Month: July 2008

No system of exploitation is ever total, just as no machine is ever one hundred per cent efficient. There is always some friction, some entropy, some dissipation of heat. In every process of transformation, some energy is lost. And this is true of capitalism as well. When social production is organized and appropriated by the monstrous body of Capital, Deleuze and Guattari say, then “a part of the libido as energy of production [i]s transformed into energy of recording (Numen)”; and again, whenever some of the circulated social product is consumed, “a part of this energy of recording is transformed into energy of consummation (Voluptas).” The crucial point, in both cases, is that only “a part” of the energy can be carried over from one form to another. The rest is lost. This sets a limit upon the overall accumulation of capital.

As Georges Bataille reminds us, non-capitalist economies often value and celebrate the very experience of loss, so that economic waste becomes a source of non-economic authority, power, or prestige. But capitalism rejects the logic of “unproductive expenditure,” and seeks instead to overcome this loss, or at least to reduce it to a minimum. Neoclassical economists fetishize efficiency, and construct idealized mathematical models from which all waste and friction have been magically eliminated. And in practice, capitalist innovation is largely driven by the compulsion to abolish waste, and to exploit every last bit of potential. Under the threat of competition, businesses are always trying to squeeze more out of the connective synthesis of production, to appropriate a greater portion of its energies. They accomplish this by increasing the productivity of labor: that is to say, by intensifying the extraction of what Marx calls relative surplus value. But of course, no matter how far this process is carried, full efficiency is never achieved. There is always something lost, and therefore always room for further intensification and further savings.

The disjunctive synthesis of recording also involves a necessary loss. This comes in the form of what Marx calls the faux frais of the circulation process. There will always be some “cost of circulation, which does not add anything to the values converted,” but rather “means a deduction from the product.” Now, Marx himself has great difficulty in determining just which activities in the sphere of circulation entail such a loss, and which are in fact productive (value-adding). And we may well agree with Jonathan Beller that, in the age of communicative or aesthetic capitalism, “the circulation of capital” must itself be “grasped simultaneously as productive and exploitative,” involving the direct extraction of surplus value every bit as much as production proper does. Nonetheless, this does not suffice to eliminate the faux frais of “storage costs, maintenance costs, protection costs, interest on capital etc., without counting the waste and spoiling which nearly all commodities suffer when they are inactive for long.” Neither bookkeeping, nor the storing of unsold inventory, nor anti-theft protection is costless — even though these practices may well serve to protect against other, greater costs. In circulation and distribution, no less than in production, some value is always leaking away, subtracting itself from the divine energy (Numen) of “self-valorizing” capital.

Energy is also dissipated in the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. In theory, wage laborers under capitalism should only receive the minimal income that is needed to replenish their expenditure of labor power, and reproduce their conditions of existence — so that they are available to work for another day. But as Marx notes, these conditions of existence are themselves historically variable: “the number and extent of [the worker’s] so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history, and depend therefore to a great extent on the level of civilization attained by a country.” For instance, in the developed world today, things like televisions and mobile phones — not to mention toilet bowls, and toilet brushes to clean them — are included in the “means of subsistence” that workers receive in exchange for the sale of their labor-power. (This is one area in which union activity, and other forms of so-called “reformist” political activity, do indeed have concrete, observable effects upon the quality of people’s lives). In any capitalist society, the level of replenishment, or the excess of historically determined “necessary requirements” over literal bare subsistence, must be marked as an unavoidable deduction from the accumulation of capital.

