February 22, 1972

I would like to come back to the structure and the state of flows in the capitalist state. Our problem is always how the flows flow over the full body of this society; how flows flow over the body without organs of money since money capital is, literally, the socius of capitalist society. I would like to try to show that capitalist society, in its very economy, forms a system of immanence: capitalist immanence has three aspects that must be defined at the economic level. It is a matter for us of knowing how the libido in a social field invests flow. And if it is true that libidinal investment is an investment of flows, the status of flows in a social formation will have to inform us about the nature of social investments, collective investments, unconscious investments in the social field itself.

Seminar Introduction

The opening seminars  at Vincennes (1970-71 & 1971-72) not only provided a site for the ground work from which Anti-Oedipus emerged, but also the transitional discussions with which the long sequence of ‘plateaus’ would be developed. As Deleuze indicates in the opening seminar, he had already spent the 1970-71 academic year outlining the ongoing collaboration with Félix Guattari. Thus, with the book’s publication quite imminent (appearing in early 1972), these sessions allow Deleuze to refine the ongoing developments with Guattari, most notably concerning the tasks of schizoanalysis and the intersection of the fields of political economy and psychoanalysis, as well as the continuing dominant and oppressive impact of this intersection both on society and subjectivity. Note that Deleuze and Guattari had only published one essay derived from this ongoing collaboration, titled ‘La synthèse disjonctive’, in L’Arc 43 (on Klossowski), 1970, 54-62, but with the publication of Anti-Oedipus, numerous interviews will appear in 1972, notably in L’Arc 49 (on Deleuze) and in La Quinzaine littéraire 143 (16-30 June 1972).

 

English Translation

Edited

Beginning in progress, the session continues Deleuze’s reflections on socio-economic theories under capitalism and their relationship to schizophrenia and psychoanalysis, with the session’s main topic being the structure and status of flows in the capitalist State. Deleuze addresses how flows traverse the monetary body without organs by considering the “system of immanence” of capitalist society, specifically how the libido invests flows in a social field, linked to the collective and unconscious investments in this very social field. The first aspect addressed is the system of differential relations between decoded flows (the axiomatic’s very definition), on the levels of industrial capital, financial capital, and merchant capital. Raising a second aspect, Deleuze emphasizes the infinite nature of accumulation, labor’s flow ceaselessly deterritorialized, capital’s flows ceaselessly decoded, capitalism gleefully extending its machine to its limit only in the schizo flow, schizophrenia as the limit of capitalism’s decoding and deterritorializing. This process corresponds to how Deleuze understands the axiomatic’s mode of functioning and argues that all axiomatics are the means of drawing science into the capitalist market as abstract, decoded Oedipuses. Deleuze locates such abstract Oedipal expressions in art and music, providing a detailed analysis of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, concluding that in art, Oedipus can cause awful expressions of the great phallus-Oedipus-anus trilogy. Deleuze returns to distinctions between codes and flows: whereas the codes in the primitive machine can only be composed in their indirect relations as finite blocs, not the same as flows, the axiomatic reveals no quality of flows outside their relations, with capitalism inventing the infinite on the economic level, and the axiomatic being a finite operation working on infinite matter. Whereas psychoanalysis initially applies the social axiomatic, at once capitalism’s social coordinates regarding subjectivity, Deleuze suggests that psychoanalysis sought to impose its own axiomatic, or finite principles, hence a structural Oedipus, again, the axiomatic initiating formal relations between fluid quantities. He concludes in response to a student question about the body without organs under capitalism which encompasses money as a tool and thereby causes something to be produced, to flow.

Gilles Deleuze

Anti-Oedipus I, 1971-1972

Lecture 7 – February 22, 1972

Transcript: WebDeleuze; transcript modified by Charles J. Stivale

Translation: Billy Dean Goehring

Code Surplus value – The Wasp and the Orchid – Oedipus, Musical Axiomatics (Stockhausen), Finite Blocks, Axiomatics – Aspects of Capitalist Immanence

… A perfectly good argument levied against anti-psychiatry: yeah, anti-psychiatrists are people who say, “Hurray for schizophrenia”—and they ascribe to [R.D.] Laing the idea that anti-psychiatry boils down to arguing that schizophrenia is what’s actually healthy. It’s such a misrepresentation.

I’d like for us to recall Laing’s basic idea, which isn’t at all what this article’s author claims it to be. Laing’s position is that schizophrenia ought to be understood as part of a process, and the question he asks is: how are schizophrenic patients produced? And he explores that question in the following way: do they come about following a schizophrenic process, or is it the opposite, i.e., are they the result of that process being interrupted, from its protracted absence, from its aggravation? And far from ignoring the fact that schizophrenic patients are suffering and unwell, he thinks they’re all the more so, since their being made into schizophrenics is linked, not to what we might call the schizophrenic process, but to what we should recognize as the interruption of such a process. It’s so dishonest to attribute to Laing and other anti-psychiatrists the idea that schizophrenia, as a diagnosis, is something to be admired.

