Integrated World Capitalism and Molecular Revolution

by Félix Guattari

This text was presented by Felix Guattari at the Conference on Information and/as New Spaces of Liberty (CINEL), which took place in Rio de Janeiro in the Fall of 1981.

Caption: None. Figure text: None.

Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) does not respect existing territorialities, nor traditional ways of life, nor the social organization of our national assemblies—all of which appear more established than ever before in representational history.

Contemporary capitalism can be defined as integrated world capitalism because it has already settled all surfaces on the planet. No human activity can escape its grasp as it works to further overcode and control every mode of socio-political expression.

This double extension of geography—a movement that closes in on itself and a molecular proliferative expansion—is correlative of a general process of deterritorialization.¹ While the social organization of national assemblies appear more established than ever before, IWC does not respect existing territorialities nor the traditional ways of life. It reconstructs production systems and social systems on its own foundations, on what I call its own axiomatic (axiomatic being opposed here to programmatic).

In other words, IWC is not program defined once and for all: it is about a crisis, an un-expected difficulty that adds and subtracts additional functional axioms. Some capitalist forms seem to collapse during a world war or a crisis like that of 1929, but then they are reborn in other forms, they find other grounds. This deterritorialization and permanent recomposition concerns both power formations² and modes of production (I prefer to talk about power formations rather than modes of production, as this notion is too restrictive of the subject considered here).

Here I will address the issue of IWC from three vital perspectives:

• That of its production systems, of its economic expression and the of IWC’s axiomatization of Socius;³
• The segmentations it has developed at the transnational level, in the European Union, and at the molecular level;
• Finally, in terms of what I refer to as the revolutionary war machines,⁴ the fittings of desire,⁵ and class struggles.

IWC and its Production Systems

It is important to remember that there is more than just an international division of labour—there is a globalization of the division of labor that generally captures all modes of activities, including those formally beyond the economic definition of work. Even the most 'backward' industries and marginal production methods, domestic activities, sports, and cultures, which managed to circumvent the world market, are falling, one after another, into a rapids of territoralisation.

IWC thus incorporates all of our machinic systems,⁶ human labours and all other kinds of social and institutional spaces—such as technical and scientific arrangements, public facilities, or the media. The computer revolution is greatly accelerating this integration process, which also contaminates in the un-conscious subjectivity of both the individual and social. As it is constitutive of the production process, this machinic semiotic integration⁷ of human labor works to model each worker not only by what they know—what some economists call ‘knowledge capital’—but also by all its systems of interaction with human society and the machinic environment.

The Economic Expression of IWC

The economic expression of IWC—its subjugating semiotics, which fashion both people and communities—is not merely a monetary system of signs, scholars or legal devices related to wage, property, and public order. It also relies on systems of servitude⁸ in a cybernetic sense. Semiotic components of capital always operate on two registers: that of representation (where the sign systems are independent and distanced economic referents) and that of diagrammatic (where the sign systems come directly into concatenation⁹ with referents as modelling tools, programming, planed social segments, and productive arrangements).

Thus, capital is much more than a simple economic category relating to the circulation and accumulation of goods. It is a semiotic category that affects all levels of production and all levels of the stratification of power. IWC registers not

only in the context of societies divided in to social classes, racial, bureaucratic, sex and age groups, but also within the tissues of our machinic proliferation. Its ambiguity with regard to material and semiotic machinic mutations characteristic of the present situation is such that it uses all the machinic power and semiotic proliferation of developed industrial societies. At the same time its power is masked by means of specific economic expression. It promotes innovation and machinic expansion which it can later recover and consolidate into fundamental social axioms on which it will not compromise: an encoded type of social arrangement, desire, work, leisure, and culture.

The Axiomisation of the Socius

In the current context, the axiomatization of Socius is characterized by three types of processing: closure, deterritorialization, and the general system of segmentarity—the complex interrelations between all of which will be explored here in detail.

