Concrete Rules and Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A

Thousand Plateaus

Introduction

What relation between the abstract and the concrete is at issue here? How do

‘rules’ relate to ‘machines’? To answer this question, we first need to distinguish

Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘machinic materialism’ from more familiar types of

materialism, whether atomistic (Epicurus, Lucretius), mechanicist (Hobbes,

d’Holbach), historical (Marx, Althusser), or physicalist (Quine, Lewis). Classical

metaphysical materialism, whether atomistic or mechanicist, combines a

theoretical proposition about the ultimate nature of reality with a series of

practical injunctions about how best to live in accordance with that reality.

Historical materialism rejects metaphysics but still attempts to derive a political

program from its account of socio-historical reality. As for physicalism, it is a

theoretical proposition that eschews the prescriptive altogether, deferring to

physics for its account of ultimate reality. But the materialism laid claim to in A

Thousand Plateaus is unlike any of the above. It does not pretend to accurately

represent an objectively existing ‘material reality’ (whether natural or social),

just as it does not propose practical imperatives derived from universal laws

(whether natural or social). It seeks to conjugate an ‘abstract matter’, conceived

independently of representational form, with a concrete ethics, wherein action is

selected independently of universal law. Here the abstract is no longer the

province of the universal (invariance, form, unity) and the concrete is no longer

the realm of the particular (the variable, the material, the many). The abstract is

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enveloped in the concrete such that practice is the condition of its development. It

is this development which is rule-governed, but in a sense quite independent of

the familiar juxtaposition of invariant rule to variable circumstance. Rules are no

longer abstract invariants that need to be applied to concrete or variable

circumstances. ‘Abstract’ now means unformed and ultimately, as we shall see,

destratified (we will try to understand what this term means below). But the

unformed is endowed with positive traits of its own, traits which, from the

viewpoint of the representation of ‘material reality’, are initially confounding.

Thus abstract matter is described as constituting a ‘plane of consistency’

characterized by ‘continuums of intensities’, ‘particles-signs’ and

‘deterritorialized flows’. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari insist that this plane of

consistency (which they also call ‘multiplicity’) must be made, since it is not

given: ‘[I]t is not enough to say ‘Long live the multiple!’, difficult as it is to raise

that cry […] The multiple must be made […]’. 1 Consistency (or multiplicity) is

made by mapping what is unrepresented in both thinking and doing. This

mapping plays a key role in developing the abstract. To understand how

concrete rules develop abstract matter, we have to understand both why A

Thousand Plateaus retains a distinction between saying and doing and why

mapping is a practice that fuses saying with doing. Thus the other sense that

‘concrete’ has here is practical: mapping the positive traits characteristic of the

unformed is a practical matter; one that is constrained by certain rules. What

sort of rules? Since abstract matter cannot be represented, the rules or practical

injunctions governing its development cannot be read off some pre-existing

1 Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (henceforth ‘ATP’) Tr. Brian

Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) p. 6,
translation modified, my emphasis.

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‘reality’. These rules will be concrete precisely to the extent that they effectuate

the abstract. Practice and theory realize one another: theoretical concepts are

effectuated in practice; practical imperatives are formulated in theory.

Thus, for all its idiosyncratic novelty, A Thousand Plateaus conforms to a classical

model of philosophizing, wherein ontology, understood as the theory of what

there is, is one with ethics, understood as a practice or ‘art of living’. This is not

to say it is a traditional or conservative work: rather, it is an attempt at the

contemporary reactivation of the classical task of philosophizing, but one where

contemporaneity is marked by the rejection of representation. 2 This rejection

entails a radicalization of philosophical pragmatics (indeed, it construes

philosophy as a generalized pragmatics) wherein neither the agents nor the

functions of practices can be taken for granted. The referent of the communal

‘we’, constantly invoked by traditional pragmatists (James, Dewey) and their

contemporary successors (Rorty, Brandom), is a starting point whose epistemic

authority and socio-historical coordinates will be gradually disassembled and

replaced by another ‘we’: that of a minoritarian ‘people to come’. By the same

token, the habitual functions and goals established around this existing ‘we’ need

to be suspended; normal functioning and established finalities are to be

disrupted. This means that for machinic pragmatics, the efficacy of performance

can no be longer be subordinated to pre-established standards of competence. So

long as practice is subordinated to representation, it can only more or less

adequately trace a pre-existing reality, according to extant criteria of success or

2Thus Deleuze’s insistence that A Thousand Plateaus [henceforth ATP] is a work

of ‘[p]hilosophy, nothing but philosophy[…]’ ‘Interview with Catherine Clement’,
L'Arc, no. 49 (revised ed., 1980), p. 99.

