Intro

• As Jean-Francois Lyotard in his �Energumen Capitalism� has argued, Deleuze and Guattari’s reevaluation of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus deserves special attention. Against recent trends in economic thought, which tend to create consumption-based theories of capitalism to counteract Marx’s apparent overemphasis on production, Deleuze and Guattari return to a model of production, but with a difference.
• �Everything is production,� they announce early in the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus, not only production itself, but also consumption and what they term �recording processes,� that is, the production of the wars of overcoding, reams and reams of physical paper and abstract memories that not only reflect but also produce and manage flows of code (4).
• In such a world, economic theory is not an abstract interpretation of the world, one among many and perhaps not the most important, but instead, capitalism is immanent to the socius�not a theory imported from upon high into the passive, unsuspecting socius, but instead already inside of it. As a result, capitalism is a powerful ally in their mission against interpretation.
• Because money is the general equivalent, that is, because it �represents an abstract quantity that is indifferent to the qualified nature of the flows� (248), capitalism is impermeable to overcoding. Unlike what occurred the old despotic State, in capitalism, �the signs of power completely cease being what they were from the viewpoint of a code� (249).

Capitalism

• This insight, which seems to grant capitalism a place of exception, unsurprisingly leads to their most radical reevaluation of capitalism, which concerns its relationship to the socius. Deleuze and Guattari do indeed give capitalism a privileged position in the socius when they announce that �capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies� (230), even the ones not obviously capitalist in nature (the barbaric tribes, the despotisms, etc).
• Picking up on Marx’s announcement in the third volume of Capital that capitalism is its own, and indeed its only, worst enemy, they explain that capitalism �has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it� (230). In other words, capitalism is the economic structure that takes a socius to its limit.
• Beyond the savage tribe that writes the code onto the bodies of its members, and beyond the despotic State that overcodes all social production onto the full body of the despot, both of which thrive on codes and struggle against the constant threat of decoding (that is, of deterritorialized flows), capitalism, whose only full body is that of abstract money, actually thrives on decoded flows.
• An agent in the production of the plane of immanence, capitalism can absorb anyone and anything. Just shy of the schizophrenic, which is the �absolute limit� of the socius as the freest possible flowing of codes, the end of all barriers, capitalism is the �relative limit of every society� (246), which reconstitutes limits even as it continues to displace them further and further away.
• In other words, capitalism both withstands and maintains the most schizophrenic intensity a socius can reach and still remain a socius.

To Antiproduction

• But why should we believe them? Why grant capitalism a position that one can argue puts a new face on the old, vitalist Creator or, at the very least, appears to reestablish capitalism’s claim to determination in the last instance? Arguing through the entire capitalist stratum would take too long, so I want to focus on a specific characteristic of capitalism that will help us understand the near-omnipotence of this all-knowing, all-penetrating capitalism: its ability to absorb its apparent opposite, the parasite that consumes production from the inside.
• I refer to the concept of anti-production, an idea that can account for the exceptional position of capitalism in Deleuze and Guattari’s work by showing that capitalism, because it weds production with anti-production, gives us a map of, a model of, directions for understanding the abstract movements of, an examination of the socius’ participation in�the plane of immanence. After providing an introductory definition of anti-production, I will then explain its relationship to other significant Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, mainly the body without organs, the State, and the war machine.

Anti-Production

• Early in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of anti-production to expound the similarities between desiring production and social production. Both types of production involve �an unengendered nonproductive attitude, an element of antiproduction coupled with the process, a full body that constitutes the full body of the socius� (10). To put it simply, production plus antiproduction equals the full body, a process that involves not only pushing the process of capital towards its limit, but also, when this limit looms close in the horizon, pushing capital into the creation and consumption of surplus value�an apparent about-face, a turning inward into its own surplus value, that causes this limit to jump back, to recede in the distance and allow capital some more breathing room.
• In other words, when any form of production stagnates (the �cramped space� of capital), the forces of antiproduction move in to activate surplus value by absorbing it, therefore making the engine move again. We can compare this process to Malthusian process of population control: just as diseases move in when the population increases so much that a landscape reaches its limit for how many people it can sustain, the forces of antiproduction move in when a growing economy appears also to be reaching its limit.