I. Closure

From the moment when capitalism invaded all economically exploitable surfaces, it could no longer maintain the expansionary impetus that was possible during its colonial and imperialist phases. As a result, its limits are now contained, which requires capitalism to recompose endlessly around itself—around the same spaces, deepening its modes of control and its subjugation of human societies. Far from being a growth factor, capitalism’s globalization corresponds to a radical rethinking of previous bases. It can lead either to a complete involution of the system, or a radical transfer of power. IWC finds its expansion, its growth, working within the same formations of power, reconverting social relationships, and developing ever more artificial markets, not only in the field of goods but also in affect. I hypothesize that the current crisis—which in reality is not one, but rather multiplicitious convergences of crises—is this oscillation between the involution of a certain type of capitalism that directly faces its own fence, and a restructuring attempt from different bases.

II. Deterritorialization

IWC must, in other words, facilitate a decisive conversion that completely liquidates earlier systems of social organization—whether at the level of production or the level of national compromise (with bourgeois democracies or social democracies).

This is the end of capitalist territoriality and its expansive imperialism and the shift towards a new form of intensive and deterritorialized imperialism—this abandonment of a number of social categories, branches of activities, and areas over which IWC was based is made possible by the remodeling and taming of the productive forces of the Socius so that they adapt to the new mode of deterritorialized production.

The deterritorialization of capital itself is what Marx has already called the “expropriation of the bourgeoisie by the bourgeoisie,” but this time, it is on a different scale. After all, IWC is not necessarily a universalizing force. It does not render bourgeois democracies throughout the world, nor does it forcefully instil dictatorship systems. What it needs is not a flattened political terrain, but a standardization of production patterns, traffic patterns, and social control modes. It is this unique concern that has led IWC to rely on relatively democratic regimes while, simultaneously, imposing dictator-

ships. In general, this orientation has the effect of disregarding the old social and political territoriality, or, at the very least, of divesting from their economic powers. But this is possible only if capital itself works to a multiply its own decision centers. Today, IWC has no single center of power. Even its North American branch is polycentric. The actual decision-making centers are spread across the globe. It is not only economic staff at the top—there are various workings of power at all levels of the social pyramid, from the manager to the father (Oedipus). IWC creates its own internal democracy. It does not necessarily require a decision along the lines of its immediate interests. By complex mechanisms, it ‘consults’ other interests, other segments with which it must deal. This policy of ‘negotiation’ is different from previous arrangements. It involves information systems and psychological manipulations on an imaginably large scale through the mass media.

The degeneration of concentric modes and hierarchies of power that were levelled in stages from the aristocracy down to the proletariat—mediated by the petit bourgeoisie—is not incompatible with these partial classifications. However, such hierarchies no longer correspond to actual fields of decision making. IWC power is always elsewhere, it is the heart of the mechanisms of deterritorialization. This is what makes it seem impossible to define, reach, and confront it. Moreover, such deterritorializing processes also create paradoxical phenomena—regions of massive underdevelopment within the most developed countries and, conversely, the appearance of hyper-capitalized urban centers (i.e. Dubai, Macau, Doha) within underdeveloped countries.

III. General System of Segmentarity

At the geopolitical level, capitalism is no longer in a phase of expansion. Rather, it is moving to reinvent itself in the same spaces through the technique of palimpsest.¹⁰ As either a center or/and a periphery of the system, capitalism cannot grow any more—its axioms are already hyper-saturated—and thus it turns and re-turns synchronously. For IWC, the problem is in finding new methods of consolidating its systems of social hierarchy. This is its fundamental axiom—to maintain the consistency of the collective forces working across the planet, IWC is required to coexist in areas of hyper-development and hyper-enrichment for the benefit of capitalist aristocracies (who are no longer localized in traditional capitalist bastions), as well as areas of relative underdevelopment and even areas of absolute impoverishment.

Between these extremes is a general disciplining of collective hard work and a partition—the establishment of spaces of global segmentarisation. The free movement of goods and people is now reserved exclusively for the new aristocracies of capitalism. All other categories of people are assigned to residences at the corners of the planet, which have become a truly global factory complete with forced labor or death camps that can span entire countries. This constant redefinition of social segments is not only about economic power—it is the whole of social life being remodeled. In Eastern France for

example, I (Guattari) lived with my father off the steel, until IWC decided to liquidate the industrial landscape. Many other spaces such as this one will be transformed into tourist areas or residential areas for the elite. Planes of new luxury continue to be erected at the cost of entire regions. New interactions and new antagonisms arise between the segments of IWC and the human arrangements that seek to resist its axiomatic through less marginalizing bases.

