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Engineering Ethical Connections:

(Re-)Conceptualising the Machines of Deleuze and
Guattari
Marcel Swiboda Part-Time Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer
a
The School of Fine Art , The University of Leeds
Published online: 04 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Marcel Swiboda Part-Time Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer (2004) Engineering
Ethical Connections: (Re-)Conceptualising the Machines of Deleuze and Guattari , Parallax, 10:3, 113-119, DOI:
10.1080/1353464042000226107

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 parallax, 2004, vol. 10, no. 3, 113–119

Engineering Ethical Connections: (Re-)Conceptualising the

Machines of Deleuze and Guattari

Marcel Swiboda

Despite the marked proliferation of English-language commentaries and debates

engaging with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari over the last decade,
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there remain some fundamental aspects of their work that need to be either
reconsidered or considered anew. The dispositif of academic arts and humanities in
an age of theory-laden analysis, with the primary emphasis on psychoanalytic,
semiotic and/or deconstructive (non-)methodologies, has increasingly welcomed the
contributions made by the work of Deleuze and Guattari in recent years, though this
has never amounted to an unequivocal one. Of course, any writer or thinker should be
subject to reservation, yet the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari have become
situated within the wider discursive frameworks informing contemporary theory has
generated a number of oversights, misunderstandings or impasses that have severely
risked compromising the potential value of their work and the means by which it could
be productively developed.

Against the grain of a certain partisan tendency within theory to pit different theorists
or different approaches against one another, the purpose of this short piece is to
provide a demonstration of how the work of Deleuze and Guattari can be gainfully
reconsidered in ways that do not, quoting Brian Massumi, ‘wink out’ other ‘process
lines’ of thought.1 In order to do this, I am returning to the much laboured ‘concept’
of the ‘machine’ in their work, to re-assess the conceptual and linguistic status of this
term in the light of the potentialities that it continues to embody.

Throughout the collaborative works of these two authors, from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia first published in translation in 1977 to What is Philosophy? translated in
1994, the term ‘machine’ has appeared and re-appeared in a variety of incarnations:
first off the ‘desiring-machine’ in Anti-Oedipus, to be replaced by the ‘machinic
assemblage’ in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, translated and published in English in
1986, also appearing in the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand
Plateaus, this latter featuring the all-important ‘abstract machine’ incarnation
(alongside the ‘war machine’, and the ‘machinic phylum’) ending finally with the
‘machinic portrait’ of What is Philosophy?

Upon even a cursory reading of these works it is clear that the term is not restricted to
a mechanist conception, even a more general technical one. Throughout Anti-Oedipus
and Kafka the reader is constantly reminded that ‘machines’ are not restricted to their
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DOI: 10.1080/1353464042000226107 113
 technical manifestations as part of particular cultural-historical moments in the
development of technology, of which mechanism, like the thermodynamics of ‘heat
engines’ would be an example.2 In defining their use of the term more positively,
Deleuze and Guattari follow the work of Lewis Mumford and Franz Reuleaux. They
derive from Mumford the idea of the ‘megamachine’ which describes the machine as
social and collective, and from Mumford’s reading of Reuleaux they take the following
description:

‘If, more or less in agreement with Reuleaux’s classic definition, one

can consider the machine to be a combination of solid elements, each
having its own specialized function and operating under human control
in order to transmit a movement and perform a task, then the human
machine was indeed a true machine’.3
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Deleuze and Guattari’s invocation of Mumford and Reuleaux here helps them to
establish their own understanding of the machine as one that is at once social and
processual, whereby the social machine is constituted out of mobile connections
between different ‘elements’ which are defined processually as constitutive of
‘movement’ and functionally as ‘performing a task’. In their rendering of the ‘desiring-
machine’ in this work, they apply the idea of mobile and contingent relations of
process and function more generally to establish a materialist conception of the
‘unconscious’ that connects subjectivity directly to both social and technical machines.