Details about Antiproduction

• This movement is quite the opposite of the contemporary notion of creating new markets: instead of creating new venues for consumption where none existed before, antiproduction creates new imperatives for production where none existed before. When an economy nears equilibrium�when production matches consumption, when sufficiently numerous and efficient people and machines produce the required amount of goods and services for a population�it nears disaster.
• If production and capital want to reach their own limits, what happens when they do? They lose their raison d’etre, lose the capacity to keep going, or, in their words to keep �bringing the capitalist economy closer to full output within the given limits, and by widening these limits in turn� (235).
• It’s just another way of saying that desiring machines work when they break down, or rather that they break down when they work: only a process of failure will keep the machine working, for if everything �works,� then no imperative to push on exists, and no new limits will be sought.
• Capitalism must be fraught with problems and contradictions in order to create the need for new forms and new reasons to exist in other forms, and antiproduction is one of its most cherished assemblages for creating those new limits.
• Capitalism therefore has a built-in feature that ensures constant movement: the cycle of surplus value that constitutes �the presences of antiproduction within production itself� (235). This surplus value, temporarily extracted from the productive cycle yet still resting of the full body of capital, is strategically reinvested, placed back into the cycle of production, whenever an economy nears stagnation, like a spare battery or jolt of adrenaline.
• Surplus value cannot merely exist, but must be plugged back into the productive assemblages to widen the sphere of capitalism, just as the surplus value created by the Industrial Revolution was �plugged back� into the economy by way of the imperialism that literally expanded capitalism’s playground. Although we might assume that technological innovations by themselves could provide this jolt and create new areas for production and therefore making antiproduction unnecessary for economic growth, Deleuze and Guattari stress quite the opposite.
• �Investment in innovation,� they explain, �are never sufficient to to realize or absorb the surplus value of flux� (234). Because surplus comes in two forms, machinic surplus value and human labor surplus value, mere technological innovation cannot address the problem of the labor force (more specifically, unemployment).
• This interesting aside in Anti-Oedipus, which serves to remind readers of the labor side of production so often forgotten in modern analyses of capitalism and revisions of Marx, We thus find ourselves in Marx’s realm of finance capital, where, instead of the classic equation M-C-M’, where money is converted into commodities and then sold to be reconverted back into money, we find that money (surplus value) seems to engender more money (more production value) all by itself, M-M’. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, �these productive powers….seem transferred from labour to capital� (11).

Dalloway Paper Explanation

Intro

• To explain what this something is that makes sense of the economic value of women’s work in Woolf’s novels, without relying on the vague concept of marriage market or the here-inapplicable concept of consumption, I want to turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of capitalism.
• In Anti-Oedipus (1973; English translation, 1977), the two theorists present not only their well-known critique of modern psychoanalysis and the common conceptions of desire and freedom attached to it, but also a fascinating�and much less well-known�revision of Marxist conception of capitalism. (Fine, so it’s actually true to the Marx we see in Capital vol 3, but it’s a part of Marx most people don’t put much stress on.)
• For Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism penetrates every aspect of the socius, particularly through the use of that perfectly abstract medium, money. In this light, the difference between the private and public sphere melts into thin air: the public sphere has entered the private sphere with a vengeance indeed.
• Counter to the current vogue in focusing on the consumption portion of the Marxist cycle of capital (M-C-M’, in which money is converted into commodities and thence into profit), Deleuze and Guattari announce that �[e]verything is production� (4). To the question of what precisely it is that Lily and Clarissa do, they would therefore answer, �Produce!�
• But we have already seen that the typical understanding of production (creation of objects for sale on the market) will not work, so we need to look further for the answer, for a conception of production that accounts for this mysterious lack of profit: the missing last step in the M-C-M’ cycle.
• As my title suggests, I find the answer in Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of antiproduction, a special form of capitalist activity located somewhere between production and consumption. By reading Woolf through Deleuzo-Guattarian economics in Anti-Oedipus, we can understand Lily and Clarissa as agents of antiproduction, which will provide a pathway to clearing up the mystery of the nature of women’s work in Virginia Woolf’s novels.
• Not just a tool for the marriage market, and not just a chic new mode of consumption, women’s work emerges as an integral part of capitalism, structurally occupying the same position in capitalism as not only the State and its war machine, but also as advertising and Empire, just as necessary as �regular� production itself to keep capitalism moving.
• After explaining this notion of antiproduction in more detail, I will present interpretations of both Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Finally, I will discuss what antiproduction means for Woolf’s poetics in general (not only in these particular novels), explaining how understanding women’s work as antiproduction can shed new light on Woolf as an avant-garde artist.

