opposed to that of structure):^23 not an instrument, a complex tool marking a
necessary yet transient stage in the metamorphoses of the commodity, but
an organ ‘excentric to the subjective fact’, inhabited by what Guattari (in his
Lacanian period) still called ‘the subject of the unconscious’, charged with
cutting up and coding energy flows. One thinks of the eccentric machines of
the English caricaturist William Heath Robinson, or Tintin threatened with
being swallowed by a huge corned-beef machine, whose ‘input’ is a succession
of ruminating cows and whose ‘output’ is a series of tins of corned beef.
Fourth shift: from ideology to assemblage. As we have seen, Deleuze and
Guattari are wary of the concept of ideology, above all in its Althusserian
structuralist version, in that it implies a separation between base and
superstructure, a world of objects and a world of representations. They have
a reductionist view of the concept, but it is clear that the coupling of
desire/machine (effected in what they call ‘machinic assemblages of desire’)
transcends this separation. The advantage of the machine over the structure
is that it functions, it works, it is positioned from the standpoint of the process
and not the classification of objects. But Deleuze and Guattari need a concept
to do the philosophical work attributed to the concept of ideology in its
necessary aspect (and not simply in its pejorative sense of mystified
consciousness): subjectivation – the production or interpellation of subjects.
The concept of assemblage is charged with this task. An assemblage has two
aspects: a material-corporeal aspect, which I have just referred to (machinic
assemblage of desire) and an institutional-social aspect (hence likewise material
in its way and yet also ideal) – the collective assemblage of enunciation. These
two aspects are indissociable, even if Deleuze and Guattari are more
forthcoming on the second than the first. Their indissociability explains the
most important characteristic of an assemblage: the ontological mix that is
effected in it. Deleuze and Guattari’s canonical example will enable us to
understand it. The feudal assemblage is composed of a certain number of
physical bodies (manors, horses, armour, knights and chatelaines, without
forgetting the villeins and a few priests), of a corpus of texts (e.g. courtly love
poems), of a body of laws and decrees, myths and beliefs, and of the institutions
(in both their material and their ideal aspects) that manage them (courts of
126 • Chapter Five
(^23) See Guattari 1972.