Because there’s something else going on that gets overlooked: this same author explains how the main thing troubling psychiatrists is their fraught relationship with their patients. Not a word about what really stresses out young psychiatrists, namely, how from the very beginning, psychiatrists have not only had to help people re-adjust, but have had to act as quasi-police, policing patients in troubling ways. What’s the point of involuntary admissions, which aren’t about figuring out madness, but figuring out who to send to a psychiatric hospital—to what extent administration and psychiatry work together when it comes to involuntary admissions—what about medical-legal files that come down hard on any children who are the least bit disturbed, even those who are emotionally unstable and who actually have a psychiatric record? This Nouvel Observateur article doesn’t mention it at all. You might remember how a prisoner named Buffet took two hostages at Clairvaux Prison and ended up killing them. Shortly after, the Minister of the Interior made a statement to prefects, something like: You should be on high alert regarding open hospitals, after seeing what happened at Clairvaux. The current campaign is moving toward a more rigid structure for internment.[1]

I’d like us to go back to the state of flows and how they’re structured in the capitalist state. Our problem is always how flows run along the surface of the full body of such a society, how flows run along the body without organs of money, since money-capital is, strictly speaking, the socius of capitalist society. I’d like to try to demonstrate that capitalist society, in the very form of its economics, forms a system of immanences. Capitalist immanence has three aspects, which we should describe economically. For us, the point is to figure out how the libido invests flows in a social field. But if it’s true that libidinal investment is an investment of flows, the state of flows in a social formation ought to clue us in on the nature of the social investments, the collective investments, the unconscious investments within the social field itself.[2]

The first aspect of capitalist immanence has to do with a system of differential relationships between decoded flows (the first definition of axiomatics). These relationships have shown up at varying levels. They’ve shown up first at the level of industrial capital: a differential relationship between two flows with different capacities [de puissance différente], between incommensurable flows, the flow of capital and the flow of labor. These flows are incommensurable in that they have different capacities, and at the same time, they’d still only be virtual, mutually independent, i.e., independent of their reciprocal determination. And then, at the same time, in terms of financial capital, we saw a differential relationship between the flow of finance and the flow of revenue or payment. It’s not about there being two forms of money, it’s that money contains both of these forms, they’re two sides of the same coin. On one side, as money-capital, there’s a financial flow, and on the other side, there’s a flow of revenue or wages. Then we saw a third sort of differential relationship at the level of market capital, namely the differential relationship between what could be called the market flow and the flow of knowledge, or innovation.

I always come back to Marx has famously written on the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall.”[3] The gist of these passages is that, in capitalism, obviously there have been developments with machines and even automation. As automation improves, human labor becomes more and more closely bound to the machine. How then can we maintain that capitalism is based on human surplus value, with human surplus value being exported according to the flow of human labor, when it comes to the development of machines in at least some parts of capitalism, where human labor is increasingly tied to machines, and where are machines more and more productive? It seems that human surplus value is steadily declining in capitalism. [Maurice] Clavel, who isn’t an economist and doesn’t pretend to be an economist, asks Marxist economists to explain how they can maintain both that capitalism depends on human surplus value and that, at the same time, machines appear to be getting more and more productive, and human labor more and more tied to them.[4]

Now, Marx says: yes, there is a tendency for relative surplus value to fall, but there are multiple independent factors counteracting this tendency. We only find one of these factors in our third differential relationship: when it comes to the parts of capitalism that get automated, what happens? First off, when does capitalism invest in so-called innovation (innovating machines and automation)? We all know that it doesn’t make such an investment to keep up with science and technology; it’s based on profitability of project in question, the venture’s profitability defined in terms relative to other ventures in the broader market. Which implies that areas with high levels of innovation—see the book, Monopoly Capital, from Maspero[5]—implies that, by contrast, there are areas where old and outdated equipment is maintained, and where machines are only invested in when it’s possible to lower the cost of production, which involves how the innovating business relates to businesses that have to keep their equipment in another area, and to the general market.

This third differential relationship is, as neo-economists say—the knowledge flow or the innovation flow in capitalist regimes—it’s proprietary, it’s paid, paid on the basis of an innovation flow and a knowledge flow, which is financially just like the revenue flow, the payment flow we discussed earlier in the context of finance capital. On the other hand, the market flow, where innovation is inscribed and which determines the latter’s profitability, has a completely different character and an incommensurable capacity [puissance]—the case of a typically capitalist differential, a differential relationship between quantities that don’t have the same capacity, by all appearances. For example: the form of money used to pay for innovation isn’t the same as that used to ascertain the profitability of said innovation. Thus, we end up with three fundamental differential relationships corresponding to three fundamental forms of capital.

This system of differential relationships represents a fundamental shift in the capitalist machine compared to non-capitalist societies; generally speaking, the phenomenon of surplus value does not begin with capitalism. Surplus value is actually a component in all social formations. What we should say, however, is that, for non-capitalist social arrangements, surplus value is a surplus value of code. For example, there is a feudal surplus value, a despotic surplus value, because you get surplus value whenever there is surplus labor. Now, non-capitalist societies already have surplus labor, already have surplus value—only it’s a surplus value of code. A surplus value of code; how might that work? It’s almost as though there were a chain, a signifying chain, and then all of a sudden it intercepts a fragment of another chain. Bizarre, this phenomenon of interception. What I’m saying is that there are chains everywhere you look; there isn’t one single chain. A major signifier is like a strip, where there are a ton of things going by, then one fragment intercepts another.

There’s an orchid, for example, and this orchid’s flower bears an incredible likeness of a wasp.[6] What’s more, it [the flower] forms both bodies, bizarrely. The orchid’s phylogenetic chain snatches up a fragment of a completely different chain: a wasp—there’s a biologist who works on this, which he calls “aparallel evolution”—the signifying chain of the wasp, where the wasp’s code and the orchid’s code suddenly collide.[7] The orchid forms the pattern of a female wasp, to the point where the male wasp is fooled and lands on the orchid, believing he’s found a female wasp. It’s a well-known short-circuit, an interception between two chains.

