4. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, *Dialogues II* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 52.
5. Paulo de Assis, ‘Assemblage, Strata, Diagram’, in *Logic of Experimentation* (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018), p. 79.
6. Anne Sauvagnargues et al., *Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 186.
1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 26.
2. Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici, eds, *Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research 3* (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2021), p. 11.
3. Paulo de Assis, ‘Assemblage, Strata, Diagram’, in *Logic of Experimentation* (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018), p. 77.
7. Anne Sauvagnargues et al., *Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 186.
8. Elizabeth A. Grosz, *Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism* (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 167–68.
While the original work of Deleuze and Guattari centers around desire in its socio-political embedding and touches on its conceptualisation in traditional psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), our primary interest here revolves around articulations on structure (or its dynamics/traversy) as well as with compositional and organisational matters that are articulated in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ through the logic of assemblage. 2 Paulo de Assis proposes to access the theory of assemblage as a “varied ecology of concepts and practices that enable new understandings of dynamic processes—without pinning them down to analytical definitions or constraints.” 3 Further he argues that while structuralism could achieve a number of results in areas like for instant linguistics and epistemology it failed to recognise the dynamic systems that would embrace paradoxical behaviours as part of their structure rather than errors. Further he quotes Deleuze in conversation with Claire Parnet:
“The difficult part is making all the elements of a non-homogeneous set converge, making them function together. Structures are linked to conditions of homogeneity, but assemblages are not.”4
Paolo De Assis describes the transition from a desiring machine to an assemblage as a “fundamental paradigm shift from structure to machine, the latter being an operative (and not descriptive) concept in relation to structure.” 5 In the book ‘Artmachines’ Anne Sauvagnargues offers to look at the notion of machinic assemblage from the analogy of a hammer and nails:
“no machine or technical tool exist 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.” 6
Another component that constitutes this labor organisation is a worker who activates the technical tool against the surface: “the operative context of the becoming of a motor gesture in its existential, cultural territory, which implied its specific assemblage of production.” 7
Sauvagnargues outlines six simultaneous components of a machinic assemblage that are described as the following:
- the ones that are concerned with the material and the energy
- semiotics that regulate the production: the functioning of any machine requires diverse discursive semiotics: written codes, printed marks, assemble instructions, instructional diagrams
- a corporeal individuation navigated by flows and decentred from the sovereign organisation of the brain
- modes of representation that codify the social perception of the flow of the machinic and are not articulated through the strata of language
- the regulative strata of detached subjectivity that is not conditioned by the desiring machines but acts as a permanently open possibility for its production
- abstract machines that keep together the functional arrangement of the five heterogeneous components
To sum up, while the notion of a desiring machine (further articulated through the logic of assemblage) shifts away from the structure, it does offer another condition of operation that is articulated through a heterogeneous multitude of stable components. In the words of Elisabeth Grosz:
“[...] It is not that the world is without strata, totally flattened; rather, the hierarchies are not the result of substances and their nature and value but of modes of organization of separate substances. They are composed of lines, of movements, speeds, and intensities, rather than of things and their relations. Assemblages or multiplicities, then, because they are essentially in movement, in action, are always made, not found.” 8