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failure. But machinic pragmatics is not geared towards representation; it is an

experimental practice oriented toward bringing something new into existence;

something that does not pre-exist its process of production. It de-couples

performance from competence. It does not engage in a utilitarian tracing of the

real; it generates a constructive mapping (and as we shall see, a diagramming) of

the real: ‘What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely

oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not

reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious

[….] The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves

an alleged ‘competence’.’ (ATP 13) Competence is reproductive, but performance

is productive. This contrast between tracing and mapping follows from the more

fundamental difference between saying and doing proclaimed in the opening

pages of A Thousand Plateaus (cited above).

Three interrelated questions arise here. First, why does the overcoming of

arborescent dichotomy still require a contrast between saying and doing, or

representation and production, contemplation and practice? What is the status

of this contrast? Second, what does performance freed from the constraint of

competence actually do? Is performance to be understood as an act, an activity,

an action, a production, or a practice? These are all related yet distinct ways of

conceptualizing doing. Is mapping a variety of doing that is not normatively

governed and achievement-oriented? Can one perform a mapping without any

regard for competence? Competence need not be teleological: not all norm-

governed doing is goal-oriented; nevertheless, an immanent standard is still a

standard. Third and finally, if making the multiple is not susceptible to norms of

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competence, what is it that makes the difference between success and failure in

constructing the plane of consistency? We will return to these questions below

when we consider the way in which machinic pragmatism is supposed to operate

a selective construction of the real (the plane of consistency).

Stratification

The disruption of utilitarian order, of the fixed goals, standards, and practices

through which reality is reproduced, cannot be immediately achieved. Since (as

Deleuze repeatedly insists) we always start in the middle, we start stratified,

organized, subjectified. Thus the practical challenge is to understand how we can

de-stratify, dis-organize, and de-subjectify without lapsing into religious self-

abnegation: ‘to reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point

where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I.’ (ATP 3) But why

would this point of apparent indifference between owning or abnegating one’s

subjectivity be worth reaching? If such a point is worth reaching, it cannot be

indifferent to this difference. Something must be retained: something of the

subject, something of the sign, something of the organism: ‘That which races or

dances upon the plane of consistency thus carries with it the aura of its stratum,

an undulation, a memory or tension. The plane of consistency retains just enough

of the strata to extract from them variables that operate in the plane of

consistency as its own functions.’ (ATP 70-71, my emphasis) What will be

retained on the plane of consistency is the torsion of destratified intensities,

particles, signs, and flows. Yet because the point of torsion is indiscernible from

the vantage of anyone invested in the importance of distinction between self and

not-self, personal and impersonal, its approach requires caution, which is of

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course one of the book’s famous watchwords. 3 Caution is required for the

composition of the plane of consistency. This is the relevance of the concrete

rules for its composition. Thus to understand how concrete rules are articulated

with abstract machines we have to understand how the composition of

consistency according to rules requires deformalizing stratified functions and

subjecting them to the torsion of absolute movement: ‘A movement is absolute

when, whatever its quantity and speed, it relates ‘a’ body considered as multiple

to a smooth space that it occupies in the manner of a vortex.’ (ATP 509) Absolute

movement (or deterritorialization) is attained through the deformalization of

stratified function. Deformalization ensures the continuity of intensities, the

emission of particle-signs, and the conjunction of deterritorialized flows on the

plane of consistency. Thus abstract matter is de- or un-formed, which means

destratified. Stratification is the source of all formalization; conversely, de-

formalization is the operator of destratification. So what is stratification?

The theory of stratification is among the most impressive, but also perplexing,

achievements of A Thousand Plateaus. I think it is absolutely central to its entire

conceptual construction; without it, nothing works. But its pivotal role is often

overlooked. The theory of stratification is a theory of the self-organization of

matter. It is unabashedly metaphysical; indeed, it is perhaps the most ingenious

and ambitious metaphysical hypothesis proposed by any 20th century

materialists.

