On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Conclusion

Summary of Conclusion

Whereas D&G’s Conclusion was essentially a rehearsal of several key concepts from throughout their text, Simondon’s is more of a brand new agenda building off the book so far, like a passionate instructor who excitedly introduces a slew of new concepts into the last day of class.

Simondon declares:

To this day, the reality of the technical object has been relegated to the background behind the reality of human work. The technical object has been apprehended through human work, thought and judged as instrument, adjuvant, or product of work. However, one ought to be capable, in favor of man himself, to carry out a reversal that would enable what is human in the technical object to appear directly, without passing through the relation of work. It is work that must be known as a phase of technicity, not technicity as a phase of work, for it is technicity that is the whole of which work forms a part, and not the reverse. (247, emphasis added)

The old “naturalistic definition” of work [travail], as human shaping of nature, is no longer sufficient, as it does not capture work as a part or phase of technicity.

There is work only when man must offer his organism as tool bearer, that is, when man must, along with his organism and his psychosomatic unity, follow the step-by-step unfolding of the human-nature relation. Work is the activity through which man actualizes the mediation between the human species and nature within himself; in this case we say that man operates as tool bearer because he acts on nature in this activity and follows this action, step by step, gesture by gesture. There is work when man cannot entrust the technical object with the function of mediation between the species and nature, and must fulfill this function of relation himself, through his body, his thought, his action.

Work is the shaping of natural matter into human-designed form:

The activity of work is what forms the link between natural matter and form, which comes from man; work is an activity that succeeds in making two realities as heterogeneous as matter and form coincide and renders them synergetic. And the activity of work makes man aware of the two terms he synthetically relates, because the worker must have his eyes fixed on these two terms which he must bring closer together (this is the norm of work), not on the interiority itself of the complex operation through which this bringing together is obtained. Work masks the relation in favor of the terms. (248)

S states that it is in part the “servile condition of the worker” that makes “the operation by which matter and form are made to coincide more obscure,” insofar as

the man who orders [commande] work to be done is concerned with what must appear in the given order [ordre], in terms of content and of the raw material that is the condition of execution, rather than with the operation that enables the process of taking form to occur: the attention is given to form and matter, not to the process of taking form as operation. The hylomorphic schema is thus a couple in which the two terms are clear and the relation obscure.

So interestingly S does not see work itself as the “process” of giving form to matter, but rather as, just another input? along with matter and the organization achieved by the “man who orders work to be done.” A focus on labor per se is, acc S, obscurantist because it hides the real “process” of which labor is just a part or phase. Cf. this quote from way back in Part Two, Chapter Two:

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

Pace Hegel, it is neither the Master, nor the Servant, for whom there is a path toward transcendence. S illustrates his point with a passage about clay which is worth quoting at length:

Indeed, it is not enough to enter the workshop with the worker or slave, or even to take the mold into ones own hands and to operate the potter’s wheel. The point of view of the working man is still too external to the process of taking form, which is the only thing that is technical in itself. It would be necessary to be able to enter the mold with the clay, to be both mold and clay at once, to live and feel their common operation in order to be able to think the process of taking form in itself. For the worker elaborates two technical half-chains that prepare the technical operation: he prepares the clay, makes it malleable, without lumps, without air bubbles, and correlatively prepares the mold; he materializes the form by making it into a wooden mold, and makes matter pliable, capable of receiving information; then, he puts the clay into the mold and presses it; but it is the system constituted by the mold and the pressed clay that is the condition of the process of taking form; it is the clay that takes form according to the mold, not the worker who gives it its form. The working man prepares the mediation, but he doesn’t fulfill [accomplit] it; it is the mediation that fulfills itself on its own once the conditions have been created; even though man is very close to this operation, he does not know it; his body pushes the mediation to fulfill itself, enables it to fulfill itself, but the representation of the technical operation does not appear in work. It is the essential part that is missing, the active center of the technical operation that remains veiled. (248-9, emphasis added)

[Simondon apparently has a similar discussion of clay at the beginning of his other book, on individuation (cf. Lambert 2012)]. In any event, the worker’s labor is external in S’s account, because it is just setting up the “condition of the process” by preparing the clay and the mold; it is the clay that takes form, which action is the “active center of the technical operation.”

For as long as man practiced work without using technical objects, technical knowledge could only be transmitted in an implicit and practical form, through professional habits and gestures: this motivating [moteur] knowledge is effectively what enables the elaboration of two technical half chains, the one starting from form and the one starting from matter. But it does not and cannot go further, it stops before the operation itself: it does not penetrate inside the mold. In its essence, it is pre-technical and not technical. (249)

I was recently reading about the transformation of beer-brewing in the 19^th century, from old, more-art-than-science practices formed through observation and tradition, toward those informed by scientific investigations into how yeast, malt, hygiene, etc. actually worked (Sigsworth 1965); the old, artisanal brewers were essentially setting up the Simondonian “technical half chains,” with no full understanding of how fermentation (or other related processes such as malting, etc.) actually worked. Nevertheless for S the key step is not just growing scientific understanding, but the switch from “tool-bearing” to “using technical objects.”

Technical knowledge, on the contrary, consists in starting from what happens inside the mold in order to find the different elaborations that can prepare it by starting from this center. Man cannot leave the center of operation in the dark, when he no longer intervenes as tool bearer; it is the center that must effectively be produced by the technical object, which does not think or feel, and which does not acquire habits. In order to construct the technical object that will function, man needs to represent to himself the way of functioning that coincides with technical operation, which accomplishes it.

[He makes distinctions in use between “function” and “operation” which I find it a bit hard to puzzle out (contrast the quotes above and below); clearer is the difference between “function” and “work:”]

One cannot speak of the work of a machine, but only of its functioning, which is an ordered ensemble of operations. Form and matter, if they still exist, are at the same level and belong to the same system; there is continuity between the technical and the natural.

