The First Discussions, First Tentative Efforts: Is The City A Force Of Production, Or A Force Of Anti-production?
(Excerpt from discussions held in May and September, 1972)
Félix: If the city is a moment in the density of facilities, you might say that is the body with organs of the facilities. It hooks onto the ungraspable pseudo-totalization of this body without organs, that does only belong to desire in dreams, as in German Expressionist cinema and its dreams of the city, or the heavenly Jerusalem. The city-body without organs exists on a more general level as the city of capital, the city of military installations, the city of commercial capital, etc. But even though it fundamentally is the body without organ of desire, it remains that all political reterritorializations occur on the city.
The city is the structure that totalizes the facilities, which themselves are machines in the socius. The city is the density threshold of the social machines. It matters less that the definition of public facilities tie them to the city or the State, or that they in some cases may seem external to the city (for instance, the fleet of Athens); one could even conceive of nomadic cities, as among the Tuaregs. They carry a potential city with them, since they are in possession of a political power that is able to recenter the social machines.
The city would be everywhere if the threshold of its emergence had been definied: the writing machine of the Urstaat marks this threshold, the threshold of the city and of the totalization of public facilities. This is the despotic signifier. On this side there are structures of political power, territorialities on the level of villages, but no public facilities. It is only when a signifier has been detached, that the terrioriality of the city becomes a deterritorialization of flows; the city is the place where primitive societies are deterritorialized, it is the object that is detached from these societies and the flow that makes this transition possible, the overcoding through taxes, people… it’s a flow of despotic writing. Different definitions of the city are thus possible according to the inter- linking of deterritorialized flow, be they writing, money, capital, or whatever. And the city is more and more identified with the body without organ of capital. From the capitol to capital. At the same time, the facilities are reterritorialized as machines. The city consists of deterritorialized flows, material flows supporting deterritorialized flows, and the city reterritoriailizes the most deterritorialized flows during a given epoch: the legislation in Venice during the Middle Ages prevented capital from being born.
The social unconscious is public facilities as such. There is nothing else. The act within all structures of representation. A public facility can only be understood in a universe of representation, the concept of public facility refers to representation precisely because it is totalizing. But the first public facility is language, which allows for a coding of discrete elements. Is there such a thing as a city without writing? The flow of writing allows a surface of inscription to be detached, a body without organs, an object detached from a flow more deterritorialized than any other and that is able to link them all together, flows of stones, day-works, a redistributor that can only function as the autonomous machine of the Master when it secures the possibility of coding deterritorialized flows. The city is the body without organs of the writing machine.
A schizoanalytical diagram of the social dynamic of the body without organs, from Anti-Oedipus.
François: The first form of writing is accounts, the quantification of something which is not in need of it: flows. But not all flows, only those that the despot taps into and separate in order to stock them. In the same way, capital is nothing but a crystallized overproduction. The city unites all of these flows, gathers them, cuts them, and redistributes them in all directions, regardless of their nature: flows of material objects, flows of information, etc. This is the function of public facilities: to register, freeze, and stock the flows. There is no other social machine – and this in opposition to the current use of the term ”public facilities,” which in current management discourse is opposed to other ”activities” (factories, offices, trade, etc.), although these in fact are the true public facilities par excellence.
Félix: Production facilities and public facilities are only opposed within a totality that encompasses them. Later you may always asses the relative relation between facilities of anti-production and production. But within capitalism this distinction is almost impossible to make. In Oriental despotism all facilities are geared towards anti-production, and production primarily takes place on primitive territories. They only become public facilities when they function for the despot. The essence of the despotic city is its activity of anti-production, coding, despotic overcoding that regulates productive flows. It is the surface of inscription of all the system that code the deterritorialized flows in relation to earlier territorialized production systems. Thus there is no specific work that produces the city, only a political specification of the city, that immediately breaks up into different productive segments – the public facilities: it functions like a body without organs. A non-engendered totalization-stasis of all decoded flows, it breaks up into thousand fragments, the different productive entities, public facilities that differ from other modes of production in being dependent on despotic coding.
François: An immoderation in the despot that moderates the flows… After the emergence of the city, one sees nothing but the monstrous body of the state (Egypt, Sumer) and its military bulimia. A limitless extension of the State as such, born of the city but only in order to finally destroy it.