This much is plain from a reading of Anti-Oedipus and Kafka, and the secondary
literature that has been produced around this conception of the machine has not been
short of such observations. However, what seems well worth re-iterating at this point
is the connection that Deleuze and Guattari’s work has to that of the seventeenth
century ‘rationalist’ philosopher Spinoza. Whilst Spinoza’s work is generally
recognised as being fundamental to the philosophical oeuvre of Deleuze, if not also
Guattari, in the case of Anti-Oedipus and the ‘libidinal philosophy’ that they produced
in the early- to mid- 1970s it is the work of Nietzsche that is considered primary in the
ethical orientation of their writings. It is certainly the case that the work of Nietzsche is
very important to an understanding of Deleuze and Guattari during this period, not
least of all his Genealogy of Morals and its exploration of the body, cruelty and mnemonic
inscription.4 One would do very well to return to Nietzsche’s own work to be
reminded as to how and why it is that – for Deleuze and Guattari – inscription is
never merely a case of signification but rather of a more base material inscription of
bodies. However, one only need consider the way in which they take up the work of
Nietzsche, amongst others (notably Antonin Artaud) to elaborate a conception of the
body to understand why Spinoza is so important. In shifting between the part-objects
that constitute the ‘desiring-machines’ of the body, the surface of inscription that
makes up the other bodies in their libidinal economy (the Body of the Despot, the
Body of the Earth, the Body of Capital, Body without Organs), what they are
effectively striving after is a Spinozist ‘common notion’, and the same can be claimed
for their understanding of the machine.

In spite of all that has been said about the term ‘machine’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s
work, the Spinozist connection seems to have been greatly downplayed in favour of
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 the Nietzschean one, and yet Spinoza does provide us with some clues as to how one
might re-read works such as Anti-Oedipus and Kafka as ethical books, against the grain
of an all-too-easy affirmation of the flows of ‘nomadic’ desire that have often
characterised the secondary literature on their work, a pseudo-affirmation that has run
the risk of reducing the ethical dimension of this work to the postmodernism, which –
for Guattari – would be tantamount to an ‘abdication of ethics’.5 The Spinozist
common notion is not itself a concept, it is rather a concept of concepts. As Deleuze
states in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy:

The common notions [...] are so named not because they are common
to all minds, but primarily because they represent something common
to bodies, either to all bodies (extension, motion and rest) or to some
bodies (at least two, mine and another). In this sense, common notions
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are not at all abstract ideas but general ideas [...]. Each existing body is
characterized by a certain relation of motion and rest. When the
relations corresponding to two bodies form a composite body having a
greater power, a whole present in its parts [...].6

It can be seen quite clearly how, as part of the Spinozist common notion, motion, rest
and bodies (simple and composite) lead to a relational conception of interaction
whereby the ‘general’ idea – as distinct from an ‘abstract’ idea – describes how it is
that in producing common notions, ideas open onto a wider array of connections and
associations, and given that for Spinoza – no less than for Nietzsche – the body
constitutes a very real material presence (extension as an attribute of substance), bodies
themselves transform their relations with one another in parallel with the general idea
that allows one to think what a body is or what it can do. For Spinoza, by defining
common notions one overcomes the privations of inadequacy, to pass to a majority of
joyful or active passions and possibly also to an active knowledge that is independent
of the passions, or passive affections that reduce a body’s capacity to act. By
conceiving of machinism along these lines, Deleuze and Guattari implicitly invoke a
Spinozist ethical trajectory which – by the time of A Thousand Plateaus – will have
become far more explicit. Yet one need not wait until A Thousand Plateaus to see the
Spinozist influence at work. By making of philosophy an attempt to produce common
notions, the words that are used to produce a conceptual inventory become secondary
to their power to draw ever-wider sets of connections as part of an open system
capable of connecting subjectivity to an Outside.7 The lesson here is that the term
‘machine’, to the extent that it is geared towards the production of a common notion,
is strategically useful, but by no means essential.8

Another lesson to be learned regarding the term ‘machine’ is that – despite the claim
that it is to be read as literal rather than metaphorical – the case remains eminently
more complicated. Firstly, it would be necessary to define the metaphorical as distinct
from the literal, and secondly to be able to somehow equate a conception of the literal
with the material concatenation of bodies that machinic interactions supposedly
constitute. A certain impatience with the model of the Saussurian ‘Despotic’ sign
might lead Deleuze-Guattarians to continue to unquestioningly assume that the
machine literally functions, without any consideration of the metaphorical status of
Deleuze and Guattari’s language.9 Likewise, the model of the Saussurian sign might be
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 used to show how Deleuze and Guattari too easily neglect the linguistic dimension of
their work in the headlong rush to affirm the creation of concepts.

