[T]he relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for codes a quantifying axiomatic that is even more oppressive. [AO: 176]
[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of / its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. [AO: 139-40]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production." [AO: 230]
By no means does the diachronic capitalist machine allow itself to be revolutionized by one or more of its synchronous technical machines, and by no means does it confer on its scientists and its technicians an independence that was unknown in the previous regimes. Doubtless it can let a certain number of scientists--mathematicians, for example--"schizophrenize" in their corner, and it can allow the passage of socially decoded flows of code that these scientists organize into axiomatics of research that is said to be basic. But the true axiomatic is elsewhere. (Leave the scientists alone to a certain point, let them create their own axiomatic, but when the time comes for serious things... For example, nondeterminist physics, with its corpuscular flows, will have to be brought into line with "determinism.") The true axiomatic is that of the social machine itself, which takes the place of the old codings and organizes all the decoded flows, including the flows of scientific and technical code, for the benefit of the capitalist system and in the service of its ends. . . . An innovation is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the existing equipment, and stand ready to make a parallel investment in equipment in another area. [AO: 233]