Félix: The body without organs is there to flatten out, to arrest, hold captive, which is impossible since everything flees in all directions. Just as all machinic systems, this one too begins to malfunction. The scribe, for instance, whose job it is to do the accounting, began to play with the signs, to write poems, as if he were a pervert or some seedy character. What you use in order to contain is even more dangerous than the previous situation: you use writing to discern a singularity, and it becomes public facilities, mathematics… The city is the body without organs of the city, but not just any one. Once you’ve squeezed it into the system, you just never get away from writing. The city is something that shouldn’t exist: the despot is enough. His ideal is Djenghis Khan: to destroy everything (except the artisans). But without cities he is not able to overcode the primitive territories. Capital is about anti-production, it would erect pyramids if only it could, but the pyramid of capital flees away ahead of it, the signs ramify and flee the field on all flanks. The body without organ of capital is the idea to master the decoded flows: it always comes one step after machinicity, after innovation. Using Hjelmslev’s distinction you might say that all the forms of expression of capital are there only in order to contain its ideal content: the capitalists are there to prevent capital from spreading, but they don’t succeed. The capitalist expropriates himself in the very mo- vement of capital – the capitalist class has the same function as an Urstaat.
The city is a spatial projection, a form of reterritorialization, a block. The originary despotic city is a military camp where soldiers were confined so that their flows wouldn’t spread… the closure of the city. The ideal of the deterrorialization of decoded flows is incarnated in the ideal of an Urstaat. But this is something impossible: the flows set in motion begin to function, they move on their own. This is public facilities. It spreads, it begins to proliferate. A public facility is there to hold something together that by definition cannot be held together.
François: The city is not just a projection in an immobile space of flows whose logic resides elsewhere. As such, the city is also a productive force, in itself, in its own spatiality, it has a productive function, it is something more than the sum total of public facilities at a given time. In order to define it, you cannot just use certain criteria concerning expansion, proximity and distance, density and concentration… It is a means of production, a use value within production.
Félix: The function of public facilities is to produce socius, city. The Roman military camp produced cities at its borders. The city was formed through a connection of co-operating machines. It defines a material logic, a kind of inner ordering: in the medieval city, the initiating impulse could be religious, it could belong to a king or a duke, it could be military, trade-related, etc. You could imagine a more primitive accumulation of socius in the city, a ”surplus value of the code” that precedes the formation of a decoded ”surplus value of the flow.” New cities today tend to be nothing but accumulated capital.
Michel: I would like to point out some questions need to be asked about public facilities:
1. By what property form is the public facility defined? The nobleman’s mill during the Middle Ages was privately owned, but only in one way: you have to distinguish collective appropriation from collective use. The property form of these facilities remains to be studied. In the medieval period, collective facilities could include the mill, the road, but also the monastery, the agronomic knowledge possessed by, for instance, a monastery. The ways in which these collective facilities are appropriated are highly divergent.
2. The function of public facilities is to provide service, but how does this service operate? To whom is it open or reserved? Which are the criteria for limitation? Or: what good does it do for those who use it? But also, which benefit (not necessarily an economic one) does the one who installed the facility get from it? In brief, it’s a question of the double or rather plural direction of the public facility.
3. The public facility has a productive effect: the ford, the road, and the bridge allow wealth to increase. But what type of production is this? What is its place in the system of production?
4. A power relation supports the existence and function of the public institution (for instance, a road with a toll, or the mill for public usage, actualize a certain power relation, the school another one).
5. The genealogical implication: how this gives rise to a certain number of effects. It could for instance be a question of showing how urbanization occurs starting from the public facility. The city and the collective facility are not equivalent: the forest belonging to the crown and the one belonging to the people are places of production just as much as a concrete factory, but what do they give rise to, what types of crystallizations? How can the process of urbanization hook into the public facility-either when it is pre-existent (bridge-mill), or when it takes the form of an urban public facility?
“Premières discussions, premiers balbutiements: la ville est-elle une force productive, ou d’anti-production,” in Recherches no. 13, 27-31. Translated by Sven-Olov Wallenstein.
