is ascribedto bodies, it makes itself corporeal, just as a chemical precipitate
appears in a transparent solution. This ‘incorporeal’ is indeed the incorporeality
of the stoics, to whom Deleuze’s attention had been attracted by an article
of Bréhier ’s.^34
The fifth thesisfollows from the two preceding ones. If an order-word has
no individual author, and if it is effective in the conjuncture and on bodies,
it is because the source of the utterance is a collective assemblage. I have already
mentioned Deleuze and Guattari’s standard example: the feudal assemblage.
It will be recalled that an assemblage has two sides or aspects – a machinic
assemblage of desire and a collective assemblage of enunciation; and that the
interest of the concept resides in the ontological mix it seeks to think. In it
we can see the two aspects of the power exercised by order-words: a material
aspect of intervention on bodies (the order-word operates like a machine, it
transmits an impulse, it communicates in the physical sense of communicating
power); and an immaterial, incorporeal face, in that the assemblage is also a
collective assemblage of enunciation. Here, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly
polemicise against orthodox Marxism, whose architectural metaphor of base
and superstructure they reject. For them, utterances intervene in the base and
are not restricted to the ideological superstructures: the production of meaning
is a production in a non-metaphorical sense. Marxism makes the base-
superstructure relation a relation of representation, encapsulated in the
notorious concept of reflection. They prefer to think the relation between
machinic assemblage and assemblage of enunciation as an expression, in the
sense assumed by this term in Spinoza (it will be recalled that Deleuze had
the warmest admiration for Spinoza and that his secondary thesis was devoted
to the concept of expression in Spinoza).^35 In as much as it is material and
machinic, assemblage does not refer to the production of goods, but to a
precise state of the mix of bodies in society (the example that Deleuze and
Guattari give, which I paraphrase here, is the stirrup, which favours the
symbiosis between man and horse within the feudal assemblage). In as much
as it is enunciative, assemblage is not concerned with some productivity of
language, but by régimes of signs and machines of expression. Against Marx
and against Chomsky, we therefore have an assemblage that knows no
134 • Chapter Five
(^34) See Bréhier 1982 and Deleuze 1990a.
(^35) See Deleuze 1990b.