Making the technical object is no longer accompanied by this obscure zone between form and matter. Pre-technical knowledge is also pre-logical, in the sense that it constitutes a couple of terms without discovering the interiority of the rela­tion (like in the hylomorphic schema). Technical knowledge on the contrary is logical, in the sense that it seeks the interiority of the relation. (250)

Different “paradigmatisms” arise from considering the “relation of work,” as opposed to considering technical operation and “technical knowledge.” This leads into a discussion of the hylomorphic scheme as essentially a misunderstanding preserved from ancient, pre-technical thought (apparently linked to the experience of the two half-chains, instead of understanding what happens in the middle, the zone left obscure before the development of true technicity? S also insists that technical objects are “detachable” mediations between nature and humanity [akin to Latour’s immutable mobiles, although part of their power derives from the fact that they are not exactly “immutable” in L’s sense, but rather adaptable? to new contexts; in any event their detachability from context of production [an aspect of alienation, in Marx’s view] gives them a power and importance which is part of what the new mechanological or whatever understanding needs to capture and bring to the fore. [Even though it’s sometimes a pain in the ass, I like having a detachable mediation.]

For all Simondon’s conscious differences with Marx he shares some of the early Marx’s arguably mystical ways of talking about work as the mediation between humanity and nature. “Work adheres to the worker, and reciprocally, through the intermediary of work, the worker adheres to the nature on which he operates.” Because of their detachability, technical objects are not, er, sticky in this way... and for this reason they somehow enable a better mediation:

The relation of man to nature, rather than being only lived and practiced obscurely, takes on a status of stability, of consistency, making it a reality that has laws and an ordered permanence. In edifying the world of technical objects and by generalizing the objective mediation between man and nature, technical activity re-attaches man to nature through a far richer and better defined link than that of the specific reaction of collective work. A convertibility of the human into the natural and of the natural into the human establishes itself through the technical schematism. (251)

[It is not clear from the context, to me at any rate, when this is happening. Is it happening throughout history, during the course of technical development? Or is it happening in the future, after this book has transformed cultural understanding of technicity?]

S makes a distinction between function [fonctionnement] and work [travail] (in French it makes more sense to say that machines “function” and people “work”). S writes, “The technical object thus carries with it a broader category than that of work: operational functioning [fonctionnement opératoire]” (252). [I’m still not clear on the difference or relation between “operation” and “function”]. Operational functioning is more than work because it includes also a previous act of invention.

Now, invention is not work; it does not presuppose the mediation between nature and the human species to be played out by somato-psychic man. Invention is not only an adaptive and defensive reaction; it is a mental operation, a mental functioning that is of the same order as scientific knowledge.

“Work” for S is limited to this physical mediation between nature and the human species; invention, by including mental operation, is not work, and can be communicated, transmitted through the technical object, unlike work, which as we saw above, somehow “adheres” to the worker. (The terms “mental operation, mental functioning” further distinguish invention from “work” in S’s usage.) The communicative, informational aspect of invention leads to the development of a “universe of technicity:”

Henceforth, above the social community of work and beyond the inter-individual relationship not supported by an operational activity, a mental and practical universe of technicity establishes itself, in which human beings communicate through what they invent. The technical object taken according to its essence, which is to say the technical object insofar as it has been invented, thought and willed, and taken up ... by a human subject, becomes the medium [le support] and symbol of this relationship, which we would like to name transindividual.

The potential of this mental universe can only be grasped or developed by people who can appreciate it “according to its essence” (cf. the previous chapter):

The technical object can be read as carrier of a definite information; if it is only used, employed, and consequently enslaved, then it cannot bring any information, any more than a book that would be used as a wedge or pedestal. The technical object that is appreciated and known according to its essence, i.e., according to the human act that has founded it, penetrated it with functional intelligibility, valorized it according to its internal norms, carries with it pure information. (252-3)

The “human act that has founded it,” per S, is not labor as some might claim, but rather invention. “what is known in the technical object is the form, the material crystallization of an operational schema and of a thought that has resolved a problem” (253).

S makes a crucial distinction between the individual and the subject:

Work, conceived as productive, insofar as it comes from the localized individual hic et nunc, cannot account for the invented technical being; it is not the individual who invents, it is the subject, vaster than the individual, richer than it, and having, in addition to the individuality of the individuated being, a certain weight of nature, of non-individuated being. (253)

Per Barthélémy (2012: passim) the “subject” is more than the mere “individual” because it carries also the “pre-individual charge;” collectively subjects form the transindividual, which for this reason is also more than a mere collection of individuals. S uses the terms “community” and “inter-individual” to refer to this lesser sort of collective, which he associates with the thought of Marxists, sociologists, etc. In relation to this S opines that, contra Marx, it is not the social relations of work in capitalism, but work itself that is inherently alienating.

If this hypothesis is right, then the true path toward the reduction of alienation would not be situated within the domain of the social (with the community of work and class), nor in the domain of inter-individual relationships that social psychology habitually envisages, but at the level of the transindividual collective. (254)

S’s is here taking on both Marx’s critique of labor and alienation within the conditions of production, but also what he calls a “counter-Marxism” of social psychology (the organizational sociologists of the human relations school, whom Braverman criticizes, come to mind). “Work,” being a concept left over from the era of mere utensils, is not the right way to understand technical objects:

the relation of the worker to the machine is inadequate, because the worker operates on the machine without his gesture continuing the activity of invention in this gesture. The obscure central zone characteristic of work has transferred itself to the utilization of the machine: it is now the functioning of the machine, the provenance of the machine, the signification of what the machine does and the way in which it is made that is the obscure zone.

A worker, according to Simondon, confronts a machine as something they use without understanding; the action which “continues the activity of invention” is the adjustment, maintenance, or repair of the machine, which requires understanding of the technical schema. (S adds the “breaking in” of machines a page later (256)).

