<<TRANSMATHOME

III           Market Making

‘Il est devenu le temps de la ville et rien d’autre, le pur ordre du temps.

 (It has become the time of the town and nothing else, the pure order of time)’.[359]

Deleuze says this of Kantian time. It is not metereological, rural, governed by the seasons, the climate, growing patterns, the  reproductive cycles of the animals; nor is it cosmic, celestial, referring to the movements of the stars, the turning of the world. It is the time of the town. But what does Deleuze mean by this, and how is it related to the problem of becoming-woman?

The problem of the town is one of circulation, of entries and exits, flows and polarizations, frequencies, horizontal integrations and co-ordinations. The town is a ‘point remarquable sur des circuits qui la créent ou qu’elle crée (remarkable point on the circuits that create it, and which it creates)’, which makes no sense in isolation, but exists only as a point in a cycle of flows, a node in a network of transfers and transmissions, interactions and associations with other towns.[360]

In Mille Plateaux Deleuze and Guattari draw on the work of Fernand Braudel, who writes of towns as ‘electric transformers’, accelerating tensions and rhythms of social and economic interaction.[361] Braudel charts a history of the town (and writes that history was introduced with the town, with the appearance of the written word); he talks  of its creating and conquering the countryside and of their mutual reciprocity; of thresholds of urbanization at which self-generated transformations occur, beyond which a town achieves a minimum of efficiency; of the divisions of labour implied by the town; of rings of stone marking the effort for independence and desire for expansion in the middle ages, offering both protection against enemies and contributing to the control of the population inside the walls; of the complicated networks of Western towns and the regimented order of Roman towns; of the emergence of town-planning in the Renaissance; of vertical as well as horizontal growth; of taxation, credit, customs and excise. And of much more. But for understanding why Deleuze calls Kantian time the time of the town there is one remark which stands out: ‘every town, wherever it may be, must primarily be a market. Without a market, a town is inconceivable’.[362]

Braudel differentiates between markets and capital. The former can be associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the production of production, the three syntheses of connection, distribution and consumption as a single cycle; market exchange ‘is both an enclosing circle and a turning hinge’, the co-ordinated, but not sub-ordinated, effect of a myriad connections, at fairs, shops, at cross-roads, on the corner, where prices are mobile but the emergent effect is one of a meta-stable and self-regulating system.[363] From the chaos of the market emerges ‘the first computer mankind ever had’[364]; but rather than the program being fixed (e.g., as in a price list), and functioning as a control mechanism on the relation of input to output, or governed by extrinsic conditions it is itself subject to transformations as a result of the concrete flows which pass through it. The cycle itself adds difference to the potential of its own functioning: more simply, it learns and learning potentiates material changes in the routes and connections, distributions and conjunctions of the cycle. The space of the market is not striated and segmented by extrinsic operations; it has no image, no central memory or general rule, and is an actual continuum, presupposing nothing other that its immanent operations, a circulation of states, a-central, non-hierarchical, surface.

This contributes to understanding why Deleuze and Guattari call synthesis passive. The cycles of a market are not effected through the operation of an external agent, an identity to which synthesis is related, but through indirect interactions, productive connections which are not trades or exchanges (Braudel differentiates trade from the self-regulating mechanisms of markets) but break-flows.

‘[T]oute machine est coupure de flux par rapport à celle à laquelle elle est connectée, mais flux elle-même ou production de flux par rapport à celle qui lui est connectée. Telle est la loi de production de production.

 ([E]very machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow, in relation to the machine connected to it. This is the law of the production of production).’[365]

The continuity of the actual continuum, of a materially intensive full space, is conditioned by the breaks or interruptions of the machines. The break constitutes a partial object, partial not in the sense of incompleteness, which would return the process to an  economy of lack specific to capital, and direct desire towards a whole object, a complete thing, once more framing the problem in extension (for how could an intensity be incomplete?). But partial (partiaux) in the sense of biased, evaluative, ‘comme les intensités sous lesquelles une matière remplit toujours l’espace à des degrés divers (like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space in varying degrees’)[366] Objects become pieces of a journey, directions, tendencies, selective principles, elements in a sequence or chain, molecular, rather than molar.

Since the continuum is intensive, and so too are partial objects, the distinction between flow and objects -which might be understood as that between money and commodity -becomes dissolved. The difference becomes one of relative compressions, or contractions of intensities; a break does not mean a separation, a removal of a sequence which leaves a hole behind, but is itself a flow, a line of escape, a different bias or directionality, which connects with another flow, effects a break or interruption elsewhere.

