Rhizome Experiment, Fall 2015

Marx's Theory

Unlike Guattari's work on machinic assemblages, in The Fragment on Machines, Karl Marx really goes after the physical and tangible machine that plays a central role in capitalism. Before continuing on this thought, I want to clarrify that Guattari's machinic assemblage certainly overlaps with Marx. At no point do the two concepts form a binary, where Marx says one thing while Guattari's says the opposite.

That being said, a good way to look at the two theories is through the idea of Harmony that Guattari brings up in Chaosmosis. Guattari addresses the idea in the physical assemblage of theater by saying, Harmony can be used literally to mean the new diverse ways that the machine allows us to engage in the world, such as the emergence of theater in Kano and the resultant new social interactions that result from the interaction of Islam and western practices (Larkin). Similarly, Marx also addresses Harmony, saying, it can also be used more sarcastically in indicating the sinister nature of the relationship between the machine and its user. We see this in Marx's work, The Fragment on Machines, which depicts capitalism turning people and their labor into commodities. Bill articulates on this relationship between man and machine in his page called Simulation Machine by saying,"Karl Marx, in The Fragment of Machines, pointed out that labor is fragmented and organized around the demands of machine to adapt the new form of time and space created by the machine". In other words, the machine in capitalism allows for conditions under which labor can be exploited in a way it had not been previously exploited. In a basic understanding of this concept, Marx is saying that before the machine, humans were only capable of a certain amount of productivity each day. The machine transversed time and space and allowed for the possibility of raising the threshold of human productivity. This is because with the introduction of the machine, all humans have to do is monitor the machine and make sure it is functioning properly. The machine takes over the manual labor once assigned to the human, and executes its tasks much more rapidly than a human ever could. 

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