3‘Every undertaking of destratification (for example, going beyond the organism,

plunging into a becoming) must therefore observe concrete rules of extreme
caution.’ ATP 503. See also ATP pp. 171-183

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Attempts to assimilate A Thousand Plateaus to the parameters of contemporary

critical theory have encouraged the tendency to limit the scope of stratification

to the experiential realm. But stratification cannot be confined to the

phenomenological or epistemological registers. It is not a function of

representation; representation is a function of stratification. Thus the theory of

stratification is not just an extension of Deleuze’s critique of the epistemology

and metaphysics of representation in Difference and Repetition. It lays out the

ontological conditions under which representation become possible. Already in

Difference and Repetition, it was clear that representation is not an extrinsic grid

which we superimpose upon reality. Reality generates its own representation.

But representation remains a kind of transcendental illusion; a cavern within

which an inverted image of the real holds sway, one that prevents us from

penetrating to the imperceptible conditions of perception (the virtual). The

theory of stratification lays out the real processes through which this cavern, this

inversion, and this image are successively generated on the same level as the real

(rather than above or beneath it). It levels the superposition of planes through

which Difference and Repetition maintained the virtual (the imperceptible) in a

position of transcendence vis-à-vis the actual (the perceptible). Stratification

explains the genesis of representability as a facet of the auto-production of the

real as such, rather than as a consequence of the transcendent hiatus between

virtual and actual. 4

4See especially ATP pp. 281-284. Miguel de Beistegui has convincingly argued
that Deleuze and Guattari contrast the plane of transcendence, or development,
which maintains a classical hierarchical distinction between (transcendental)
condition and (empirical) conditioned, albeit in the form of unconscious
virtuality and conscious actuality, to the plane of immanence, or consistency,
where the difference between stratificatory and destratificatory processes is

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Stratification is the double-articulation of content and expression. This double-

articulation is the condition of all order, structure, and regularity. But

stratification is complex. Both the articulation of content and that of expression

are bifurcated. At the elementary physical level, content is articulated by splitting

material flows into successively coordinated molecular units. Molecular

substance is formally coordinated: this is the substance and form of content.

Expression is articulated by establishing ‘functional, compact, stable structures’

(ATP 41), and constructing molar compounds onto which these structures are

superimposed. Molar compounds are formally structured: this is the substance

and form of expression. Stratified content is formed matter; stratified expression

is structured function. Both articulations are segmented and the bi-univocal

relations between segments of content (formed matters) and segments of

expression (structured functions) are the source of every real structure, whether

physical, biological, or sociopolitical. Thus material reality comprises three

fundamental types of strata: physico-chemical; biological; and anthropomorphic

(or allomorphic because the anthropomorphic strata have the power to colonize

the others). Only the first gives molar expression to molecular content: biological

and allomorphic contents are not necessarily molecular, nor are their

expressions necessarily molar. But what is common to every stratum is the

coordination of structured function (expression) and formed matter (content).

Matter is assigned a determinate function on the basis of its formation (whether

unfolded on a single level, such that the principle of perceptibility cannot but be
perceived together with that which it renders perceptible. See Miguel de
Beistegui Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press 2010), Chapter 3, pp. 47-76.

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physical, organic, or socio-cultural); function is assigned a determinable form on

the basis of its substance (whether molecular, cellular, or semiotic). This is the

crux of all stratification as immanent principle of the self-organization of matter.

Yet stratification is also process of division. Strata ‘shatter the continuums of

intensity, introducing breaks between different strata and within each stratum.’

(ATP 143) This division is real, not ideal (it is not dialectical). Strata split and

segment, but they also conjoin and connect. Thus Deleuze and Guattari insist on

the real (as opposed to formal) distinction between content and expression. It is

a difference in being, not just a difference in thought. Stratification is a real

synthesis establishing a common root for expressive form and expressed

content. Thus there is an isomorphism of content and expression: ‘[T]heir

independence does not preclude isomorphism, in other words, the existence of

the same kind of constant relations on both sides.’ (ATP 108) This isomorphism

makes of stratification an instance of ‘divine judgment’, which is to say,

ontological as opposed to cognitive (or transcendental) synthesis: ‘Indeed, the

significance of the doctrine of synthetic judgment is to have demonstrated that

there is an a priori link (isomorphism) between Sentence and Figure, form of

expression and form of content.’ (ATP 108) Where Kant’s doctrine of synthetic

judgment traced the isomorphy of intelligible form and sensible content back to

the activity of the transcendental subject, stratification anchors the isomorphy of

expressive form and expressed content in the functioning of the abstract

machine, the ultimate source of stratic synthesis. Concrete assemblages

presuppose the articulation of structured function and formed matter. But they

do so insofar as each envelops an abstract machine.

