Assemblages and abstract machines

In Chapter 1 we suggested that the concept of assemblage is the most important concept in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Not only is the book itself an assemblage but the successive plateaus describe a variety of assemblages in relation to different fields of content: machinic assemblages of desire, collective assemblages of enunciation, nomadic assemblages and apparatuses of capture, ideational, pictorial and musical assemblages. A Thousand Plateaus might be described as a reiterated theory of assemblages in which the concept of assemblage provides formal continuity across the analyses of very different contents in each plateau. At the same time, those analyses transform and deform the concept of assemblage in such a manner that it exemplifies the continuous variation which Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to philosophical concepts (see Chapter 1, pp. 13–17).

What Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage is, in the first instance, a multiplicity (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:132). In accordance with Deleuze’s reiterated contrast between numerical and qualitative multiplicities, there are two kinds of assemblage: extensive, molar multiplicities that are divisible, unifiable, totalisable and organisable; and molecular, intensive multiplicities that are not unifiable or totalisable and that do not divide without changing in nature. These two kinds of assemblage may be characterised in a variety of ways: for example, in their Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari contrast arborescent and rhizomatic multiplicities. While the terminology of trees and rhizomes Page 43

is chosen for its broad cultural resonance, the differences between them correspond to the differences between numerical and qualitative multiplicities. Arborescent systems are ‘hierarchical systems with centres of signifiance and subjectification’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:16). They are ‘unifiable’ objects in the sense that their boundaries can be clearly defined and their parts connected according to an invariant principle of unity. They embody the principles of organisation found in modern bureaucracies, factories, armies and schools, in other words, in all of the central social mechanisms of power. By contrast, rhizomes are fuzzy or indeterminate objects, defined ‘by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature (metamorphose into something else) and connect with other multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:9). They lack principles of unity or connection such as central axes or invariant elements. They are determined rather by ‘magnitudes and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:8).¹⁰

Another variation on the distinction between two kinds of assemblage or multiplicity occurs when Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between molar and molecular or between macropolitical and micropolitical levels of social analysis. This is not simply a difference in scale but a difference in kind. On the one hand, politics is played out in conflicts between molar social entities such as social classes, sexes and nations. On the other hand, it is simultaneously played out at the molecular level in terms of social affinities, sexual orientations and varieties of communal belonging. The microsociology of Gabriel Tarde offers an alternative to class analysis which addresses the molecular level of social life. In these terms, for example, in respect of the 1789 revolution ‘what one needs to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:216).¹¹ Deleuze and Guattari explicitly relate the differences in kind between micropolitical and macropolitical analysis to the distinction between kinds of multiplicity drawn by Reimann, Bergson and others when they suggest that

We are doing approximately the same thing when we distinguish between arborescent multiplicities and rhizomatic multiplicities. Between macro- and micro- multiplicities. On the one hand, multiplicities that are extensive, divisible and molar; unifiable, totalizable, organizable; conscious or preconscious—and on the other hand, libidinal, unconscious, molecular intensive multiplicities composed of particles that do not divide without changing in nature, and distances that do not vary without entering another multiplicity and that constantly construct and dismantle themselves in the course of their communications.

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987:33)

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Assemblages are defined in terms of a quadripartite structure along two axes. On the first axis, assemblages are composed of discursive and non-discursive components: they are both assemblages of bodies and matter and assemblages of enunciation or utterance. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between forms of content that involve bodies, their interactions and passions; and forms of expression that involve utterances, speech acts or statements. In this respect, assemblages are close to what Foucault called dispositifs of power and knowledge, such as the modern system of penal imprisonment, or the complex arrangements of discourse and practices which define modern sexuality.¹²

On the second axis, assemblages are defined by the nature of the movements governing their operation. On the one hand, there is the constitution of territories and fields of interiority; on the other hand, there are points of deterritorialisation, lines of flight along which the assemblage breaks down or becomes transformed into something else. Every assemblage has both movements of reterritorialisation, which tend to fix and stabilise its elements, and ‘cutting edges of deterritorialization which carry it away’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:88). For Deleuze and Guattari, these movements are constitutive of any assemblage: the articulation of the corporeal and discursive elements of a given assemblage ‘is effected by the movements of deterritorialization that quantify their forms. That is why a social field is defined less by its conflicts and contradictions than by the lines of flight running through it’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:90).

It is at this point that the second element of Deleuze’s concept of difference, the concept of virtuality, plays an important role in the concept of assemblage. While assemblages are more or less concrete arrangements of things, their mode of functioning cannot be understood independently of the virtual or abstract machine which they embody. Deleuze and Guattari propose that the constitutive function of the movements of deterritorialisation is in turn directed by the abstract machine which inhabits the assemblage like its virtual double. They define abstract machines as ontologically prior to the distinction between content and expression within a given assemblage, existing in ‘the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:141). Like the Ideas, Problems or Structures in terms of which Deleuze characterised the transcendental field of thought and matter in Difference and Repetition, abstract machines are virtual multiplicities which do not exist independently of the assemblages in which they are actualised or expressed: they are neither corporeal nor semiotic entities but ‘diagrammatic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:141). They are always singular and immanent to a given assemblage. As the diagram of a given assemblage, the abstract machine is vital to the operation of that assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:100). Abstract machines are virtual machines in the same sense as the software program which turns a given assemblage of computer hard-

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ware into a certain kind of technical machine (a calculating machine, a drawing machine, etc.). As the characterisation of abstract machines as diagrammatic suggests, they constitute a dimension of the assemblage not unlike Derrida’s writing in general where ‘Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:141).

Deleuze and Guattari also assign a complex causal function to abstract machines. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze endorsed the concept of structural causality in terms of which Althusser and others sought to make sense of Marx’s thesis of economic determination, suggesting that ‘this structure never acts transitively, following the order of succession in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each time and in each case, constitute the present’ (Deleuze 1994:186). In similar fashion, the abstract machine immanent in a given assemblage ‘presides over’ the distinction between forms of content and expression and distributes this across the various strata, domains and territories. It also ‘conjugates’ the movements of deterritorialisation that affect those forms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:141). Abstract machines are therefore endowed with a directive power which Deleuze and Guattari are careful to distinguish from other models of causality: an abstract machine ‘is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:142).¹³

Deleuze and Guattari sometimes speak as if there were but a single Abstract Machine of which all concrete assemblages were more or less complete actualisations. This is because for them the function of mutation, metamorphosis and the creation of the new is ontologically primary. Just as Bergson viewed qualitative multiplicities as associated with the ontologically primary realm of duration, and just as problematic Ideas or Structures formed the fundamental elements of Deleuze’s differential ontology in Difference and Repetition, so Deleuze and Guattari treat rhizomatic, molecular and micropolitical assemblages as prior to arborescent, molar and macropolitical assemblages, and the abstract machine of mutation as prior to the abstract machine of overcoding. This priority is implicit throughout the reiterated theory of assemblages in A Thousand Plateaus, even though it is only occasionally made explicit. We saw above that rhizomatic multiplicities are defined not by an internal principle of unity but by the line of flight or deterritorialisation according to which they metamorphose. Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate their conception of assemblages from that of Foucault in similar terms.¹⁴ Given this conceptual connection between absolute deterritorialisation and qualitative assemblages, Deleuze and Guattari assert the ontological primacy of both when they refer to the priority of movements of absolute

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deterritorialisation, describing absolute deterritorialisation as ‘the deeper movement…identical to the earth itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:143).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 1110