4.10. Infinite reproduction of money and credit - Part XXXI - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

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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OUT NOW! - MONETA, RIVOLUZIONE E FILOSOFIA DELL'AVVENIRE (RIZOSFERA/OBSOLETE CAPITALISM FREE PRESS, 2016)

E' finalmente disponibile online l'antologia e.book curata dal collettivo Obsolete Capitalism intitolata «Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire. Nietzsche e la politica accelerazionista in Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski» (Edizioni Rizosfera/Obsolete Capitalism Free Press, 2016).

Clicca QUI Free Download - E.book


Gli autori sono: Algorithmic Committee, Sara Baranzoni, Edmund Berger, Lapo Berti, Paolo Davoli, Ettore Lancellotti, Network Ensemble, Obsolete Capitalism, Obsolete Capitalism Sound System, Letizia Rustichelli, Francesco Tacchini, Paolo Vignola. 

Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell’avvenire

a cura di Obsolete Capitalism

Siamo proiettati a velocità fotonica nella comunicazione istantanea e nel controllo continuo mentre le forme di dominio rapido appaiono inarrestabili. Il museo delle ideologie si riempie di concetti in via di esaurimento quali capitalismo, neoliberismo, marxismo, keynesismo. Ora, con più esattezza, il sistema modula i vari flussi che innervano il pianeta: Moneta, Ricerca, Controllo, Informazione, Circuito sono i vecchi nomi che attraverso una nuova velocità producono potere. Maggiore è l’immanenza del Mercato, maggiore è la probabilità che al conflitto si sostituisca l’interruzione, il virus, la fuga di notizie, l’invisibilità, il fuori-circuito, la biforcazione. Uno squarcio nella «zona grigia» dell’egemonia.

Gli autori del libro Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell’avvenire indagano alcune aree poco battute di politica accelerazionista attraverso linee teoriche contagiate dalle filosofie più visionarie: Nietzsche, Klossowski, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault. Più che analizzare la grande trasformazione culturale in atto, la presente antologia evidenzia i pericoli in cui incorre il pensiero del futuro quando ancora mantiene pratiche, schemi e linguaggi di un’epoca industriale e post-industriale che mostra in tutti i suoi aspetti una crisi perpetua. Siamo tutti coinvolti nel duro intreccio di liberazioni insperate e nuovi asservimenti che ci prospetta la presentificazione del futuro da parte della tecnologia a linguaggio numerico, ma - come afferma Deleuze - «non è il caso né di avere paura, né di sperare, bisogna cercare nuove armi». Sperimentare è dunque il primo impegno politico e filosofico per un futuro differente.

Blockchain for Social Good @ Bruxelles, 21 giugno 2016

The workshop is organised by EPSC (European Political Strategy Center), DG CONNECT (Communications Networks, Content and Technology Directorate-General), DG FISMA (Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union Directorate-General), DG GROW (Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs Directorate-General) and the JRC (Joint Research Centre).

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is not just Blockchains and Blockchains is not just Bitcoin. Experts are saying that the Internet will come to be seen as the background technology that made distributed ledger applications possible. Will DLT really bring a more profound change to our societies over the next ten years than the internet has over the past ten?

The event aims at tacking stock of existing activities in this emerging field, considering their regulatory and standardisation implications, as well as at defining a roadmap of how the European Commission can contribute to these developments, in particular through Horizon 2020 actions.

Provisional Agenda:

9:30 Introduction by the hosts (Committee of the Regions, DG Connect)

9:40 "DLT Beyond financial applications", by Primavera De Filippi, CNRS, Research Fellow at Berkman Center For Internet & Society

An overview of existing as well as potential applications of DLTs

10:45 Coffee break

11:00 Roundtable: Strengths and limitations of distributed ledgers technologies for social applications – concrete examples

Sharing experiences and recommendations for impactful research on distributed ledgers. What has worked and what has not? What are the main roablocks?

Aaron van Wirdum, Bitcoin Magazine
Brett Scott, Alternative Finance Explorer, University of the Arts London
Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt Shelter Project
Jessi Baker, blockchains for tracing provenance
Amor Sexton, Adroit Lawyers, specialist digital currency legal practice (tbc)

12:30 Lunch Break

14:00 Roundtable: Decentralising governance (Chair: Robert Madelin)

What could the EU / EC bring? What is necessary to promote practical use cases and governance? Do we need any standardisation/regulation?

