[o]ur [capitalist] societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes, codes foreign and exotic...this taste is destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function (245).
“Mobile, flexible capital is capable of inserting itself into any cultural milieu. In countries as different as Japan, Brazil, France, and Kenya, capitalism is able to take advantage of the local symbolic order (Harvey 1989). The forms that capitalism takes in these various countries reflect the symbolic order that the capitalist machine has plugged into. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari do not characterize the capitalist machine as monolithic or unitary, it does not have an ‘I’, an ego, or a unified identity. It works instead as a polymorphous destroyer of codes. It continually breaks down the cultural, symbolic, and linguistic barriers that create territories and limit exchange. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘[c]ivilization is defined by the decoding and deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’ (244).
“It would seem that Deleuze and Guattari are making a move similar to Jameson’s by asserting that schizophrenia resembles and is associated with the logic of late capitalism. ‘Yet it would be a serious error,’ assert Deleuze and Guattari, ‘to consider the capitalist flows and the schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of... decoding’ (244). Capitalism ‘produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars’ but the schizos are not salable. (245) Indeed, the schizophrenic is locked up in institutions, and turned into a ‘confined clinical entity’ (245). If the schizophrenic really exemplified the culture of capitalism, why aren’t schizos celebrated as heroes and heroines in contemporary capitalist society? Deleuze and Guattari conclude that:
schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit....Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death (246).
“As capitalism decodes and deterritorializes it reaches a limit at which point it must artificially reterritorialize by augmenting the state apparatus, and repressive bureaucratic and symbolic regimes. The schizophrenic never reaches such a limit. S/he resists such reterritorialization, just as s/he resists the symbolic and despotic territorialization of the oedipalizing psychotherapist.
“Thus, Deleuze and Guattari disagree with Jameson’s argument that schizophrenia reinforces and contributes to the hegemony of capitalism. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari see the schizophrenic as capitalism’s exterminating angel. For them the schizo is a radical, revolutionary, nomadic wanderer who resists all forms of oppressive power. They believe that radical political movements should ‘learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs’ (Seem xxi). Schizophrenic sensibilities can replace ideological and dogmatic political goals with a radical form of productive desire. This ‘desiring-production’ brings the unconscious into the real, and unleashes its radical world-making potential. Productive desire need not be solipsistic, and includes the ‘group psychosis’ induced by radical postmodern artistic creations and political movements. Neither is desiring-production limited to clinical schizophrenics. Desiring-production marks the schizophrenic potential in everyone to resist the power of despotic signifiers and capitalist reterritorialization.”
@Negations
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