Capital, on the other hand, through the State as its ‘modèles de réalisation immanents (immanent model of realization)’,[367] imposes external controls, ostensibly with the purpose of protecting the consumer - of making things “fair” or “equal”. The State corporatizes, industrializes, massifies, introduces regulative mechanisms, taxation, credit control, tariffs, damaging the autonomous balance of markets, and, more importantly, divorcing economic from social life through the medium of politics: capital, Braudel says, is a political word. In effect, Braudel argues, capital functions as an anti-market, as an inhibitor, or as Deleuze and Guattari express it, as antiproduction. Unlike the State as an extrinsic transcendent unity - God, the Despot - however, in a capitalist régime, the State as the agent of anti-production becomes immanent to all flows, ‘une gigantesque entreprise d’anti-production, mais au sein de la production même, et la conditionnant (a gigantic enterprise of antiproduction, but at the heart of production itself, and conditioning this production)’.[368] The cycle is thus attached to an extrinsic determined image, from which its power and its movement appear to emanate, and in terms of which all its relations are understood.

 In Passive Synthesis, the difference beween conjunction as a blockage, or point of accumulation that subjugates all flows to a single flow, and conjunction as AND logic was mentioned - the difference between a macro-history of great men, with the subject as agent of synthesis, and a micro-history of populations and flows. The former, Deleuze and Guattari argue, is the conjunction specific to capital, to the formation of an abstract attraction-machine, from which all flows seems to emanate. Like the Kantian transcendental, like the subject, capital appears as an unengendered presupposition of production, as the father of surplus value, folding back over markets and regulating the concretization of its abstract axiomatic.

The complexities of the relations between capital and the State,  capital and the market, the difference between the social economics of a market and the political economics of capital, which re-describes social relations according to its own needs, are too intricate to explore here: another thesis would be needed. What is important for understanding the above comment of Deleuze’s about Kantian town time is the double aspect it implies. The town faces both ways; in one direction, it faces the State, and capitalist axiomatics and in the other it faces the market. Deleuze and Guattari call money and the market ‘la vrai police du capitalisme (capitalism’s true police)’;[369] however, Irigaray’s question concerning what would happen if commodities learned to speak can be shifted sideways, and re-asked in relation to money and markets. What happens if money learns to speak, not with the voice of capital, as an expression of purchasing power, of hedonistic potential, of luxury and excess and of the expansion of power, but of its own behaviour, as a flow which resists accumulation, which always escapes, which effects movements, rather than buying things, potentiates mobilities and interactions which cross through capital zones, but never remain inside.

Community or commercium. From one perspective the town and the flows of trade appear organized by the capital and the State, and the town and its markets appear to depend for the flows that circulate through it on the resources these supply. In the other direction, the town is fundamentally a market in contact with other markets, from which emerges a world-economy different to the capital economy between States; indeed, Deleuze and Guattari write that not only did the towns not create capitalism, but that they anticipated it and warded it off. They point to the mechanisms of anticipation and inhibition referred to in Forces and Deductions, in relation to the warding off of the State by primitive and nomadic States; these mechanisms ‘jouent dans les villes “contre” l’Etat et “contre” le capitalisme (are at play in the conflict of towns “against” the State and “against” capitalism’). Whilst capitalism won, however, the horizontal networks of the towns were not demolished as a result of this; for capitalism requires the markets, requires the release of flows it effects and the cycles it turns, just as reason needs time, in order not to be god, and men need women, in order not to die. But something always escapes.

Like the town time faces both ways: in one direction it is the chronological line of succession, defined by the unit, the corporeal present measuring actions and causes, to which past and future are relative, indicating only the relation between two presents. Here is formal time, the concept of time, physical and cyclical, concrete: time as money. In another direction, however, it is the pure empty form of time, the labyrinthine line which divides into itself, incorporeal, imperceptible, autonomous, disinvested of matter, and the time with which Deleuze credits Kant, in the first of the four poetic formulae; time unhinged from the cardinality of capitalism, which adds its coins one by one by one by one and keeps them in the bank, measuring its wealth relative to its history and the dreamed prospects of its future. The market is the turning hinge of the cycle; unhinged from the State and from capital, the market becomes.