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Abstract envelopment

What is an abstract machine? Here are two definitions: ‘The abstract machine

exists enveloped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it

defines, and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification it

performs (the Planomenon).’ (ATP 73, my emphasis) ‘We define the abstract

machine as the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters

remain.’ (ATP 141, my emphasis) The abstract machine is Janus-faced: on one

side, it accounts for the unity of composition (i.e. synthesis) proper to strata,

insofar as these allocate structured functions to formed matters. This is to say

that it performs a stratificatory function. But on the other side, it decouples

structure and substance, form and content, deforming both expressive function

and expressed matter. This is its destratificatory role. Stratification and

destratification are two aspects of a single, indivisible machinic process,

straddled by every abstract machine.

In its destratifying role, the abstract machine draws the plane of consistency by

articulating a non-formal function with a formless matter. What it retains of

stratic expression is the tensor, the a-signifying sign which indexes a continuum

of intensive variation. What it retains of stratic content are heterogeneous

intensities, or more precisely, different degrees of different intensive qualities:

degrees of temperature, speed, conductivity, resistance, dilation, etc. These are

the expressive traits of unformed matter. Thus the non-formal function is

composed of tensors expressing different degrees of different qualities of

intensity. It does not coordinate constants and variables, measuring continuous

10
degrees of difference, but conjugates different kinds of differences in degrees.

This is why it composes a continuum of variation, where variation is no longer

subordinated to a fixed, homogeneous domain of variables. Instead, it distributes

discontinuous differences in the kinds of degree (different degrees of

heterogeneous qualities). Bonta and Protevi give the following examples of non-

formal functions: the channeling of differences in temperature by a heat engine

and the imposition of conduct by a discipline. To diagram a complex

phenomenon, whether epidemic, market, or swarm, is to draw its non-formal

function. 5

Thus abstract no longer means universal, ideal, or eternal; it is a function of

variation: ‘[T]here is no reason to tie the abstract to the universal or the

constant, or to efface the singularity of abstract machines insofar as they are

constructed around variables and variations.’ (ATP 92-93) Tensors quantify

continuous variation, not through unities of measure but through multiplicities

of measurement. Quantity is no longer subordinated to invariant units of

measure (number as unity); it indexes the qualitative particularity of

heterogeneous intensities such as speed, temperature, conductivity, etc. (number

as multiplicity). Thus magnitude varies according to the variation of the qualities

it measures: ‘Number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements

according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a

multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered (the primacy of

the domain over a complex of numbers attached to that domain). We do not have

5See Mark Bonta and John Protevi Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and
Glossary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004) p. 48.

11
units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measurement.’ (ATP 8) This is

to say that there is no fixed unit of measure for the differences in dimension of a

multiplicity, only a variety of measurements; a non-metric multiplicity

numbering the qualitative heterogeneity of dimensions without referring to a

common element or numerical base.

Tensor signs are indices of this qualitative heterogeneity or continuous variation

of intensities. Thus the tensor sign expresses the diagrammatic function of

deformalized expression. This deformalization of expression is a prerequisite for

the quantification of writing proclaimed at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus:

‘[Q]uantify writing. There is no difference between what a book talks about and

how it is made.’ (ATP 4) To quantify writing is to conjugate expression and

construction, structured function and deformalization, stratification and

destratification. This is the function of the diagram. Thus non-formal functioning

is diagrammatic:

‘A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor

expression […] Whereas expression and content have distinct forms, are

really distinct from each other, function has only ‘traits’, of content and of

expression, between which it establishes a connection: it is no longer

even possible to tell whether it is a particle or a sign. A matter-content

having only degrees of intensity, resistance, conductivity, heating,

stretching, speed, or tardiness; and a function-expression having only

‘tensors’, as in a system of mathematical, or musical, writing. Writing now

functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes. The

diagram retains the most deterritorialized content and the most

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 deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them.’ (ATP 141, my

emphasis)

The diagramming of informal functions and formless matters not only conjugates

signs and particles on the plane of consistency; it expresses the auto-

construction of the real, the machinic unconscious.

