Technics is long way from explaining what is at stake when we speak of machines since Guattari uses this term to specify how an assemblage works, the kind of assemblage that he calls ‘machinic’. Of course, the first kind of machine that comes to mind is one that is a fabricated, material apparatus, machines as they are ordinarily defined: technical entities distinguished from tools, the latter set in motion by human muscular force, while our industrial machines engage tools through automation, regulating their temporality and their energy in the repetition of their performance of work.
When we define technical machines in this way, we turn them into artifacts that are more complex than tools, situating them on an evolutionary timeline of culture leading to an industrial capitalism that integrates calculation and technics (engineering). A rupture with the simple tool set in motion by human motor and informational energy, the technical machine ‘combines solid elements functioning under human control in order to transmit movement and execute a task’, capturing a kind of energy that is biological or natural.2 According to this definition, machines only exist in the industrial age of capitalism.
TECHNICAL INDIVIDUALS AND MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGE
Henceforth, the machine is no longer understood as a subset of technics and certainly does not represent progress vis-à-vis the tool. In the sense in which Guattari uses the term, it is instead the problematic of technics that is dependent on ‘machines’: the machine is a prerequisite for technics, not an expression of it. Drawing upon historians and philosophers of technics, including Leroi-Gourhan, Détienne, Mumford and Simondon, Guattari proposes that a technical entity – a tool or a machine (for example, a hammer or an airplane) – should not be studied in isolation without taking into consideration the milieu of individuation that surrounds it and allows it to function. No machine or technical tool exists by itself, for these artifacts only function in an assembled (agencé) milieu of individuation, which constitutes its conditions of possibility: there is no hammer without a nail, and thus the interaction between a multitude of technical objects makes the fabrication of hammers and nails possible, while also forming the conditions of their utilisation and the practices and habits associated with them. Simondon explains this succinctly: any technical entity refers to an associated technical system, which functions as a transcendental condition of possibility.
At the same time, this condition is not limited to the technical domain, for the hammer and nail presuppose the hand that holds the hammer to pound in the nail, that is, the mobility of the gesture, the definition of the worker, the division of labour within the system of production, all in addition to the wall, the wood and the surface into which the nail is hammered: the operative context of the becoming of a motor gesture in its existential, cultural territory, which implies its specific assemblage of production. The technical object and the social arrangement in which it is inserted are in no way independent of one another. Moreover, it is the social arrangement that determines technics, not the opposite. Détienne formulated this clearly: ‘technics is, in a way, internal to the social and mental’.3 We thus cannot analyse the most humble technical object – the hammer or the airplane – without taking into account the social montages that make it possible.
MACHINE: CONCEPTUAL OPERATOR OF ASSEMBLAGES
Guattari thus urges us to expand the ‘limits of the machine, stricto sensu’ (the technical entity) to include ‘the functional ensemble which associates it with man’ (C 34), though it would be better to say with humans, men and women socialised in diverse assemblages. With this formulation, the concept of the machine is completely transformed: it no longer concerns the technical entity, but instead the social assemblage that tools and machines require as an operative condition. The machine henceforth serves to define the conditions of possibility of technical works (mises en oeuvres techniques), explaining how cultures modulate the biological, the sociopolitical and the material in their assemblages. This new transversal conception turns the machine into an operator-concept that aims to explain real social processes, an operator of individuation, and an operator of social assemblages.
Lewis Mumford, who first integrated the term ‘machine’ into the analysis of societies, proposed the concept of the human collective machine to analyse the architectural accomplishments of preindustrial societies in the Copper Age, which channelled enormous quantities of human labour into collective machines. These machines extend beyond technical entities because they define the organisation of labour in terms of a ‘social machine’ that assembles humans together with materials and other living beings to perform this work (large-scale collective productions) under human control, a power exercised in a coercive, motor form (for example, through guards and soldiers) through the neuro-motor transmission of information (which in turn implies writing, teams of scribes transmitting orders from the summit to the base). For Mumford, the social apparatus manifests itself as an information machine, transforming muscular energy into social labour, requiring a division of labour whose huge differential dissipates enormous quantities of energy in the form of inequality.
Deleuze and Guattari retain from Mumford the extension of the concept of the machine to the social, but they extend it to types of organisation for which the notion of labour remains alien because they do not manifest the statist conditions of class division. Societies said to be without a State, studied by Meyer Fortes, Evans-Pritchard and Pierre Clastres, exhibit social machines that are different but nevertheless operative. Machines are thus social before being technical, not only because any technical entity refers to a social machine, but also because the concept of the machine makes it possible to integrate the Marxist problematic of the analysis of modes of real production into structural conceptions of the social provided by ethnology, sociology or history. Viewed from this epistemological perspective, the concept of the ‘machine’ proposes nothing less than a transformation of the social sciences in accordance with a philosophical method that opens symbolic structures or logics to real modes of production. ‘Machine’ in this second sense defines the operativity of the social, not in general, but on a case-by-case basis.