The worker’s alienation is translated by the break between technical knowledge and the exercise of the conditions of use. This break is so noticeable that the function of adjusting the machine is strictly distinct from that of the machine’s user in a large number of factories, in other words, distinct from the worker, and it is prohibited for workers to adjust [régler] their own machines by themselves. The activity of adjustment, however, is the one that most naturally continues the function of invention and construction: adjustment is a perpetual, if limited, invention. (255)

Braverman, of course, would strongly object that it is precisely within the “domain of the social” that we can find the cause of this separation. Simondon would apparently rather situate it on a cultural or even civilizational level, as the effect of continued hylomorphic thinking, than situated socially and historically as an aspect of the class struggle over the control of knowledge in the productive process. S talks about the knowledgeable user/adjuster who has “forms within himself” which allow for an understanding of the “forms carried by the machine;” through this communication “the work done on a technical object becomes a technical activity and not simply work” (emphasis added). [In Heideggerian terms, for the worker the machine is ready-to-hand; for the adjuster/controller it is present-at-hand:]

The technical activity distinguishes itself from mere work, and from alienating work, in that technical activity comprises not only the use of the machine, but also a certain coefficient of attention to the technical functioning, maintenance, adjustment, and improvement of the machine, which continues the activity of invention and construction. (emphasis added)

S then goes into an interesting (and today very relevant) discussion of alienated consumers: “The technical objects that produce the greatest alienation are those meant for ignorant users.” [Cf. Stiegler on technology making people “stupid.”]

Such objects progressively deteriorate: they are new for a short time, and quickly begin to devalue when losing this aspect of being new because they can only distance themselves from the conditions of initial perfection. The sealing of delicate organs is indicative of this divide between the manufacturer, who is identified with the inventor, and the user who only acquires usage of the technical object through an economic process … (255-6)

“The machine remains one of the obscure zones of our civilization, at all social levels. This alienation exists as much at the management level … as it does at the level of workers.” Thus, contra Marx, this alienation is not solvable by the mere ownership of the means of production:

... it wouldn’t be enough for workers simply to be the owners of their machines in order for alienation to be abruptly reduced; to possess a machine is not to know it. Non-possession, however, increases the distance between the worker and the machine on which his work is accomplished; it makes the relation even more fragile, more external, more precarious. It would have to be possible to discover a social and economic mode whereby the user of the technical object would not only be the owner of this machine, but also the man who chooses it and who maintains it. (256-7)

[Finally Simondon and Braverman agree about something!] Nevertheless Simondon says nothing more about this promising “social and economic mode.”]

Per S, both labor and capital are “inessential with respect to technical activity;” as we have seen earlier in the book, he considers economic and political context “extrinsic” to the essence of technics. The sort of [transcendence] he is aiming for is somehow thus distinct from that achieved through class struggle:

This level of technical organization where man encounters man not as the member of a class but as a being who expresses himself within the technical object which is homogeneous with respect to his activity, is the level of the collective, going beyond the inter-individual and the given social. (257)

“The relation with the technical object cannot become adequate individual by individual” because the desired condition of the transindividual requires “a coupling between the inventive and organizational capacities of several subjects.” Yet interestingly he does not seem to see this as coming about through a reorganization of society at large, but as happening through companies, which unify labor and thought through the organization of “technical committees at the level of their employee councils:”

in order to be efficient and creative, an employee committee should be essentially technical. The organization of channels of information in a company must follow the lines of technical operation and not that of social hierarchy or of purely inter-individual relations, which are inessential with respect to technical operation. The company, being the ensemble of technical objects and men, must be organized on the basis of its essential function, that is its technical functioning; it is at the level of the technical operation that the whole [ensemble] of the organization can be thought, not as a confrontation of classes, i.e., as a pure social ensemble, or as a grouping of individuals each having their psyche, which brings the ensemble down to an inter-psychological schema, but as a unit [une unité] of technical functioning. (258)

It is a bit jarring to see such innovative and thought-provoking philosophical reconceptialization lead up to such tepid reformism. Simondon’s idealism leads him yet again to imagine that existing hierarchies are “extrinsic” to the alienation of labor and thought, which can be overcome simply by introducing a new way of thinking. [And how surprising that sixty years after this book’s publication, our society remains so alienated!]

He goes on to criticize Bergson, Poincaré, Le Roy, and pragmatists in general for “conflating” work and technical operation; they attempt to overturn the Classical hierarchy (e.g., in Plato, etc.), in which mental activity (σχολή) was seen as superior to manual labor, by insisting on the primacy and validity of the latter. This, however, only preserves the false opposition of utility to truth:

Pragmatism, by appearing to reverse the hierarchy of values, defines the true by the useful; but it preserves the schema of opposition between the norm of utility and the norm of truth, to such an extent that it results in a relativism in the order of knowledge, or at nominalism if this attitude is pushed to its most rigorous and extreme consequences; science is not more true, but more useful for action than common perception. (260)

Technics is an “intermediary reality” between work and σχολή, and thus not understandable through either concept.

It seems that this opposition between action and contemplation, between the immutable and the moving, must cease in the face of the introduction of the technical operation within philosophical thought as area of reflection and even as paradigm.

Barthélémy, Jean-Huges (2012) “Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon” in de Boever, et al., eds. Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Lambert, Léopold (2012, Dec. 8). “Form and Matter: Gilbert Simondon’s Critique of the Hylomorphic Scheme Part 1” The Funambulist (blog). https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-form-matter-gilbert-simondons-critique-of-the-hylomorphic-scheme-part-1

Sigsworth, E.M. (1965) “Science and the Brewing Industry, 1850-1900.” Economic History Review, 17(3): 536-550.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 20

 

Summary of Chapter 20: A Final Note on Skill

Braverman notes that his argument in this book goes against the “popular view” of his time, that increased mechanization leads to an increase in skilled work, because there is a need for training to use the machinery.

The concepts of “skill,” “training,” and “education” are themselves sufficiently vague, and a precise investigation of the arguments which are used to support the thesis of “upgrading"” is further hampered by the fact that they have never been made the subject of a coherent and systematic presentation. We can grapple with the issue only by attempting to give coherence to what is essentially an impressionistic theory, one which is obviously considered so self-evident as to stand above the need for demonstration. (294)

He criticizes discussion of “average skill” in this regard, when it is really an issue of polarization.

The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers.

“For most of those who hold it, the ‘upgrading’ thesis seems to rest upon two marked trends. The first is the shift of workers from some major occupational groups into others; the second is the prolongation of the average period of education” (295). This is “a splendid example of the manner in which conventional social science accepts carefully tailored appearances as a substitute for reality.”

