From Affect to Value: towards a Deleuzian approach to creative production and control in late capitalism

This dissertation is an attempt to map out the production process of graphic design within contemporary circuits of capitalist production. I will argue that understanding the production process of design today is assisted by Deleuze and Guattari’s understandings of capitalism as both a deterritorializing and reterritorializing force. I will argue that the generative power for graphic design is drawn from a level that Deleuze and Guattari describe as the body without organs, which is affective in composition. As affect, this raw material for design is a generative, non-conscious, non-representative, and unstructured milieu associated with what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the virtual. On the other hand, I will argue that design labor also mobilizes a more structured and hierarchical level of discipline and control against these novel proliferations. This second level is associated with what Deleuze and Guattari call the plane of organization or actual plane of existence. I will ultimately locate this latter controlling side of capital within what Marx (1976) associated with the labor process of design labor. I will argue that the labor process of design is a technique that reterritorializes, manipulates, channels and ultimately de-radicalizes the creative affective energy that designers drawn from the body without organs. Once design work is understood in this way, I argue that we can then recognize the occupation as a strategic point through which capital both expropriates value from affective flows, while simultaneously serving as disciplinary mechanism to control the possibilities for subjective becomings.