Time out of joint: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

on Time and Capitalism

Alessandro Arienzo

Representing time has always been a challenging effort. The most typical
depiction of time is that of a continuous line moving from the past toward
the future. Time is a measure of motion, and it bears with it the ideas of
direction and linearity. Not surprisingly, from antiquity to modern age
timelines have always been used to represent and picture historical processes
by giving them a rationale, whether it was theological, moral or merely a
chronological order. Within this linear representation, time express a flow of
events, or a set of choices in a more complex arboreal/genealogical picture.
In their Cartographies of Time. A History of Timeline, Daniel Rosenberg
and Anthony Grafton investigate the history of the graphic representation of
time through time maps. Their work is a history of lines and of the attempt
to dominate complexity through linearity. From the classic Eusebian model,
chronologies and genealogies aimed at assembling valuable information and
tied it to memorable graphics. In this sense, timelines express a principle of
authority and authoriality that while describe events, pre/scribe their
relations and our relation with them. Seen from a different angle, their
volume is also the narration of the effort to escape the linear representation
of history, and to elaborate alternative modes of representing the series of
events. The authors, in fact, admit that: «our idea of time is so wrapped up
with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually
impossible» (Rosenberg, Grafton 2010: 13). Grafton and Rosenberg thus
remind us that in his Matter and Memory (1896), Henry Bergson has pictured
the metaphor of timeline as a deceiving idol: «an idol of language, a fiction
[…] In reality there is no one rhythm of duration; it is possible to imagine
many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of
tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness, and thereby fix
their respective places in the scale of being» (Bergson 1988: 207). In other
words, «space alone is homogeneous; duration and succession belong not to
the external world, but to the conscious mind» (Bergson 1988: 120).
Henri Bergson was an influential philosopher for Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. In their philosophical and political investigation, they question the
dominium of linearity and attempt to sketch a plurality of “cartographies”
based on a complex topology made of temporal and spatial lines, curves,

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plateaux as well as processes of territorialization and deterritorialization.
All of them acting at different molar and molecular levels. Against the
sovereign principle of linearity ruling time and history, Deleuze and Guattari
propose a different world in which reversibility, discontinuity and
indeterminacy are intertwined with moving lines, continuous flows and
machines.
The latter term is a very complex one. A machine is «a system of
interruptions or breaks» (Anti-Oedipus: 36) or, in other words, a
determination or a set of stable relations between flows. Deleuze derives the
concept of flow from the writings of the philosopher Henri Bergson and by
his theory of multiplicity, and both Deleuze and Guattari widely use it in
their works having also in mind the problem of the economy of flows
(Deleuze 1971). In his Cours Vincennes held in 1971 and dedicated to A
Thousand Plateaus and to the Anti-Oedipus Deleuze points out how the
concept of flux cannot be understood by posing the question of the nature of
the things flowing in it. Rather, the flux is the correlate of five other notions:
pole, code or accounting system, stage of transformation, sector and stock.
In other words, the flux can be better understood by pointing out the break-
flow. The flux is the pure movement of thing that is at the same time
necessary and made possible by the existence of differences (the poles), and
accounting system (a coherent system of passages between the poles), a
process of transformation between the two poles that are also poles of
concentration or scarcity (sector and stock). Deleuze, thus, clarify that

For this notion of the break-flow has to be understood simultaneously in two ways:
it is to be understood as the very correlation of flux and code, and if, returning once
more to capitalism, we are aware that flows are "accounted for", it is in favour of a
movement of decoding such that the accounting system has simply taken the place
of codes; it is at this point that we come to realize that it's no longer sufficient to
speak of an accounting system, but rather of a financing system or structure
(Deleuze 1971).

In this sense, a society is always constituted by flows, and a person is

always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. Moreover, at the same time, a
person «is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point
of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet,
an interception of many flows» (Deleuze 1971). Thus, a machine is “a form”
that, for this simple reason, constitute a break, a couture, in a plain of
consistency. Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is clearly a philosophy of
immanence and the “plain of consistency”: «Far from reducing the
multiplicities number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts
across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number