I’d argue that in this area, there’s a surplus value of code; it’s like an animated code. A sort of bio-code pounces onto a fragment of a completely different code and appropriates it. Here, the orchid starts to depict female wasps. I’m simply assuming that that’s how surplus value works in non-capitalist societies: at the level of code, there are jumps, what [Marcel] Griaule also calls the fructification of wealth, that show up as interceptions between chains of instances of surplus value. Such surplus value is a surplus value of code.[8]

With capitalism, what’s the major shift? With capitalism, there’s no longer a surplus value of code. How does it work under capitalism, looking specifically at code? There’s this sort of conversion of surplus value: surplus value ceases to be that of code and becomes a surplus value of flow. One of the outcomes of capitalism isn’t the existence of surplus value—since, again, it existed before—but the transformation of code surplus value into flow surplus value. And the surplus value of flow results from the differential relationship between the different types of flow that we were just discussing. I’d also say that the differential relationship between the flow of capital and the flow of labor generates what we ought to call human surplus value, since it’s produced from human labor. The differential relationship between finance/revenue flows generates what we might call financial surplus value. And lastly, the third market/innovation relationship generates a specifically machinic surplus value. Those are the three forms of flow surplus value in capitalist systems.

As for how the most sterile, the sterile body, the unproductive body of money, can manage to produce something—in other words, if money is x, how can this x be added to a “+ Dx” which stands for the fluctuation and fructification of money? The answer comes to us in the following way: behind the fluctuation itself is the differential relationship between flows. In other words, if we write capital/surplus value as x + Dx, where does Dx come from? It always comes from these Dy / Dx sort of differential relationships, such as the three we just saw with human surplus value, financial surplus value, and machinic surplus value.

I’d like to return to the idea that none of these flows can be defined independently, since their differential relationship is one of reciprocal determination. There’s no flow of capital if wealth is not convertible into means of production. It can be converted into means of production only when the capitalist encounters the worker who possesses nothing but his/her labor force. In other words, capital as industrial capital remains purely virtual if the capitalist cannot find anyone selling their labor on the market. And conversely, the worker is only virtually a worker if they do not find the capitalist to buy their labor force. In other words, both of these flows—the flow of labor and the flow of capital—are incommensurable and caught up in a reciprocally determining relationship, to the point that one cannot be determined outside its differential relationship with the other.

It’s not at all a two-part sequence where, on the one hand, capitalism decodes and deterritorializes flows and then introduces an axiomatic to salvage it. Strictly speaking, it’s in one fell swoop, and that’s why, from the very outset, state capitalism—as historians well know, there’s never been the slightest contradiction between private capitalism and state capitalism. In the very same move, capitalism substitutes an axiomatic for ruined code. That way, the differential relationships already fill in some of the immanence of the capitalist machine, this immanence being like the hollow of money-capital. That’s clear enough.

This second aspect amounts to saying that, not only does it work, and not only does it presuppose decoded and deterritorialized flows, but it decodes more and more, deterritorializes further and further. Capitalism only appears to reintroduce code. There’s an axiomatic of money; at any given moment, everything in the machine is simultaneous. It decodes, it deterritorializes at every turn: the deterritorialization of the worker and their decoding is never done. We shouldn’t interpret primitive accumulation as something that only happened early on—primitive accumulation doesn’t stop! The flow of workers doesn’t stop getting deterritorialized; the flow of capital doesn’t stop getting decoded. It’s always too coded for capitalism’s needs, even though, in another sense, it hasn’t been coded from the very beginning.

At the same time, it must be said: mutant capital, short-term capital, this sort of capital migration, all this about decoding and deterritorialization—it shouldn’t be taken as metaphorical. These are physical processes, economic-physical processes. For all other societies, there was only the fear that flows would decode and deterritorialize, and the prayer in these societies was: God, spare us from the flood! God, don’t let anything spill over. And all desire was involved; all of society’s libidinal investments were involved—keep this horrible thing from happening, this unspeakable thing, i.e., flows running with no code, flowing with no lands [terres].

Yet, on the other hand, here capitalism is, fat and happy; it’s a really devious turn of events. There’s this wicked illustration by some Englishman: people are crying in a movie theater—we don’t know why; we can’t see the screen. And there’s a little old man tucked away in the corner alone, who looks ridiculously spiteful, with beady little eyes, and he’s busting a gut. It must be a vampire movie. Everyone’s crying, but he’s laughing. Well, that’s capitalism. In what way does the machine work even harder with capitalism? This is the second aspect of capitalist immanence: looking at the capitalist flow itself, without qualifying it any further, an unnamable thing flowing over the body of money-capital—it’s the flow of the unnamable, the unnamable out on a stroll. It’s the flow whose limit is the schizo flow. In this sense, schizophrenia is the external limit of all decoding and all deterritorialization… [Interruption]

… Schizophrenia as the limit for the processes of decoding and deterritorialization. In that sense, capitalism does have an external limit, and saying that its external limit is schizophrenia is just another way of saying that it functions on the basis of decoded and deterritorialized flows. Hence capitalist economic processes and schizophrenic circuits are tightly intertwined. They don’t cross wires because they describe different domains. But were we to make a sort of topography of so-called short term migrant capital, it would be constantly moving, deterritorializing. And were we to map the migrations of Beckett’s characters, the great Schizo stroll, from an economic perspective, it wouldn’t be any different. It all falls under the heading of deterritorialization and decoding, where schizophrenia is indeed the external limit. But it’s true of the flows coursing over the surface of capital in and of themselves—it’s their external limit.