Guattari thereby extends the analyses of A Thousand Plateaus by distinguishing three different kinds of social machines that correspond to different social states: the Neolithic machine, or writing machines linked to the emergence of urban megamachines (Mumford); nomad machines, involving the collusion of metallurgical machines and war machines; and capitalist machines. The concept of the machine thus defines a historical and social machinic assemblage, an assemblage of enunciation, and a machinic assemblage of bodies, which concerns the operativity of singular social functioning. The machine thus authorises both a new philosophy of history, which is empirical and not linear, and a political philosophy that refuses to cut theory off from its social conditions of realisation. It also calls for a conception of the interaction between thought and matter as a cutting of flows, and a social conception of the desiring individual, no longer solitary but ‘machined’, which Guattari terms a ‘desiring machine’.
THE SIX MACHINIC COMPONENTS
In Chaosmosis, Guattari attempts to construct the concept of the machine by proposing at least six simultaneous components, which together contribute to its definition (C 33–5). The first three primarily concern actual individuation, while the last three refer to modes of subjectivation, in accordance with the systematic distinction that differentiates the individual from modes of collective subjectivation, which are largely unconscious and which transform the individual into a subject.
First, Guattari considers ‘material and energetic components’. His materialist commitments motivate him to take this empirical condition of actualisation into account above all else, and in post-Einsteinian physics, matter is composed of energy.
The second component concerns the semiotics – noetic more than mental – that play a part in the fabrication of every technical object. With regard to industrial technology, these ‘diagrammatic and algorithmic components’ – plans, formulas, equations and calculations – play a role in all manufacturing. An industrial, technical machine can never be reduced to its material components. It entails complex noetic data, including calculations, programs and algorithms that turn any industrial, technical machine into a theoretical object. In effect, these technological machines require the contribution of engineers, not only with calculations – equations put to work through their functioning – but also, in the preparatory phase of their elaboration, scientific research, industrial applications and private or State laboratories. The industrial machine is built on a scientific machine with a cognitive output. This scientific machine capitalises on the cognitive factor from elementary school to the university, according to complex networks (arborescences) of teaching, research, laboratories, institutes and companies, as well as circuits of finance, research funds, foundations, economic investment in education, research, production and commercialisation. These elements not only make the fabrication of artifacts possible, but even more, they make them profitable by producing humans capable of using them and especially of purchasing them.
Consequently, it is impossible to deal with technological machines by relying on a Cartesian description of thought penetrating into mathematicised matter. It is not a question here of individual thought, but rather of a collective assemblage of enunciation, which articulates an entire civilisation of technological industry. Pure thought demands a sociological analysis, which in turn leads to a politics of its industrial operations. Thus, the mention of the matter or energy of technical machines is perhaps a prerequisite to their concrete existence, but it is not sufficient, for these machines also involve semiotic components that are clearly of the noetic order and doubtless put a kind of thought into play, but a thought that is not necessarily conscious, or even human or mental.
These codings and numerical applications in effect depend on semiotics, but only by automation, by an artificial intelligence that is neither conscious nor mental in the sense of an act of consciousness that takes place in a human brain, but which is rather performed by motors of computational calculation and other technical machines, recalling Leibniz’s claim that every machine entails machines of machines. The functioning of any machine, an airplane for example, additionally requires diverse, discursive semiotics: written codes, printed marks rather than speech, assembly instructions, schedules and instructional diagrams, which are also non-discursive (figures, sketches, measurements), as well as patents, instructional manuals, security warnings, treaties, industrial and State conventions, and a variety of laws which encompass, permit, configure and regulate these industrial productions.
These diagrammatic and algorithmic functions thus refer to semiotics, calculations and to language, but may not be attributed to an original author, to a human individual who thinks them or produces them under his or her proper name. We are very far from Descartes.
Third are ‘components of organs, influx, and humours of the human body’ (C 34). Here, we are on the plane of human individuation, that of the constituted individual: you and me. While we may have surmised that the organs disappeared with the body without organs, in this instance the organ becomes a machinic organ, blinking on and off with impulses and humours; it is not an abstract organ, but rather a body being traversed by flows that precede the material and the cognitive. These material and noetic components are not arranged according to an evolutionary timeline, the energetic-material component serving as the basis for the noetic component. The first two components must not be understood as two stages that progress toward a successive assumption of cultural form. On the contrary, Guattari makes it possible for us to recognise their ‘heterogenesis’, their becoming active (prise en acte), their mutual consolidation.