Part one: What Is Antiproduction?

• If one were to create a list of the most familiar, most indispensable Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, the idea of antiproduction would not likely count among them. In the company of flashier, hotter concepts like the body without organs and the schizophrenic, it seems to waver in the background, a mere footnote to Anti-Oedipus. Even the amount of text specifically devoted to this concept�perhaps fifteen to twenty pages, all told�appears to contradict spending much time lingering over it.
• Yet it occupies a crucial structural position in their explanation of capitalism; without it, capitalism could not (to use another of the two theorists’ phrases) push itself to its limits. Accordingly, it is a quite common phenomenon, despite its unfamiliar ring. �No one,� Deleuze and Guattari warn ominously, �escapes participation in the activity of antiproduction that drives the entire system� (11).
• It saturates the socius in many guises, the most common of which is the State itself: government, which absorbs surplus value (think taxes) and therefore works as antiproduction. All of the branches of government are included, from education to road-building, from public sanitation projects to bureaucracy and politicians. Notably, the State’s major nineteenth- and twentieth-century process, Empire and war, feature as two of the most prominent forces of antiproduction.
• While Empire releases excess population (labor force) from the center to various peripheral locations (Africa, Australia, Canada, the United States, India), as well as investment capital, war also employs human labor in the form of soldiers, uses capital to purchase the various instruments of what Deleuze and Guattari term �the War Machine,� and prompts major industrial projects, both in terms of expanding preexisting industry (by taking control over preexisting factories and increasing its production levels) and spurring new forms of production (new weapons, new sanitation implements, and new types of food storage units, for example).
• While the theorists do not explicitly name many other forms of antiproduction, they significantly name advertising as another prominent example.

Detail

• So much for the forms of antiproduction. Now, we need to understand why antiproduction must exist. In essence, according to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism involves two complementary processes, production (of course) and its photographic negative, antiproduction. By antiproduction, they do not mean the opposite of production in the sense of consumption or mere destruction, nor do they indicate a moment in time when production ceases or must stop.
• Antiproduction is still productive in the sense that a product is still made; as Deleuze and Guattari explain, the cycle of production ensures �the presence of antiproduction within production itself� (235). The difference between production and antiproduction lies in what function the process performs in the larger sphere of capital itself: Does the production allow a further circulation of goods and services, initiating a process of creating surplus value and then using this surplus value to produce more and thence create still more surplus?
• Or does it instead absorb surplus capital, making it practically disappear outside of the cycle of (productive) capital? If the production process in question causes the capital cycle to continue and expand, then it is �regular� production; if the production merely absorbs surplus capital, which exits the capital cycle, never to be seen again, then it is antiproduction.
• Such a conception seems absurd, completely contradictory of the capitalist imperative. After all, capitalism is a distinct form of economy precisely because it mandates the reinvestment of profits, the circulation of surplus in order to expand capital’s reach indefinitely. Yet Deleuze and Guattari, throughout their textual corpus, ask us to consider the �cramped spaces:� spaces so small that the subject cannot move, moments when one’s opportunities of ever advancing or understanding anything seem excruciatingly narrow, or situations so uncomfortable and unbearable that one can hardly live their day-to-day lives.
• In such cramped spaces, they argue, new creations occur; they are breeding grounds for innovation and therefore actually promote creation rather than impede it. Thus, antiproduction, by absorbing surplus value, artificially creates a deficit or temporary atmosphere of poverty, which then necessitates another turning of the wheel: more production in order to make up for the apparently wasted capital.
• If producers produce too much surplus value, they might have enough money to live on for the rest of their lives, and thus stop producing�the real fear of capitalism, which regards antiproduction as yet another cattle prod to keep its workers active. Therefore, in times of abundant surplus, something must happen to absorb that excess capital, or the system will stagnate. After antiproduction eats up profits, in other words, the resulting reduction in available capital causes more people to seek jobs or increase their labor output (it makes people work harder, making them reach their full capacities as laborers), as well as induces a new era of investment (the economy expands with the creation of new factories, new products, and new markets).
• In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, it �bring[s] the capitalist economy closer to full output…[and] widens these limits in turn� (235). A rather Malthusian concept, antiproduction puts the brakes on excessive profit-making, just as disease might check an overflowing population.
• We mustn’t strain the Malthus comparison, however, because antiproduction always occurs in the service of the expanded productive activity that necessarily follows the antiproductive moment. Instead of �checking� the progress of capital in order to keep it within a certain boundary, antiproduction allows capitalism to expand much further than it ever could just by �regular� production alone. If production reaches equilibrium, in which consumption matches production precisely and all people have gainful employment, then no new investments are made; the same products are made by the same people in the same quantities.
• Of course, one might initially believe that sheer human greed�the desire for more and more profit (in other words, more surplus value)�would keep the system expanding on its own. Yet Deleuze & Guattari stress that value comes in two types: money (finance capital) and people (labor value). Though entrepreneurs can certainly supply or effect the first type of value, they usually cannot supply the second by themselves. Rearrangements of the human labor force must occur just as readjustments of finance capital must occur for new investment opportunities to become realized.
• Nor can the invention of new products by itself cause a sufficient change in the economy to prevent capitalism from stagnating. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, �investment in innovation is never sufficient to realize or absorb the surplus value of flux� (234). Like entrepreneurs, innovations can cause the mobilization of finance capital, but they cannot create a new workforce or adjust human labor conditions to make new or expanded production possible, so more organized apparatuses (the State, advertising companies, et cetera) are necessary for expanding a nation’s economy.