And at the same time, we’ve seen that capitalism constantly counteracts its tendency, i.e., it fends off its limit. It’s what I had proposed as an equivalent for the Marxist principle of declining surplus value: [capitalism] tends towards a limit that it perpetually resists; it constantly counteracts its tendency. The making of Schizos is fundamentally capitalist production. From the point of view of our differential relationships, it’s an unconsumable product. It keeps driving away its own limit, to the point that we could say it has no external limit, that it only has internal limits, those of capital itself, internal limits that are constantly reproduced on a larger and larger scale. That’s what I was getting at last week regarding Bernard Schmitt and his theory of financial capitalism.[9] He highlighted how the reproduction of capitalism by no means occurs in the form of extensive reproduction; it happens sporadically through destruction-creation, according to the notorious capitalist understanding of money-economies—creating money, destroying money, creating money—and that at each sphere of destruction-creation, there’s a sort of widening of limits. The way it happens isn’t contained at all; like everything that happens on a full body’s surface, it takes place in intensity.

In that regard, flows do have an external limit in capitalism: schizophrenia, the schizo flow, the schiz-flow. But just as they’re caught up in differential relationships that make up an axiomatic, their external limit is constantly warded off. Strictly speaking, this machine has no external limit. From the perspective of its flows, there are, [but] there not from the point of view of the differential relationships between flows. On the other hand, the differential relationships between flows always have internal limits set by the state of capital and the differential relationships between the three differential relationships themselves, i.e., the second-degree differential relationships between industrial capital, finance capital, and market capital. There are thus internal limits that constantly get reproduced on a larger and larger scale. This is the second aspect of capitalist immanence as an economic system: the reproduction of internal limits on an ever-wider scale, this way of countering the external limit of decoded flows by substituting prior limits that refer to the differential relationships between decoded flows and that are constantly reproduced on a wider scale.

How does an axiomatic work, in the most concrete terms possible? Even if we approach the word through its mathematical roots—I don’t believe that’s where we’ll get its true meaning—there’s a social aspect to it; true axiomatics is social and not scientific. Scientific axiomatics is only one method whereby flows of science, flows of knowledge, are stored and maintained in the capitalist machine. It’s no good to assume that the notion of axiomatics is consistent. Scientists do, because axiomatics allow them to ensure a kind of consistency. In fact, it’s a thoroughly inconsistent notion; it’s a mess, from top to bottom. An axiomatic consists of a process. But it’s never fully exhausted by this process. What’s more, this process is always anti-axiomatic, i.e., it’s something that flows, and in flowing, increasingly verges toward its limit, toward a schizz. And the role of axiomatics is to counteract, to compensate for its limit, to bring it all back as best it can, not a code, but to substitute internal limits corresponding to the differential relationships between decoded flows, to substitute that for the very process of decoding flows in and of themselves.

Axiomatics follows the process of decoding and substitutes a combinatorial system for faulty codes, i.e., what it loses at one end it makes up for at the other. Every axiomatic is a way of tying science back to the capitalist market. All axiomatics are abstract forms of Oedipus; they’re processes of abstract oedipalization, oedipalization without mommy and daddy. It consists in axiomatizing decoded Oedipus [missing text]… The ever-widening scale is—we add an axiom, we rework the axiomatic, something leaks [fuit] out the side. The axiomatic no longer holds—you rework the axiomatic, you re-axiomatize.

I’d like to offer an example from art and music. There’s a certain trend in contemporary music towards combinatorial or axiomatic music. One of the most brilliant representatives—you’ll understand where Oedipus fits in: there’s a figurative Oedipus, the little daddy-mommy-me triangle, and we have to ask ourselves what it has to do with capitalism. It’s not enough to point to bourgeois families; we need to show how Oedipus, defined by the daddy-mommy-me triangle, is necessarily bound up with capitalist economic axiomatics. When the figurative Oedipus doesn’t work, there are all kinds of Oedipus we don’t recognize because they aren’t figurative—abstract versions of Oedipus. Hence, we can talk about Oedipal music or Oedipal painting. An Oedipal form of music might be great, but it’s still Oedipal. How so? Through its opposition to Schizo music.

In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, you have the gamekeeper, and Lady Chatterley is carrying his child. Because she needs a legitimate father—and it can’t be the gamekeeper—she approaches one of her painter friends, who says, “I’ll do it on one condition, that you pose as a model for me.”[10] And Lady Chatterley is annoyed, not at the idea of posing as a model, but because she isn’t sure what he’s up to. And then there’s this dreadful exchange between the gamekeeper and the painter, and the painter is pretty hostile, totally deranged. He bristles at the gamekeeper and despises him, and the gamekeeper sends it right back. Looking at his paintings, the gamekeeper says, “”It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.” And the painter responds—as twisted and hateful as he can—“Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity.” The game keeper looks and says, “No, I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations”—going right for the jugular—“are stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental.”[11]

I like this passage because it shows us how both versions of Oedipus can coexist. The gamekeeper is right. No one has gone as far as [D.H.] Lawrence in sort of de-oedipalizing sexuality, nature. The more Oedipus is concealed or abstracted, the harder it will be to scrape it out [curettage]. You can take the curette to the figurative Oedipus, but the most pitiful and brilliant things can survive in the secret corners where Oedipus finds shelter, in art. You have to think like that gamekeeper: in all modern art, there are some truly ugly, dirty things. If necessary, what started out glorious has become mortifying, has become anal. Now, Oedipus is anal. Anality is foundational for Oedipus, since, as everyone knows, Oedipus is founded on castration. But what’s behind the castration? It’s obviously not the phallus; it’s the anus. The anus is the very act of castration, and the phallus wouldn’t exist without the anus. In other words, this whole aspect of Oedipus is defined by this infamous trinity (phallus – Oedipus – anus). But I think it started off gloriously and then began to go foul.

