Social Machine(s) & Technical Machine(s)

In its simplest, so-called manual forms, the technical machine already implies an acting, a transmitting, or even a driving element that is nonhuman, and that extends man's strength and allows for a certain disengagement from it. The social machine, in contrast, has men for its parts, even if we view them with their machines, and integrate them, internalize them in an institutional model at every stage of action, transmission, and motricity. Hence the social machine fashions a memory without which there would be no synergy of man and his (technical) machines. [AO: 141]

[Technical machines] do not in fact contain the conditions for the reproduction of their process; they point to the social machines that condition and organize them, but also limit and inhibit their development. [AO: 141]

It will be necessary to await capitalism to find a semiautonomous organization of technical production that tends to appropriate memory and reproduction, and thereby modifies the forms of the exploitation of man; but as a matter of fact, this organization presupposes a dismantling of the great social machines that preceded it. [AO: 141]

The same machine can be both technical and social, but only when viewed from different perspectives: for example, the clock as a technical machine for measuring uniform time, and as a social machine for reproducing canonic hours and for assuring order in the city. [AO: 141]

The social machine is literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations. This is the / social machine's supreme task, inasmuch as the apportioning of production corresponds to extractions from the chain, resulting in a residual share for each member, in a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording, and the productions of consumption. Flows of women and children, flows of herds and of seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding. [AO: 141-42]

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]