This debate has brought Deleuze and Guattari scholarship to something of an

impasse, and it is here that any partisan affiliations to particular schools of thought
need to be resisted. Indeed, if Massumi’s claim for the ethics of cultural studies10 is to
be taken seriously, then it becomes essential to avoid unnecessarily flag-pinning, and if
the claim for the status of the common notion is not to be undermined, then it is
necessary to take an ‘additive’ approach rather than a subtractive one.11 Whilst it
certainly could be argued, along with Deleuze and Guattari, that signifiance constitutes
a ‘regime of signs’, bound up with linguisitic redundancy, it is also necessary to
remember that their work can be read according to such a regime. To the extent that
their philosophical language signifies, it should be understood as constituting a
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rhetorical strategy of polemic or provocation, not merely calculated to persuade the

reader of anything in particular, but rather to ‘short-circuit’ the connection between
the body of the reader and the body constituting the text that they read, in such a way
as to provoke a challenge to the habitual chains of association constituting their
thought and their relationship to the world.12 To this extent, the register of
signification and the register of the common notion are not mutually exclusive, but
rather in negotiation.

Furthermore, in the way it is often taken up the Saussurian model potentially entails
the dismissal of an unquestioning transcendental a-historical a priori rendering of the
sign. From the perspective of the deconstructionist, or alternatively from that of the
postmodernist, one would do well very to consult Gregg Lambert’s insightful reading
of Deleuze and his precursors in the Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze:

[W]e might recall a [...] crisis in Saussure’s announcement of the

‘arbitrariness that determines the relationship between the signifier and
the signified’. In the wake of this announcement, this led many to
proclaim that the relation is total and all-encompassing in the sense
that every order of the signifier is completely arbitrary; therefore,
every relation is potentially false, the signifier itself despotic. Such a
view led to many exaggerated and naïve statements concerning the
‘arbitrariness of the signifier’ that has recurred often in the history of
postmodernism, and has evolved into similar statements concerning
‘text’ and ‘textuality’ by those associated with ‘deconstruction (i.e.
‘there is no signified’, ‘no meaning’, ‘nothing outside of the text’, etc.)
most of which betrayed a certain manic polarity between jubilation and
despair. Yet, much of this exaggeration might have been avoided if
these same critics had chosen to read Saussure further on this point;
they would discover that while the relationship between signifier and
signified was ‘arbitrary in principle’ [original emphasis], it was at the same
time ‘absolutely necessary’. Here, at this moment, Saussure affirms
Something over Nothing, which takes the form of a ‘necessity’, that is
the historical unfolding of a signifying chain through time [...].13

Lambert’s reading of Saussure brings the latter’s linguistics into proximity with both
the affirmationist and historico-materialist dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari’s work,
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 positing a necessary connection between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. At once, according
to Lambert, the sign enters into a relationship with history but also time (as is well
known, the role of time is fundamental in the philosophy of Deleuze), and Lambert
also suggests in his reference to ‘historical folding [...] through time’ that there may be
a way of thinking the sign as bound up with the Baroque fold that Deleuze articulates
throughout his work The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.14 It is here that we might invoke
the idea of ‘equivocal definitions’, ‘rhetorical moves and ‘metaphorical slippage’ used
by N. Katherine Hayles15 in relation to the work of Michel Serres, to show how
Deleuze and Guattari do indeed rely on certain linguistic or textual manoeuvres which
lead to a situation in which what would constitute a signifer or a signified becomes
unclear (is the machine the signified of the common notion or, as with Spinoza’s idea
of an idea, does machine perhaps not become a signifier whose signified is the
common notion?). If there is any value in attempting such a negotiation as this then it
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can only take place if accompanied by an attempt to re-think what is dogmatically

assumed to be the unequivocal status of the Saussurian sign as it presently functions in
cultural theory. In short, the willingness of both parties is required if negotiation is to
succeed.