Take an international example: something that started out as a sort of song of life, something that was revolutionary—because I can’t think of anything revolutionary that isn’t a song of life. When that turns into a filthy culture of death. At first, pop art was incredible, not the least bit surrealist, in both music, like John Cage, and in painting; there was a great outpouring of life. And then before long, by the time you get to the tail-end of pop art, it turns to death, and not just because they were merely copying what had already been done. It goes much deeper than that. All of a sudden, its flow becomes disgusting: tortured bodies, machines, tubes—something like a non-figurative axiomatic.

When it comes to schizo-analysis, you have to look for both versions of Oedipus. Before he died, Stravinsky said, “Everything I’ve done has been because my mother didn’t love me and my father was never there.”[12] That’s his big, figurative Oedipus; that’s the musician’s Oedipus. But on another level, there might be an Oedipal painting, and that’s more or less what we find in Lawrence: these tubes and corrugations, this abstract painting which has become something dead, or pop art which has turned into a sort of death scare.

What are we to make of this axiomatic, which is no more than abstract Oedipus, informal Oedipus? So much so that when Oedipus has been run out of his little nook in the family, he necessarily shows back up in forms that have to be confronted all over again, combinatorial forms, axiomatic forms. Again, it’s for this reason that we’re taught we shouldn’t confuse psychoanalytic Oedipus and familial Oedipus—because the psychoanalytic Oedipus is an abstract Oedipus, one that tends towards non-figurative versions.

When a musician as brilliant as Stockhausen tries to explain what’s specified by a combinatory system, in what it does musically, I find his choice of words rather instructive: “My work constructs a multiplicity.” That’s very close to the very movement of the process of flows. What really makes up a multiplicity are flows that are decoded and deterritorialized. Stockhausen uses a term from physics and mathematics—where the term, “multiplicity,” was a noun referring to something that completely side-steps the choice between the one and the many. Multiplicity as a noun, the noun-form of multiplicity—that really dissolves everything about the one as well as the many, because “multiple” could no longer work as an adjective.

An ever-growing multiplicity of musical interpretation perhaps becomes possible through series of 17 periods.[13] So, his work will have 17 periods, and from one periodicity to the next, the multiplicity grows—what I had described as creeping or leaking [fuir] from one end. A sound flow slips under—under what? We know the extent to which Stockhausen participated in the whole movement of decoding that characterizes contemporary music; decoding, not in the sense of deciphering a code, but in the sense of destroying musical codes. He tells us: the idea of an ever-growing multiplicity means that it slips out from under anything you might reintroduce as code.

The result is a free dynamic process, dynamic because the multiplicity is constantly growing; that’s what I was getting at when I was describing a decoded flow tending towards its external limit. Multiplicity is process, not combinatory—since multiplicities are always growing and free, since they don’t reach limits and have no end in sight—indeed, its movement, its process tends towards its external limit, which is always beyond it, pushed further away as the decoded flow spills over. But we shouldn’t take that too far. What he was saying is: I’m going to unleash a dynamic process of growing multiplicities which is continually decoded, and which continually tends towards its limit. I argue that at this point, it’s not about combination or axiomatics; we’re dealing with process, but at the same time, any increase in multiplicity has to be compensated for by reducing and converging the formal elements to be interpreted and by a limitation concerning laws of combination. Great: in the first sentence, he was talking about process; in the second, he’s putting it in terms of combination and axiomatics.

What I’d like for you to appreciate is that, from our current perspective, this way of describing Stockhausen’s music is absolutely no different from what we were saying earlier about the purest form of monetary political economy. Swap out the properties of the flows, and it’s exactly the same thing. I’m well aware of what a genius Stockhausen is, but being brilliant doesn’t stop you from making all sorts of compromises, or from producing what appears to be the most axiomatized or combinatorial work possible, while at the same time involving all sorts of pieces and fragments. Its combinatorial, axiomatic aspect is absolutely non-consistent; that doesn’t stop it from working, from having a really peculiar function. In one sentence, he says: I’m going to put you through a dynamic process of growing multiplicities and decoding flows. But hang on, let’s not get ahead of ourselves; the flow process itself—the growth of flows, the fluctuation of what’s flowing—the flow flows via the multiplicity’s expansion. That has to be compensated for. “Should be compensated for”—there’s a legitimate and an illegitimate way of understanding “should.” Either he says it “should” because I, Stockhausen, want it to be that way, or he’s describing the nature of how multiplicities expand, that the increase in its multiplicity be compensated for. Why, then? Sure, for Stockhausen since that’s what he’s doing. But does it inherently have to be so? Is it part of the music? It’s what makes Stockhausen original, but one could very well imagine investigating the sonic process of expanding multiplicity, where the increase in multiplicities doesn’t have to be compensated for. Why “should” it be? It’s possible, but it doesn’t have to be.