B not surprisingly demolishes the argument for the first trend (that workers have been “upgraded” into higher skill levels) by showing that the supporting statistics have been created retroactively “based not upon a study of the occupational tasks involved, as is generally assumed by the users of the categories, but upon a simple mechanical criterion, in the fullest sense of the word” (297). To illustrate this he gives a great example of the difference between horse-driving and automobile-driving occupations:

Let us take as an example the categories of teamster on the one side, and the operators of motor vehicles (such as truckdrivers, chauffeurs and taxidrivers, routemen and deliverymen, etc.) on the other. These categories are important because that of teamster was, before World War I, one of the largest of occupational groups, while the drivers of various sorts are, taken together, one of the largest today. The former are classified, retroactively, among the “unskilled” laborers, while the latter, because of their connection with machinery, are classed as operatives and hence “semi-skilled.” When the Edwards scale is applied in this fashion, a skill upgrading takes place as a consequence of the displacement of horse-drawn transport by motorized. Yet it is impossible to see this as a true comparison of human work skills. In the circumstances of an earlier day, when a largely rural population learned the arts of managing horses as part of the process of growing up, while few as yet knew how to operate motorized vehicles, it might have made sense to characterize the former as part of the common heritage and thus no skill at all, while driving, as a learned ability, would have been thought of as a “skill.” Today, it would be more proper to regard those who are able to drive vehicles as unskilled in that respect at least, while those who can care for, harness, and manage a team of horses are certainly the possessors of a marked and uncommon ability. In reality, this way of comparing occupational skill leaves much to be desired, depending as it does on relativistic or contemporary notions. But there is certainly little reason to suppose that the ability to drive a motor vehicle is more demanding, requires longer training or habituation time, and thus represents a higher or intrinsically more rewarding skill than the ability to manage a team of horses. (297-8)

It is only in the world of census statistics, and not in terms of direct assessment, that an assembly line worker is presumed to have greater skill than a fisherman or oysterman, the forklift operator greater skill than the gardener or groundskeeper, the machine feeder greater skill than the longshoreman, the parking lot attendant greater skill than the lumberman or raftsman. (298)

The “semi-skilled” category and descriptions barely differs from the “unskilled”. The issue of some required training is raised, but B points out that even “unskilled” job typically require some training. The operative/assembly line jobs, which the statisticians take as “semi-skilled” and thus an upgrade for formerly “unskilled” workers, are typically easier to learn [and thus in actuality less skilled, per Braverman] than the jobs that are being left behind. B denounces this as the “imaginary creation of higher categories of skill by nomenclatural exercises” (300). He goes on to emphasize the range of skills represented in the category of “farm laborer,” contradicting contemporary sociologists who imagine that any movement of workers out of this category is an upgrade. Likewise, statisticians consider “service worker,” as well as clerical work, as higher categories than industrial operative or laborer, but Braverman has already pointed out in previous chapters how these categories obscure an actual deskilling and decrease in pay.

The reflex response which causes governmental and academic social scientists automatically to accord a higher grade of skill, training, prestige, and class position to any form of office work as against any and all forms of manual work is a tradition of long standing in American sociology which few have ventured to challenge. … The weight of the prejudice which rates all “white-collar” above all “blue-collar” work is such that the growth of the former at the expense of the latter is again taken as evidence of an increase in skill and training for which no real factual backing is required, so self-evident is this conclusion for the conventional wisdom (301-2)

Another argument the sociologists Braverman is arguing against put forward as evidence of increased skill is increased education. B points out this has to do with far more than work:

In this we see first of all the fact that the requirements of literacy and familiarity with the numbers system have become generalized throughout the society. The ability to read, write, and perform simple arithmetical operations is demanded by the urban environment, not just in jobs but also for consumption, for conformity to the rules of society and obedience to the law. Reading and figuring are, apart from all their other meanings, the elementary attributes of a manageable population, which could no more be sold, cajoled, and controlled without them than can symbols be handled by a computer if they lack the elementary characteristics of identity and position. Beyond this need for basic literacy there is also the function of the schools in providing an attempted socialization to city life, which now replaces the socialization through farm, family, community, and church which once took place in a predominantly rural setting. Thus the average length of schooling is generally higher for urban populations, and the shift of a population from farm to city brings with it, almost as an automatic function, an increase in the term of education. (302)

B recounts the history of how high school diplomas became widely seen as requirements for many jobs in the US, for reasons unrelated to the actual skill required in work, such as policies to control unemployment.

The postponement of school leaving to an average age of eighteen has become indispensable for keeping unemployment within reasonable bounds. In the interest of working parents (the two-parent-job-holding family having become ever more common during this period), and in the interest of social stability and the orderly management of an increasingly rootless urban population, the schools have developed into immense teen-sitting organizations, their functions having less and less to do with imparting to the young those things that society thinks they must learn. In this situation the content of education deteriorated as its duration lengthened. The knowledge imparted in the course of an elementary education was more or less expanded to fill the prevalent twelve-year educational sojourn, and in a great many cases school systems have difficulty in instilling in twelve years the basic skills of literacy and numbers that, several generations ago, occupied eight. This in turn gave a greater impetus to employers to demand of job applicants a high school diploma, as a guarantee – not always valid – of getting workers who can read. (304)

He goes into a lengthy and quite savage critique of the education system:

We cannot neglect the direct economic impact of the enlarged school system. Not only does the postponement of the school-leaving age limit the growth of recognized unemployment, but it also furnishes employment for a considerable mass of teachers, administrators, construction and service workers, etc. Moreover, education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation for the construction industry, for suppliers of all sorts, and for a host of subsidiary enterprises. For all these reasons – which have nothing to do with either education or occupational training – it is difficult to imagine United States society without its immense “educational” structure.... The schools, as caretakers of children and young people, are indispensable for family functioning, community stability, and social order in general (although they fulfill even these functions badly). In a word, there is no longer any place for the young in this society other than school. Serving to fill a vacuum, schools have themselves become that vacuum, increasingly emptied of content and reduced to little more than their own form. Just as in the labor process, where the more there is to know the less the worker need know, in the schools the mass of future workers attend the more there is to learn, the less reason there is for teachers to teach and students to learn. In this more than in any other single factor – the purposelessness, futility, and empty forms of the educational system – we have the source of the growing antagonism between the young and their schools which threatens to tear the schools apart. (304-5)

Braverman turns to the central thesis of the book:

For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery – that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over labor processes to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge. But the extreme concentration of this knowledge in the hands of management and its closely associated staff organizations have closed this avenue to the working population. (307)

[And this is not because of any inherent aspect of technological development, but because of the particular shape this development takes in a capitalist system.]

