Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

clothes, giving it a mission ... But [on the other hand] we must declare

as well that an assemblage has points of deterritorialization; or that it

always has a line of escape by which it escapes itself and makes its

enunciations or its expressions take flight and disarticulate, no less

than its contents that deform or metamorphose ... (Kafka, 85–6)

The assemblage is not a process of interpretation or the discovery of

something waiting to be discovered, a synthesis of opposites or the

realization of a putative truth. The assemblage is not a theatre, but a

factory. It acts on segments, extensive and intensive material elements

that have no homogeneity. Place together electrons, silicon, telephone

lines, human brains, and from these you can make a digital web.

Not necessarily. Not because the digital web is the logical deploy-

ment of the elements that constitute it, but because machinic assem-

blages that ignore roots only know combinations.

This is why the principle of the assemblage puts into motion an

unlimited creativity.

The assemblage extends over or penetrates an unlimited field of imma-

nencethat makes the segments melt and liberates desire from all its

concretizations and abstractions. (Kafka, 86, emphasis in the original)

The emergence of harmony from chaos (chaosmosis) results from the

creativity of assemblages, from outlining constellations in order to recog-

nize in this the sole possible bridge over the abyss of senselessness.

Tantric egg

The reading of Anti-Oedipushas already raised the idea that the machinic

and the organic are not two distinct domains, two incompatible systems,

but rather provisional molar fixations of molecular and submolecular

material matter. The machinic, the organic, and the semiotic combine

together in the unconscious, and the rule of combination is not definable

in the abstract as a universal generative grammar. The unconscious

arranges organic, historical and sexual segments.

The distinction between machine and organism, between life and

mechanical assemblage, is only a way of speaking, a discursive and class-

ificatory strategy, an epistemic expedient that we must constantly put

into question on the sub-segmental and sub-atomic levels.

Jacques Monod has defined the originality of these syntheses, from

the standpoint of a molecular biology or of a ‘microscopic cybernet-

92 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography

9780230_221192_10_cha09.pdf 10/3/08 11:35 AM Page 92