What does he mean by “compensate”? The flowing process with growing multiplicities is a process affecting time and space. It’s a process whose basis is Space-Time, or duration, even. In such a spatio-temporal process with growing multiplicities, there’s a whole outpouring of flows, and what’s more, the flow increasingly has a ton of fluctuation. When he says that it should be compensated for, he’s telling us that the mounting freedom in its spatio-temporal multiplicity has to be compensated for by restricting the combination of its formal elements: timbres, pitches. His thing has 17 periods—from one period to the next, the multiplicity expands, as he puts it, with “gradual indeterminacy in attack intervals and their sequence.” So, from one period to the next, this indeterminism, this musical indeterminism, which is tied to the multiplicity’s growth across periods, is shaped and defined as a continuously expanding spatio-temporal multiplicity. That’s what I’d call a more and more extended decoding and deterritorialization of flows.

But at the same time, there’s something else covering that up: namely, the closer you get to the 17th period—where the growing multiplicity is closest to its limit—as you move toward the 17th period, the more this growing multiplicity and the freedom of its flow gets compensated for by a combinatorics of its formal elements—to the point where, Stockhausen says in the rest of the text, the 17th period—where the multiplicity has expanded the most—should also be the one closest to the first period, where the multiplicity was equivocal. There’s no better way of describing how combinatorics replaces the process and its external limit with a set of formal internal relations.

When it comes to musical combinatorics, you could reach the same conclusions we did in our examination of an economic axiomatics of money. The first dimension has to do with the fluctuation and fluxion of flows moving toward an external limit and constantly coming up to this limit which then tend to put something over the limit. Such art forms that have nothing to do with the schizophrenic as a clinical phenomenon. I ought to call them schizophrenic Art forms. The schizoid Arts, whatever form they might take, are about taking deterritorialization, decoding, all the way, causing flows of expanding multiplicity—our task will be to circle back later to this notion of increasing multiplicity—and then on that note, there’s a quite different law that presupposes decoding and deterritorialization, one that backpedals. Namely: the external limit, as the threshold of absolute decoding, as the breaking through the wall and the wall’s wall—thus, as the reality of the Schizo Arts—ends up getting replaced by something else.

The growth process of flows will get axiomatized, will get taken up in a combinatory system. At that point, rather than an external relationship limiting decoded flows, there’ll be internal relationships limiting the differential relationships between decoded flows, i.e., what [Stockhausen] is calling the relationship between formal elements. It’s the same operation as that of capitalism: it’s a matter of warding off the external limit. It’s about preventing flows from fluctuating in free multiplicities. So, instead of an external limit, an outside threshold as the limit of decoded flows, we instead find a system of internal relationships reproducing on a wider scale. […] [Interruption]

… One side of axiomatics—but it’s only an aspect of axiomatics inasmuch as they’re failing, vanishing codes—at the other end, there’s the process of decoding, the deterritorializing process of expanding multiplicities, with its external threshold, its external limit. Axiomatics swings from one end to the other: it takes the process a step further, but then it hast to tie it off, prevent it from leaking out [fuir]. It recaptures it by combining formal elements; in place of the process tending toward its external limit, it substitutes an internal limit system, corresponding to its formal relationship. That’s precisely how axiomatics operates.

There’s no reason to talk about political economy any differently than we do music, if we’re framing things in terms of flow, since the problem is this—don’t all axiomatics, whatever they may be, form abstract Oedipuses, these figurative Oedipuses that constitute bringing back [possible missing words]?

As for the second aspect of capitalist immanence, it seems to me that it—if the first was a system of differential relationships between decoded flows—the second aspect is that, instead of the external limit of decoded flows, it substitutes a system or aggregate [ensemble] of internal limits that correspond to its differential relationships, a system of reproducible internal limits that can be replicated on an ever-wider scale.

An axiomatics that carries and operates on decoded flows—it compensates for the flows’ free expansion by restricting the system of formal relationships defining the system’s internal limits, even if that means reproducing these limits on a larger and larger scale.

Geometry has long been linked to signs we might think of as territorial, which are themselves linked to a set of codes. There are codes—right up to the end of feudalism—so long as there is no capitalist machine. Cartesian geometry: looking at it one way, doesn’t it ruin a whole array [tout un ensemble] of prior geometric codes? But from another angle, isn’t it still a code, with a whole coordinate system, a whole system of territorialization? For territorialization isn’t just about land [terre]; it’s whenever signs are reflected onto whatever serves as territoriality for said signs.

The Cartesian coordinate system strikes me as an attempt to reterritorialize mathematical signs which are in the process of being decoded. As far as I can tell, [it comes down to] acknowledging a scientific endeavor that no longer goes through code but in fact goes through an axiomatic. It first happens in mathematics, around the middle of the 19th century, and it takes place in the context of differential calculus, that is, with [Karl] Weierstrass. He proposes a static interpretation of differential calculus, whereby differentiation is no longer understood as a process, and he turns differential relationships into an axiomatic. That only really takes shape under 19th century capitalism.[14]

Student: You said that in a code, each element is determined in itself, whereas in an axiomatic, flows are determined through their differential relationships. Morse code, for example: dot, dash, dot, dash—each element is determined separately. But when we have a group [ensemble] of elements, they’re differentiated from each other, and we pin a meaning onto them.

Deleuze: I’m not so sure Morse code is a code. Neither is it a purely combinatorial system. It’s a sort of residual combinatorics.