Another way to put this is to note that workers are also consumers. As Kojin Karatani puts it, capitalism’s alienation of its workers, and its consequent “separation between the spheres of production and marketing,” leads to a situation in which “laborers are totally equal to consumers… It is not that individual workers buy the very same things that they produce, but that in totality… laborers qua consumers buy what they produce.” One result of this identification is a displacement of attention from production to consumption, leading to “the illusion of the consumer subject that plays a major role in consumer society.” By privileging consumption, neoclassical economics elides the labor process altogether. It ignores questions of the organization of production (connective synthesis) and of the allocation of resources (disjunctive synthesis). Instead, it focuses exclusively upon the individual consumer’s “preferences” and “choices” under conditions of supposed scarcity. (Deleuze and Guattari would call this a “segregative and biunivocal” use of the conjunctive synthesis). In this way, neoclassical economics makes considerations of efficiency mandatory; and it renders both exploitation and waste literally unthinkable. Within the neoclassical framework, there is no way to conceptualize them at all.

Nonetheless, consumerism is not a mere ideology. It would be wrong to say, as old-fashioned Marxists sometimes used to do, that we are “really” workers rather than consumers. Rather, these two functions are always intertwined. Consumerism is an “objective” illusion, one that effectively functions, and has actual consequences, in our everyday lives. The prospect of dissipation through consumption is a necessary compensation for the tedium of productive labor. As workers, we are almost entirely constrained. We have to continue working, just in order to survive; and we have to obey the orders we receive in the workplace. And even though we acquiesce in these harsh conditions, the surplus of our productive activity is still stolen from us. There is nothing uplifting or liberating about productive industrial (or, for that matter, post-industrial) labor; which is why the old-line Marxist (Stalinist or Stakhanovite) glorification of the “heroic worker” is so ludicrous and grotesque. If this were all, then wage labor would be little different from slavery. And indeed, David Graeber precisely argues that “industrial capitalism [i]s an introjected form of the slave mode of production… what one buys when one buys a slave is the sheer capacity to work, which is also what an employer acquires when he hires a laborer. It’s of course this relation of command which causes free people in most societies to see wage-labor as analogous to slavery, and hence, to try as much as possible to avoid it.”

But this is only one side of the story. Deleuze and Guattari say that, when we return to the scene of production as consumers, we are given a sort of compensation or bribe: we recover a “residual share” of the surplus that was stolen from us in the first place. There is always a “residual energy” returning to us in the form of enjoyment: a “residual share [une part residuelle],” a “recompense [un salaire],” a “reward [une prime].” There is always “a share [une partie] that falls to the subject as a part of a whole, income [un revenu] that comes its way as something left over” — however feeble and inadequate this sum may be. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the subject per se is most accurately “defined by the share of the product it takes for itself [la part qu’il prend au produit], garnering here, there, and everywhere a reward [la prime] in the form of a becoming or an avatar, being born of the states that it consumes and being reborn with each new state.” The subject, so defined, has “no ego in the center”; it is “nothing but a series of singularities… collecting everywhere the fraudulent premium [la prime frauduleuse] of its avatars.”

It is no accident that Deleuze and Guattari’s terms for describing this subject are primarily economic ones, referring neither to wages nor to “profit of enterprise,” but to revenue derived from the ownership of property (interest or dividends). The subject of the conjunctive synthesis (the “schizo”) is a sort of rentier: not a prosperous one, but a pathetic figure of faded grandeur, such as we might find in the pages of Balzac, who barely ekes out a living from his various sources of income. Of course, the overwhelming majority of wage earners are not actually property holders even in this limited sense (except to the extent that the more fortunate among them might have paid off the mortgages on their homes, or might have saved some residues of their earnings in pension funds invested in stock and real estate). But Deleuze and Guattari seek to emphasize the radical incommensurability between the roles of worker and consumer, even though the same people are usually both. We are forced, as Karatani says, to buy back as consumers the very goods that we initially created as producers, and that were taken away from us. This “alienation” is the reason why my subjective jouissance as a consumer has nothing to do with my objectified toil as a producer. I do not consume in the same way that I produce. Even the money that I spend wastefully and gleefully, as a consumer, on (as Deleuze and Guattari say) “an imposed range of products (‘which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’)” seems utterly disconnected from the money that I earn painfully in wages or salary — despite the fact that it is, of course, exactly the “same” money. It is only, and precisely, in such a climate of disconnection that “acts of consumption” can be exalted as our only possible “expressions of freedom.” Or, as Graeber puts it, “rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely `free’ because others are absolutely unfree,” as was the case under slavery, in consumer capitalism “we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions over the course of the week and working day.”