Thus the alternative to stratic synthesis is not analysis – the formal disintrication

of the abstract and the concrete as invariant form and variable content – but

another kind of synthesis; which is to say, an alternative intrication of the

abstract and the concrete. This synthesis is not cognitive but practical: it is the

diagramming of the junction between non-formal functions and unformed

matters. Tensors perform a diagrammatic function: they are the operators of

torsion through which deformalization composes intensities, sign-particles, and

flows on the plane of consistency. Diagrammatic composition is the identification

of these points of torsion. But this composition requires concrete rules: ‘There

are rules, rules of ‘plan(n)ing’, of diagramming [….] The abstract machine is not

random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not

occur in just any fashion.’ (ATP 70-71) Thus it is the rules of planification

(‘planing’) that ensure consistency, not decoding, deterritorialization, or

destratification as such. These rules extract deformalized functions from strata:

‘[T]he plane of consistency is occupied, drawn by the abstract Machine […]’ (ATP

70)

Concrete development

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It is concrete rules that effectuate the abstract. They develop the abstract

machines enveloped in the strata. But this development hinges upon the

distinction between stratification and assemblage (agencement). Because

stratification is the precondition for every machinic assemblage, and

assemblages are at once territorial and deterritorializing, assemblage is the

practical condition for the development of the abstract. Agencer is a verb: to

assemble. It is because concrete assemblages already envelop abstract machines

that they can develop them: planification or planing is the concrete development

of the enveloped abstract. It cuts across physical, biological, and

anthropomorphic strata to compose unformed matters, anorganic life, and non-

human becomings. Thus rules of destratification = rules of planing =

development of the enveloped.

Nevertheless, the distinction between Sentence and Figure, expression and

content, saying and doing, remains necessary precisely insofar as it is not only a

real consequence of stratic synthesis but also a condition of development or

planing. Thus destratification is not the abolition of the difference between

saying and doing, or competence and performance; it is their informal re-

articulation; one which retains an expression that has been decoupled from

organic function, just as it retains a content that has been released from its

organizing form. Development renders performance indissociable from

competence.

But how then are we to understand selection? How does performance operate a

selection between greater or lesser degrees of connectivity (or dimensions) on

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the plane of consistency? How can it discriminate between greater or lesser

degrees of development? How are we to measure the extent of construction?

Here again the answer is: through concrete rules.

Concrete rules orient us in the composition of consistency; they provide an

immanent measurement for the degree of continuous variation: ‘Constant is not

opposed to variable; it is a treatment of the variable opposed to the other kind of

treatment, or continuous variation. So-called obligatory rules correspond to the

first kind of treatment, whereas optional rules [règles facultatives] concern the

construction of a continuum of variation.’ (ATP 103) Thus concrete rules are

optional, which is to say that they are neither universal imperatives nor context-

sensitive directives. While the former presuppose the stratified distribution of

constants and variables, through the constancy of principles and variety of

circumstances, the latter presuppose an empiricist pragmatism that merely

relativizes principles to the constancy of organic or psychological self-interest.

But optional rules cannot simply be contrasted with necessary or categorical

imperatives as if they were merely contingent or hypothetical imperatives. They

are not hypothetical imperatives because they cannot be formulated with regard

to any pre-established practical goal or utilitarian objective. Their form cannot

be: ‘If you want X, do Y’, where X is relatively constant with regard to the variable

Y, because the functional co-ordination of Y as means to end X remains entirely

beholden to the stratification of function, whether physical, organic, or

subjective. Nor are optional rules merely ‘contingent’, since contingency is

merely the stratic obverse of necessity. Concrete rules are ‘optional’ to the

extent that they are constituted by their own selection, ‘as in a game in which

15
each move changes the rules.’ (ATP 100) This is why concrete rules are

formulated in the shape of questions, the answers to which transform the

assemblage within which they have been formulated. They are rules of

assemblage that operate a selection according to the ways in which the

assemblage under construction conjoins saying and doing, function and matter.

Thus concrete rules of assemblage are distributed along two axes of questioning.

