Annotations ¶
Money is best defined as a catalyst or stimulant of trade (and its absence, an inhibitor). Barter, the exchange of goods for goods, is relatively inefficient in that people must wait for their complementary needs to meet. The occasions when one person has exactly the good that the other needs, and vice versa, are exceedingly rare. But any good that is highly desirable and can easily be put back into circulation can play the role of money: blocks of salt, cowry shells, coral, ivory — even cigarettes in modern prisons.26
The conceptual confusion engendered by all the different uses of the word “capitalism” (as “free enterprise” or as “industrial mode of production” or, more recently, as “world-economy”) is so entrenched that it makes an objective analysis of economic power almost impossible. One could, of course, simply redefine the term “capitalism” to include “power to manipulate markets” as a constitutive part of its meaning and to rid it of some of its teleological connotations. But as philosophers of science know well, when a theory begins redefining its terms in an ad hoc way to fit the latest round of negative evidence, it shows by this very act that it has reached the limits of its usefulness.
Many of the inventions that Europeans used to colonize the world (the compass, gunpowder, paper money, the printing press) were of Chinese origin, while Europe’s accounting techniques and instruments of credit (which are often cited as examples of her unique “rationality”) came from Islam. Thus, nothing intrinsic to Europe determined the outcome, but rather a dynamics bearing no inherent relationship to any one culture.
If this book displays a clear bias against large, centralized hierarchies, it is only because the last three hundred years have witnessed an excessive accumulation of stratified systems at the expense of meshworks. The degree of homogeneity in the world has greatly increased, while heterogeneity has come to be seen as almost pathological, or at least as a problem that must be eliminated. Under the circumstances, a call for a more decentralized way of organizing human societies seems to recommend itself.
However, it is crucial to avoid the facile conclusion that meshworks are intrinsically better than hierarchies (in some transcendental sense).
Britons, so conscious of their race, are, in fact, an amalgam of the Beaker Folk of the Bronze Age, the Indo-European Celts of the first millennium B.C., the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Picts of the first millennium A.D., and finally the Vikings and their parvenu grandchildren, the Normans.… [Hence] the notion that there are stable, pure races that only now are in danger of mixing under the influence of modern industrial culture is nonsense. There may indeed be endogamous groups, largely biologically isolated by geography and culture from their neighbors, such as the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest, but these are rare and not perfectly isolated in any event.29
Biology can feed back onto biology through social distinctions: for hormonal reasons, women, on the average (but only on the average), have a different proportion of muscle to fat than men, and this has the consequence that women, on the average (but only on the average), can exert somewhat less physical force on objects. The division of labor between men and women and the division of early training, activity and attitude cause a very considerable exaggeration of this small difference, so that women become physically weaker than men during their development to an extent far in excess of what can be ascribed to hormones.39
A general cooling-down process occurred in the Northern hemisphere in the fourteenth century. The number of glaciers and ice-floes increased and winters became more severe. One historian suggests that the Vikings’ route to America was cut off by dangerous ice at the time. Another thinks that some dreadful climatic drama finally interrupted European colonization in Greenland, the evidence being the bodies of the last survivors found in the frozen earth.… Similarly the “little ice age” … during Louis XIV’s reign was more a tyrant than the Sun King. Everything moved to its rhythm: cereal-growing Europe and the rice-fields and steppes of Asia.… All this gives additional meaning to the fluctuations of material life, and possibly explains their simultaneity. The possibility of a certain physical and biological history common to all humanity before the great discoveries, the industrial revolution or the interpenetration of economies.52
many civilizations in the past carelessly intensified the exploitation of their soils, failing to implement available techniques (such as terracing) that could have protected this valuable resource from eroding away. Consequently, those societies inadvertently set a limit on the number of times they could pass their genes down through the generations. (An upper limit of seventy generations existed for most cultures, according to one historian’s calculations.) In this case, the bounded rationality of many elites and the prospect of short-term gains promoted the accumulation of habits and routines that, in the long run, destroyed the conditions under which the gene pools of those civilizations could reproduce themselves.
However, one must not assume that the power to impose a set of values on a population (and hence to influence the direction of that population’s cultural evolution) is always strong enough to eliminate the selective effect of individual choice. (Herein lies another weakness of “cultural relativism”: not only does it emphasize the exotic at the expense of the unremarkable, which is where human universals are to be found, but it tends to focus on the norms of a society while ignoring the actual behavior of individual agents, who may or may not always adhere to those norms. Perfect obedience cannot be taken for granted.103) According to Durham, absolute imposition and free individual choice need to be taken as idealized poles of a continuum, with most actual behavior falling somewhere in between, as a mixture of the two.