Finally, this crazed consumerism is the way that the capitalist mode of production manages a loss that it incessantly disavows, but that it cannot actually escape. Unproductive expenditure may well be the very point of the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. For this synthesis continually exempts or extracts something from the otherwise infinite processes of production and circulation. It provides a terminus for the otherwise aimless and limitless movement of the valorization of capital. For the conjunctive synthesis marks the point at which the circuits of money and commodities (C-M-C and M-C-M’) are broken, so that exchange comes to a momentary end. In the residual subject’s jouissance, the commodity is withdrawn from circulation, in order to be used up or destroyed. The conjunctive synthesis thereby deducts something from capital accumulation. And yet, without this synthesis and its deductions, the capitalist economy could not function at all. As Marx and Engels tell us, even in the ‘normal’ situation of bourgeois society, “a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.” Or, as David Harvey puts it, since capital is always in danger of being choked by overproduction and overaccumulation, it must continually resort to “violent paroxysms” of “the devaluation, depreciation, and destruction of capital.” Specifically, this is what happens on a major scale in moments of economic crisis. But on a minor or “molecular” level, the conjunctive subject or consumer is itself always in crisis — and it can only alleviate this situation by indulging in another round of shopping, purchasing, and consuming.

When we are free only as consumers, the market replaces all other forms of contestation and valuation. Conflicts that might have been resolved at other times through violence and coercion, or consensus and negotiation, or voting, or other political processes, are now adjudicated entirely through cost-benefit analysis and the mechanism of prices. This also means that the only form of judgment is aesthetic judgment. Questions of empirical fact and of the understanding (Kant’s First Critique), together with questions of morality (the Second Critique), are displaced into questions of taste (the Third Critique). And since questions of taste have no objective basis, they can only be resolved by seeing how the sum of individual choices plays out in the marketplace. It could scarcely be otherwise, once we assume, with Virginial Postrel, that the market can provide for everybody’s wants, and that we can simply “look away from the stuff we don’t like.”

However, the great fantasy of market adjudication rests on what Kant would call a paralogism. Kant cites two great “commonplaces about taste”: first, that “everyone has his own taste”; and second, that “there is no disputing about taste.” These would seem to go along with the premises of free-market theory. But Kant goes on to tell us that aesthetics is not merely subjective; it is about more than just personal preferences. Indeed, for Kant, a question of mere preferences, like my choice between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, isn’t really an aesthetic question at all. The difficulty of aesthetic judgment comes from the fact that we demand “other people’s necessary assent” to our aesthetic claims — even though we also know that these claims have no objective basis. My aesthetic judgments are irreducibly singular, but at the same time they appeal to a sensus communis. Although they are groundless, they are “put forward as having general validity (as being public)” — they are never merely a private matter. The result, Kant says, is that we continue to quarrel about taste, even though we know we cannot dispute over it.

The difference between disputing and quarreling, Kant says, is that, in the case of disputing, “we hope to produce\ldots agreement according to determinate concepts, by basing a proof on them, so that we assume that the judgment is based on objective concepts.” That is to say, disputes can be adjudicated by reference either to facts, or to agreed-upon norms. But quarrels cannot be resolved in such a way. They are indeterminate, irreducible, and without higher appeal. They offer no built-in path of reconciliation. This is precisely why Postrel counsels us to “look away” from our aesthetic disagreements, instead of continuing to argue about them. And yet, such arguing never goes away. Even as atomized consumers, we do continue to quarrel over our tastes — “and rightly so,” as Kant remarks. We must quarrel, because our aesthetic judgments, however singular and ungrounded they may be, are nonetheless public and communicable. Every expression of aesthetic taste thus makes the presumption that society does indeed exist, and that it is more than just an agglomeration of “individuals and families.” Aesthetically considered, the social is not a matter of identities, but one of differences and singularities. It is guaranteed, not by any supposed norms of “communicative reason,” but by the very fact that we quarrel in the absence of such norms.