The first axis asks: Which content? (I.e. which regime of signs?) Which

expression? (I.e. which system of bodies?): ‘In each case, it is necessary to

ascertain both what is said and what is done.’ (ATP 504, my emphasis) The

second asks: What are the cutting edges of deterritorialization? What abstract

machines do they effectuate? ‘The concrete rules of assemblage thus operate

along these two axes: On the one hand, what is the territoriality of the

assemblage, what is the regime of signs and the pragmatic system? On the other

hand, what are the cutting edges of deterritorialization, and what abstract

machines do they effectuate?’ (ATP 505) The answers to the first set of questions

specify the assemblage’s type of signification and its degrees of territoriality: its

expression and its content, or what it says and what it does. The answers to the

second set of questions specify the assemblage’s type of abstract machine and its

degree of deterritorialization: its non-formal function and its unformed matters.

In answering this second set of questions, we identify the point of indiscernibility

between saying and doing. Thus for instance, itinerant metallurgy is the content

of which nomadism is the expression; the mode of signification proper to the

nomad war machine is numerical, or counter-signifying, while its territoriality

consists in smoothing space. Numbering number is the tensor of nomadic

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distribution, which occupies space without categorizing it. Counting without

measuring is constructive deformation; hence the war machine’s high index of

deterritorialization, both social and cognitive.

Practical mediation

Thus in answering both sets of questions, we determine the concrete rules and

perform the diagramming function. Specifying our signifying regime and

measuring our degree of territorialization is the condition for diagramming the

interaction of function and matter beyond the strata. Thus diagramming is akin

to engineering: it is a cognitive operation carried out with a view to effectuating

certain practical imperatives under specific material constraints. It lets us see to

what extent a line of flight is liberatory for us insofar as we find ourselves in

between strata and metastrata: ‘In effect, consistency, proceeding by

consolidation, acts necessarily in the middle, by the middle, and stands opposed

to all planes of principle or finality.’ (ATP 507, my emphasis) Acting in the

middle, diagramming deformalizes stratified signs and substances to achieve

consistency.

This is why Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist that the distinction between

territorial and deterritorial, smooth and striated, strata and body without

organs, is not the difference between good and bad, let alone a matter of good

versus evil. 6 Deterritorialization is not a theological imperative. There is no

6E.g. ‘There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into
a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie
back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy,
even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad.’ (ATP 9)

17
transcendence vis-à-vis the strata; consistency is not oriented towards an end-

point or final state where territories, codes, and signs have been definitively

eliminated and the strata abolished. Since we are always in the middle – in

between the organic, subjectified, signifying, and the inorganic, a-subjective, a-

signifying – the consolidation of consistency can only proceed from a certain

stratified vantage point, from whence different possibilities of action become

assessable. The resort to the notion of ‘possibility’ is certainly awkward here

given Deleuze and Guattari’s Bergsonism, which entails rejecting possibility as an

artefact of representation. But it is difficult to avoid, just as it is difficult to

unyoke the term ‘practice’ from the notion of ‘action’, which seems to invite an

appeal to a disavowed notion of subjective agency. Yet agencement is not without

agency. The concept of machinic assemblage decouples agency from

subjectivation and reallocates it to pre-individual collectivities. Assemblage is a-

subjective agency. The need for concrete rules of assemblage is a consequence of

the fact that our power of assemblage, our capacity for assembling, for

connecting and consolidating consistency, is constrained both by our degree of

territorialization and our type of signifying regime. Territories, signs, and codes

are conditions of consistency. But they are enabling conditions. This is why

‘alloplastic [i.e. anthropic] strata […] are particularly propitious for the

assemblages’ (ATP 514, my emphasis)

Thus A Thousand Plateaus does not wholly revoke the privileging of the human

standpoint. It does not simply jettison philosophical humanism and the

problematic of the subject (as elaborated from Descartes to Kant, Hegel, and

Heidegger) the better to plunge directly into the inhuman maelstrom. Its

18
methodological sophistication, which is to say, its account of diagramming as the

real materially writing itself, precludes appeals to the ‘intuition’ or ‘lived

experience’ of the real. Deleuze and Guattari understand that we cannot simply

jump out of the strata onto the plane of consistency (whether we ought to accept

the metaphysics of stratification is another matter, which we will return to

below). We cannot simply nullify everything that distinguishes the human from

the non-human by philosophical fiat. This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s careful

cartography of the layers of stratification exposes the uninterrogated

phenomenological biases of certain strands of posthumanist metaphysics.

