4.9. - Part XXX
The modern immanent machine
Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016
“The modern immanent machine, which consists in decoding the flows on the full body of capital-money: it has realized the immanence, it has rendered concrete the abstract as such and has naturalized the artificial, replacing the territorial codes and the despotic overcoding with an axiomatic of decoded flows, and a regulation of these flows; it effects the second great movement of deterritorialization, but this time because it doesn't allow any part of the codes and overcodes to subsist” (AE, 261).
If, at the time of the Anti-Œdipus the two movements of evasion from the territory and return to the territory could express conformant powers or at most powers provided with a temporary equilibrium, in the period of time that separates the present from the seventies we have assisted to the hyper-performance of money and its evasion from the territory, creating a strong imbalance with respect to the return to dry land, which has manifested itself in a progressive and advanced undermining of nations, of popular identities, of local institutions and of the social sector ramified on the surface of the Earth. Monetary abstraction, in symbiosis with mathematics, cybernetics, computer science and logistics, has acquired so much value in drawing itself closer to unlimited extensions and elastic chronoscopic speeds that the rapid domination reached in these last few years of domestication has no equals in history, accelerating that radical nihilism envisaged by Nietzsche in the second half of the XIX century. The boundaries of monetary abstraction still have to be drawn, especially now in a time of forced circulation determines by negative interests, which is a signal of the approximation of the nummus to the “zero degree” of infinite monetary circulation. It is likely that formations of sovereignty have entered a phase of metamatic constraint of the monetary instrument in order to test the state of preservation of the force of imbalance of the whole system. The crisis of industrial capitalism and the birth of a post-industrial capitalism triggered by credit and monetarism surfaced and erupted - as recalled earlier – in the renown “Nixon shock” of August 1971, when the US dollar was unpegged from the gold standard, overturning the millenary principle of sovereignty of the gold currency – nomisma Caesaris in auro est. The epochal passage from “geological” currency – the US dollar – to the abstract and “headless” currency, unlimited because free from any fixed rate or concrete value, is certainly the product of circumstantial dynamics and paroxysmal processes going back to Bretton Woods and to the competition between nations and opposing geopolitical forces, but it also marks the moment of authenticity of the statement of the economist de Brunhoff when he writes that there is no contemporaneity between capital and credit: “That is why in capitalism even credit, formed into a system, brings together composite elements that are both ante-capitalist (money, money commerce) and post-capitalist (the credit circuit being a higher circulation…). Adapted to the needs of capitalism, credit is never really contemporary with capital. The system of financing born of the capitalist mode of production remains a bastard” (de Brunhoff, La monnaie in Marx, p. 147 quoted in AE, 206). It is clear that the system of credit financing will survive to the agony of industry and to the disappearance of labour, because historically it existed before capitalism, and in some of its aspects it has been anticipating the future override of the system. The self-organisation in planetary platforms and the independence reached by the political and institutional order has made credit – accumulated, distributed, rapid, liquid and abstract money – and finance – fluxions, cybernetics, reticulated, dromological and metamatic money – autonomous circulations, in great part estranged from the circulation of capitals in the real economy. In the lecture he gave on 19.12.1971 at Vincennes, Deleuze went beyond the elaboration that he would have soon presented in the Anti-Œdipus (February 1972) and introduced a definition of money – infinite reproduction of a flow of abstract quantities – very relevant, even more today than at the time:
“With money which itself can no longer be coded, within a certain framework, we begin with money and we end with money. M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney], there is absolutely no means of coding this thing here because the qualified flows are replaced by a flow of abstract quantity whose proper essence is the infinite reproduction for which the formula is M-C-M. No code can support infinite reproduction. What is formidable in so-called primitive societies is how debt exists, but exists in the form of a finite block, debt is finite” (Webdeleuze, lecture of 16.11.1971).
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