The upshot of all this is that the question of “taste” remains a problem for the aesthetic capitalism that is premised upon satisfying it for everybody. In spite of personal differences and ostensible market indifference, not all tastes are equal. Some tastes are in fact more socially prestigious — today we would say cooler — than others. Veblen long ago remarked that social judgments of taste involve “invidious” distinctions. Today, Scott Westerfeld, in his novel So Yesterday, reminds us that “most people aren’t cool,” and “will never be cool,” no matter how avidly and expensively they consume — and the way they dress proves it. Even that great democrat Andy Warhol, who claims that “I never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty,” nonetheless finds some expressions of taste interesting, and others just corny. “When I see people dressed in hideous clothes that look all wrong on them, I try to imagine the moment when they were buying them and thought, ‘This is great. I like it. I’ll take it.’ You can’t imagine what went off in their heads to make them buy those maroon polyester waffle-iron pants or that acrylic halter top that has ‘Miami’ written in glitter. You wonder what they rejected as not beautiful — an acrylic halter top that had ‘Chicago’?”

The connective synthesis of production is presubjective or transsubjective; the disjunctive synthesis of recording is estranging and asubjective. It is only in the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, that “something on the order of a subject can be discerned” for the first time. This subject is not the traditional philosophical one. It is too insubstantial, too fleeting and transitory. It emerges abruptly and unexpectedly; and it dissolves just as quickly. When feeling swells beyond a certain point, so that a threshold is crossed, a subject is precipitated into existence. It comes forth with an exhilarating cry: “So that’s what it was… So it’s me! … It’s me, and so it’s mine…” Describing the jubilation of this me, Deleuze and Guattari replace the Cartesian cogito with a more fundamental sentio: “the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think…) presuppose an I feel on an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content.” Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) is a logical deduction, giving rise to a necessary, eternal truth: my act of thinking proves that I really exist. But Deleuze and Guattari’s sentio ergo sum (“I feel, therefore I am”) registers a contingent, ephemeral process of emergence: I only exist to the extent that I feel, and in the very instant that I feel. The subject is not a stable, persistent entity, but a momentary flash of self-enjoyment, an ecstatic tremor of jouissance.

The subject of the conjunctive synthesis is therefore “a strange subject\ldots with no fixed identity, wandering about over the body without organs, but always remaining peripheral to the desiring-machines.” That is to say, this subject is a product of its experiences, rather than being their ground or their precondition. Here Deleuze and Guattari are thinking less of Descartes than of Kant, whose formulations they both extend and invert. In Kant’s subtle revision of Cartesianism, the cogito no longer refers to a substantial entity. Instead, it designates a formal condition of all experience, “the original synthetic unity of apperception.” Kant says that my various experiences hang together by virtue of the fact that I am able, at least in principle, to claim them all as mine. No matter what particular “ideas” or “presentations” fill my mind, and no matter what I perceive or feel, “the I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations.” This cogito need not refer to a thinking substance, as it does in Descartes. It need not even imply an actual psychological process; the possibility of there being such a process is enough. My presentations still necessarily belong to me, “even if I am not conscious of them as being mine.” The formal possibility of adding an I think to the contents of my thought, whatever they may be, is thus the basis for the “synthesis” of “everything manifold in intuition” into a “thoroughgoing identity.” This “combination” of presentations into a conjunctive unity is something that “cannot be given through objects, but — being an act of the subject’s self-activity — can be performed only by the subject himself.”