My Additions to D and G

• Yet it is at precisely this point of Deleuze and Guattari’s elucidation of antiproduction that I would like to suggest a revision. What if human labor is more easily controlled than they let on? What if private citizens could somehow alter the human labor force, outside of (human) reproduction? I want to suggest that marriage is precisely such an institution.
• By merely marrying a woman, a man of means, either a leisured gentleman or a middle-class professional could effectively remove a woman’s potential labor out of the cycle of capital. The woman still labors�domestically, either in �heavier� work, such as running a household with or without servants, or in cultured activities, such as needlework, singing, or even entertaining as a hostess�but outside of the flow of capital. Married women who work but who are not literally paid, I would like to argue, comprise a large part of the human labor force of antiproduction.
• Like the wars that produce and produce in the short term, yet only seem to consume and destroy in the long term, like the advertising costs that absorb the company surplus that otherwise would be reinvested into production, and like the State that expands into �big government�-style spending specifically during times of national wealth, these women actually spend money by working, rather than generating it.
• And yet even the lightest parts of their labor�holding balls and dinners, creating endless watercolors and embroidered cushions, �practising� at the pianoforte in the afternoon�are not as frivolous or pointless as they sound. They do not produce a net loss by their waste, but instead make a larger net gain possible in the future, as they ensure that the labor pool remains the correct size to stimulate the economy. As agents of antiproduction, these women in their labors make the expansion of capital possible by making large quantities of surplus value disappear.
• By wasting their labor, by not realizing their labor’s potential in cold, hard cash, they control the level of surplus human labor, decreasing it so that capitalism can expand. I do not mean to make these women sound especially heroic, but, by realizing the actual function of the labor and goods they waste, we can better understand the relationship between women’s work and capitalism.
• To accomplish this task, I will examine my two test-cases, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as two texts whose privileging of women’s work, in the forms of Mrs. Dalloway’s and Mrs. Ramsay’s hostessing skills and Lily Briscoe’s non-commercial painting, dramatizes the role that �the right kind of waste� in the private sphere makes the public sphere possible.

