In other words, this is the fundamental action of a society: to code the flows and to treat as an enemy anyone who presents himself, in relation to society, as an uncodable flow, because, once again, it challenges the entire earth, the whole body of this society.
I will say this of every society, except perhaps of our own – that is, capitalism, even though just now I spoke of capitalism as if it coded all the flows in the same way as all other societies and did not have any other problems, but perhaps I was going too fast.
There is a fundamental paradox in capitalism as a social formation: if it is true that the terror of all the other social formations was decoded flows, capitalism, for its part, historically constituted itself on an unbelievable thing: namely, that which was the terror of other societies: the existence and the reality of decoded flows and these capitalism made its proper concern.
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