Under what conditions it is worthwhile to continue living in such a system? What are these unconscious ties that force us to continue to adhere to such injustices in spite of ourselves? All these segmentarity axioms are bonded to each other. IWC not only intervenes in the world, it also penetrates us at the most most personal level—unconscious molecular determinations that continue to interact with key components of the IWC with an unprecedented and unexplored invasiveness.

Transnational Segmentarity

The North-South confrontation tends to lose its consistency. Even during phases of intensity like the one, which has persisted for some time, we have taken a turn towards the artificial, the theatrical. Because most of the contradictions are no longer situated in the North-South axis, but in the self-other axis—with the understanding that it is always, ultimately, for IWC to ensure control of all areas that tend to escape, and that there are self and other within each country. Is it enough, then, I think, to say that the new segmentarity sits at the ‘cross’ between a critical phenomenon—a latent, implicit war between self and other—as well as a secondary phenomenon, an explicit rivalry between North and South.

The cleavage of the de-development of the South (even within the super-trading oil countries of the Middle East) has created an absolute-path-of-poverty—a process of extermination which has become a permanent feature of the current situation. But other factors also come into play.

The opposition between transnational capitalism, multinational/international lobbies, and national capitalism, while retaining local importance, is not really relevant from a global point of view. In fact, all these international contradictions organize themselves, meet, and develop complex combinations that cannot be reduced in North-South, self-other, or national-multinational axiomatics. They proliferate as a kind of rhizome,¹¹ a multidimensional assemblage that includes countless historical, religious, and geopolitical peculiarities. One can not overemphasize the fact that the axiomatization—the production of new axioms in response to these specific situations—is not part of a general program, nor dependent on a central executive that directs such axioms. The axiomatic of IWC is not based on ideological analyses, it is part of the process of production.

In such a context, any prospect of revolutionary struggle confined to domestic spaces, as well as any prospect of taking political power by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat, appear increasingly illusory. Projects of social transformation

are doomed to impotence if they do not engage in a subversive strategy at the global register.

The European Segmentarity

The opposition in Europe between North and South is bound to change significantly in the coming years. What appeared to be a fundamental antagonism will perhaps prove to be increasingly ‘phagocytable’—i.e. negotiable at all levels. So no Sino-American model, no return to a pre-war proto-fascism, but rather an evolution, by successive approximations, towards an authoritarian system of ‘democracy’ in a new form.

The methods of repression and social control of Northern and Southern actors tend to approach one other—a permanent zone of securitization from the Urals to the Mediterranean threatens to relay the current European judicial agenda.

Molecular Segmentarity

In capital-intensive areas, we constantly find two types of basic problems:

• Struggles, in the more classical sense, for economic, social, and trade union interests;
• Struggles, which I will group in the register of the molecular revolution, for desire, for freedom, for an environment in which to question everyday life.

The struggles for interest—questions regarding the general standard of living—remain carriers of essential contradictions. We must not underestimate their importance. Yet one can assume that, due to the fact that such struggles lack a comprehensive strategy, they serve primarily as a process through which revolutionary energies are re-integrated into the axiomatic of IWC. They can never lead themselves towards a real social transformation. They can never move us towards direct confrontations such as the Paris Commune of 1848 or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917—they simply do not offer a clear break of class against class necessary to initiate the redefinition of a new type of society. In case of force majeure event, IWC is able to trigger a kind of international ORSEC strategy,¹² a sort of permanent Marshall Plan. European countries, Japan and the United States can collectively subsidize loss, and for a long time, maintain capitalism as a bastion of powerful market fluctuations. At stake is the survival of IWC, which functions here as a kind of international insurance company that has in reserve enough financialized capital to weather even the most difficult storms.

So what will happen? Will the current crisis lead to a new social status quo of standardization, marginalization and ghettoization—a generalized welfare State with an oversaturated media machine that offers but a few niches of freedom here and there? It is a possibility but it’s not the only one. As soon as we move beyond simplistic patterns, we see that countries like Germany and Japan are not immune to major social upheavals. At least in France anyways, it seems that the situation is evolving towards a liquidation of the sociological balance which manifested itself for decades by way of a relative parity between the left and right forces. We are moving towards a fundamental shifting of the terrain—a new deterritorialization in which over half of the

populous—frightened and dazed by the mass media—huddle into a conservative culling (i.e. Trump 2016), while a seizable minority remains more or less refractory.