In the case of code, or a coding of flows, flows get their own qualities based on the code, i.e., they can only be indirectly related to each other. It makes no difference whether the flows are described separately or are necessarily related to each other indirectly, be it code or axiomatic, the [word unclear] only in their relationships with each other. In the case of a code, flows are interrelated, but their qualities are distributive, i.e., they inherently belong to the flow in question—that’s how the flow of the unnamable is avoided. With code, flows each have to be described on their own, and they have to relate to each other indirectly.

For example: we’re told that in a primitive machine, there are three flows: consumer goods, prestige goods, and authority over human beings. That gives us three loops: these flows are delineated separately. Granted, they don’t exist outside the relationship they have with each other; the nature of their relationship is such that the relationship between flows [unclear]… and that, by virtue of the indirect relationship between flows, that is, under certain conditions, in certain places, under certain circumstances where, e.g., the flow of consumer goods ties back to the flow of prestige goods. Prestige goods will only be exchanged for consumer goods at the territory’s periphery.

A whole system of indirect relationships between qualified flows; that’s what a code is. From there, it follows that units of code are, by nature, finite blocks, because so far as code is concerned, a unit of code is something that draws in samples [prélèvements] from different flows. Each unit of code will be laden with different samples, and will be able to compound them, in their indirect relationships, in the form of a finite block—you restore the balance between these qualified flows, for example, in the form of consumption. But what goes into consumption loses something; there’s a functional imbalance. It never works in the form of exchange—it’s always imbalanced, and this imbalance is compensated for by the prestige of the one giving to consumption, or by their right to women. It forms a finite block. Finite blocks are units of code, units of code not being the same thing as flows, but are veritable finite cuts, cuts forming finite blocks.

In an axiomatic, flows have no quality outside of their relationships. The capitalist is not the owner of a flow of capital; he’s only the owner of a flow of virtual capital so long as he hasn’t converted his titles to wealth into means of production, into machines, for example. And he doesn’t convert his titles to wealth until he finds someone whose labor he can buy, and vice versa: flows cannot be characterized apart from their reciprocal determination, which has priority over their characterization. It follows that axiomatics always deals with the infinite; its matter is infinite, whereas there isn’t any code for the infinite. That’s why theologians, despite themselves, are progressive: they get into atheism, and find themselves confronted with the challenge—is this thing codable?

Here again, ideology is bullshit—we shouldn’t think about theology in the Middle Ages through the lens of ideology; it’s stranger than that: some aspect of social organization starts unfolding right away. Ideology does not exist. In the ideological field, what’s at play is much more immediate. Theologians find themselves faced with something that calls into question the very form of their society: is it possible to code infinity? And the problem of heresy arises in their Trinitarian coding… [Interruption]

Once we’re dealing with an infinite process, codes break down. Capitalism invents infinite, even economically speaking: at the level of capitalist production, of producing in order to produce. And, as a second infinity, capital in the form of x / Dx ad infinitum. Capitalism is what makes infinite debt possible. With capitalism, production, the social body in the form of money capital, and debt all become infinite processes, and it gets axiomatized. What escapes code, the process as infinite process, will be the sort of material or expanding multiplicity that axiomatics is responding to. As for axiomatics, what it carries back to the finitude of axiomatics is always an infinite material—it’s the finite representation of an infinite process.

An axiomatic is an act of finitude performed on infinite matter. Weierstrass was the one who took every way of interpreting differential calculus, from Leibniz to [Joseph Louis] Lagrange, and threw it all out the window, claiming it had nothing to do with process. Yes, there is a process as pure matter, but we can’t stop there; it all has to be axiomatized. Which means finding the finite grid to choke out the infinite number of possible combinations. Weierstrass interprets differential and infinitesimal calculus in a way he himself calls “static,” where there’s no longer any flux towards a limit, no longer any concept of threshold, but instead a system of choices, from the perspective of an ordinal interpretation. Differential calculus is completely turned around from the perspective of ordinal numbers, no longer from the perspective of cardinal numbers—thus, a static order with a system of assumptions or choices in an ordinal series, where the concepts of limit, threshold, of movement towards, have lost all meaning. In other words, differential calculus brings with it an infinite matter which relatively decodes mathematics, compared to its previous state. Axiomatics is a finite network applied onto infinite material, since such infinite material had gotten away from codes.

Theologians have this machine: the Christian flow is one of infinite debt, the flow of its infinite process. It contaminates every code; the Roman code falters beneath it. The challenge is how to save the Roman Empire and Christianity at the same time. Theologians talk about the Trinity, but their discussion isn’t what’s important. What matters is the formal operation they carry out: through their theology, they’re also working out a political economy. Christianity offers us the infinite, which is to say, we’re in a social regime where nothing ends—it’s for life. We need to approach infinity economically. In other words, I’ll take the codes that caused finite blocks to circulate, and I’ll make a finite block of alliance and kinship. The prisoner said to himself, “Well, they’re going to kill me, and then it’s over for me,” in the sense of “this is finite.” That’s what Nietzsche’s talking about in the second essay of The [Genealogy of] Morality: during the prehistoric age, debt is finite.