This, then, is what a machinic assemblage consists of when it individuates a singular body – a human body or technical machine – within a collective assemblage of enunciation and a machinic assemblage of bodies. More precisely, a machinic assemblage ‘consists’, assuming a provisional consistency in individuating, not from matter in general or from pure thought, but as cerebral individuation, a corporeal organ blinking on and off, which becomes extended by cutting through material and noetic flows. An organ, certainly, but this organ does not have any more existence than the machine on the plane of its actualisation alone: vibrating with chemical and electrical impulses, with affects, we are indeed situated on the plane of the body without organs, because the brain is no longer centred in terms of a sovereign organisation, but open, in machinic connection with flows and humours.
We must then define the machine as what connects us, not as a technical object we can hold in our hands and turn on and make work with a button, lever, throttle or screen, or as something we insert our bodies into. The machine is no longer a technical object, but is rather the operative philosophical concept that explains how three components – matter, thought and brain – may function together while remaining heterogeneous. As stated in the first and second principles of the rhizome, the principles of connection and heterogeneity, to connect is to produce (and not reduce) heterogeneity.
MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES, DESIRING MACHINES AND ABSTRACT MACHINES
But, this analysis is still not sufficient. These components, after all, explain nothing and have already been discussed for a long time: what philosopher has not attempted to consider the material, the cognitive and the affective together? Nevertheless, everything changes when we conceive of their mode of composition as machinic. According to this new definition, the machine only exists in the plural, as the cutting of flows, a machine that cuts a flow in turn gets cut by other machines, as we have just seen in the case of the body, which cuts material and semiotic flows. This becomes clearer when we approach the three final components of subjectivation.
The fourth component consists of ‘individual and collective mental representations and information’ (C 34), a formulation that may trigger worries about the reappearance of strata of ideology or of the sphere of communication, which have been justifiably criticised. On the contrary, what is at stake is a collective assemblage of enunciation, which does not refer to an individual’s use of thought or of speech, but consists of the semiotic layers of mass-mediatised information, of the industry of social and commercial order words (mots d’ordre), order words that also emanate from every sphere of local or professional expertise or social situation. Every machinic assemblage includes a collective assemblage of enunciation, which must not be confused with the structure of a spoken language (French or English, for example), or with a technical, formal or scholarly language. In accordance with the critique of structural linguistics performed in The Machinic Unconscious and extended in A Thousand Plateaus, a language may no longer be considered a closed and homogeneous structure. Language does not belong to any one of us, and is rather positioned between us, as a plane of enunciation for which we are only individual terminals. Language does not function as a system centred on its own grammaticality but is rather constantly set into variation, thrown off course by singular usages that set it adrift. Even defined in this way as heterogeneous, such a language remains an abstraction. The assemblage of enunciation is not only of a linguistic order, but is also semiotic, mixing levels of disparate languages with order words, images, fictions, information and representations relayed by an industrialised mass media that inundates us, as well as by all of the multiform, contradictory discourses to which we are exposed and that we in turn help circulate, following the diversity of our affiliations – both private and public – including those that are professional, convivial, local, amorous and social. This whole cacophony of discourses precipitates into enunciations, projecting modes of representation that norm our perceptions and thresholds of tolerance.
This fourth plane of information and representation cannot subjectivate us without a fifth component: ‘the investments of desiring machines producing a subjectivity adjacent to these components’ (C 34). It is indeed our investments, composite as well as massive, economic as well as desiring, that allow the preceding components to assume consistency. ‘Desiring machines’: the term ‘machine’ reappears here, no longer to define a collective assemblage of enunciation, but as that which makes it possible for an individual human body – mine, yours – to be subjectivated by a social machine, all the while that it is feeding into it. There is no longer any spontaneism of desire; the desiring machine is constructed by social coding through and through. For this reason, it is called a ‘desiring machine’, a coding of flows. Lacan demonstrated how desire is coded by the unconscious, which functions like a language. Such an unconscious is thus not private but social, and is also not familial, constructed around the parental figures of a given individual. On the contrary, Lacan proposed an unconscious caught up in a mode of subjectivation that is not individual but implicated in language, which is both collective and unconscious. But, following Marx and against Lacan, language is not sufficient to code the unconscious. In the first place, any language presupposes a regime of machinic production, not one that is symbolic or structural. At stake here is the polemic against structuralism, which completely opposes Lacan’s theory of the signifier. The machinic unconscious does not express itself in abstract mathemes or in any kind of language of the unconscious defined by specialists. On the contrary, it is produced, historically singularised, within a specific, determinate social assemblage.
This fifth condition encounters the subtle and decisive difference between the terminal individual and the collective mode of enunciation that subjectivates us, codes the unconscious, and moulds consciousness. In A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari calls them, with Deleuze, strata of significance and subjectification, advocating that we liberate ourselves from our Oedipalised unconscious and our consciousness programmed to make us good citizens by viewing them as capitalist codings, not as human nature.