But if we approach this problem from another angle, not only from struggles of interest, but from molecular struggles, then the panorama changes. What appears in these social spaces—spaces in which systems of control are working intensively to square and sanitize—is a kind of social bacteriological war, something that no longer stays within clearly defined fronts—gendered, racialized, and class fronts—but as molecular changes that are difficult to comprehend. Multi-faceted viruses of this kind are already addressing the social body in its relationship to consumption, work, recreation and culture (autodidactions that disseminate like free radios to question the work of the political representation system).

Mutations of unpredictable consequences have began to emerge within subjectivity—modulated through consciousness and the unconscious such mutations are already operating within (in)dividuals and social groups.

Assemblages, Desire, Class Struggle

How far can we go this molecular revolution? Is it not doomed, in the best case, to vacillate in the ghettos of South-Other? Would the molecular sabotage of dominant social subjectivities take us far enough? Should this molecular revolution spend its reserve of emancipatory social forces on engaging in struggles for mere interest at the molar level?

The main thesis supported here is that the axioms of IWC—closure, deterritorialisation, and new segmentarites—will never be able to deal with the molecular sabotage of dominant social subjectivities. The resources of IWC may be limitless in regards to the production and manipulation of institutions and laws. But they face, and will face (ever more violently), a real wall—a maze of impassable confrontations introduced by a libidinal economy¹³ which posits that the molecular revolution is not just about everyday relations between men, women, gays, straights, children, and adults in all categories. After all, the libidinal economy functions first and foremost as a flow of producing-mutation. It reveals the soft underbelly of the mental processes involved in a new global division of labor rendered by the technological revolution.

This does not mean that the molecular revolution automatically brings forth a social revolution that is capable of giving birth to a society, economy and culture that provides an alternative to IWC. After all, was it not a molecular revolution driven by desire which served to pave the way for National Socialism’s rise to power? It is important to remember that when a molecular revolution opens the flows of desires it is a wholly undetermined opening—both the best and the worst can come out.¹⁴ The outcome of such molecular transformations depends primarily on the ability of explicitly revolutionary fixtures to articulate the political and social struggles of interest. In other words, the outcome of revolt is determined not merely by a revolutionary practice, but also by

a revolutionary process. This is the essential question. Without such a folding in of the distinction between theory and practice (process), all mutations of desire, all struggles for spaces of freedom, all that defines a molecular revolution, will never be able to initiate this social and economic change on a large scale.

Within this context of molecular revolution, how can we imagine revolutionary war machines of new type the are able to be grafted on both the overt and social contradictions of IWC?

Most professional activists recognize the importance of these new areas of dispute, but immediately add that in the currently moment, we must taper our expectations: ‘We must first reach our goals politically before we can intervene in the everyday issues that circulate within schools, relationships, socials groups, and ecology.’ Almost all left and extreme left or autonomist currents find themselves in this position. In their own ways, each of them is ready to exploit ‘new social movements’ which have developed since the sixties, but no one ever asks the question of how to create tools that are adapted to respond to a society of control.¹⁵ As soon as the traditional activist is confronted with this fuzzy world of everyday desires and practical freedoms, they are overcome by a strange deafness and selective myopia which induces a panic at the idea that a some sort of chaotically molecular and ontologically anarchistic response to IWC would contaminate the set and ordered ranks of their organizations—ranks they cling to for a sense of self.

To them, queers, crazies, free radios, feminists, ecologists and such are all a bit dodgy! In fact, when confronted with molecular agents of transformation, traditional organizations feel directed and threatened in both their militant character and their emotional investment.

Some nagging questions: How do we ‘invent’ new types of organizations working at the nexus of this junction that mobilize the effects of molecular revolutions towards class struggles in the Global North and struggles for emancipation in the Global South (new types that are capable of dissembling, case by case, the segmental transformations of IWC which render world populations as undifferentiated masses)?