It takes an incredible series of events before you get an economy of infinite debt. There’s never been an economy of exchange; exchange is a guise for the circulation of debt when it becomes infinite, but when it’s still debt, it never looks like an exchange. When we’re dealing with the problem of how to stop a process without reintroducing codes, the answer comes in the form of axiomatics, a finite grid, a number of finite principles marshalling a combinatorial system whose figures are infinite. That’s how Oedipus works: the figurative Oedipus, the imaginary Oedipus, has a special territory, one of pure, infinite matter, since, no matter what happens, Oedipus will be there: you love your father, you don’t love him, you’re perverted, neurotic, or psychotic—regardless, it’s Oedipus (infinite process), the figurative form of Oedipus. It’s no secret that Oedipus has an unlimited number of permutations.

Psychoanalysis is the application of an axiomatic that far exceeds it. In part, it applies the social coordinates of capitalism: it’s essential for capitalism that there be two sorts of individual: social individuals and private individuals. Social individuals—capitalists, bankers, workers—and private persons—family members—do not belong to the same order. Part of capitalism is how one sort of individual gets reflected [rabattre] onto another, and psychoanalysis is an application of capitalist axiomatics. But in its unending ambition, it gets sick of acting as a field of application for a pre-existing Oedipus—it tells us, for example, that the infinite versions of Oedipus are only imaginary. Which means that its Oedipal material is precisely the infinite process as reduced by psychoanalysis, but the problem is how to avoid an infinite process and to find a finite grid.

Fed up with being the application of capitalist axiomatics, psychoanalysis wanted to become an axiomatics in and of itself, i.e., to find a handful of finite principles the infinite combinations of its infinite material depend on. That’s the structural Oedipus, the psychoanalytic Oedipus. It was axiomatized the moment it said, “But the infinity of Oedipus is imaginary,” and that depends on a handful of principles forming a structure, which are able to generate, produce all the imaginary forms of Oedipus. At that point, axiomatization is exactly what the structural Oedipus does.

Student: Could we say that the way the stock market operates depends on an axiomatic?

Deleuze: Accounting activities, on the one hand, and stock market activities, on the other, might not be axiomatics per se, but they directly depend on economic axiomatics. An axiomatic is not defined by the constancy of certain quantities but by the establishment of formal relationships between flowing quantities.

Student: The body without organs of capital?

Deleuze: The body without organs of capital isn’t the entire capitalist machine. The body without organs of capitalism is an idea that only works at the next level. Money qua money is incapable of producing anything; its role is sterile, unproductive. Therein lies a major paradox: it turns out that this big unproductive, sterile entity does produce—that money makes money. So, something has to be stuck onto money’s BwO, but it doesn’t come down to claiming that capitalism is money-as-BwO. It means that capitalism understands money as BwO and, thanks to a whole series of cogs and wheels, it makes money produce something. Money as BwO indicates a part of the machine. Something has to flow over the BwO, and capitalist desire is aimed at this whatsit flowing over the BwO of money capital. The latter precisely being flows caught in reciprocal determination.

Student: Schizophrenia is when someone lives in a space and time different from ours. Is it possible for the schizophrenic to latch back onto our space-time, and if so, how would we relate capitalism to this modification in the space-time continuum?

Deleuze: I’ll borrow the example of Mrs. [Gisela] Pankow’s psychotherapy—she ends her account by saying, “Thus, I turned this bold schizophrenic into a timid paranoiac.” A recoding of the schizo, then, converting the schizo into a paranoiac. Laing doesn’t propose bringing schizos back to the reality of capitalism at work in our society. In reality, it can’t come down to bringing the schizo back to this or that social code. Laing rejects that… [End of the session]

Notes

[1] Although the specific article reference is unclear, this comment refers to the riot at Clairvaux Prison in 1971 during which two prisoners took a prison nurse and guard hostage, then murdered them, for which they were executed in November 1972.

[2] These comments roughly correspond to Anti-Oedipus, pp. 226-229 and 249-253.

[3] Given the context of a discussion on Anti-Oedipus, it might be Marx’s Grundrisse, as well as Capital, volume I, Part 2, Ch. 4. See Anti-Oedipus, p. 392, notes 71 and 72. See also their reference to Suzanne de Brunhoff, especially Marx on Money, trans. Maurice J. Goldbloom (New York: Urizen, 1976) on Anti-Oedipus, p. 392, note 73.

[4] On Clavel, see Anti-Oedipus, p. 232, and 392 note 76.

[5] Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). See Anti-Oedipus, p. 392, notes 77 and 81.

[6] On this subject in an economic context, see Anti-Oedipus, pp. 283-285. See also Guattari’s notes in The Anti-Oedipus Papers, trans. Kélina Gotman (New York and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) and MIT Press, 2006) since he developed this example as early as April 1970 (pp. 179-182).

[7] He’s referring to Remy Chauvin, Entretiens sur la sexualité (Paris: Plon, 1969). See Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.

[8] On this reference to Griaule, see Anti-Oedipus, p. 163.

[9] See Anti-Oedipus, pp. 236-238, 249-250.

[10] This exchange occurs in Chapter 18 of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

[11] Quote adjusted to match Lawrence’s text.

[12] On this Stravinsky reference, see Anti-Oedipus, p. 121.

[13] Deleuze is referring to Stockhausen’s “Zyklus” (1959), which is divided into 17 equal “periods.”

[14] Deleuze returns to Weierstrass in his discussion of Leibniz; see Lecture 3 of the first Leibniz Seminar (April 29, 1980), as well as Lectures 7 and 8 from the “Leibniz and the Baroque” Seminar (January 20 and 27, 1987).

Notes

For archival purposes, the original transcription was created at WebDeleuze, its revision completed in February 2023. The translation was completed in April 2023, with additional revisions and descriptions completed in September 2023.