Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Percept, Affect, and Concept,” chap. 7 in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 171.
Translation from the French by Suely Rolnik, based on the English version in The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends, trans. Robert Hurley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Semiotext(e), 2015), 33.
“Capitalistic” is a notion proposed by Félix Guattari. The French psychanalist takes as its starting point Marx’s idea that capital overcodifies exchange value, homogenizing and submitting all economic activity under its domination. Guattari extends this idea to the processes of subjectivation, which would be equally overcodified and homogenized under the capitalist regime. With this, such regime neutralizes singularities and, above all, it interrupts the processes of singularization that emerge from the encounters between them and the transmutations of reality that these processes would tend to unleash. Similarly to what occurs in economics with this operation, subjectivities tend to submit themselves to the regime’s purposes with their own desire, reproducing the status quo in their choices and actions. The suffix “istic” added by Guatttari to “capitalist” refers to this overcoding; according to him it is one of the main operations of this regime, impacting all the domains of human existence. This idea of Guattari’s has an important place in his thaught, and has been further resumed in his work with Gilles Deleuze, as one of the main axes of their collaboration, since The Anti-Oedipus, their first co-written book.
This actually happened to the Rio Doce (Sweet River), near a village named Krenak in the municipality of Resplendor. Some time after this part of the river was seemingly dead due to the devastating impact of its abuse by the multinational mining company Vale do Rio Doce, it was discovered that the river had started to flow again underground. See Ailton Krenak, “Em busca de uma terra sem tantos males,” in O lugar onde a terra descansa (Rio de Janeiro: Núcleo de Cultura Indígena, 2000).
Translated from the Portuguese by Vivian Mocellin.