B moves on to the next key point, which is what lessons this study of labor in monopoly capitalism can have for a post-capitalist society: “The worker can regain mastery over collective and socialized production only by assuming the scientific, design, and operational prerogatives of modern engineering; short of this, there is no mastery over the labor process.” This can to an extent build off the current educational system:

But such an education can take effect only if it is combined with the practice of labor during the school years, and only if education continues throughout the life of the worker after the end of formal schooling. Such education can engage the interest and attention of workers only when they become masters of industry in the true sense, which is to say when the antagonisms in the labor process between controllers and workers, conception and execution, mental and manual labor are overthrown, and when the labor process is united in the collective body which conducts it. (308)

In this light, B criticizes certain schemes for workplace democracy which he thinks do not go far enough in actually challenging control over the means of production:

The demands for “workers 'participation” and “workers’ control,” from this point of view, fall far short of the Marxist vision. The conception of a democracy in the workplace based simply upon the imposition of a formal structure of parliamentarism­ – election of directors, the making of production and other decisions by ballot, etc. – upon the existing organization of production is delusory. Without the return of requisite technical knowledge to the mass of workers and the reshaping of the organization of labor – without, in a word, a new and truly collective mode of production – balloting within factories and offices does not alter the fact that the workers remain as dependent as before upon “experts,” and can only choose among them, or vote for alternatives presented by them. Thus genuine workers’ control has as its prerequisite the demystifying of technology and the reorganization of the mode of production. This does not mean, of course, that the seizure of power within industry through demands for workers’ control is not a revolutionary act. It means rather that a true workers’ democracy cannot subsist on a purely formal parliamentary scheme.

In this context he remarks that the Soviet Union, which seized ownership from the bourgeoisie but did not institute true worker’s control in the workplace, was stuck in the “abortive first stage of revolution” from a truly Marxist perspective.

In contrast to B’s more hopeful vision, the current capitalist system separates knowledge and skill from labor, robbing humanity of “its birthright of conscious and masterful labor” (309). He ends by casting back to the previously noted, almost refreshingly naive directness of the Taylorians, who had explained that under Scientific Management there is in fact no “unskilled” labor, because all workers will have been trained to carry out their specific tasks:

It is this conception that lies behind the shabby nominal sociology in which the sociologists find “upgrading” in the new names given to classifications by the statisticians. “Training a worker,” wrote Frank Gilbreth, “means merely enabling him to carry out the directions of his work schedule. Once he can do this, his training is over, whatever his age.” Is this not a perfect description of the mass of jobs in modern industry, trade, and offices?

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 19

Summary of Chapter 19: Productive and Unproductive Labor

Braverman reiterates that being in the working class is determined by a social relation, not the specific form of work that is done:

The various forms of labor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value. Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense. (284)

There remains the question of what constitutes “unproductive” labor. B notes that the distinction between “productive and unproductive” originates with the classical economists, whom Marx was critiquing:

In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature of the work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was concerned specifically and entirely with the role of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor. (284-5)

… Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. (285)

Self-employed proprietors, such as independent farmers, artisans, professionals and so on, are unproductive for capital, or even outside the productive/unproductive distinction and in fact “outside the capitalist mode of production.” Servants are also outside the distinction, since their labor is not exchanged against profit but against revenue (e.g. the capitalist pays for the gardener at his home out of his own pocket). [But does this change if the maintenance of the home for future sale is seen as an investment? Not to mention the other forms of “capital” which having a home with a garden and a gardener produces, outside of a strictly Marxist framework—by which I mean to refer not so much to Bourdieu’s original forms of “capital,” but attempts to integrate these with Marxian concepts, e.g. Zhu (2020) on the “cultural fix.” (Which also being a variation on Harvey’s “spatial fix,” is linked to the expansion of capitalist relations which Braverman is talking about).]

B points out that the productive/unproductive distinction is important because as more kinds of work are brought into direct exchange for capital, this shows the expansion of capitalism, and capitalist relations, through society. He gives the example of an individual tailor employed by a customer for one suit alone, vs. a capitalist employing a roomful of tailors for suits, plus profit. “Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value” (286).

In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transformation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist’s purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.

... the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all forms of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.

The unproductive labor which capitalism increasingly pays for is involved, not in the production of value, but in the work of the appropriation of surplus value, and in the “realization problem” of ensuring that products get sold, so they can be turned back into capital.

These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enormous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode of production, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota. (287)

[This is furthermore important, because in a different organization of society, these would be unnecessary, or not as important; there would be no need, or less need, for these kinds of “unproductive” labor in a socialist economy.]

B gives an example of the same kind of work being in one case productive, in another unproductive:

The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits—­all of these forms of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle. Yet this lack of effect is not due to the determinate form of their labors—the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all of which do contribute productively to commodity value, according to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization of value in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the “services” of capital in the form of credit, etc.

Summarizing his argument so far:

Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit. … the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.

Modern bourgeois economics has failed to grasp this change, because it can’t account for it, only being able to see things from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. Thus, for bourgeois economists, “the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation” (288).

And the very idea of the “wealth of nations” has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of “prosperity,” a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.

[Here, couched in Adam-Smith-ian terms, is another implicit critique of the capitalist international economic system vis-a-vis a possible socialist system.]

Unproductive workers employed in early capitalism had a certain high status as enablers of the capitalists’ wealth, but the new system means they have lost this status. Just as productive workers lost their individual input and now create value only as a mass (for example, the individuals on an assembly line only contribute partially, and production is actually brought about by all of them together), unproductive laborers have also lost their individuality and are now also a mass, “which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers” (289).

And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. (290)

B clarifies how his own argument is rooted in Marx’s sketches of the issue. Contra Ian Gough, B insists that Marx never described commercial workers as a “commercial proletariat,” but as “wage-workers,” this distinction being important because, although they do have the same employment status as industrial workers, they are not productive of surplus value, like a true proletariat:

The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is in Marx’s mind like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value. (292)

However, Braverman also notes that Marx did not peer far into the future of capitalism, since he was more intent on ending capitalism, soon:

... it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.