Notes

• For D and G, by “Decoding flows” they kind of mean what Marx refers to as the abstraction enforced by capitalism
  • Everything becomes generalized, doesn’t have to mean one thing or the other; interchangeability, the transformation of quality into quantity
• 223: “the capitalist machine’s time is diachronic. The capitalists appear in a succession in a series that institutes a kind of creativity of history, a strange menagerie”
  • He’s referring to the fact that say, Roman antiquity and European feudalism had elements of capitalism (property, money, production, ground rent), so that it has diff historical incarnations
  • Makes it seem like Bergsonian evolution to me! B/c D and G read so much Bergson, it’s possible they had him in mind
• Dissolution = decoding of flows
  • “always compensated by residual forces or transformations of the State” 223
    • they can’t always be utopian
    • explains Bowen in the hotel
    • Maybe deterritorialization and reterritorialization will help me describe the Hakim Bey stuff about temporary autonomous zones
• Capitalism = a specific constellation of flows
  • flows of property, money, workers, means of production
• 224 on Space
  • “only through their encounter in a place, and their conjunction in a space that takes time, do decoded flows constitute a desire—a desire that, instead of just dreaming or lacking it, actually produces a desiring-machine that is at the same time social and technical.”
  • this is perhaps the role of space: to negotiate the creation of desire
• 224 What Makes Capitalism Capitalism?
  • “generalized decoding of flows, the new massive deterritorialization, the conjunction of deterritorialized flows.”
    • Which is completely contingent and easily might not have happened 226
  • the civilized capitalist machine (compared w/earlier despotic or savage machines) “ceases to be tied to the enjoyment or to the excess consumption of a class” and “makes luxury itself a means of investment, and reduces all the decoded flows to production, in a ‘production for production’s sake’ that rediscovers the primitive connections of labor, on condition—on the sole condition—that they be linked to capital and to the new deterritorialized full body, the true consumer from whence they seem to emanate” 224-5
    • that is, no longer do you have mere orgies of consumption and luxury…but this consumption MUST be tied to the greater economic cycles
  • They mention Marx’s “encounter” between the deterr worker and decoded money 225
    • which ends up in capital have more and more control over production 226
      • disjunctive synthesis: the exchange relation that requires the creation of “abstract labor” (two diff types of labor at diff times in diff places are conjoined)
    • you have to have a specific type of conjunction: capital must have control over production; merchant capital and finance capital must be integrated into the larger system where they will hook up w/industrial capital
      • you must have production, of course, but then again you must have merchant capitalism b/c that’s the way you make even “the most disadvantage creature” invest into “the capitalist social field as a whole” b/c “who doesn’t desire flows?” 229
    • sure, noncapitalist societies have financial and merchant capital, but that’s not a full blown capitalist system until it looks like value begets value (D and G: “filiative”), that, in Marx’s words, “value…suddenly presents itself as an independent substant, endowed with a motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn,” having “relations with itself” rather than w/commodities or money (capital vol 1, 154)
      • capital becomes “quasi cause” of productive forces, in D and G’s words
      • as a result it has a “tendency towards concretization” 227 b/c the abstraction becomes independent
• “the transformation of the surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux” 228
  • Of course, “codes continue to exist—even as archaism—but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine” 232, so that instead of the flows of code being “encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist systems,” they are “freed” by capitalism and its decoding 233
    • that’s why you can have all of these logics floating free, attaching at one place and reattaching at another (cf Handful of Dust): everything becomes capital in the “axiomatic of the world capitalist market” 234
• Reminder: of Marx’s saying that capitalism like vampire: capital = dead labor, sucking on living labor to give it new life
  • when capital is the full body of the socius
  • when money is used as the general equivalent 226, where it is the “quantitas” (it can represent any magnitude of value)
    • that allows all of this unification to go on
    • thus only under capitalism do we REALIZE the thing called abstract labor, which always exists but which doesn’t require our recognition of it till capitalism
• Antiproduction Again
  • “unrealized surplus value of flux is as if not produced, and becomes embodied in unemployment and stagnation”
    • “what it absorbs is not sliced from the surplus value of the firms, but added to their surplus value by bringing the capitalist economy closer to full output within given limits, and by widening these limits in turn” 235
  • antiproduction is “at the heart of production itself, and conditioning production” 235
    • does not “oppose…limit…or check” production but instead “insinutes itself” into production to realize surplus value
      • NOT JUST ABSORB SURPLUS VALUE BUT REALIZE SURPLUS VALUE
• “capitalism’s supreme goal, which is to produce lack in large aggregates, to introduce lack where there is always too much, by effecting the absorption of overabundant resources” 235, in conjunction with “stupidity” (that is inefficiency)
  • their examples of antiproduction: “absorption of surplus value outside the spheres of consumption and investment: advertising, civil government, militarism, and imperialism”