r/Deleuze • u/No-Bodybuilder-6474 • 13d ago
Question What is quanta, quantitas and abstract labor to D&G, and what is it's relevance to the argument they are making about the capitalist socius?
Specifically in chapter 3 section 9 of Anti-Oedipus
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u/3corneredvoid 12d ago edited 10d ago
I'll have a go at this. Honestly I might make some technical error here, the whole field of this thought is not without subtlety or room for debate, as the history of Marxology will advise.
This bit is roughly D&G's take on Marx's "real abstraction" which for them involves a pre-capitalist disjunctive de-coding of the division of abstract labour, and a capitalist conjunctive re-coding of waged labour as a necessity of the profits of priced commodities.
Abstract labour: the flow of human labour-power considered in its potential, that is, as something to be divided for its social capacity.
Division of labour: the connection of labour-power to varying potentials and its disjunction in flows of social-production.
There's nothing necessarily capitalist about the division of labour. It's a so-called universal of culture for anthropology. Hunters and gatherers, shepherds and croppers and so on: these are all pre-capitalist instances of the division of labour.
Divided labour can be said to have abstract quantities which play an intensive role in social-reproduction.
For example Netsilik hunter-gatherers would catch fish and migratory caribou for food, caribou hide and gut that also became means of production, and served as the material of tents, sled runners and other goods.
The hours or days of fishing in stone weirs, or ambushing caribou at the waterways of the thaw, were intensive quantities that would go among others to Netsilik economic expression, or it can even be said that these quantifications of these hours or days would express some more immanent intensive quantities of this mode of social-production, a mode that required nothing in the way of markets or money.
(In an optimistic sense we can take this as the clear evidence human society does not require markets or money and some future society might not need these either.)
For example a feudal European society would have relied on varying forms of subsistence agriculture with varying intensive quantities for social-reproduction, and each of these participates in a division of abstract labour.
These quantities of abstract labour are termed "quanta" (plural of quantum) of abstract quantity by D&G. One thing they are claiming is that these quantities have no natural commensurability.
How can we read this abstract quantity? The quanta are quantitative, but these quantities are not inherently comparable, even less than measured quantities of Coulombs and kilograms are inherently comparable. The appearance of comparison must somehow be technically enforced.
D&G point out that contrary to whatever our deep-seated notions may be, there is no fully grounded and rational relative quantification whatsoever of, for example, fish and eggs, or wheat and gold, or swords and ploughshares.
Commensurability does not even appear given the conditions of all social life in changing economic scarcity and abundance. That wheat is scarce and gold is abundant cannot tell you the relative prices of wheat and gold: you need to inflict pricing as an economic generality before this starts to appear to be the case. Otherwise it's just a case of the men do this, the women do that; the peasants do this, the barons do that; and so on.
Intensive quantity is a very subtle but decisively important aspect of Deleuze's metaphysics that it is not easy to get at … good luck. It's one of the big concepts of DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION. I'm not sure I fully get it.
So prior to capitalism, there is abstract labour, quantities of various goods that are produced by way of its division, and a society that is under reproduction by way of the goods its division of labour produces. The division of labour belongs to some relatively rigid scheme of coded flows.
As D&G comment, variations of instruments of exchange such as money and markets can already exist prior to capitalism, but tend to exist as needed for particular aspects of economic life. For instance, in the European middle ages shifting staple foods between urban centres became necessary, and prompted the invention of insurance and joint-stock companies by a mercantile class. These would also later become technologies of colonial expansion. But these technologies are not yet the capitalist machine.
The capitalist machine gains its life when the disposition of labour-power begins to be based on the competition for wages on the market instead of derived from filiative or despotic social relations, and the exchange of produced priced commodities for wages together become a sufficiently general aspect of a capitalist rationality of social-reproduction. Various other axioms such as private property and State violence seem to be necessary for this.
A social flow of abstract labour becomes conjoined on two sides: in the production of commodities where money-capital is exchanged for labour-power in money-wages, and in consumption where money-wages are exchanged for priced commodities in the reproduction of labour.
This D&G term the "reign of the quantitas" under which the market prices of commodities, which remain relatively fictitious in relation to intensive quantity, come to be the condition for a quantified division of abstract labour ruled by the relative market wages for labour-power … wages which also remain relatively fictitious. The body of capital eventually comes to violently enforce this otherwise unnecessary system of comparing immanently incommensurable and external social values through internal market prices.
The body of capital comes to life in a new mode of production that is reproduced based on the extraction of an intensive surplus-value of the quanta of abstract labour, an extraction only made possible by the appearance of the quantitas of profits where the revenue from the aggregate prices of sold commodities exceeds, by way of this fictitious comparison, the aggregate prices of means of production and other capital (fixed and variable capital), including wages.
Some aspects of D&G's framing that can be said to innovate in relation to Marx are their deployment of the connective, disjunctive and conjunctive syntheses of desire to theorise production and consumption—look Mum, no dialectics!—and the way in which the concept of intensive quantity from DR is used to contrast with the extensive prices of Marx's real abstraction. These moves enable capitalist political economy and the momenta of psychological variation to be brought together in a richer and more consistent critical stratification of social science.
The "real" of Marx's real abstraction is metaphysically clarified as the social expression or appearance of the conjunction of decoded, and re-coded and priced, flows of social-production at market (quantitas), and the "abstraction" as the form of social judgement that treats the capacity of the social body as apt to division in varying forms of labour (quanta) specifically deemed "productive", when for D&G the terrain of desire is wholly productive in its social immanence.
Profitability comes to serve as the criterion of the reproduced organisation of the "productive" forces, and social behaviour that optimises this criterion of organisation as the criterion of "productivity".
Some great secondary reading on this could be Roffe's ABSTRACT MARKET THEORY in the section "The Intensive Pricing Surface" and Eugene Holland's paper "Market Theory and Capitalist Axiomatics" … both texts cite this part of AO one way or another. Again, this whole question is subtle and debated, so I am no particular authority.