More than 10 years ago many of us marveled at a whitepaper that we felt cemented and furthered the Battle of Seattle of 1999 against economic globalization. Since then economic and political forms of decentralization have become ever more evident and increasingly a part of life. Younger generations already come part and parcel of that epistemological reality, it’s game theory, decentralized games and memes, totalizing institutions are strange, boomer and inadequate.
Already Foucault before Deleuze saw Power as neither an agency or a structure : Power is “everywhere’ and comes from everywhere” , it’s a constant negotiated flux. If Power itself is a flux, for Foucault it is also not a negative : “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth”.
If Deleuze disagreed with his friend many times he always agreed that Power must be considered a flux and was always very interested in Keyne’s notion of Capital flows.
Going further he reflected on the way Capital, although deterritorializing and positing axioms, has the tendency to overcome and reterritorialize : “capitalism was not able to constitute itself except through a conjunction, an encounter between decoded flows of all kinds. The thing which was dreaded most of all by every social formation was the basis for a social formation that had to engulf all the others: that what was the negative of all formations has become the very positivity of ours.”
Its reterritorialization is always due to concepts of transcendence that depart from the actual immanence of becoming.
In that sense the schizo-process of the immanent and philosophical decentralization or deterritorialization of the Ideal is always a process of becoming minor.
This is where tangential lines of flight are for Guattari the seeds of possible worlds beyond capitalistic overcoding.
This is where also I see this Hive movement is not simply further deterritorialized Calital seeking surplus like so much of this tokenization age but has the potential of truly being liberating schizo machinic desiring-production.