For Deleuze and Guattari, in contrast, the subject is the outcome of the conjunctive synthesis, rather than its underlying principle. It is not what drives the synthesis, but what gets synthesized. “For Kant, the world emerges from the subject”; but for Deleuze and Guattari, as for Whitehead, “the subject emerges from the world.” The conjunctive synthesis is therefore not a fait accompli, but a process that needs to be renewed at every moment. Experience first happens, as it were, without me; it is only afterwards that I am able to claim it as “mine.” And my sense of being a “self” is not the basis for this claim, but rather a consequence of it. The I think — or better, the I feel — indeed accompanies each of my presentations; but for Deleuze and Guattari, this means that it comes after them, emerges from each of them, and extracts “a residual share” of their content as a sort of “recompense” for its perpetual dispossession. The subject is a supplement, a marginal epiphenomenon, a “mere residuum.” It is “a spare part adjacent to the machine,” a byproduct of processes that both precede it and go beyond it. It remains “peripheral” to the breaks and flows of the connective synthesis of production, even though it is impelled by the energy of these breaks and flows. And it is continually displaced along the “fluid and slippery” surfaces of the disjunctive synthesis of distribution, even as it “can situate itself only in terms of the[se] disjunctions.” The subject of the conjunctive synthesis neither makes anything, nor accumulates anything. All it can do is consume, dissipating both its objects and itself in a process somewhat like what Georges Bataille calls sumptuary, nonproductive expenditure.

The subject of the conjunctive synthesis is nomadic and intermittent. It neither endures through time, nor remains fixed in space. It is always in process, always in passage, always dying and being reborn. As it moves over the monstrous body of capital, it passes through “an unlimited number of stationary metastable states… and the subject is born of each state in the series, is continually reborn of the following state that determines it at a given moment, consuming-consummating all these states that cause it to be born and reborn (the lived state coming first, in relation to the subject that lives it).” Each of these “lived states” is a different manner of being, a different model of selfhood, a different fashion or style. Each of them involves different “phenomena of individualization and sexualization”: different “civilizations” or “races,” or what Foucault would call different modes of subjectification and self-cultivation, and different aesthetics of existence. The conjunctive subject passes through these states, one after the other. It never remains in any single configuration for long. It scavenges and exhausts whatever resources it can find in a given state, and then resumes its search elsewhere. Through all this, it is engaged in a desperate struggle for survival; it is rarely more than one step away (or one paycheck away) from foundering for good. Much like one of Paul Di Filippo’s “neohumans,” the conjunctive subject lives in the interstices of the monstrous body that serves as its host, dodging macrophages and lymphocytes as it “walk[s] through mazed passages crimson as blood, and [rides] the sticky turbid currents through large arteries.”

And yet, there is something splendid and glorious about the subject of the conjunctive synthesis — despite its marginality and its transience. For it lives an “experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable — a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form.” In other words, it lives a purely aesthetic condition. The existence of the conjunctive subject, with its strange euphoria, is absolute, unconditonal, and intransitive — or, if you prefer, autistic, auto-affecting, and solipsistic. This subject exhibits what Whitehead (characterizing living things in general) calls “a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment.” It does not recognize, or relate to, anything beyond itself — not even the occasion that provokes it, and that it consumes. The sentio, Deleuze and Guattari say, is “a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic.” In this condition, I relish the feeling aroused by a “presentation” in itself and for its own sake, “no matter how indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of this presentation” — which is precisely Kant’s definition of the “pure disinterested liking” that is required for any “judgment of [aesthetic] taste.” And it is of no consequence whether the feeling in question be pleasant or painful, positive or negative; the intensity is all that matters. For “even suffering, as Marx says, is a form of self-enjoyment” (Deleuze and Guattari are citing the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in which Marx says that, in a fully emancipated world, even “suffering, humanly conceived, is an enjoyment of the self for man”).