And, as a revolutionary sharing this conviction, B concludes by noting that unproductive laborers now share much in common with the true proletariat, hinting at (though not stating here) their potential role as co-revolutionaries:

That which in Marx was a subordinate and inconsequential part of the analysis has thus for us become a major consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The few commercial wage-workers who puzzled Marx as a conscientious scientist have become the vast and complicated structure of occupations characteristic of unproductive labor in modern capitalism. But in so becoming they have lost many of the last characteristics which separated them from production workers. When they were few they were unlike productive labor, and having become many they are like productive labor. Although productive and unproductive labor are technically distinct, although productive labor has tended to decrease in proportion as its productivity has grown, while nonproductive labor has increased only as a result of the increase in surpluses thrown off by productive labor—despite these distinctions, the two masses of labor are not otherwise in striking contrast and need not be counterposed to each other. They form a continuous mass of employment which, at present and unlike the situation in Marx’s day, has everything in common.

Zhu, Annah Lake (2020) “China’s Rosewood Boom: A Cultural Fix to Capital Overaccumulation.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(1):277-296.

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture

In this chapter they continue the series of propositions (but not of axioms?) from the previous chapter. The date refers to the flourishing of Çatalhöyük. The cover image is of a method for trapping partridges in a net using bait and an artificial cow, which the trapper manipulates “afin d’amuser les Perdrix” before capturing them in the net (Chomel 1767: 881-3). Kishik (2009) gives an interesting discussion of the source, though he refers to a different image of the same net without the cow and partridges.

Proposition X: The State and its poles.

D&G begin the chapter reiterating the Mitra-Varuna distinction from Dumézil, the two poles of the state being those of the “Binder-god,” or conqueror, and the “jurist-god,” or legislator. These can both conduct war according to their own principles, but this is only the captured war machine; the war machine is always represented by a third god or force [cf. Vaneigem’s “third force.”]. There is a “tempting three-part hypothesis” (426), whereby the war machine becomes a mediator between the two poles, in a 1 (binder god), 2 (war machine), 3 (jurist god) relationship. However, this does not in fact explain the origin of the State, as the first term of the conquering binder god remains presumed as somehow originary (and this remains eternal as the third jurist-god or republic aspect remains in “resonance” with the first (427)). Thus war can not be called on as an explanation for the existence of the state (because it presupposes the existence of the state), similarly to how “private property presupposes public property,” and “money presupposes taxation.” [They are here arguing against Engels’ theory of the State from his Origin of the Family; yet while the second and third points can be taken as well established (cf. Proudhon, Graeber), the first still seems a bit circuitous imho. Nevertheless they will make the case in the following proposition.]

Proposition XI: Which comes first?

On one level, the answer to this question is the aforementioned imperial pole of the state; yet at the same time they are framing the discussion to avoid a first-this, then-that series which could imply a social evolutionism. Smith (2019) gives a good overview of D&G’s sources and interlocutors in this section: they are arguing specifically against the evolutionism of Childe and Engels, as well as (behind them) Morgan and Spencer; key authors they draw on for support are Jane Jacobs, Fernand Braudel, and of course Clastres.

They begin with a discussion of the Urstaat, or originary State, which Smith argues “does not refer to a supposed first state, but rather functions as an Idea (in the Deleuzian sense) that is present, throughout the social field, as a virtuality or problem” (Smith 2019: 150). At the same time, they want to avoid the error made by Clastres, of imputing mechanisms in pre-State societies which counter the emergence of hierarchy to an “overmysterious presentiment of what they warded off and did not yet exist” (429). Thus, the Urstaat has to be in some sense always-already present, more literally in the sense of “tendencies that ‘seek’ the State” through incipient hierarchy (430; and I feel Clastres had made this argument as well); but also in terms of this “immemorial” “Idea of a completely captured and coded flow” (Smith, ibid., quoting from A-O); “it was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing” (431). Toscano notes that D&G “revive the Hegelian intuition that the state has always been there – not as an idea or a concept, but as a threshold endowed with a kind of virtual efficacy, even when the state as a complex of institutions and as a system of control is not yet actual” (Toscano 2010: 44).

Everything is not of the State precisely because there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. (430; emphasis original)

This argument links back, one presumes, to their early discussion of language founded on the order-word (as opposed to “communication”); here they talk about translation as opposed to “communication:”

Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication.

They elaborate an important distinction between the roles of cities and states in the ancient world. Towns are always in a network of other towns, the individual town is a “circuit-point” in this network. This means the urban network has “egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic” (432) (in much the same way as the State remains at heart hierarchical, although taking differing, even democratic and “socialist” forms, which D&G assert are “not façades” (436)).

Expanding on Clastres’ thesis, then both cities and states become thresholds or potentials which primitive societies ward off, and which thus to some degree preëxist in these societies without overcoming them:

Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through which to communicate. This is the sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold. (433)

Neither city nor State preceded the other, as both are in “reciprocal presupposition” (434). Both are forms of, or form through, deterritoralization of the previous “primitive” societies. It would be an error to see them, as imagined in a certain 20^th century free-market mythology, as opposed poles of statist order on the one side and free-market capitalism on the other: “the towns did not invent capitalism,” which depends on the State in particular.

They come to a central argument, which is they they will define social formations in terms of machinic processes rather than by the modes of production favored by Marxists and social scientists in general (435). (Modes of production, they argue, are merely dependent on these machinic processes).

Social Formation	Machinic Process
primitive societies	prevention-anticipation
State societies	apparatus of capture
urban societies	instruments of polarization
nomadic societies	war machines
ecumenical organizations	“the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations”

Proposition XII: Capture

In this section they continue what is essentially their own critique of political economy, updating Marx with some insights from later economists and twentieth century anthropology. They begin with Jevons’ marginalist theory of value, applied to traditional society’s prevention-anticipation of the State. This leads them to a distinction between limit and threshold, such that “the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change” (438). “Exchange is only an appearance” (439) in the economic relations between pre-state groups; it is really about evaluation in relation to desire: “The issue is one of desirability as an assemblage component: every group desires according to the value of the last receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.” And “it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage)."