Jakob von Weizsäcker, Member of European Parliament
Philippe Dewost, Caisse Des Dépôts, France
Philip Boucher, Policy analyst, European Parliamentary Research Service
Pindar Wong, Cyberport, HK, Scaling Bitcoin
Markku Markkula, President of European Committee of Regions (tbc)
Francesca Bria, NESTA, Digital Social Innovation project (tbc)

15:30 Coffee Break

16:00 All: Defining a roadmap for EU research on Blockchains for Social Good

What has the EC done insofar? Brief summary of ICT call on "distributed architectures for decentralised data governance" (DG CNECT) and DG FISMA activities

Open discussion and conclusions

17:00 Closing

4.9. The modern immanent machine - Pt. XXX - Excerpt from the essay «Acceleration, Revolution and Money in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

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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Lettera di Marco Pannella a Toni Negri, 28 ottobre 1983

Lettera di Marco Pannella a Toni Negri, 28 ottobre 1983

Marco Pannella sostiene di non essere più in contatto con Toni Negri da alcune settimane. Ha appreso dal «Corriere» che l'imputato del processo «7 aprile» eletto nelle liste radicali, con una lettera ad un'università spagnola annunciava l'intenzione di proseguire la latitanza. Ha quindi deciso di inviargli, attraverso il «Corriere», questa lettera che riceviamo e volentieri pubblichiamo.)

