Throughout his career, beginning in the early 1980s, Guattari developed historically-based typologies of capitalism that mapped re-orderings of its constituent features (state, market, production) towards a nascent theory of globalization and the rise of a networked world economy, called Integrated World Capitalism. In an age in which information is a factor of production and labour becomes immaterial, the playful life-cycle of capitalism proposed by Guattari, and recalled by Asada, was attached to economic and historical blocs: elderly or early mercantile capitalism (Italy and France are supported by the transcendental signifier Catholicism); adult or industrial capitalism (England and the US and the self-policing, oedipalised, individual); infantile, postindustrial capitalism (Japan and neither transcendental nor inner-oriented persons, but those of a purely relative, child-like wonder and passion, perfectly adapted to a placeless electronic space).
... Guattari provides specific negative examples of ‘capitalistic infantilism’ in popular culture. There is a strong ‘machinic eros’ in Japanese culture that is deeply repetitive and productive of a subjectivity invested in getting high on machines. The problem, for Guattari, is whether a machinic buzz connects with a productive social outlet, like business, sending it in new directions, or vegetates stupidly in addiction to video games, or even implodes into suicide. All three are evident in Japan. For Guattari, ‘Japan is the prototypical model of new capitalist subjectivities’ that has produced within the high-tech miracle ambiguous results, careening wildly from the extraordinarily creative to the hyper-alienated.
- Gary Genosko
