assemblage, of a horizontal integration across different moments of
the labour process (planning, partial manufacturing of kinds of mer-
chandise, assemblage and testing, styling, advertising) that take place
in different parts of the planet.
While a world-wide market implies the mobility of finished goods,
the process of globalization instead involves a true and precise deter-
ritorialization of the process of production. In the phase we are defin-
ing as globalization there are no longer any relations between financial
investment and control over production. Whoever invests capital is
interested in knowing how the company’s stock in which one invests
will fare, but one is not expected to know what goods the company pro-
duces. The divorce between exchange value and use value is definitive.
The circulation of value diverges completely from the material circulation
of goods produced. The product that is especially exchanged, above all, is
information.
It is evident that this transformation that we are calling globalization
is made possible by the diffusion of technologies of communication
and virtualization: the process of production is in large part dematerial-
ized, that is, modes of information are produced. Generally the produc-
tive sectors, in which materials that mobilize physical energies of the
classic industrial kind must be handled, are situated in more peripheral
locations in the international economic system, where the workforce
can be had at minimal cost.*******The whole process that today is being extensively deployed was con-
ceptualized by Félix Guattari precisely in this essay.
After having discarded decisively the fear of the prospect of nuclear
war, and having recognized its character of pure simulation, after
having implicitly foreseen the desegregation of the social-authoritarian
systems and their economic assimilation to integrated world capital-
ism, Guattari furnished some elements for analysing this model.
The premise of this analysis is contained on the first page of Piano sul
pianeta: ‘Capital is not an abstract category, but rather a semiotic opera-
tor’ (3).
What does this mean? It means that while the labour process is frag-
mented, extended, recomposed and decomposed through deterritor-
ializations of all kinds, the process of valorization integrates all the
fragments of capitalist production not only (not simply) through the
abstract functioning of the laws of value, but also through the con-20 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_04_cha03.pdf 10/3/08 11:32 AM Page 20