How do we to fight such arrangements, which, unlike more traditional forms of organization, require creations that will not be blindsided by, or subsumed within, the technological innovations of capitalism, nor the affectively managed populations subjected to the violent experimentations of IWC at each stage of everyday life? Nobody can define today what the future forms of coordinating and organizing the molecular revolution will look like. However, it is clear that fundamentally, they involve a respect for the non-reducible autonomy and singularity of each of the components of revolutionary organization. It is clear that the level of sensitivity, consciousness, action rhythms, and theoretical justificat-

ions of more traditional party/union-based organizations do not coincide with the rupture necessary for molecular revolution. But perhaps it is desirable, even essential, that they never coincide. Through their constant co-optations and stases they will learn that their contradictions and antagonisms will not be ‘solved’ by retreating into a binding dialectic or organizational hierarchies that are both overbearing and oppressive.

A Revolutionary, Efficient War Machine

What forms of organization are necessary to embody such a revolutionary ontology? Something vague, something fluid? A return to the anarchic ideas of Belle Epoque? Not necessarily! From the moment an imperative to respect the features of both the singularity and heterogeneity of various segments of struggles is implemented, it becomes possible to develop, by way of delimited objectives, a new means of structuring, or blurring, questions of fluidity in the context of revolt. As a social revolution, the molecular revolution is faced with the harsh reality that if we are to be an effective revolutionary war machine we must consider both the moment of revolt, and, perhaps more importantly, the least static (de)institutional arrangements we plan to install the moment after the revolt has subsided. But for such decision-making bodies to become ‘tolerable,’ and thus not be dismissed as mere replications of the molar power of IWC, it is essential that they be released from any ‘systemocracy’ at both the ideological and unconscious register. Many who have experienced traditional forms of activism today tend to react with hostility to any form of organization or any person who claims to preside over the administration of a meeting or the writing of a text. Since the first and continuing concern is the junction between molar struggles and molecular investments—whether local, urban, regional, industrial, continental, or beyond—the question of the establishment of revolutionary information and decision centres must be approached from a new perspective. This requires rigorous and disciplined actions and methods radically and diagrammatically different from the programmatic systems offered by the Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks.

I will say more about this complementarity (not a mere peaceful coexistence) between:

• An analytico-political work on the social unconscious;
• New forms of struggle for freedom (such as that of a federation of groups “SOS freedoms”);
• Struggles within multiple “unsecured” social categories marginalized by the new segmentarites of IWC;
• The most traditional social struggles.

The few sketches, which emerged from the sixties in the United States, Italy and France, can hardly serve as a model anymore. However, by dissecting the failure of the past we can advance the reconstruction of a real revolutionary movement. In this regard, we must prepare for the unexpected, for the emergence of absurd and revolutionary character performances, for the development of subversive techniques that are still unimaginable—particularly in the fields of media studies and information technology.

Labor movements and revolutionary movements are still far from understanding the importance of this debate on such vital matters of organizational and mobilization. They would do well to accelerate their efforts to grasp the complexities of IWC—which now has the means to forge (and re-forge) new weapons to confront the upheavals that new segmentarities are able to generate. After all,

IWC has no need to resort to experts on these issues—they have the systemic power to deploy new practices. Capitalism knows how to mobilize multicentrage deployments. The complexities of administering control pose no problems to it regardless of the fact that IWC is not, and has never been, directed by one central staff or a super policy office.

As long as we remain prisoners of social antagonisms that have very little to do with the present situation, we will continue to go around in circles in our ghettos, we will remain indefinitely on the defensive, unable to appreciate the scope of new forms of resistance arising in new fields of revolt. Our conception of the world is one contaminated by the ubiquitous traces of IWC. The first of these traces is the feeling of helplessness that leads to a kind of general fatalistic anxiety. On the one hand we have the Gulag, on the other the mouldy crumbs of capitalism. Out of this, smoky approximations of a vague socialism emerge which we can see neither the beginning of the beginning, nor our real revolutionary purpose. Whether you are apolitical or political, on the left or on the extreme left, we seem to be locked up in a fortress—a barbed wire fence that unfolds not only over the entire surface of the planet, but also in all corners of our imagination. And yet, IWC is much more fragile than it appears. And by the nature of its development, it is destined to weaken even more. No doubt that in the future the spectres of capitalism will be called upon once again to solve the many problems of technical, economic and social control. But the molecular revolution escapes its grasp more and more every day. Another impetus for revolt is already gestating in our modes of sensitivity, in our relational patterns, our relationships at work, the city, the environment, culture—in brief, the molecular revolution multiplies in our social unconscious. And as IWC feels overwhelmed by these unconscious waves of molecular transformation, its power over nature, over subjectivity, over life itself nature will dissipate, and in a desperate move to recapture control, IWC will harden. Hundreds of millions of young people already face the absurdity of this system in Latin America, Africa, Asia—they are the carriers, an inexorable wave bringing forward a different future. Neoliberals of all kinds live under the sweet illusion that things will work out by themselves in the best of all capitalist life worlds. One can reasonably surmise that the most diverse revolutionary forces are being developed in these spaces of the ‘othered,’ and they will continue to expand and rapidly in the decades to come.

