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.Even more important, the work of artis itself a desiring-machine.The artist stores up his treasures so as tocreate an immediate explosion, and that is why, to his way of thinking,destructions can never take place as rapidly as they ought to.From this, a second difference in regime results: desiring-machinesproduce antiproduction all by themselves, whereas the antiproductioncharacteristic of technical machines takes place only within the extrinsicconditions of the reproduction of the process (even though theseconditions do not come into being at some "later stage").That is whytechnical machines are not an economic category, and always refer backto a socius or a social machine that is quite distinct from these machines,and that conditions this reproduction.A technical machine is thereforenot a cause but merely an index of a general form of social production:thus there are manual machines and primitive societies, hydraulicmachines and "Asiatic" forms of society, industrial machines andcapitalism.Hence when we posited the socius as the analogue of a fullbody without organs, there was nonetheless one important difference.For desiring-machines are the fundamental category of the economy ofdesire; they produce a body without organs all by themselves, and makeno distinction between agents and their own parts, or between therelations of production and their own relations, or between the socialorder and technology.Desiring-machines are both technical and social.It is in this sense that desiring-production is the locus of a primal psychicrepression,33 whereas social production is where social repression takesplace, and it is between the former and the latter that there occurssomething that resembles secondary psychic repression in the "strictest"sense: the situation of the body without organs or its equivalent is thecrucial factor here, depending on whether it is the result of an internalprocess or of an extrinsic condition (and thus affects the role of the deathinstinct in particular).But at the same time they are the same machines, despite the factthat they are governed by two different regimes and despite the factthat it is admittedly a strange adventure for desire to desire repression.There is only one kind of production, the production of the real.Anddoubtless we can express this identity in two different ways, eventhough these two ways together constitute the autoproduction of the3£ ANTI-OEDIPUS unconscious as a cycle.We can say that social production, under determinateconditions, derives primarily from desiring-production: which is to say thatHomo natur a comes first.But we must also say, more accurately, thatdesiring-production is first and foremost social in nature, and tends to free itselfonly at the end: which is to say that Homo historia comes first.The body withoutorgans is not an original primordial entity that later projects itself into differentsorts of socius,as though it were a raving paranoiac, the chieftain of the primitivehorde, who was initially responsible for social organization.The social machineor socius may be the body of the Earth, the body of the Despot, the body ofMoney.It is never a projection, however, of the body without organs.On thecontrary: the body without organs is the ultimate residuum of a deterritorializedsocius.The prime function incumbent upon the socius, has always been to codifythe flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flowexists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated.When the primitiveterritorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine set up akind of overcoding system.But the capitalist machine, insofar as it was built onthe ruins of a despotic State more or less far removed in time, finds itself in atotally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializingthe flows.Capitalism does not confront this situation from the outside, since itexperiences it as the very fabric of its existence, as both its primary determinantand its fundamental raw material, its form and its function, and deliberatelyperpetuates it, in all its violence, with all the powers at its command.Itssovereign production and repression can be achieved in no other way.Capitalismis in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows ofproduction in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in theform of the "free worker." Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalistmachine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of thesocial field.By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created anaxiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in thedirection of the deterritorialization of the socius.Capitalism tends toward athreshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a bodywithout organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorializedfield.Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of thecapitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of thedespotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?**On hysteria, schizophrenia, and their relationships with social structures, see the analyses by GeorgesDevereux in his Essais d'ethnopsychiatrie generate (Paris: Gallimard), p.67tf and the wonderful pages inKarl Jaspers' Strindberg und Van Gogh (Berlin: J.Springer, 1926).(English translation, StrindbergTHE DESIR1NG-MACHINES 33 The decoding of flows and the deterritorialization of the socius thusconstitutes the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism.It continually draws near to its limit, which is a genuinely schizophrenic limit.Ittends, with all the strength at its command, to produce the schizo as the subjectof the decoded flows on the body without organs more capitalist than thecapitalist and more proletarian than the proletariat.This tendency is being carriedfurther and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatchitself straight to the moon: we really haven't seen anything yet! When we say thatschizophrenia is our characteristic malady, the malady of our era, we do notmerely mean to say that modern life drives people mad
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