Caro Toni Negri,

è giunta l'eco, finalmente, e a Madrid, della tua esistenza e delle tue intenzioni. Ci sei ancora, dunque, e operi e auspichi che un qualsiasi Paese ti offra la possibilità di fare tranquillamente il filosofo, intellettuale, impegnato - beninteso - a trasformare il mondo e non solo a contemplarlo.
Precisi anche che tale obiettivo ti impone in questo periodo una vita difficile, a Parigi o dovunque ti trovi. Proclami, inoltre, di voler in tal modo rifiutarti di obbedire a leggi ingiuste, comportamento doveroso per chiunque abbia un minimo di virtù civile repubblicana.
Consentimi, per quanto mi e ci riguarda, di stare ai fatti, e di starci non per contemplarli - appunto - ma modificarli. E credimi, li modificheremo; ti piaccia, come spero, o non ti piaccia, come temo. E presto.
Un primo fatto è il seguente: da molte settimane, ormai, ti occupi di tutto, tranne che del processo «7 aprile», del tuo essere deputato eletto per ben chiari motivi e obiettivi, dei concreti problemi dei tuoi compagni di prigionia e di violenza subita e da abbattere invece che da aiutare a trionfare (contro di loro e contro la giustizia, s'intende!), della condizione carceraria in genere, dell'uso agevolmente e prevedibilmente fatto di quel che appare oggi più come la tua fuga verso i lidi privati dell'oasi o del ghetto che, ad esempio Maria Antonietta Macciocchi e altri, continuano ritenere privilegio e diritto dell'«intellettuale europeo». Non una lettera, non una dichiarazione, non un'intervista, non una frase, non un'informazione, non una risposta, non dico una lotta, ma nemmeno un gesto in tal senso.
Certo, mi dirai: «Son settimane dure, in fondo sono solo settimane, caro Marco; e sono un latitante, sono in fuga, vorrei vedere te al mio posto, se mi beccano rischio l'ergastolo, non sono né un martire né un eroe, gli anni e anni di galera me li sono fatti io mica tu, i miei genitori, i miei figli, la mia compagna, mica i tuoi....
Appena avrò sistemato questa faccenda, appena il filosofo e intellettuale che io sono - per dinci, lo si ricordi! - avrà ottenuto in qualche Paese d'Europa e del mondo l'ospitalità sicura, il lavoro, la casa, vedrai come mi impegnerò, se me lo permetteranno, certo, ma anche io sono capace di rompermi, alla fine, e di tornare, e poi anche di farmi fuori perché, te lo ho già detto, ci metto poco a farmi fuori, con questa vita, questa storia, questa violenza...».
Certo, certo caro Toni Negri. Io ho infatti rispettato con il silenzio la fuga di Oreste Scalzone, malato terrorizzato che dichiarava a tutti, pateticamente, che lui in prigione ci sarebbe morto, non gli era omogenea, ed era vero, e che così giustificò la sua fuga. Scalzone non era deputato, era detenuto, la sua è stata un'evasione, non ha preteso in tal modo di fare il suo dovere rivoluzionario, o democratico, o di intellettuale. Il suo processo sarebbe tardato anni, l'opinione pubblica non ne sapeva nulla, tranne che anche lui era un mostro. Si era nella fase in cui si imponevano le leggi terroristiche con l'alibi del terrorismo, contro i nostri soli sforzi e ostruzionismi non in quella di oggi, con quelle leggi in crisi e riconosciute inutili e ignominiose da tutti, con il caso tuo e di Enzo Tortora imposto alla attualità politica della gente e non solo dello Stato.
Il tuo processo è in corso, i tuoi compagni lo subiscono in carcere, non sono deputati, sono macellati ogni giorno da un ingranaggio che tu hai in queste settimane la responsabilità di aver reso quasi invincibile: il clima è tale, dopo la tua fuga, che non vi sono a volte avvocati, nemmeno uno; che a volte ve ne sono uno o due; si parla del tuo rifugio e di te all'estero, per meglio tornare a nascondere la loro situazione e la loro verità, si va avanti ora ad un ritmo frenetico, cinque, sei interrogatori ad udienza, i pentiti lasciati senza contestazione e contraddittorio, uno spettacolo umano, giudiziario, civile orrido e crudele, cui tutti sembrano rassegnati. Su di loro stinge l'uso e l'abuso di un episodio facilmente contrabbandabile come viltà e la violenza anche contro chi è esposto, impegnato, ha lottato per liberare la giustizia da leggi, situazioni, processi, sentenze, esecuzioni suicide, oltre che barbare.
Non sono che settimane, ma quali settimane, quali giorni e quali notti, quali ore, che avrebbero potuto essere di segno opposto all'attuale.
Avresti potuto essere lì e altrove, ogni giorno lottando per tutti e per te, cioè manifestando con chi combatte ancora «per la giustizia», mettendo a frutto i talenti consegnatici, che stai sperperando davvero in modo quasi blasfemo, tanto l'errore mi appare stupido, tanto è distruttivo a cominciare dalla tua esistenza, dal tuo futuro, dalla tua immagine ma anche dalla tua concreta esistenza, se avessi ascoltato - se ascoltassi - la voce della ragionevolezza e della speranza, invece che quella delle tue elucubrazioni vitalistiche e della disperazione, di un individualismo esasperato e disperato. Poi, un giorno, ti prenderanno. Quando la sentenza ci sarà già stata, sarà divenuta esecutiva, ti avranno potuto facilmente condannare - grazie anche alla tua latitanza - per le più ignominiose accuse.
Avresti potuto dar corpo ad altro che a questo nulla, a questo tragico squallore. Deputato in carcere, a Rebibbia o a Poggioreale, all'Ucciardone o alle Nuove, in una situazione di accusatore e di qualcuno che vuole e sa fare, della conquista della propria libertà, una conquista di libertà, di verità per tutti, privilegiato quanto nessun altro mai, aiutato dal colloquio intenso, continuo, con i tuoi compagni di storia, di violenza subita oltre che in alcuni casi inferta, da noi, dalla gente. Avresti, avremmo potuto...
Invece, nulla. Anzi l'opposto.
Noi andremo avanti, malgrado gli inconvenienti gravi che il tuo fuggire, il tuo mancare, ha provocato. Per noi le ragioni e la forza che ci hanno consentito di concepire, affermare, anche quel che è passato attraverso il decreto di scarcerazione per decorrenza-termini di Toni Negri, emanato dal popolo sovrano per nostra iniziativa, restano. L'irreparabile semmai, è per te, innanzitutto, e per i tuoi compagni, e tutti coloro che sono vittime di meccanismi giudiziari e di leggi che colpiscono il prestigio stesso della giustizia e dello Stato.
Forse si è ancora in tempo, perché il danno e l'errore siano almeno in gran parte riparati.
Ti propongo, o ripropongo, quanto avevamo insieme previsto, deciso noi e accettato pubblicamente tu. Riconoscere un errore, caro Toni Negri, è prova e ragione di forza. Sono certo di interpretare in tal modo i sentimenti, le speranze, le valutazioni dei tuoi compagni, dei tuoi elettori, dei miei compagni del Partito radicale, dell'opinione pubblica democratica.
Sai bene che non solamente chi s'abbassa a odiare e odiarti, dal cattivissimo maestro Almirante al mio amico imbecerito (spero provvisoriamente) Indro Montanelli, ma un certo Stato partitocratico, la cordata dei teoremisti alla Calogero, che ti disprezza e odia a partire dalla tua e sua concreta storia, sono interessati a che tu continui ad essere fuori, a lasciar libero corso alla mostruosa macchina in moto.
Sai bene che non è un caso se ti fa proporre la protrazione della fuga da parte di questo o quel servizio segreto fino in America Latina o altrove; se lo Stato francese non fa mostra di zelo, gli stai benissimo così, anche perché sta benissimo a quello della partitocrazia italiana. Esci da questa situazione, fuggi la fuga, dà corpo, e voce, e mano alla dignità ma soprattutto alla speranza ragionevole ed umana.
A questo punto, nel salutarti, ti preciso le regole del gioco cui intendo attenermi. Ti chiedo di decidere in modo inequivocabile e provato, solido, entro il 15 novembre, con noi e solo con noi, le modalità dell'esecuzione del mandato di cattura e del tuo rientro nel processo, accanto ai compagni e a tutti noi. Di renderlo pubblico e di riprendere da quel momento, con noi, l'azione volta a pubblicizzare e far conoscere ovunque, in Europa, la verità processuali e le ragioni ideali e politiche, civili e di diritto, della lotta che così torneresti a raggiungere, a far anche tua.
E di passare al fatto, ai fatti, entro il 1 dicembre, al massimo.
Se la tua decisione fosse altra, ti prego, ove tu ritenessi di continuare a poter restare deputato, di iscriverti immediatamente al Gruppo misto della Camera.
Dal 15 novembre, definitivamente, o compagni o avversari.
Per gli stessi motivi per i quali, con decisione assolutamente unilaterale, decidemmo di presentarti e di farti eleggere, motivi ideali quant'altri mai, perché tu dessi forza anziché debolezza ai 25.000 detenuti in attesa di giudizio e alla speranza nello Stato di diritto, democratico, contro l'usurpazione partitocratica, da quel momento sarei anch'io dovunque tu saresti, a spiegare, scrivere, parlare alla gente ed all'opinione pubblica, facendo noi del Partito radicale, in ogni sede, quel che non hai ancora fatto e rischi di aver disfatto, a cominciare dalla chiarezza sul caso del «7 aprile», e sul tuo.
Dio, la coscienza, la speranza - l'uno o le altre o insieme - ti illuminino, Toni Negri. Ne hai e ne abbiamo bisogno, tutti, anche chi per lottare per le sue idee crede invece di aver bisogno del peggio, e non del meglio, di te.