The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable objects... (440)

The Archaic State, having passed the threshold, engages in stockpiling; the argument regarding stock is derived from V. Gordon Childe, though Smith (2018) traces it back further to Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, relating to primitive accumulation. The State absorbs the previously existing traditional societies which had coded the land, by overcoding them:

In solely descriptive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land assemblages (which operate by overcoding).

The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility of plots of equal surface area). (441)

They return to the previous chapter’s distinction between work and free action, with Massumi occasionally translates travail as “work,” and other times as “labor.” Smith (2018), (who consistently uses “labour”), notes that the distinction is derived from the work of Martial Gueroult.

In this section they lay out their “trinity formula,” an adaptation of Marx’s trinity of capital-profit, land rent, and labor-wages; their trinity is land, work, and money, with “money” replacing and subsuming(?) Marx’s “capital,” by bringing the state and its taxation into the concept.

They distinguish between four “regimes of violence”: struggle, war, crime, and policing. In particular the distinction between war (even when captured by the state) and legal violence (aka policing) underscores their difference from the “war is the health of the state” argument which would equate the two: “State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that defines the law, ‘police’ violence and not the violence of war” (448).

Proposition XII: The State and its forms.

The question now becomes: Once the State has appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States and the archaic imperial State?

Smith succinctly summarizes the issue, and how it relates to the above “trinity:”

the archaic state cannot overcode and capture without at the same time freeing up a large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. It cannot create large-scale public works without a flow of independent labour escaping from its hierarchised bureaucracy of functionaries, notably in the mines and in metallurgy. It cannot create coinage without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or giving birth to other powers (notably in commerce and banking). It cannot create a system of public property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, and then starting to slip through its fingers. Finally, it is with the rise of private property that classes appear, since the dominant classes are no longer part of the state apparatus, but become distinct determinations that make use of a now-transformed apparatus. (Smith 2018: 236)

"[T]he state is at once capture and the impossibility of complete capture, since the state can only overcode by decoding (abstraction)” (ad loc.) The archaic state overcodes, but this releases “decoded flows” which escape from it. D&G clarify that by “decoding” they do not mean “deciphering,” but de-coding, [“un-coding” could have been the more felicitous term]: “the state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that escapes it own code” (448-9). The varieties of state have to do with how this relationship to both overcoding and decoding is organized.

The Greek city-states exist at the periphery of the Egyptian, then later the Persian world-economy and feed off of/benefit from the wealth it has generated. Flows are overcoded in the Orient, then decoded in Europe. “Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes surplus value of flow” (451). Split into public vs. private sphere [in state space], slavery changes from communal workers to private property. “[T]he State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as such.”

Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects, the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes of subjectification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social subjection.

The point is to draw out the relationship between capitalism and the state, how they are dependent on each other, while also articulating their differences in relation to territory, coding, etc. They clarify the difference between axiomatic and coding/codes:

axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. (454)

Toscano expands on this:

Originating in the discourse of science and mathematical set theory in particular, axiomatic denotes a method that need not provide definitions of the terms it works with, but rather orders a given domain with the adjunction or subtraction of particular norms or commands (axioms). Axioms thus operate on elements and relations whose nature need not be specified. They are indifferent to the properties or qualities of their domain of application and treat their objects as purely functional, rather than as qualitatively differentiated by any intrinsic features. Axioms are in turn accompanied by theorems, or models of realisation, which apply them to certain empirical or material situations. (Toscano 2010: 21-2)

[Thus axiomatic refers to the non-specifying, discretizing and [extensive rather than intensive “disembedding” aspect of capitalism]. Per D&G the imminent axiomatic is effectuated in models of realization [thus the axiomatic of the Urstaat is realized in specific forms of the state? Though they state later that the archaic state is characterized by a transcendent formal unity, distinct from capitalism’s immanent axiomatic. It is more that the archaic State plays a role of primitive accumulation and creating uncontrolled decoded flows, clearing the way for the axiomatic of capitalism to emerge; one it does it becomes a “megamachine,” a world system within which existing states are models of realization of said axiomatic]. The relation of state and capital in terms of De/Re/Te:

It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. (455)

So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows.

They assert that models of realization are “supposed to be isomorphic” with the axiomatics they effectuate; but how can this be so when so many differing models of the State effectuate the axiomatic? They discuss this with three points:

1. There is really just one (capitalist) world market, even the [so-called] socialist states are part of it, like it or not;

2. The real capitalist market tolerates polymorphy for two reasons: a) [articulation] of capitalism with non-capitalist modes of production, b) the bureaucratic socialist states are able to “conjugate with capitalism;” “there is only one world market, the capitalist one.”

3. The axiomatic encompasses the diversity of existing state forms, and while they are not all equivalent or interchangeable, they are interconnected, for instance the western democracies install and support dictatorships in the third world.

It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. (456)

A key difference in operation of the archaic state and modern states is the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. Machinic enslavement means the individual becoming part of a vaster machine composing other people, animals, materials, and so on: a “constituent piece” (457) [this is presumably distinct from the mere fact of being part of an assemblage; likely having to do with the organization of the machine towards the Face of the Despot in the signifying regime of the Archaic State].

But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine.

This second form is also exploitative, it just treats the individual as a subject and not a mere object, along the way to extracting labor value. It seems that capitalism then introduces an even stronger version of social subjection which recreates some aspects of ancient enslavement, but this is in relation to technical machines:

One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development, has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic enslavement.

But the naked or “free” worker of capitalism takes subjection to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the “capitalists,” are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the “proletarians,” are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital …

[I was recently reading about the controversial Hart and Risley (1995) study of how parents of three groups (professional class, working class, and “welfare”) speak to their children, and how well the children go on to perform in school. Long story short, the higher the class the better the children are treated, and thus they go on to do better in school. Besides all sorts of methodological issues, the study clearly is of the “culture of poverty” sort of argument, ignoring all sorts of socioeconomic context to blame children’s adult social status on how they were raised by their parents. Nevertheless, in terms of D&G’s terminology, we can also see it as an illustration of how class identity is replicated. The professional class parents treated their students as subjects of enunciation, asking them questions, and expecting them to grasp a wider variety of words and concepts, which is precisely how the parents themselves are treated in their work and by capitalism, i.e., as subjects of enunciation. In turn, the working and “welfare” class parents, according to the study, asked fewer questions and issued more commands, treating the children like subjects of the statement, precisely as they in turn are treated in this economic system.]

