Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium
En el libro "Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Echizophrenia",
Gilles Deleuze y Felix Guattari definen muy bien
la racional patologia del regimen.
QUESTION:
When you describe capitalism, you say:
There isn't the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality. (Not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of *this* pathology, of *this madness*, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that's where its rationality comes from.
Does this mean that after this "abnormal" society, or outside of it, there can be a "normal" society?
GILLES DELEUZE:
We do not use the terms normal or abnormal .
All societies are rational and irrational at the same time.
They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational.
Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either.
It's like Theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation.
Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational, not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors.
Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift.
Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad.
It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational.
Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time.
QUESTION:
So what is rational in a society?
It is -- the interests being defined in the framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests, their realisation?
GILLES DELEUZE:
But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society.
The true story is the history of desire.
A capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A "disinterested" love for the oppressive machine.
QUESTION:
So what is specific to capitalism in all this?
GILLES DELEUZE:
Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly "abnormal" way in capitalism.
I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage.
http://sisifocansado.blogspot.com/2011/10/el-capitalismo-un-delirium-muy-especial.html
Aparecido en Signs of the Times:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/236252-Psychopaths-Develop-Technology-to-Detect-Angry-Normals
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PD:
Si.
Definitivamente, nuestro régimen actual
es un Delirium Muy Especial (DME),
tan especial que cuesta mucho ser visto
cómo es en realidad;
porque 'ver algo desde dentro'
es lo mismo que tratar de percibir la polución
cuándo estamos dentro de ella
...máxime cuando esa 'polución'
posee un poder de compra
tan efectivo que nos envuelve a todos
en la misma nube de 'deseos'
y 'cuerpo sin extremidades'
que queremos alimentar.