McKenzie Wark: The Sublime Language of My Century @ Public Seminar, May 14, 2016

The Sublime Language of My Century

McKenzie Wark @ Public Seminar

(...) Another way to tackle this would be impute some meaning to Marx’s famous remark to the effect that he was not a Marxist. What if what he meant by that is that he was not one of those who simply took a language and a rhetorical form extracted from his texts as a given? He was, to the contrary, the one who had constructed that language with a quite particular purpose in mind: to understand the situation of his times from the labor point of view. So: what if we kept the commitment to understanding, not his times, but ours, from the labor point of view, whatever that might mean now — and bracketed off the rest?

That makes a certain sense to me. I really am puzzled by why we should use blocks of linguistic material from his time again to understand our time. Why use the fashionable philosophy, the popular science, the political tracts, or the technological metaphors of the mid-nineteenth century? When poets or novelists do that, we immediately think its dated and quaint. But somehow we want our great narrative to be about capitalism, even if it is dated and quaint.

Of course different genres of text have a different relationship to tradition and innovation, and at different moments in their development. They aren’t always in synch. And of course there’s generally a culture industry in which the texts get pulped into sameness, and an avant-garde trying to do something else. If you are trying to write an interesting, rather than merely successful, novel or poem, you want to change things at the formal level, rather than ship your wine in the same old bottles. The thing is, where readings and rewritings of Marx are concerned, they seem to me to belong to the culture industry. Its a commonplace now to read Capital as a work of philosophy or an epic novel, but to do so very conservatively. And indeed could there be anything more conservative now that the tradition of continental philosophy? (...)

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4.8. Endless movement and the breaking of balance - Pt. XXIX - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016

