If capitalism is a kind of cancer, does it need to be cured? What would it mean to be returned to health? Perhaps it is a question of exacerbating that cancer itself – or at least one aspect of that cancer: of allowing the disease to cure itself, or at least to metamorphose into something less horrifying.
Like a metastatising cancer, capitalism spreads, and it does so, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in their classic analysis, by releasing codes from their fixed determinations, unleashing a flow of means of production which is deterritorialised. This is what Marx called the ‘continual revolution of the means of production’ and it is a revolution: there is a great leap in creativity. But this unleashing is governed by the logic of money, which assigns everything a price. Herein lies the ambivalence of the revolution implicit to capitalism: at one and the same time, a new world is opened and then barred from us. New forces are unleashed but are captured almost instantaneously.
Deleuze and Guattari call axiomatisation the way in which flows are cojoined so that surplus can be extracted from them. The reterritorialisation this accomplishes shackles the creative forces unleashed through ‘constant revolutionising’. Still, there is always an interval: if forces of creativity, what Deleuze and Guattari call desiring-production, are freed, they are only freed for so long as the capitalist cannot make a profit on such freedom.
What chance is there of truly revolutionary action? This will depend upon experiencing the interval between the encounter with desiring-prodiction and the axiomatisation of such creativity. But how is this possible?
Do not think of it as what you set out to experience, but of what engages you. Do not think of this encounter as one you can bring about. Yes, we are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital; our future is determined by what is owed to capital. Capitalism has passed the stage of what Marx calls the ‘formal subsumption’ of labour by capital in order to accomplish ‘real assumption’, wherein, as Negri argues, all social activity is determined by capital. This is our control society ...
Nevertheless, there is the chance of tracing those intervals which open as it were in the very articulation of capital: they become the hinge which might unjoin capitalism from itself. This disarticulation, crucially, concerns time, or the temporal synthesis upon which capitalism is predicated. What is necessary is to attend to the interval as it unjoins the time of capitalism from itself. The time is out of joint.
This still sounds vague and utopian. The objection arises: how might this lead to a political programme? How to translate the revolts which occur from time to time and place to place into a global movement?