Anti-Oedipus: 3 Savages, Barbarians, Civilised Men
The third section is concerned with the genealogy of desiring-production, or its amalgamation in certain social forms. The three forms loosely trace the decoding of flows of desire, and the concomitant increased repression of these decoded flows. Briefly, the three social formations discussed are the primitive territorial machine; the imperial despotic machine; and the civilised capitalist machine. Each formation is defined by a differing system of representation as well as a different organisation of desire and production.
In this chapter I am most interested by representation. What is meant by “representation is always a social and psychic repression of desiring-production”? Repression and representation are always made up of three terms: the repressed representative (of desire), the repressing representation (of desire), and the displaced represented (of desire). Hopefully I can understand what each of these terms are.
In the territorial machine representation is inscriptive. To use the term representation is almost inappropriate. Signs are carved in the flesh. It is not so much that they have a meaning in their pictorial form; rather the scarification, the pain, the affect that comes from their inscription marks a body as having a particular orientation. A ritual that marks a boy as a man; a woman as a wife; etc. This marking defines man as a debtor. They are taking from Nietzsche here, to say that debt is the original relationship, that the suffering inscribed on man as a result of debt is the first form of memory, memory of relationships, of alliance.
Alliance takes the form, then, of ‘repressing representation’ in so far as the inscription which defines it encastes men in relationships apart from “the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire”. This filiative memory is the repressed representative. It stands almost directly for desire; while the representation of alliance comes from without, laying itself over the direct filiative relationship.
“Incest is only the retroactive effect of the repressing representation on the repressed representative.” Oedipus (the represented) then comes at the end, as the effect of the repression of alliance (the representation) on filiation (the representative). It is only a side-effect of the necessity of circulating one’s relatives. It is not so much that you should not commit incest in its own right: rather those directly related to you must circulate because alliance demands it. It only appears that Oedipus is primary; but in fact it is final.
In the primitive machine desiring production is coded according to the alliances which appear as a result of debt. This flow belongs to this tribe; this flow belongs to that tribe; you must trade such and such to x; chiefs must participate in potlatch and destroy their wealth etc. The primitive machine is also territorial. The repressed representative (filiation) directly connects to the earth. Lines of filiation tie back to deities understood as the body of the earth itself. The body of the earth appears in the ‘great biocosmic memory’. Production also directly connects to the earth in the sense that the ‘essence of wealth’ is perceived as directly in the earth. Thanks is given to the earth for providing sustenance.
This is how the ‘full body’ of the socius can be understood as falling back on desiring production, in the sense that all flows appear to emanate directly from it. Flows of people, flows of material, flows of desiring-production.
In the despotic machine, the flows of the primitive machine remain, however they are ‘overcoded’. Local alliances are allowed to continue operating, but a surplus portion of the flows are redirected to the despot. The finite debt which circulates and defines the primitive machine becomes infinite and directed toward the body of the despot.
The monarch is also the sole cause of production; the demi-god who guarantees harvests. No longer is production tied to the earth. The direct relationship of people to the earth disappears. The earth in itself, as a territory, vanishes (no more rivers, mountains, forests: now borders, parcels, property). It is ‘deterritorialised’, but reterritorialised on the body of the despot.
As a result representation changes also. Writing and speaking develop a 1:1 relationship. Inscription is no longer about marking but about meaning. What does the despot want? The written word signifies the despot’s will in the form of taxation. (Money develops now, primarily to enable taxation, not as a tool for exchange). This is where the signifier becomes nothing more than an arrow pointing to another signifier. Lacanian semiotics. The phallic signifier as transcendent guarantor of all displaced meaning. And indeed it is meaning which assumes the role of displaced represented of desire. (Still with Lacan — desire as the endless metonymy, the endless search for a fill-in for objet petit a).
This form of representation is supposedly also Oedipal (see how Oedipus has shifted from displaced represented to repressing representation). Sister and mother as ‘new’ concepts derived from the overcoding effected by this new representation against primitive machines. They come from the collapse of all alliances into one great alliance with the King; and from the extended filiation doing something else. I’ve struggled to follow this bit.
In the capitalist machine, things once again shift. There are no longer any codes, whether between alliances or directed toward the king. Capital replaces coded flows (flows which are directed according to repressing representation; i.e. alliance, or the despot, which implement rules or instructions) with axiomatised flows. Axiomatic in the sense that the laws which govern these flows seem natural, given, and yet remain always artificial and can be added to. What does this mean? Economic law on the order of Adam Smith, supply and demand curves, abstract labour and abstract wealth.
Because, or alongside the decoding of the flows, the form of representation in capitalism shifts also. I do not fully understand this but they discuss Hjelmslev’s linguistics which follow deterritorialised flows of content and expression, as well as the notions of figures and images, in contrast to the despotic regime of the signifier. This is perhaps a truly post structuralist understanding of representation; in the Lacanian linguistics, while meaning still shifts due to metaphor and metonymy, it is still ultimately derived from a single source, the signifier understood as phallus, Father, law, the primeval break (understood as the 1:many relationship). In Hjelmslevian linguistics and the capitalist representation it theorises, language truly becomes a flow of many:many. This is extremely interesting, as I had previously thought Lacan’s linguistics was already deterritorialised in its endless deferral — yet now I see that Lacan’s endless deferral is itself a return to transcendence in its understanding of the signifier. I should return to this again.
Capital is also the limit of previous societies insofar as it performs decoding on a wide and complete scale. However it is not the absolute limit, which position is occupied by schizophrenia and free desiring-production. This is because capital always winds up reterritorialising what it deterritorialises. It decodes only to axiomatise (and schizophrenia, true schizophrenia, is beyond axiomatics). Schizophrenia is discussed as the external limit of capital; where the flows which it decodes and axiomatises (into strata) seek to escape to (line of flight). The internal limit on the other hand is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Capital can only ward this off by expanding, by finding new codes to decode, new flows to integrate and axiomatise. Think of axiomatics also in the Gramscian sense of hegemony, where capital finds new and revolutionary things and folds them into itself — “yes, even the revolution can be marketed. Che Guevera on sweatshop t-shirts.” To reduce everything to money, to make everything equivalent, is to subject everything to the same mathematical laws, axiomatics, whereby everything can be substituted.
Misc stuff which I found interesting:
- The relationship of two flows, flows of capital and flows of wages/income, as so quantitatively different as to be qualitatively different.
- The notion of there being only one class, that class which performs decoding.
- The notion that no body can be robbed: that purchasing power is created by the flow of salary in the first place.
- The notion of anti-production being internalised: the army, the state war machine, as Bataillean destruction of excess. How does this differ to potlatch in the primitive territorial machine? Because there is no prestige attached?
Each of these machines also represents a full body: the earth, the despot, capital. A body produced by flows of desiring production which fall back on them and appear to make them emanate from itself. This is obvious in the understanding of the despot and capital (capital especially, think the reversal of C-M-C to M-C-M), but the earth perhaps not so much. It helps to think of the earth not in its pure physicality but as an object in relation to primitive societies. The full bodies in contrast to the body without organs, fall back on desiring production, assume it for themselves, turn the death drive against desiring production (secondary repression) to maintain themselves. The body without organs, on the other hand, is never fixed, it follows wherever desiring production leads. This would be the form of the socius in a schizophrenic society (what Ian Buchanan calls permanent revolution).
There are a few main things to remember as key to the different social machines. Representation and the role it plays in repressing desiring production. The notions of code and territory, decoding and deterritorialisation. The understanding of the full body. Again, a lot of this is tied back to Oedipus but that part still feels secondary to me. I really like this section and need to remember to come back to it especially in relationship to capital.