A different process is involved when the transmission involves not formalized knowledge but embodied know-how. In this case, the information in question cannot travel by itself (through books, for example) but needs human bodies as its vehicle. This kind of transmission may be compared to that involved in epidemic contagion. Braudel argues, for example, that the printing press and mobile artillery did not create a permanent imbalance in the distribution of power in Europe because they spread too rapidly across the Continent, thanks to the mobility of their practitioners. Printers and mercenaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries migrated continuously, taking their skills and know-how wherever they went, spreading them like an epidemic.106
Here we have been exploring exclusively the interactions between culture and genetics, but nonetheless we must never lose sight of the fact that the flow of replicators (whether genes, memes, norms, or routines) constitutes only half the story. The flow of matter and energy through a system (which often means the flow of biomass, either living or fossil) is of equal importance, particularly during intensifications. The role of genetic and cultural replicators (or, more accurately, of the phenotypic effects of those replicators) is to act as catalysts that facilitate or inhibit the self-organizing processes made possible by intense matter-energy flows.
A port, and a military port is — with its circulation of goods, men signed up willingly or by force, sailors embarking and disembarking, diseases and epidemics — a place of desertion, smuggling, contagion: it is a crossroads for dangerous mixtures, a meeting-place for forbidden circulations. The naval hospital must therefore treat, but in order to do this it must be a filter, a mechanism that pins down and partitions; it must provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the confusion of illegality and evil. The medical supervision of diseases and contagions is inseparable from a whole series of other controls: the military control over deserters, fiscal control over commodities, administrative control over remedies, rations, disappearances, cures, deaths, simulations. Hence the need to distribute and partition off space in a rigorous manner.132
As Deleuze and Guattari put it: “You will never find a homogenous system that is not already affected by a regulated, continuous, immanent process of variation (why does Chomsky pretend not to understand this?).”65
Our criticism of these linguistic models is not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, that they are not abstract enough, that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field.… [T]here is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. There is no ideal speaker-listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community. Language is, in Weinreich’s words, “an essentially heterogeneous reality.” There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.70
In essence, what Deleuze and Guattari oppose is the postulation of a “universal core” (or synchronic dimension) of language, since this relegates social processes (such as pidginization, creolization, or standardization) to a secondary role, affecting at most the transformational component of the grammar. What they propose instead is to give historical processes a more fundamental role by modeling the abstract machine of language not as an automatic mechanism embodied in individual brains but as a diagram governing the dynamics of collective human interaction.
As Foucault writes:
Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to the state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to the primal social contract, but to permanent coercions, not to fundamental rights, but to indefinitely progressive forms of training, not to the general will but to automatic docility.… The Napoleonic régime was not far off and with it the form of state that was to survive it and, we must not forget, the foundations of which were laid not only by jurists, but also by soldiers, not only councillors of state, but also junior officers, not only the men of the courts, but also the men of the camps. The Roman reference that accompanied this formation certainly bears with it this double index: citizens and legionaries, law and manoeuvres. While jurists or philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.88
The overall effect of mass newspapers and news agencies was homogenizing. Newspapers aimed their presentation to the lowest common denominator, while news agencies attempted to create a product that would be acceptable to all their subscribers (i.e., newspapers with vastly different editorial policies), which meant that rather than aiming for objectivity they aimed for widely acceptable neutrality. “The agencies assume that a uniform editorial approach is not only possible but also desirable. A government crisis is covered in the same way whether it happens in Nigeria or Holland. Similar standards are applied whether the story is being sent to Pakistan or Argentina. A single, objectively verifiable account of each event [which in most cases means quoting a reliable official source] is the bedrock of agency reporting.”128 It is this homogenization of point of view, amplified by the news agencies’ global reach, that is the real problem with the agencies today, not some overt conspiracy to diffuse “capitalist ideology” through the Third World.
The news agencies have come to embody a true antimarket structure, that is, one dominated by managerial hierarchies and not by owners or their representatives.154 Although they are not engaged in a conspiracy to promote “capitalist values” around the world, they do have a strong homogenizing effect, arising from the routinization and standardization of point of view (with the concomitant distorting simplification) and, ultimately, from the very form of the flow, that is, a flow emanating from very few places to a large number of subscribers. This type of flow (a “one-to-many” flow) guarantees that there will be a small number of producers of this type of “linguistic product” and a large number of consumers. The one-to-many structure of news delivery was eventually built directly into the technological infrastructure used to manage the flow. In the 1950s, for example, Reuters’ financial services division began to build its own (Teletype-based) communications network for the delivery of its product (commodity and stock market news). By 1963, the International Financial Printer began operations, but the real takeoff did not occur until the slow, bulky, and noisy teleprinters were replaced by video terminals in the 1970s. (By 1982, Reuters alone had over thirty thousand terminals in eighty-one countries.)155
Humanity has never been moving “vertically” up a ladder of progress, but simply exploring “horizontally” a space of possibilities prestructured by stable states.
