Infinite reproduction of money and credit
4.9. Pt. XXXI -
Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016
If money is the infinite reproduction of a flow of abstract quantities, we can then conceive it as a software related to a hardware, i.e. the digital chrematistics, which has already introjected in our age its metamatic nature, and swiftly travels within digital networks, inside a superior, artificial and over-human circulation. Money, in the Anti-Œdipus and even more today, is a decoded abstraction that sums up value, order, number, calculous, distribution and speed. For a Left, and a revolutionary movement, that, still in 1972, in disconnected and confused ways, take as reference the field of “Marxist humanism”, the shift of the axis of critical theory from the world of production and industry to the domain of flows and of money-credit has been opposed for a long time, if not openly rejected. The shift in paradigm, though, released certain effects and reached an unstoppable critical mass of its own. The infinite reproduction of money in the global circuit has reached its accelerated peak thanks to the role played by the global network of Central Banks of constant injection and coordinated punctual inflating. Infinite money, thus, has circuits of commercial perpetual reproduction, which we will term “relative”, and circuits of perpetual financial reproduction, which we will term ‘absolute’, managed by supranational global institutional networks. It will be necessary to restart from here, from this Nietzsche-Klossowski-Deleuze axis and, generally, from the French revolutionary Rhizosphere, in order to perfect the tools and analyses capable of dig into real information of gregarious sovereignty formations. Certainly the aggressive and polemical work of Deleuze and Guattari in the phase of the Anti-Œdipus had the great merit of identifying the growing systemic fault line that was about to shift, to deteriorate and to rupture – the great historical asymmetry between infinite and money, mobility and credit, stability and capital – which brought market economies, with deep and abrupt transitional crises, from the planned quantitative industrial world to the post-productive cybernetic-credit-financial world. Additionally, one of the most relevant merits of the Anti-Œdipus is having theorised, starting from the considerations of Nietzsche and Foucault, the monetary and credit infinite. If the “infinite creditor” was to be traced back “new collective memory” conceived by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, and concerning “a debt system: […] a voice that speaks or intones, a sign marked in bare flesh, an eye that extracts enjoyment from the pain”, “infinite money” is then to be related to Foucault’s Lectures on the Will to Know that he gave in February 1971. The “infinite creditor” is certainly according to Nietzsche the Christian God, while the debt, in ancient societies as well as in commercial ones, fulfils the task “to breed man, […] to form him within the debtor-creditor relation, which on both sides turns out to be a matter of memory – a memory straining toward the future” (AE, 180). “Infinite money”, according to Foucault in 1971, is born instead from a chrematistics in the strict sense, artificial, “which seeks only the acquisition of money itself and consequently in unlimited quantities. This rests on exchange” (LKW, 145). Deleuze and Guattari return to the topic of the infinite in the Anti-Œdipus, adopting the thesis of the philosopher of Poitiers: “The abolition of debts, when it takes place – they refer to Solon, the Athenian legislator – is a means of maintaining the distribution of land, and a means of preventing the entry on stage of a new territorial machine, possibly revolutionary and capable of raising and dealing with the agrarian problem in a comprehensive way” (AE, 197).
Immediately after, they refer to Cypselus, tyrant of Korinthos: “in other cases where a redistribution occurs, the cycle of credits is maintained, in the new form established by the State, money” (AE, 196). However, in greater depth, Deleuze and Guattari, returning to Foucault’s studies on Greek tyrants, affirm that “money – the circulation of money – is the means for rendering the debt infinite. […] The infinite creditor and infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts. There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves” (AE, 197). Money in the Anti-Œdipus is, thus, turned into THE “systemic dispositif” of power aimed at perpetuating infinitely the credit cycle, similarly as the tyrant of Korinthos taught us; however, even more distinctively, contemporary money created ex-nihilo by the coordinated action of central and commercial banks, and therefore infinite, is the prerequisite and the supporting structure of more subjecting infinites, which, under the double-face umbrella of credit/debit, result as refund/existence, duty/guilt, crisis/resource, catastrophe/bifurcation. Money is, hence, the fulcrum and the pivot on which the contemporary power system rests for all its policies: money is its main weapon, due to its synthetic credit-debit relation which becomes the “transmission belt” of the commercial and institutional credit world. This monetary paradigm of power that Foucault traces back to the VII century B.C. in Ancient Greece, has been overlooked by Marxists, but not by the intellectuals of the Rhizosphere. Until today, the demystifying and incendiary work of anti-œdipic and rhizomatic authors has not reached in our culture the “masterpiece” status that it deserves, because obscure and gregarious forces – the braking powers – are still operating, with the aim of keeping society under the conforming and homogeneous pressure of perpetual slavery, gregariousness that Nietzsche so appropriately defined in the accelerationist fragment on the strong of the future. The Anti-Œdipus, far from resting on innocuous ‘irenisms’, continues to generate hybrid processes of affirmative and transforming energy thanks to its deep analytical capacity. Everything is made clear: “There we no longer have any secrets, we no longer have anything to hide. It is we who have become a secret, it is we who are hidden, even though we do all openly, in broad light” (DI, 46).
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