Capitalism’s new machinic enslavement “in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal Unity” (458).

But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible “humans-machines systems” replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action.

Automation reduces human workers to parts in the machine, and supplants variable capital (labor) with a larger proportion of constant capital (machinery).

But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.

The technical machine thus involves both enslavement and subjection, not as opposing forces but “two simultaneous parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other.” They provide the example of television:

For example, one is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (“you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is . . .”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.

[Needless to say, the case for the new machinic enslavement with our current communication and entertainment technology is far stronger than it was with television in D&G’s day! In a footnote (570n57) they reference Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451in which television has moved from being a mere device in the room, to “forming the walls of the house” [and metaphorically, the boundaries of the imagination. Has not VR made this dystopian fantasy a [virtual] reality?]

Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic that is effectuated in the model. (459)

They now delineate three historical forms of the state:

1) archaic States or Empires, machinic enslavement and overcoding of already-coded flows (that is, conquest of traditional “pre-State” societies);

2) diverse States existing in relation to the archaic State empires, “which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows”;

3) modern nation-States, “which take decoding even further and are models of realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows” and rely on both social subjection and the new machinic enslavement.

Whereas for the second kind of state, the Empire or Urstaat was on the horizon, with the modern capitalist state system it has been brought back to the center of political economic reality. “Capitalism has reawakened the Urstaat, and given it new strength” (460).

Proposition XIV: Axiomatics and the presentday situation.

“Politics is by no means an apodeictic science” (461); it is experimental, fumbling, grasping, a posteriori. Naturally, this is praise from D&G’s point of view. Capitalism and the State are axiomatic and we want to get them out of our heads! Axiomatics is not the cutting edge of science, it is rather a capturing of flows:

The great axiomaticians are the men of State of science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics, who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic conception of geometry.

To the axiomaticians, D&G contrast the intuitionist school of mathematics, more interested in problems than in theorems. The remainder of the chapter will be a “summary sketch” of seven “givens” which Adkins clarifies are “currently informing the creation of axioms in capitalism” (Adkins, 228)

1. Addition, subtraction.

Here they go into more detail on how axioms work in capitalism – there are competing tendencies within capitalism to add, and to subtract, the number of axioms in operation. [These seem to be related to the question of how capitalism survives crises? It does not seem to be clearly stated, but they have been making references to the composition of capital (variable vs. constant) throughout this chapter, and this is linked to the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.] These also have to do with capitalism’s relationship with the state; social democracies increase the number of axioms, while totalitarian ones reduce them [Exhibit A, the reduction of axioms in Trump’s current retooling of state power to more efficiently suit the interests of the wealthiest]. They reiterate their distinction between totalitarianism and fascism and discuss it in this regard.

2. Saturation.

“Saturation” sounds like a reference to Simondon, but he is not mentioned, and the concept itself is only invoked in passing:

Can we express the distribution of the two opposite tendencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inversion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. (463)

They invoke Marx on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (this is proof that capitalism is an axiomatic), [and hence the relation of axiomatics to crisis], and link the subtraction of axioms to totalitarianism, and the addition of axioms to social democracy; however, these are two opposed but linked parts of the modern state/capitalist axiomatic [and linked to the two poles of the State?] They go on to denounce the “disenchanted” concept of recuperation and talk about worker’s struggles.

3. Models, isomorphy.

“In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole external world market” (464). Nevertheless, there are actually three bipolarities organizing the variety of existing states:

1) the isomorphy of the social democratic and totalitarian states at the center of the [world system];

2) an East-West heteromorphy between the capitalist West and the bureaucratic socialist East; and

3) a North-South polymorphy, between center and periphery.

4. Power (puissance).

This section treats of the operation of war in the contemporary [i.e., late Twentieth Century] world system.

On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a “war of materiel” in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. (466)

They derive five points from Virilio (separated here for clarity):

[1] that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence;

[2] that it performs a technoscientific “capitalization”;

[3] that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed;

[4] that this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy,” domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world);

[5] that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe.

 

5. The included middle.

This section discusses the intrication of center and periphery in the modern world-economy [hence the contrast with the “excluded middle”]. D&G identify unequal exchange as one of the most important axioms of capitalism, and briefly restate some of the language on overcoding and decoding which has run through this and the previous chapter:

The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery). (468)

The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and the urban flow.

They discuss how the center becomes involved in the periphery and vice versa, giving the example of a Third World social democracy which establishes power through a “class rupture” [incorporating part of the working class as voting, represented subjects, and excluding others as an underclass who are left to fend for themselves in an informal economy]. “And the States of the center deal not only with the Third World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the inside.” Here they draw on Negri and the operaists in a discussion that ties back to their previous invocations of the composition of capital.

These phenomena confirm the difference between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic and floating.

 

6. Minorities.

“Ours is becoming the age of minorities” (469). They reiterate that minorities, like majorities, are not constituted by number but “by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant majority”. They invoke the concept of multiplicities from “One or Many Wolves”:

What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the “and” produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute “fuzzy,” nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, “masses,” multiplicities of escape and flux. (470)

It does not help or further the cause of minorities to simply be incorporated into majorities, or even to flip the system and constitute new majorities of their own. “What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable …. Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.”

The remark on the inability of the axiomatic to accommodate even modest demands by majorities, as a sign of “the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms” (471).

The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.

 

7. Undecidable propositions.

Of course the axiomatic does marshall the war machine, which is also nondenumerable and all that, but this is limited by the way coöptation by the state has changed the objects of the war machine, as discussed in the previous chapter. They go into more about the particular politics of minorities, how integration does not really achieve anything, while the “final solution" extermination is impossible. “The minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means” (472). They reiterate that at the same time as capitalism organizes denumerable sets into stable forms, it also creates nondenumerable sets which escape beyond it: “It does not effect the ‘conjugation’ of the deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them.”

The result is that “undecidable propositions” proliferate:

Every struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic. (473)

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