No doubt, the different dynamical processes that have shaped human history are changing this space as we move, new stable states appearing while others disappear or lose stability. The stable state defining a community of mutually supporting members obviously had not disappeared, rather we had drifted away from it, and computer networks may now bridge that gap. On the other hand, if the value of computer networks is this (nonfuturistic) catalytic role, their future worth will depend entirely on the quality of the communities that develop within them. Moreover, these communal meshworks will embrace people with diverse political inclinations (including fascistic communities), so that the mere existence of “virtual communities” will not guarantee social change in the direction of a fairer, less oppressive society. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us.162
To simply increase heterogeneity without articulating this diversity into a meshwork not only results in further conflict and friction, it rapidly creates a set of smaller, internally homogeneous nations. (Hence, the balkanization of the world would increase heterogeneity only in appearance.)
Second, even if we manage to create local connections between heterogeneous elements, the mere presence of an emergent meshwork does not in itself mean that we have given a segment of society a less oppressive structure. The nature of the result will depend on the character of the heterogeneous elements meshed together, as we observed of communities on the Internet: they are undoubtedly more destratified than those subjected to massification by one-to-many media, but since everyone of all political stripes — even fascists — can benefit from this destratification, the mere existence of a computer meshwork is no guarantee that a better world will develop there.
You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying.… If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged towards catastrophe. Staying stratified — organized, signified, subjected — is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.13
All these precautions are necessary in a world that does not possess a ladder of progress, or a drive toward increased perfection, or a promised land, or even a socialist pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Moreover, these warnings derive from a recognition that our world is governed not only by nonlinear dynamics, which makes detailed prediction and control impossible, but also by nonlinear combinatorics, which implies that the number of possible mixtures of meshwork and hierarchy, of command and market, of centralization and decentralization, are immense and that we simply cannot predict what the emergent properties of these myriad combinations will be. Thus the call for a more experimental attitude toward reality and for an increased awareness of the potential for self-organization inherent in even the humblest forms of matter-energy.
When we think that the majority of equations used in science are linear and that a linear conception of causality dominated Western thought for over two millennia, we may be inclined to think that our lack of familiarity with questions of self-organized heterogeneity and our tendency to think about complexity in terms of homogeneous hierarchies derive from the way we represent the world to ourselves. No doubt, the entrenchment in the academic and scientific worlds of certain discursive practices informed by linear thinking and linear representation is indeed part of our problem. But to try to reduce a complex situation to a question of representations is, in turn, a homogenizing force very much alive today among social critics. Here we have argued that both the world of objective referents and the world of labels and concepts have undergone processes of uniformation and standardization, so that both discursive and nondiscursive practices need to be taken into account when tracing the history of our homogenization.
Changing our way of thinking about the world is a necessary first step, but it is by no means sufficient: we will need to destratify reality itself, and we must do so without the guarantee of a golden age ahead, knowing full well the dangers and possible restratifications we may face.
It is important, however, not to confuse the need for caution in our exploration of the nonlinear possibilities of (economic, linguistic, biological) reality, and the concomitant abandonment of utopian euphoria, with despair, resentment, or nihilism. There is, indeed, a new kind of hope implicit in these new views. After all, many of the most beautiful and inspiring things on our planet may have been created through destratification. A good example of this may be the emergence of birdsongs: the mouth became destratified when it ceased to be a strictly alimentary organ, caught up in the day-to-day eating of flesh, and began to generate other flows (memes) and structures (songs) where the meshwork element dominated the hierarchical.16 The emergence of organic life itself, while not representing a more perfect stage of development than rocks, did involve a greater capacity to generate self-consistent aggregates, a surplus of consistency.17 The human hand may also have involved a destratification, a complete detachment from locomotive functions and a new coupling with the external environment, itself further destratified when the hand began converting pieces of it (rocks, bones, branches) into tools.18 Thus, despite all the cautionary tales about simplistic calls for anarchic liberation, there is in these new theories a positive, even joyful conception of reality. And while these views do indeed invoke the “death of man,” it is only the death of the “man” of the old “manifest destinies,” not the death of humanity and its potential for destratification.19
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