And thus it is up to each of us to determine to what extent, however small, we can work to update the policies of these revolutionary machines—for they are us and we are them—we are all theoretical, libidinal, and aesthetic machines—subjectivities imploding outward which are accelerating the crystallization of a new mode of social organization far less absurd than the insatiable monstrosity we are currently experiencing today.

Caption: Translated by A.T. Kingsmith, 2016 www.adamkingsmith.com Figure text: san seb canal

Notes

Footnotes

1. For Guattari, the molar register refers to the transcendence of any models into which existence must fit—individual, representational, and conscious levels of subjugation—while the molecular level refers to the immanence of the process of enslavement as it unfolds within IWC—it gestures to a emancipatory diagrammatic, supra-individual, post-representational, un-conscious dimension of subjectivity that is equality as constitutive of the flows of capital. ↩

2. Power formations: sets of relationships between people, things and institutions which produce effects of domination that capture the flows of desire by territorialising events. ↩

3. Socius: the society as registered in its physical space, which is transformable along social vectors by microscopic actions that propagate in it. ↩

4. Revolutionary War Machines: temporary organizations of a formal social movement. ↩

5. Layout of Desire: we live in streams of infinitely numerous and differentiated desires that tie each being to a noticeable singularity. Every individual and collective being—including animals and plants—has a subjective consistency, with a capacity for action, an assemblage of desire driven by a libidinal economy. ↩

6. Machinic: a semiotic device that transforms the layout of desire by changing the direction of its flow—such transmissions can alter the scale and the content of desire. ↩

7. Semiotics: a semiotic device operates by directing representations, innovative actions, and transformations towards new forms of expression, as well as artistic, intellectual, and technical creativity. ↩

8. A machinic system: a communication system of another dimensional tempo, an assemblage of desire directed to another. This is the resumption of the cybernetic model. This machinic enslavement system creates repetitions of automation, such as those instilled by the education system. ↩

9. A concatenation: usually this concept designates a chain of causes and effects, but for Guattari, this sequence takes place in a multi-dimensional space, giving it the form and direction of the flows of desire. ↩

10. A palimpsest: a partially erased parchment which is written on again. Guattari is sensitive to traces of previous writing that interfere with any new message—it adds a degree of noise that makes it possible to draw new lines of desire for the accumulation of new signs of resistance. ↩

11. A rhizome: a way of plant growth that modulates from every angle thanks to the lack of differentiation between the stem and root. To make a rhizome is to push out in all directions, moving from one medium to another and back in a fluid movement that refuses any one-way (i.e. arboreal) formations of power. ↩

12. ORSEC (Organisation de la Réponse de SÉcurité Civile) plan is for widespread or long-lasting natural disasters; this does not necessarily mean many casualties, as there can be an ORSEC plan even when there are no wounded. ↩

13. According to Guattari, every political economy is a libidinal one—an intensity which has no equivalent in currency because it does not rid the circuits of capital of the force of libidinal investment. Intensive "exchanges" are ignorant of the constitutive negation of both political economy and natural theology since the libido invests unconditionally. ↩

14. For Guattari, each assertion of organized revolt also contains the ever present possibility of a counter assertion or counter-revolt. Modernity in this sense is inherently conflictual. All constructions within IWC imply a possibility of destruction and a return to a control system, especially via alternative constructions. ↩

15. A society of control: a mechanism of consumerist paranoid that results in the individualizing compulsion to manage the declining wages, precarity, unemployment, and poverty wrought by IWC in the same way one would manage a corporate balance sheet. In other words, IWC has rendered populations as guilty and responsible subjects that personally internalise all the failures of the neoliberal power bloc—especially failures externalized by the state-form and the corporation onto society. Guattari has imagined a city where, if this process continues, one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier—but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation. ↩