But collective assemblages cannot work without the investments of desiring machines, ‘which produce a subjectivity adjacent to these components’. It is crucial to observe that subjectivity thereby intervenes laterally, by becoming detached: subjectivity is not the abstract sum of our desiring machines but instead their condition, which we can transform if we make an effort. Socially produced, artifactual, subjectivity acts as an always-open possibility, not as a causal result. If our desiring machines produce ‘a subjectivity in adjacency’, their investment thus also contributes to transforming it. This open and dynamic relation, rendered possible by the mode of consistency of concrete, machinic assemblages, whether we are speaking of social, capitalist machines or other social assemblages, explains why societies change.
In order to insure this becoming, the sixth component, doubtless the most decisive, intervenes: ‘abstract machines installing themselves transversally to the machinic levels previously considered (material, cognitive, affective and social)’ (C 35). Abstract machines hold together the five heterogeneous components that we have just analysed.
Abstract machines must be absolutely distinguished from desiring machines. First and foremost, they are created at the moment they are set in motion by a concrete assemblage as that which makes it hold together and gives it a provisional consistency. As always in Guattari’s thought, consistency proceeds through deterritorialisation, not through an identificatory binding together: abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages through points of decoding and deterritorialisation. It would be wrong to consider them an essence, a reason behind the assemblage, or a kind of structure that evaporates from the real: there is nothing eternal about them, as they are positioned precisely in the interstices of components that they deterritorialise by connecting. Presupposed by the assemblage that they explain, they operate in this assemblage as its condition of possibility, neither exterior, nor anterior, but strictly coextensive with its empirical existence.
An abstract machine is thus not a thing or a Platonic Idea, any more than it is a structure of an assemblage. Transversal to different components, it carries them along in a functional arrangement, which works through breaking down and through deterritorialising. There are thus as many abstract machines as machinic assemblages. Since an assemblage is not given, any more than an individuation is fixed on the plane of the human body (but instead concerns a bottle of water, an eyelash, an electron or the Earth), the same goes for the abstract machine, which is a diagram of an assemblage. The abstract machine operates at whatever fractal level you want and enables you – as a variable in your possibilities of analysis, of your capacities to invest reality – to produce new modes of subjectivity. Any given assemblage engages its ‘extracted machine’ – points of deterritorialisation, non-formed materials, non-formalised functions – which causes it to hold together. This is why the machine works by breaking down.
AESTHETIC PARADIGM
This reveals the extent to which the concept of the machine is operative in relation to structure. We may think that the machine and structure are equivalent at the level of abstract machines, but structure thinks the abstract machine as a system of ideal relations, perhaps defined at the level of reality, but nevertheless frozen in the eternity of its logical consistency, whereas the abstract machine pushes us to think an operativity that is not closed on itself or eternal, but given in the variable course of its real and provisional operativity. This is why, once again, a machine only works by breaking down.
Contrary to structure, the abstract machine is, according to Guattari, traversed by a desire for abolition. It is a question of becoming, of a little lucky charm that goes ‘poof’, not of a death drive. The desire for abolition only has mortifying connotations for those wedded to the schema of identity. But when the abstract machine functions, it fails, it always fails, it necessarily fails, because any functioning involves the provisional singularity and uncertain contingency of a force that becomes exhausted right at the moment it gets going.
Failure is thus decisive for an understanding of machinic operativity. The machine fails in functioning. It fails at all possible levels of its structure. This failure concerns its operativity, and it is here that Guattari replaces what he calls the scientific paradigm with his aesthetic paradigm.
The scientific paradigm corresponds less to the actions and imaginations of real science than to the representation we make of it. It defines the operativity of science as the discovery of an explanatory structure, lodged in an eternity that necessarily looks longingly to the past because it presents itself as the stable essence of a reality, sufficient in itself. The aesthetic paradigm, open to the future, conceives of explanation as a risky endeavour, like a diagnostic construct. While the scientific paradigm would like us to believe that in order to understand our societies, our political action, our ways of thinking, we should find truths, the aesthetic paradigm – which does not oblige us to be artists, to put flowers in our hair, or play the flute in our bare feet – enjoins us to think about the operativity of our concepts in a prospective, uncertain and unhinged way, in order to decide whether, yes or no, it works.
NOTES
1. The agrammaticality of this title is intentional and meant to call attention to the new conception of the ‘machine’ being put forth. Translator’s note.
2. According to the kinematic definition of Franz Reuleaux, director of the Berlin Industrial Academy, author, in 1875, of The Kinematics of Machinary: Outline of a Theory of Machines, trans. Alexander B. W. Kennedy (Mineola: Dover, 2012). My translation.
3. Détienne, ‘La phalange, problèmes et controverses’, in Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne, 134. My translation.