This is why, in the world of aesthetic capitalism, we are free exclusively — and quite precisely — as consumers. The conjunctive synthesis of consumption is the only one of the three syntheses in which we are able to make free, or formally unconstrained, choices. For as Kant tells us, “only the liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free, since we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason.” The first (connective) synthesis, the production of production, is something like a physics, or a mechanics, of bodies and their energies. Roughly speaking, it corresponds to the phenomenal world of Kant’s First Critique, and to what Kant calls the “interests of sense.” For the world of production is driven by sheer material need: we are compelled to sell our labor-power, simply in order to survive. The second (disjunctive) synthesis, the production of recording, is something like an ethics, or a politics, of social organization and distribution. Roughly speaking, it corresponds to the noumenal, moral world of Kant’s Second Critique and to what Kant calls the “interests of reason.” The world of distribution and circulation is driven by the constraints of the market. These constraints appear to us as ineluctable laws in the face of which there is No Alternative — so that (as Kant says of the moral law) “we are objectively no longer free to select what we must do.” But the third (conjunctive) synthesis, the production of consumption, stands apart from both of these sets of interests or compulsions. Therefore it corresponds, roughly speaking, to Kant’s Third Critique, with its aesthetics of sensibility and enjoyment. The world of consumption is the only one that “leaves us the freedom to make an object of pleasure for ourselves out of something or other.”

The monstrous body of capital — the socius, or the Body without Organs — is massive, imposing, and unavoidable. It defines the very situation in which we live. It is the milieu that all our thoughts and actions presuppose, the environment to which they all refer, the context in relation to which they alone have meaning. In this sense, capital truly is a “divine” force: it suffuses itself into everything, and it subsumes everything. But this divinity is not the end of the story. The monstrous body of capital is indeed everywhere; but for all that, it is not everything. It has grown to be a “transcendental condition” — but it is not transcendent. In Kantian terms, its status is regulative and not constitutive. Or as Marx puts it, the “laws” of capital logic are only “tendential” ones; they are not totalizing or deterministic. The body of capital is therefore not-all. For one thing, it is never satiated; this means that some margin always remains beyond its grasp, some activity that has not yet been capitalized and appropriated. For another thing, it remains infested by parasites, the remnants that it has been unable to transform into itself. As Deleuze and Guattari say, “the surface of this uncreated body swarms with them, as a lion’s mane swarms with fleas.” We ourselves are these fleas; and even as the body of capital strives to eliminate us, it also cannot exist without us. Just as God needs a creation that is separate from himself, and free to disobey him and err in its ways: so capital requires an external source of inputs, as well as an external dumping ground for outputs. It needs conditions that are not yet its own, and also those that are no longer its own. It must always demand additional ‘raw material’ to subsume, and it must always demand an outlet for the results of this subsumption. In short, capital is not really “self-engendered”; it needs both producers from whom it can extort productive labor, and consumers to whom it can sell its products.

In Deleuze and Guattari’s account, therefore, the Body without Organs is only one of three “syntheses” that together compose the “transcendental conditions” of capitalist existence. The socius is the matrix of surplus appropriation, and then of circulation and distribution. It operates what Deleuze and Guattari call a disjunctive synthesis, or a synthesis of recording, “of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference.” But such a process cannot continue indefinitely, all on its own. The disjunctive synthesis of capital is not a perpetual motion machine; it is not a closed, self-contained, self-renewing system. Contrary to the assumptions of neoclassical economics, it is not an equilibrium system. Rather, it is what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers call a dissipative structure, a far-from-equilibrium conductor of flows of energy. If the socius were only able to feed back upon itself, and live upon its own resources, it would either suffer a short circuit and quickly burn out, or else slowly succumb to entropy. This is precisely why it is not-all. In order to function, the disjunctive synthesis must be preceded by a connective synthesis, a synthesis of production, or “of actions and of passions”: a fuel upon which the body of capital is able to feed. And it must be followed by a conjunctive synthesis, a synthesis of consumption or consummation (consommation), “of sensual pleasures, of anxiety, and of pain”: a spark of self-enjoyment that discharges tensions and reboots the entire reproductive process.