Machinic pragmatics starts from a stratified vantage point that is unavoidably

anthropocentric; yet it is precisely the preservation of a certain strategic

anthropocentrism that prevents it from lapsing into anthropomorphism and

projecting human properties onto non-human reality. Such projection is

characteristic of every metaphysics that believes it can simply disregard Kant’s

access problem – what are the conditions under which human beings can think

and know about non-human reality? Rather than ignore the constraint of human

subjectivation in a way that only reinforces it and transplants human

characteristics into the non-human, Deleuze and Guattari propose to use our

stratified condition – our organic, subjectified, signifying state – as a leverage

point for the development of consistency.

The problem of selection

The development or consolidation of consistency is inherently selective. As we

know, it is concrete rules that operate the selection and ensure the consolidation.

Two questions immediately arise pertaining to selection: ‘What is being

19
selected?’ and ‘How is it being selected?’ The answer to the first question is:

Whatever increases the degree of connectivity and the dimensions of

consistency. The answer to the second is: Through the concrete rules that allow

us to discriminate between increases or decreases in degrees of connectivity and

dimensions of consistency. But now it becomes apparent that the answer to the

first question is already the answer to the second. The selected ‘what?’ is also the

selecting ‘how?’ This is to say that it is the plane itself that is the operator of

selection:

‘The plane sections multiplicities of variable dimensions […] The plane is

like a row [enfilade] of doors. And the concrete rules for the construction

of the plane obtain to the extent that they exercise a selective role. It is the

plane, in other words, the mode of connection, that provides the means of

eliminating the empty and cancerous bodies that rival the body without

organs, of rejecting the homogeneous surfaces that overlay smooth space,

and neutralizing the lines of death and destruction that divert the line of

flight. What is retained and preserved, therefore created, what consists, is

only that which increases the number of connections at each level of division

or composition, thus in descending as well as ascending order (that which

cannot be divided without changing in nature, or enter into a larger

composition without requiring a new criterion of comparison...).’ (ATP

508, my emphasis)

An enfilade is a series of communicating rooms each connected to the other by a

single adjoining door, so that one cannot enter a room or move from one to the

next by means of an external corridor. The corridor is the supplementary

dimension of transcendent overcoding with regard to the series of

20
interconnected rooms. To characterize the plane of consistency as an ‘enfilade of

doors’ is to say that there is no extrinsic dimension (corridor) by means of which

its intrinsic dimensions (rooms) could be related to one another. What connects

each room is its door or threshold. The threshold or limit of a multiplicity or

assemblage is accessible only from within it. Each threshold is a mode of

connection from room to room, multiplicity to multiplicity. But the mode of

connection is the plane itself. It is the plane that connects the dimensions

through which it is composed. This means that the criteria of selection (concrete

rules) are discernible only from the vantage of an assemblage (dimension)

already composing the plane. Recall that the selection is operated by

diagramming content and expression, what is said and what is done within an

assemblage, but in such a way that this diagramming determines a non-formal

function and a formless matter that have become indiscernible, performing a

saying that is also a doing. This is diagramming as the consummation of machinic

pragmatics: to achieve a thinking-doing that develops the real while the real

envelops it in turn. Selection becomes creation as participation in the auto-

construction of the real. Thus it is the plane (i.e. the mode of connection) that

selects itself through the concrete rules of assemblage: connection

(consolidation) is the selection of connection. This is a-subjective agency insofar

as every selection operated by concrete rules within an assemblage is also the

self-selection or auto-consolidation of the plane itself.

There is a troubling circularity here, although it is one deliberately engineered

by Deleuze and Guattari. Consistency is consolidated by increasing its number of

connections and thereby its dimensions. The consolidating selection is effected

21
through concrete rules, which are in turn determined by us, for who else can

answer the questions that determine the rules? Since the plane does not pre-

exist its practical construction, we decide what increases or decreases

connectivity on the plane; yet the plane also decides through us. But this seems

to introduce a fatal reversibility into the relation between concrete assemblage

(the stratified) and abstract machine (the destratified). The real’s auto-selection

through us is just as much our selection of the real. Our decisive role in the

composition of consistency, which is supposed to be the concrete development

of the enveloped (the destratified), requires re-enveloping the abstract within

the concrete (the stratified). The absoluteness of relativity (connection) becomes

indistinguishable from the relativity of absoluteness (the body without organs as

disconnection). But then are we not absolutely relativizing the absolute? And if

we are, doesn’t machinic pragmatics risk lapsing into its less glamorous, more

prosaic majoritarian cousins, either pragmatic individualism or liberal

pragmatism?