Endless movement and the breaking of balance

Here Nietzsche’s Eternal return comes into play. According to Klossowski, the distinctive sign of the Vicious Circle – this is the term he uses to define the Nitzschean Eternal Return – is an incessant movement, “readying the individual to will its own annihilation as an individual by teaching the individual to exceed itself by re-willing itself, and to re-will itself only in the name of this insatiable power. The Eternal Return would here from the counterpart to knowledge, which, if it increases in proportion to power, nonetheless has the conservation of the species as its major preoccupation. Now the Eternal Return (as the expression of a becoming with neither goal nor purpose) makes knowledge 'impossible', at least with regard to ends, and always keeps knowledge at the level of means: the means of conserving itself. This in turn is what determines the reality principle, which therefore is always a variable principle. But not only does the Eternal Return not determine reality, it suspends the very principle of reality, and in a certain manner leaves it to the discretion of the more or less felt degree of power – or better, to its intensity” (NCV, 104). The essence of the Return, or the Phantasm, is, thus, the repetition of the same Unequal, that is, the reiteration of random difference, the energetics of the fortuitous. Simulacra keep returning, and their unavoidability determines a series of disindividuations. The perpetual transformational power of schizo-nomad singularity that embraces the doctrine of the eternal return is certainly antithetical to the gregariousness deriving from the Axiomatised Return of Capital and from the Return to the Identical of the subjected individual: in fact, the doctrine of the Vicious Circle elaborated by the axis Nietzsche-Klossowski foresees the “return of power”, which is nothing but the “sequence of balance breakings” and ultimately the destitution of the identity subject. Deleuze and Guattari, indeed, fully understand this difference between relative limits, always reconstituted, of the capitalist process and the absolute limits of the revolutionary schizophrenic process. The schizo-revolutionary process interacts with Chaos, seeks the creative dimension in order to interact with chaotic forces, altering the existent; the capitalistic process stops at the boundary of Chaos, it does not remove the boundary, the wall that separate itself from the chaotic outside, but – rationally – it capitalises its steps, returns to virgin spaces recently acquired and ploughs them in order to enrich them with new axiomatics. The boundaries that capital assigns to itself are determined by the network of centres of balance and of monetary trans-valuation, which it plans and builds at the limits of its delirium. If “schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist field from one end to the other”, for Capitalism “it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies into a world axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with new interior limits” (AE, 246). From these words it seems that the barrier – the line that separates capitalism from the boundary of Chaos – is the line of the monetarisable. The area of creation, of experimentation, of implicit failure of the analysis and of research for its own sake, according to capitalism cannot be irrigated with monetary flows: too many energetic impulses with no sense nor purpose circulate: in fact, it lack the main purpose of capital, namely the profitability derived from the “extraction of value”. Both sense and purpose are determinations of the principle of reality to which ultimately market firms always refer. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari write that “[m]onetary flows are perfectly schizophrenic realities, but they exist and function only within the immanent axiomatic that exorcises and repels this reality” (AE, 246). The equalising axiomatic recovers what has been decoded and indirectly represses the subversive charge released by the primitive affirmative force, enclosing in the monetarisable space of the global circuit what had just been dispensed by the code. Money controls, through the blazes of flames and the fumes of combustion, and distributes at a higher level, a global one. For such reason, money does not evolve, but rather remains into the circuit, in which arranges itself according to indigenous speeds. There, in advanced circulation, money itself and, as Marx wrote, “[t]he value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus value or expands itself. It is this movement that converts it into capital” (C, vol. I, part 2, ch. IV p.79). However, the fracture happens exactly here, the overcoming of the Marxian concepts of money, money-value, money-good, money-fetish, by the new function attributed to money by the political philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari and the whole French revolutionary Rhizosphere. Money, in its unlimited abstract quantity is indifferent to the qualified nature of flows; this means that money is trans-qualitative, as its process of distribution and circulation; it has made itself independent and self-organised, both with respect to short cycles of exchange (money-commodity-money; M-C-M) as well as the circulating special nature (territory-exchange-territory; T-E-T), that is, sovereignty. And if “the strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to the previous ones”, this would mean that it is “monetarisation [which] everywhere comes to fill the abyss of capitalist immanence, introducing there, as Schmitt says, "a deformation, a convulsion, an explosion – in a word, a movement of extreme violence” (AE,250). Control, power, desire, independence, self-organisation, indifference, violence, trans-quality: these are the new characteristics of money at the time of the Anti-Œdipus, that is, at the time of infinite and abstract monetary economy, which add themselves to those classic determinations already highlighted by critics of political economy. Nowadays, money-liquidity accumulated, abstract, and digitalized – in other words, dematerialized and financialised money which preserves the characteristics of the seventies, accumulating them – is the main instrument of capitalist accelerationism. It develops itself through capitals’ restless nomadism in the quest for punctual and planetary profit together with the monetary infinite as an effective anti-crisis instrument, generated by the increase in monetary mass and by the perpetual creation of liquidity thanks to the wise dosage of vertical and horizontal transactions of the public and private sector by Central Banks across the world, coordinated among themselves. It is the system of Central Banks independent from political power that ultimately determines the liquidity of the system and the injection of money in the traditional banking system and in the network circling of capital markets. The crucial innovation of the roles of circuits, platforms, markets, currencies and Central Banks, already in expansion and in phase of consolidation during the years of the rhizospheric analysis, has been actively registered in the accelerationist passage of The Civilised Capitalist Machine under the section of “Immanent Axiomatic of Capital” (AE, 250).

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