The socius can be described as a disjunctive synthesis, because of the way that it captures all production, appropriates or “attributes” this production to itself, and then divides and distributes the fruits of this production, according to a “system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about.” Capital is not a substance, but a process and a relation: a process of continual metamorphosis, and a series of “relationships between… producers,” that “take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour” (Marx). In its “constantly renewed movement,” capital does not “prefer” one form to another, or even one path of transformations to another. The channels of circulation and the objects of distribution are therefore always changing, even as the outcome of the process — the “valorization” of the capital being circulated, thanks to the sale and consumption of the product, and the consequent “reflux of money to its starting point” — remains the same. The disjunctive synthesis comes down to a play of differences that do not make a difference, or of choices that have no consequence or significance. “No matter what two organs are involved, the way in which they are attached to the body without organs must be such that all the disjunctive syntheses between the two amount to the same on the slippery surface.”

Deleuze and Guattari’s first synthesis, the connective synthesis of production, can be identified with the actual labor process: that is to say, with “purposeful activity'” that transforms the world. The young Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts describes this process as “Man’s species being,” involving the worker’s immediate relation to “nature,” or to “the sensuous external world.” For nature is “the material on which [the worker’s] labor is manifested, in which it is active, from which and by means of which it produces.” Deleuze and Guattari follow this definition when they present the connective synthesis as “universal primary production” in the course of which human “industry” has a “fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man.” Strictly speaking, this process is not (or is not yet) subjective. In Marx’s terms, the individual human being is not yet separated from “the life of the species” as a whole, nor from nature, which is humanity’s “inorganic body.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, similarly, there can be “no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do within the life of man as a species.”

When free production is described in this way, it may sound a bit too much like Rousseau’s “state of nature” (or perhaps, in Deleuze and Guattari’s version, like the aggressively outrageous anarchy of Otto Muehl’s Actions-Analytic Kommune, as presented in Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie). But neither Marx, nor Deleuze and Guattari, ever suggest that such “production” actually has (or might ever once have had) an independent, objective existence; it is always intertwined with other social processes, or with other syntheses. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx only evokes production in the context of a discussion about how human beings’ species-specific “life-activity has been systematically estranged from human beings themselves, leading to the isolation of “individual life in its abstract form.” The later Marx, abjuring such existential language, instead emphasizes the way that “the process of production must be a unity, composed of the labour process and the process of creating value.” But where productive labor is a living, social, and embodied process, value-creation involves all the abstraction inherent to the extraction and realization of surplus value. It is not the case, therefore, that free production comes chronologically first, and is only appropriated afterwards by the capitalist; rather, once the mechanisms of capitalism are in place, the capitalists themselves organize social production with the aim of extracting value.

Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the connective synthesis never takes place all by itself: “there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately consumption and recording, without any sort of mediation, and recording and consumption directly determine production, though they do so within the production process itself.” The connective synthesis of production is always already accompanied by the other syntheses, and in particular by the disjunctive synthesis of recording, which both organizes the connective process, and appropriates its products. In the connective synthesis, “there is no need to distinguish…between production and its product… The pure ‘thisness’ of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing.” But in the disjunctive synthesis of recording, the product is taken out of the flow, separated from the production process of which it was a part. This is what transforms it into a commodity. In its “pure thisness,” it was “an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness,” Marx says. In this process, the first (connective synthesis is branched upon, and subordinated to, the second (disjunctive) synthesis. This is why capitalism presents us with “a fetishistic, perverse, bewitched world” in which the “apparent objective movement” of the full body or socius appears to us as the motor of social reproduction. Although the disjunctive synthesis depends, both logically and materially, upon the connective synthesis, it always appears as if the second synthesis came first. And this appearance is itself a basic principle of social organization and social reproduction.

[Discussion of the third synthesis, the conjunctive synthesis of consumption, will follow in a later posting]