(Some notes in the margins of Goodchild's work. I also draw on Holland's study of Deleuze and Guattari.)
Money was born as a means of passage where coding reaches its limits. Alliez sumarises Aristotle’s account of the invention of money thus: cities far apart, cities which do not share values, can trade with one another. Money can now pass across the plains, the steppes, the whole world. But money is not just a way of mediating a spatial distance. As I argued in another post, it also implies a disassociation of time because of the temporal split between buyer and seller.
One might contrast a natural and a credit economy to make this point more clear. In the former, money facilitates exchange. Goods, labour and services can thereby answer wants, needs and interests. Property and money are exchanged’ they are commensurate. But when money is raised as a loan on the basis of a debt, then it is necessary to increase production to generate a profit in order to pay back this loan. When the supply of money is increased, prices do not rise proportionately to take account of this increase. It is the production of goods and services which expands.
In order to receive credit, it is necessary to commit to future production and profitability. One does not pay back one’s creditors in wealth (in goods), but in money. The circulation of a ‘natural’ economy can be increased without limit; money is now deterritorialised from natural exchange. The cycle of profit and debt drives the circulation of capital insofar as it necessitates the incessant creation of money through the contracting of new loans. It is not simply having money that matters, but credit-worthiness. Credit can be produced from thin air; it is born by fiat. It does not need to be repaid in goods and services. It is to be repayed by taking out more loans. But the circulation of credit demands the commitment to further production. Thus the future of capital opens which takes heed of nothing but its own increase.
As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when coding breaks down. You tell yourself that you do not desire money for its own sake, but for goods and services to which it provides access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any particular investor or financier, capitalism desires and realises its own increase. This desire produces other desires within the capitalist social machine. This is why William Large can write, 'Time and money are not our projections, but we the projections of time and money': as indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital. Our desires attest to this operation.
Here desire, along with belief, arrives from capital itself. Zizek likes to quote Sloterdijk: we know what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway, then comments that capitalism operates in the manner of Tibetan prayer-wheel. It desires for us and through us. But might there be other beliefs in desires which await us within this socius? Deleuze and Guattari's two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia provides some indications.
A great shift occurs with capitalism as Deleuze and Guattari show in their analysis of the transition from savagery through despotism to capitalism: no longer are flows of matter and energy organised qualitatively and symbolically as in savagery and despotism. In savagery, social codes determine what is of value and therefore collectable. Bataille was right, however, to highlight the role of expenditure in such a system, whereby accumulation is always limited by the ritual destruction or dispersal of accumulated goods. In despotism, the despot must be paid in one representative of value, that is gold, which has a meaning over above the values particular goods have within particular tribes in savagery. Value is deterritorialised from goods with specific value and now accrues to a universal equivalent. But this equivalent is not yet the money of capitalism since it is imposed on tribes from without; it accomplishes the political subordination of particular groupings. Money is here only a kind of debt which passes to the despot.
What changes with capitalism? There is a more general deterritorialisation as money becomes a common currency whose value is to be understood in terms of exchange-value. Previously, the social machine was organised through symbolic codes, whether they are understood in terms of the goods of the savage or the figure of the despot who imposes a hierarchy. With capitalism, there is no such organisation; what matters above all is the production of surplus value; to that end, qualitatively dissimilar resources are brought together as quantitatively exchangable commodities in the universal market.
Deleuze and Guattari call axiomatisation that process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus. This conjoining of quantified flows operates through an ongoing decoding of all established meanings, customs and beliefs. But this decoding is not to be rejected as a simple reification as Lukacs argues. Decoding awakens a difference even as axiomatisation attempts to recapture this difference. In despotism and savagery, coding is the basis of identity. In capitalism, however, it is the addition of new axioms which allow a profit to be extracted from difference that operates as a principle of identity. True, capitalism is linked to a cycle of decoding and recoding; the axioms of capitalism sweep away existing codes of meaning and conduct replacing them temporarily with another set of codes, before this recoded set is itself swept away. But this is no reason to despair since there is a fundamental change in the shift from despotism to capitalism. As Holland comments:
Social valuation is now quantiative rather than qualitative: exchange-value simply disregards or over-rides the concrete differences between commodities, rather than reducing them in the name of similarity and identity, as codes strive to do.
The danger is that before we become aware of such concrete differences the addition of new axioms interrupts the potentially revolutionary movement of decoding. We all believe in capital; we believe in it and desire it. But there are other potencies which may engage us that offer the possibility of a new belief and a new desire.
Beliefs and desires: in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari draw on the work of the nineteenth century French ‘microsociologist’ Gabriel Tarde. They write: ‘Tarde’s best work was his analysis of a miniscule bureaucratic innovation, or a linguistic innovation, etc.’ What does this mean? Bonta and Protevi provide a useful gloss:
... flow is that micro-deviation from the norm, that little nuance ‘sure we’re all Americans but here we start our 4th July celebration with a parade from the our local Veterans Against War group, then we have the Dykes on Bikes group, then instead of hot dogs we have veggie burgers ...’ (Of course, on another level of analysis, there are always molecular flows escaping these representations: vegetarians who once in a while ... and so on).
A micro-deviation. The market is integrated, begetting money of itself. Yet there are openings within the infinite increase of money. True, capitalism always works through a reterritorialisation of flows. It does so for the most part through a reterritorialisation onto arbitrary, archaic signifiers, but there is also a reterritorialisation of credit capital onto exchange capital. The latter is more deterritorialised than the signifiers which play such an important role in savagery and despotism and offers us the potential of revolution. It is here one might seek the micro-deviation which could give rise to new beliefs and desires.
Goodchild: ‘It is [...] theoretically possible to isolate the flow of belief and desire from their reterritorialisation on credit capital, so as to fold them back upon themselves as specific styles and modes of existence.’ This from his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari (Religion and Capitalism develops this thought). But what does it mean?
Credit, folded back on itself, produces credit, not an exchangeable quantity. People are trusted who are capable of generating trust, and such trust becomes the precondition for collective activity. Such a refolded ‘capital’ no longer needs to be quantified; one discovers the liberation of autonomous and non-quantifiable flows of belief and desire.
It is credit, then, which Goodchild finds potentially liberating insofar as it may produce a different set of beliefs and desires. But is trust enough? After all, it can always be reterritorialised by directing itself towards a particular process or end. Accordingly trust must be 'folded back upon itself', Goodchild comments, 'in order to open itself to a new threshold of deterritorialisation: trust in trust, an immanent faith in this life as it is'. Only thus might it allow us to reach what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of immanence of capitalism - its 'outside', that is: desire.
I'm still not sure what Goodchild is pointing towards (this is my mistake, not his; I will simply have to work harder), but I think it has to do with the engaging of particular potencies which are given as the outside of capitalism, insofar as they escape the articulation of capital as a kind of chaos which has to be bridged by the operation of money. As chaos, this 'outside' gives itself to be experienced in terms of a different set of beliefs and desires 'within' capitalism. And it is given such there is a kind of folding of past and future into the present on the part of the experiencing individual.
This should no longer be understood on the model of autonomous self-determination. Rather - and here Goodchild breaks from the humanism of political science -it will entail the engagement with nonhuman powers, for example, fertile soil, fresh water, crops and domestic farm animals, all of which escape the technological-industrial subordination of producitivity to efficiency and output as well as with power-relations which open between us which usually passed over with too much haste.