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of multiplicities, with any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency
is the intersection of all concrete forms» (A Thousand Plateaus: 251). The
concept of “machine” express the networking of a plurality of lines, flows,
curves (of spaces as well as temporalities) in which the productive capacity
of desire realize itself. The holding together of diverse element is a
consistency and it represents a style of existence.
This immanent philosophy and the concept of flow are already present in
Gilles Deleuze earlier works, in particular in his Difference and Repetition
(1968) and Logic of sense (1969). In the former volume, Deleuze confronts
with Kantian concept of synthesis discuss three syntheses of time. While in
Kant syntheses are activities undertaken by the mind or the subject, in
Deleuze they are passive processes that are constitutive of both minds and
subjects: «Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming
a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of
time» (Williams 2011: 187n). The first, passive, synthesis has an organic
nature and is a contracted habits being the living present of the body and a
mens momentanea) in which the past is our genetic heredity and the future
is a mere necessity. The second synthesis is the “memory”, and it resembles
the Bergsonian concept of a pure past. The third synthesis concerns the
conditions for the production of the new and shows that: «time out of joint
means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated
from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up
its content, its relation to movement overturned; in short, time presenting
itself as an empty and pure form. Time itself unfolds (that is, apparently
ceases to be a circle) instead of things unfolding within it (following the
overly simple circular figure). It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal,
a pure order of time» (Deleuze 1994: 88).
In his Logic of sense there is a further distinction between Chronos and
Aîon the he derived from the stoics. In broad terms, Chronos represents the
chronological time. In Chronos only the present “exists”, and past and future
are its extensions under the figure of motion. Chronos is “form”, it is the
development of a form. Deleuze alse describe Chronos as a pulsed time, not
necessarily regular or periodic, that “punctuate” the formation of a subject.
Aîon is a completely different time, which the Stoics described as proper of
the incorporeal. Aîon only subsist only in the past and in the future as in it
the present has no other existence than being an instant that lean toward the
past or the present. In Aîon the instant is never “present” to itself.
Nonetheless, Deleuze places in its evanescence and openness to future the
grounds of language and mutation. Within this topology characterized by the
intertwining of Chronos and Aîon, time and movement are expressed in a

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very peculiar way: as “becoming different”, becoming woman, becoming
revolutionary, becoming philosophy.
Time is not a measure of movement but is in itself “motion”: the motion
of desire. That of the desire is a fundamental concept in Deleuze and
Guattari. Against psychoanalysis, and against the structuring of the
unconscious as the theatre of the Oedipal tragedy, or as the locus of an
absence (The Anti-Oedipus, 1972 and A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), Deleuze
and Guattari develop the idea that the unconscious is a desirous machine and
that desire is production. Psychoanalysis defined the unconscious moving
from the ideas of “absence” and “want”. Civilization is based on this
domination of libido and instincts, and on the capacity to renounce and
“sublimate” the instincts. The correlate of renounce is “the Law”, barring the
subject from reaching the object of its desire. In fact, desire is always the
desire of “a Thing” that must be barred to promote the transferring the
instinctual aims.
Against this “reactive” view of desire – desire of something absent,
wanting or lost – Deleuze and Guattari declared that desire does not depend
on missing “a Thing” and it does not prelude to any law. Desire is production.
Any social arrangement has its matrix in desire and in the productive
capacity of the unconscious. In fact, the unconscious is in itself a social and
collective arrangement, and is continuously traversed by desires that are
never exclusively individual. Capitalism is not merely a social system, but is
a specific libidinal economy, developing through the investments in cash
flows, means of production, markets, and commodities. These are all
assemblages within an economy of desire.
The Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are the two moments of an
intellectual effort that was entitled by Deleuze and Guattari Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, for the very reason that capitalist economy function in a
continuous circle from de-territorialisation (dis-individuation) to
territorialisation (individuation) and back again. In this sense, interpreting
capitalism takes the same effort of interpreting psychosis, more specifically
schizophrenia. In fact, schizophrenia has the capacity to realize – and
potentially does realize – all the different psychotic forms: in a very peculiar
way, it is a unity of differences. Thus, capitalism resembles the
schizophrenics in its capacity to permanently de-codify and de-territorialise
itself to the limit, and transform itself in contrasting options, forms, and
desires.
The ideas of territorialisation and de-territorialisation bear with them the
image of a cartography: and Deleuze and Guattari constantly use images
such as lands, borders, lines, planes, curves. These images are both
geographical and conceptual, as territoriality is a movement of subjectivation

