» On scizophrénise à la périphérie, mais non moins au centre et au milieu «
Here André Gorz’s double portrait of the scientific and technical worker takes on its full meaning. Although he has mastered a flow of knowledge, information and training, he is so absorbed in capital that the reflux of organized, axiomatized stupidity coincides with him, so that when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little desiring machines by tinkering with a television set – O despair. Of course the scientist as such has no revolutionary potential ; he is the first integrated agent of integration, a refuge for bad conscience, and the forced destroyer of his own creativity.
Let us consider the more striking example of a career à l’americaine, with abrupt mutations, just as we imagine such a career to be : Gregory Bateson begins by fleeing the civilized world, by becoming an ethnologist and following the primitive codes and the savage flows ; then he turns in the direction of flows that are more and more decoded, those of schizophrenia, from which he extracts an intersting psychoanalytic theory ; then, still in search of a beyond, of another wall to break through, he turns to dolphins, to flows that are even stranger and more deterritorialized.
But where does the dolphin flux end if not with the basic research projects of the American army, which brings us back to preparations for war and to the absorption of surplus value.In comparison to the capitalist State, the socialist states are children –but children who learned something from their father concerning the axiomatizing role of the State. But socialist States have more trouble stopping unexpected flow leakage except by direct violence. What on the contrary is called the co-opting power of capitalism can be explained by the fact that its axiomatic is no more flexible, but wider and more englobing.In such a system no one escapes participation in the activity of antiproduction that drives the whole productive system. « But it is not only those who man and supply the military machine who are engaged in an anti-human enterprise.
The same can be said in varying degrees of millions of other workers who produce, and create wants for, goods and services which no one needs. And so interdependent are the various sectors and branches of the economy that nearly everyone is involved one way or another in these anti-human activities : the farmer supplying food for troops fighting in Vietnam, the tool and die makers turning out the intricate machinery needed for a new automobile model, the manufacturers of paper and ink and TV sets whose products are used to control the minds of the people and so on and so on. »
Thus the three segments of the ever widening capitalist reproduction process are joined, three segments that also describe the three aspects of its immanence:
(1) the one that extracts human surplus value on the basis of the differential relationbetween decoded flows of labour and production, and that moves from the centreto the periphery while nevertheless maintaining vast residual zones at the center;
(2) the one that extracts machinic surplus value, on the basis of an axiomatic of the flows of scientific and technical code, in the « core » areas of the centre;
(3) the one that absorbs or realizes these two forms of surplus value of flux by guaranteeing the emission of both, and by constantly injecting antiproduction into the producing apparatus.
Schizophrenization occurs on the periphery, but it occurs at the centre and at the core as well.
Facs of Life 