. It’s not about coding, they’re saying: “All of your codes, we don’t give a shit. You may fuck, do it two or ten at at time, what counts is axiomatics.” In this sense there is no longer a coding, but an over-coding.
François: Precisely. With the reservation that up until now, until the new order, all existing public facilities, even the so-called productive ones (in economical terms), have been organized in a despotic way.
Félix: Every time you make me jump! First we say that the threat has always been capital, even among the Zulus, it is always there as a decoded flow. And we say that it is such a threat that were it is threatens the most, there one realises the strongest anti-production. The school, the hierarchy, the despotism, the territorialism you speak of in the factory, are there precisely as an anti-production directed against this threat, against the machinic phylum. But capitalism is forced to constantly expand its own axioms, since they nature of the flows is to explode in your hands: if you want electronic factories to function, you cannot take peasants and have them work like slaves, you have to give them space, otherwise it doesn’t work. Capitalism has to change, has to abandon, it always tries to recode, overcode, create oligopoles, but something eludes its grasp, something doesn’t work. The axiomatic is such that capitalism is unable to reach it.
Extracts from “Une discussion fabuleuse ne parvient pas, malgré son âpreté à percer l’énigme du capital,” in Recherches no. 13, 129-134. Translation by Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