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and individuation while de-territorialisation is the opposite strife for de-
individuation and for the production of new arrangement and different
“machines”.
This interpretation of capitalism as a libidinal economy openly contrast
those of Freudism and with Marxism, and clashes frontally with the attempt
to merge the two. While Freudism was criticized for the imposition of an
oedipal theatre that was, in fact, a representation of the bourgeoisie family,
a major critique was also moved against the Marxist theory of value/labour.
According to Marx, workers sell their human labour power to the capitalist
who pay for the worker’s ability only what they need to reproduce their
labour power. The amount of time/labour, which is kept by the capitalist,
represents the quantity of workforce extracted to produce plus value.
“Absolute plus value” is the result of the increase of value through the
extension of the time of labour. “Relative plus value” is produced while
keeping fixed the time/labour with an increase in the productivity of the
whole process. In this second case, it is the “technical composition” of living
labour, namely of variable and fixed capital, to increase the productivity and
the capacity to extract a higher quantity of value. In his theory of
value/labour, Marx displays how the economic mechanic of Capital reduces
Labour to power and time. Power is the ability to produce, and represent a
complex mixture of individual workforce and social cooperation. Time is the
general measure of productivity and the partition of labour time gives the
units of measure of the value produced. Capitalism is driven by one single
linear and universal temporality, punctuated by the time of production, and
by the amount of time/value subtracted to the worker. The discipline of
Capital is essentially the discipline of time as it has been magisterially
described in the works by the historian Edward P. Thompson (1967) and
recently discussed by Moishe Postone in his Time, Labor and Social
Domination (1993).
In A Thousands Plateaus, the two philosophers propose a different
interpretation of the relation of value/labour characterizing capitalism. The
production of value is not primarily based on time as a quantitative measure,
but it is the result of a qualitative regulation of labour-force, which ultimately
result in the production of subjectivities. Labour force is therefore interpreted
as a “machinic” structure, and as an assemblage of “different processes of
productions”, in which a multiplicity of temporalities converge. Capitalism
is not a mere process of extraction of value, but is a machinery that produces
subjectivities and individuation.
In this sense, capitalism is the radical decoding and deterritorialization of
the flows that previous social machines had zealously coded, namely the
feudal society. Indeed, capitalism is also a coding and territorializing social

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machine that connect deterritorialized flows of labour and capital and extract
a surplus from that connection. Thus capitalism sets loose an enormous
productive charge the surpluses of which is captured and controlled by the
institutions of private property that associate this production to individuals.
Indeed, those individuals are not “natural” as they have a social nature which
is, in fact, a social division between capitalist or labourer and, in a second
instance, private as they belong to specific family. In Deleuze and Guattari's
terms, capitalism's decoded flows are reterritorialized on “individuals” with
their correlate of individual rights – the most important is that of private
property – and a psychological configuration as they are family members as
figures in the Oedipal triangle.
The countering of Capitalism is therefore the continuous and active
capacity to produce forms of life, which not place themselves in an historical
continuity or into a timeline of value production. Schizo-analysis deals with
the continuous search for the condition of a revolutionary political struggle.
However, revolution is nomadism, i.e. the transversal freeing of desire in its
productive nature, and in its capacity of becoming something else. By taking
their distance from an image of history as a timeline, Deleuze and Guattari
sketched history as a geography, and the capitalist society as an archipelago
of temporalities. In their approach, time is a nexus of lines, flows,
segmentations and plateau. In this sense, it should not merely a subjective
experience, nor an objective/quantitative measurement of movement; it
rather express a cartography of forms of life, of regimes and assemblages
always in becoming. Time is not a measure but is a quality and, in this sense,
it has more to do with geography than with history. Reality is [in] becoming
and becoming is geographical for things and people are made of different
and uncertain “lines, directions, entrances and exits”.
Time is primarily collective, multiple, and differentiated, and can be
traced in the qualitative punctuation of forms in their becoming different
(woman, philosophy, revolutionary). It is a temporal stream of consciousness
whose nature is co-operative and trans-individual. Against the conservatism
of psychoanalysis, schizo-analysis is part of revolutionary struggle aiming at
the liberation of fluxes from the Super-Ego. Against the orthodoxy of a
Marxism based on a systematic timeline of dominations and revolutions
preparing the communism to come, Deleuze and Guattari affirmed that the
revolution is not an act or an historical event; it is rather a “becoming
different” through a desiring economy alternative to that of capitalism.

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