When one surveys the use of the term ‘machine’ through the rest of Deleuze and
Guattari’s work it should become much clearer that whichever of the above
perspectives is used to determine the status of the term machine, the term’s function is
in some way contingent without being arbitrary, and that it marks tendencies,
movements, slippages or passages that somehow connect its use to an underlying
ethical trajectory. Yet it is important to remember that for Deleuze and Guattari
(particularly Guattari) the machine always has an a-signifying dimension to it in that the
processual aspect of machinic interactions will always exceed the relation between
signifier and signified.16 Guattari was highly dismissive of what he considered ‘semiotic
enslavement’ which would lead him to posit a Hjelmslevian glossematics contra
Saussurian linguistics, modified in order to distance the model further from the
Saussurian sign and in order to point up its materiality. Throughout his solo writings
he seeks to situate the signifier as part of a much wider network of processual
interactions involving bodies, subjectivity, signifying and a-signifying components and,
for Guattari the ‘abstract machine’ is a fundamental component of passage away from
the restrictions of a representational model towards a more open ‘transversal’
approach, but a good deal of his dismissiveness is based on idea that signifiers occupy
a ‘stratum’ independent of signifieds, thereby making of ‘arbitrariness’ an obstacle that
blocks the pursuit of an ethical trajectory. This dismissiveness is compounded by the
idea we have already encountered from Anti-Oedipus that signifying semiologies
materially and historically emerge with Despotic regimes which makes them
oppressive as well as redundant. Guattari persistently re-iterated the need as he saw it
to go beyond the representational model of signification in his attempts to produce a
materialist semiotics, and one of the ways in which he did this was to show how the
constitution of subjectivity is linked to the abstract machine of the face, a concept of
concepts that Guattari produced with Deleuze.17

What is at stake with this rendering of the ‘abstract machine’ is too complex to go into
any detail here, but we can get a fair idea by considering the much-neglected case of
the ‘machinic portrait’ inspired by the machine sculptures of Jean Tinguely that
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 appears in What is Philosophy?. The image of Kant’s thought that they produce as a
drawn diagram takes its inspiration from the exhibition of Tinguely’s work called The
Philosophers, installed at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1988, comprised of
machine-based constructions dedicated to 18 different philosophers, scientists and
thinkers whose ideas influenced the work of the sculpture.18 It is a ‘portrait’ of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason that attempts to survey tendencies of interaction and movement
between the various different aspects of Kant’s architectonic approach to philosophy,
for example the categories constitute ‘shafts that are extensive and retractile according
to the movement of [...] the schemata’.19 The aim of this machine portrait once again
is not to fetishistically re-incarnate Kant for the cyber-generation, anymore than it is
to produce a figurative portrait of Kant the philosopher. It is rather to pay ‘more
attention [...] to the plane of immanence laid out as an abstract machine and to
created concepts as parts of the machine’.20 That it is not a portrait in the more
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established sense is also key to Deleuze and Guattari’s strategic efforts in A Thousand
Plateaus to ‘dismantle the face’, as itself an abstract machine that re-inforces a privated
passional subjectivity (black hole or eyes) that situates the material body directly in
relation to signifiance (white wall of the surface or skin) but in such a way that it closes
down the connection with the Outside.21 Rather then, the machinic portrait attempts
to diagram the relation between concepts and the abstract machine that make of
philosophy an act of creation, and moreover, an act of creation which situates thought
in its relation to the Outside, a necessary yet highly contingent task of philosophy for
Deleuze and Guattari.

The creation of concepts as part of the ‘plane of immanence’ or the ‘abstract machine’
is, in the last work of Deleuze and Guattari’s, the explicit task of philosophy. It is also
in this work where the influence of Spinoza is most apparent, himself here described
as the ‘Christ’ of philosophers’ who produced the ‘best plane of immanence’.22 To the
extent that What is Philosophy? re-states the collective endeavours of Deleuze and
Guattari’s earlier work it points up the fundamental influence of Spinoza that has been
argued throughout this short piece. The aim here has not so much been to establish
Spinoza as a more important precursor to Deleuze and Guattari than either Nietzsche
or Bergson, but rather to illustrate some ways in which we can still view Deleuze and
Guattari’s conception of the machine as productive in relation to contemporary
cultural studies, in an effort to posit some ethically challenging ideas that do not simply
seek to reinforce a partisan or dogmatic relation to theory.

