[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. Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all of history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly. [AO: 139-40]
In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes. Then again, if we say that capitalism determines the conditions and the possibility of a universal history, this is true only insofar as capitalism has to deal essentially with its own limit, its own destruction--as Marx says, insofar as it is capable of self-criticism (at least to a certain point: the point where the limit appears, in the very movement that counteracts the tendency). In a word, universal history is not only retrospective, it is also contingent, singular, ironic, and critical. [AO: 140]
[Limit as eschatological determination] can be understood in many different ways. In the first place, desiring-production is situated at the / limits of social production; the decoded flows, at the limits of the codes and the territoritories; the body without organs, at the limits of the socius. We shall speak of an absolute limit every time the schizo-flows pass through the wall, scramble all the codes, and deterritorialize the socius: the body without organs is the deterritorialized socius, the wilderness where the decoded flows run free, the end of the world, the apocalypse. Secondly, however, the 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. With the result that capitalism--in conformity with the movement by which it counteracts its own tendency--is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall farther away. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit. Thirdly, there is no social formation that does not foresee, or experience a foreboding of, the real form in which the limit threatens to arrive, and which it wards off with all the strength it can command. Whence the obstinancy with which the formations preceding capitalism encaste the merchant and the technician, preventing the flows of money and the flows of production from assuming an autonomy that would destroy their codes. Such is the real limit. [AO: 175-76]
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]
If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but / only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it. [AO: 231]