Decadence and Anarchy

the central insight of the theory of fetishism is not that political economy discloses production relations among people behind material categories, but that in a commodity-capitalist economy, these production relations among people necessarily acquire a material form and can be realized only in this form. The usual short formulation of this theory holds that the value of the commodity depends on the quantity of labor socially necessary for its production; or, in a general formulation, that labor is hidden behind, or contained in, value: value = "materialized" labor. It is more accurate to express the theory of value inversely: in the commodity-capitalist economy, production work relations among people necessarily acquire the form of the value of things, and can appear only in this material form; social labor can only be expressed in value. Here the point of departure for research is not value but labor, not the transactions of market exchange as such, but the production structure of the commodity society, the totality of production relations among people. The transactions of market exchange are then the necessary consequences of the internal structure of the society; they are one of the aspects of the social process of production. The labor theory of value is not based on an analysis of exchange transactions as such in their material form, but on the analysis of those social production relations expressed in the transactions.

While psychoanalytic readings, which tend nowadays to be filtered through the work of Jacques Lacan, are conceptually organized around an Oedipal architecture of cuts that are centered around the traumatic stain of the Real, schizoanalytic readings are conceptually organized around a multiplicity of machines that, by cutting through both virtual and actual phyla, assemble heterogeneous elements into fragile assemblages that are not pre-formed or organized into sets of psychoanalytically and thus Oedipally overcoded structures. Against the psychoanalytical reading of movies as both thematic representations and formal figures of Oedipal machines, schizoanalysis sets the reading of movies as optical expressions and affective montages of relational changes between heterogeneous machinic systems; as optical and acoustic planes of consistency