Balibar and the transitory break
Our society produces schizophrenia, Part 2
[Section of a painting by
, digitally altered]In their 1972 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari describe schizophrenia as “our very own ‘malady,’ modern man’s sickness,” which they seek to understand from both psychoanalytic and political economic perspectives. They conceive of schizophrenia as both “the exterior limit of capitalism itself” and “the conclusion of its deepest tendency.”[i]
In Part 1 of this essay, I explained how Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the clinical schizophrenic (“the schizophrenic entity”) as a product of capitalism is influenced in part by Foucault’s understanding. According to Foucault, schizophrenia is a pathological form made possible by unresolved socio-economic constraints and contradictions, an escape from the various forms of alienation which define work and life under capitalism, a condition of “the world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations between men.” As he explains, “[o]nly the real conflict of the conditions of existence may serve as a structural model for the paradoxes of the schizophrenic world.”[ii]
Through a return to the critique of capitalism, as found in the work of contemporary philosopher Étienne Balibar, Deleuze and Guattari also understand schizophrenia as a general process, a social category of rupture, of non-correspondence between productive forces and relations of production, “the exterior limit of capitalism itself.”
Guided by Balibar’s reading of Marx’s Capital in particular, Deleuze and Guattari look to Capital to understand the general dynamics and properties of the mode of capitalist production, especially as Marx analyzes them in the first volume chapters “Division of Labour and Manufacture” and “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” and the third volume chapters “Economy in the Use of Constant Capital” and “Counteracting Factors.”
Here, I’ll focus on the influence of Balibar in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia as a general process of rupture in capitalism.
Part 3 of this essay will focus more on the way in which Deleuze and Guattari, through a largely Spinozist inspired conception of desire, combine the analysis of madness and the critique of capitalism.
Important for Deleuze and Guattari is Balibar’s 1965 essay “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” a contribution to the book Reading Capital which was a collection of essays produced by a seminar facilitated by the Marxist philosophy professor Louis Althusser.
Balibar identifies as the object of Marx’s analysis the successive development of productive forces, as definitive of the composition of capital.[iii] For example, the internal limit to the rate of profit is defined by the organic, quantitative aspects of capital’s composition: the relation between productive forces and relations of production.[iv]
Balibar describes the transition between modes of production as a rupture in the correspondence between the relations of production and productive forces, setting free the elements that would form the structure of another mode of production.[v]
Even the transition, Balibar explains, has a structure: “It is itself a movement subject to a structure which has to be discovered […] the forms of transition themselves are particular ‘forms of manifestation’ of this general structure: they are themselves modes of production.[vi]
Things Work Well Only Providing They Breakdown
For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is a system in which “things work well only providing they breakdown.”[vii] The mental pathologies they analyze are to be understood in the context of the interruptions inherent to capitalist production, for the limits capital must break down are defined by what Balibar describes as the antagonism between productive forces and relations of production.
The development of productive forces between manufacture and large-scale industry involves the fragmentation and displacement of the worker, such that labour, as Deleuze and Guattari write, “ceases to be a constituent part of the production process, in order to become adjacent to this process.”[viii] From the point of view of the composition of capital, this historical tendency is an inversion of proportions in the ratios between constant and variable capital—that is, between the numbers and values of machines vs. workers throughout the economy—the effects of which are ongoing dynamics in the mode of capitalist production.[ix]
One effect of this inversion is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) because as the means of production become more productive, their products become less valuable.[x] But the development of large-scale industry brings with it countereffects which enable capital to periodically overcome the immanent limits to profit. Thus, the increasing fragmentation and subordination of the worker is part of a broader tendency by which capital perpetually breaks down and re-composes itself.
For Marx, the TRPF has “simply the character of a tendency” because it is accompanied by contradictory effects of the same cause.[xi] In Capital: Vol. Three, Marx explains that the question left unanswered by the Political Economists on the topic of the TRPF is why it is not yet more substantial or rapid. Towards answering this question, he elaborates on several counteracting tendencies—banking, finance capital, increased exploitation of labour, and diminution of the cost of constant capital.[xii] These dynamics enable displacement of the immanent limits of capitalist growth, only to be confronted again at a greater scale.[xiii]
Following Marx and other contemporary Marxist theorists, Deleuze and Guattari explain that banks help counteract the TRPF by financing the movement of capital from the center to the periphery, and “the increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center” amounts to “ensur[ing] a rise in the rate of surplus value.”[xiv]
It is in the context of these dynamics as they relate to the Crash of ‘29 that Deleuze and Guattari conceive of the rise of fascism as well as capital’s scientific advance in marketing and integration of the “Third World.” These are reactions and breakthroughs which develop as lines of escape from the limits of accumulation, as means of limit displacement.[xv]
For Deleuze and Guattari, it is particularly through Marx’s law of the counteracting tendency that schizophrenia ought to be examined,[xvi] understanding schizophrenia as “the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency.”[xvii]
the relationship of schizophrenia to capitalism [goes] far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology, etc., […] it should be examined at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one and the same production process. Our society produces [schizophrenics] the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that [schizophrenics] are not salable.[xviii]
The point that schizophrenics are only distinguishable from commodities in that they are not saleable pertains to their consummability as bearers of labour-power; they do not offer the modified productive forces which make for commodifiable labour power. For example, famously, before taking up painting in his late 20s, Van Gogh struggled to find a fitting career, even being dismissed from ministry for being considered excessive in his spiritual practices.
One and the same production process
We find in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia the transitory break between modes of production Balibar defines in terms of rupture, a non-correspondence between the productive forces and relations of production.[xix] Hence, schizophrenia is produced at and exists just beyond capitalism’s limit of appropriation.[xx]
In this broad category, schizophrenia as non-correspondence also characterises capital’s peripheral limits in the resistance of the colonized,[xxi] and art and science carry a revolutionary potential as “schizophrenizing” processes for they bear the ability to restore intellectual potentialities which the worker loses within the relation with capital and which, as Marx writes, “confront him as a power ruling over him.”
Thus, at capitalism’s limit we find not only the catatonic schizophrenics of the clinic but also artists who “short circuit” social production, “to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines” and to cause desire to “undermine technical machines:” for example, “Arman’s charred violins, for instance, or Cesar’s compressed car bodies;” on the other hand, Dali’s method of critical paranoia or the discordant conclusions of Ravel’s compositions.[xxii]
Notes
[i]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Penguin Books), 246.
[ii]. Michel Foucault, (2011 [1976]) Madness: The Invention of An Idea [previously published under the title Mental Illness and Personality], trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: HarperCollins),138-9.
[iii]. Étienne Balibar (2015 [1970]) “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital (London: Verso), 414.
[iv]. Ibid, 462.
[v]. Ibid, 448-9.
[vi]. Ibid, 441.
[vii]. Deleuze and Guattari, 230.
[viii]. Ibid, 232.
[ix]. Balibar, 443, 457, 458.
[x]. Karl Marx (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books), 510, 512.
[xi]. Karl Marx (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books), 339
[xii]. Ibid, 339–75.
[xiii]. Karl Marx (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books), 358; See also Balibar, 461; and Deleuze and Guattari, 231.
[xiv]. Deleuze and Guattari, 230–1.
[xv]. Deleuze and Guattari, 373.
[xvi]. Ibid, 245–6.
[xvii]. Ibid, 246.
[xviii]. Ibid, 245.
[xix]. Balibar, 441.
[xx]. Deleuze and Guattari, 35.
[xxi]. Deleuze and Guattari, 187-9.
[xxii]. Ibid, 31–2.