Notes

1
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement,
Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002), p. 256: ‘There is always
enough room in this world for qualitatively “more”.
More modulation, more belonging [...] [T]here
is only one general principle in ethics: no person
has the God-given “right” to tell another to “wink
out”’.
2
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans.
Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), p.180. Here Deleuze describes the
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118
mechanistic machines that characterise sovereign
society as distinct from the industrial machines of
the nineteenth century. Both of these instances are
‘mutations’ of a Capitalist machine.
3
Lewis Mumford, cited in Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R.
Lane (New York and London: Continuum
Publishing, 1984), p.141.
4
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp.185, 190,
191.
 5
Félix Guattari and Nicholas Zurbrugg,
‘Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication: An
Interview’, in Gary Genosko [ed], A Guattari
Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 1996),
pp.114–17.
6
Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: City Lights Books,
1988).
7
For the idea of machinism in relation to open
systems, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement
Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986), p.59; see also
Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of
the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (New York
and London: Routledge, 2002), p.41. On the
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relationship between subjectivity, thought and the
Outside, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan
Hand (New York and London: Continuum
Publishing, 1986), pp.94–123.
8
Here the term ‘strategic’ should be taken in the
sense of ‘non-stratified’ as established by Deleuze.
See Deleuze, Foucault, p.71–93.
9 the point of departure would have to part company
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti Oedipus, pp.200–17.
The idea of the Despotic sign ties in to Deleuze and
Guattari’s attempts to produce an historico-
materialist conception of semiotics such that in
despotic societies the body of a deity or ruler
replaces the mobile codings of primitive territorial
inscription with the redundant ‘overcoding’ of
bodies by subjecting them to a transcendent object,
for example ‘God’. Compare ‘On Several Regimes
of Signs, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (New York and London:
Continuum Publishing, 1988).
10
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.256. Massumi
posits cultural studies as ‘an ethically-tending
process line’.
11
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.256.
12
Foucault, for his part, describes Deleuze and
Guattari’s strategic use of language as geared
towards the neutralisation of ‘the effects of power
linked to their own discourse’, and calls this
Marcel Swiboda is a part-time Research Assistant and Associate Lecturer in the
School of Fine Art at the University of Leeds. He is the reviews editor of parallax
and assistant editor of the Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. He is also the
co-editor with Ian Buchanan of Deleuze and Music to be published by Edinburgh
University Press (forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press, July 2004).
‘humour’, see Foucault, ‘Preface’, in Deleuze and
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.
13
Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
(New York and London: Continuum Publishing,
2002), p.77.
14
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque,
trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Pres, 1993), passim.
15
Cited in Maria L. Assad, Reading with Michel Serres:
An Encounter with Time (New York: SUNY Press,
1999), p.3.
16
Brian Massumi points out how, whilst not in
opposition to a corporeal materialism of the body,
recourse to Saussurian linguistics does make it
difficult to figure the body without stemming its
movement, its heterogeneity and its capacity for
ethical change, but nevertheless he does indicate
that there is scope for a worthwhile negotiation. See
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 4: ‘The aim [of
this book] was to put matter unmediatedly back into
cultural materialism, along with what seemed most
directly corporeal back into the body. Theoretically,
with the linguistic model at the basis of the most
widespread concepts of coding [...] This was
undertaken not in a spirit of opposition to ‘Theory’
or ‘cultural studies’, but in the hope of building on
their accomplishments, perhaps refreshing their
vocabulary with conceptual infusions from neglected
sources or underappreciated aspects of known
sources’.
17
See Félix Guattari, ‘The Place of the Signifier in
the Institution’ in Gary Genosko [ed], The Guattari
Reader, pp.148–57.
18
Heidi E. Violand-Hobi, Jean Tinguely (Munich and
New York: Prestel, 1995), p.154.
19
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (New York and London: Verso, 1994),
pp.56–7.
20
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 56–7.
21
Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Year Zero: Faciality’, in A
Thousand Plateaus, pp.167–191.
22
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p.60.
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