The qualities of power

This reversibility or relativization is symptomatic of a more fundamental

difficulty: How do we determine the measure of consistency? One cannot

construct without increasing, even if this increase is not measured in units. So

how do we select what to increase given that it cannot be measured in fixed

units? What are we constructing, given that we must proceed by subtracting

unity, so that the extent of our constructive activity cannot be gauged in terms of

constancy, regularity, or order? How do we measure the dimensions of a

22
consistency devoid of constancy? Two successive passages seem particularly

relevant here. The first occurs on the book’s penultimate page:

‘[T]here is a whole process of selection of assemblages according to their

ability [aptitude] to draw a plane of consistency with an increasing

number of connections. Schizoanalysis is not only a qualitative analysis of

abstract machines in relation to the assemblages, but also a quantitative

analysis of the assemblages in relation to a presumably pure abstract

machine.’ (ATP 513, my emphasis)

In this passage, Deleuze and Guattari seem to affirm the possibility of attaining a

quantitative measure of an assemblage’s capacity for increasing degrees of

connectivity and dimensions of consistency. If this capacity can be assigned a

quantitative measure, then selection operates on the basis of this measure:

assemblages are selected or deselected according to the magnitude of their

‘ampliative’ capacity (i.e. increasing degrees of connectivity and dimensions of

consistency). Capacity would presumably be cashed out here in terms of a

Spinozist notion of power: the power to affect and be affected. Assuming a rough

equivalence between modes and assemblages, every assemblage would be

characterized by a degree of reality (consistency) corresponding to its power of

affecting and being affected. As Deleuze writes of Spinoza: ‘A thing has all the

more reality or perfection insofar as it can be affected in a great number of ways:

quantity of reality always finds its reason in a power that is identical to essence.’7

Power is identical to essence as actuality, not potentiality: essence is existence as

act. Thus essence is the power of acting, of affecting and being affected, whose

7 Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Minuit 1968), pp. 83-84, my

translation.

23
increase converts passivity into activity: ‘The power of acting is the only real,

positive, and affirmative form of a power of being affected.’ 8 The reality of

affectivity derives from the power of activity: the greater the power of acting, the

greater the power of affecting and being affected. But what determines this

increase in power? For Deleuze’s Nietzsche, the power of acting is a function of

the quantity and quality of forces composing a body. Crucially however, quality is

that aspect of quantity ‘that cannot be equalized out in the difference between

quantities.’9 Thus quality is the intensity of force. Differences in the quantity of

force are generated by different qualities of force, i.e. different intensities (speed,

heat, resistance, conductivity, etc.) What Deleuze calls ‘the absolute genesis’ of

the qualities of force is attributed to the will to power. 10 Power is the being of

force, its reality or actuality. But because power is will to power, self-

intensification, it is the quality proper to the will to power that determines the

qualities of forces. The qualitative difference proper to power is affirmative or

negative; the qualitative difference proper to forces is active or reactive. Thus

differences in the power of acting, in the capacity to affect and be affected, follow

from the fundamental difference in the quality proper to power, which is either

affirmative or negative. But if what is selected is difference in power, and the

only quantity proper to power is determined by its quality as either affirmative

or negative, then it is the quality of power that determines its quantity in terms

of its capacity to affect and be affected. In other words, it is the affirmative will to

power that selects between the affirmative and negative qualities of power.

8 Ibid., p. 204
9 Nietzsche and Philosophy, Tr. By Hugh Tomlinson, London: Athlone, 1983, pp.
43-44.
10 Ibid., p. 51.

24
Assemblages that increase connectivity and consistency are those that select

between increases and decreases in connectivity and consistency. The selection

of assemblages reiterates the deliberate circularity in Deleuze’s account of the

selection of will to power.

The trouble then is that this difference in the quality of power is already actual. If

differences in the capacity to act ultimately reduce to differences in the qualities

of forces, as either active or reactive, then the difference in power on the basis of

which selection is supposed to discriminate between assemblages has already

been determined: it is already a difference in actuality (since the differences in

modal power already correspond to differences in their attributive expression).

This is to say that difference in power is already a difference in being. Flattening

essence onto existence as power of acting effectively levels the distinction

between making a difference in being (selecting) and accepting a difference in

being as given, since the essential differences in degree of activity, which is to

say, differences in the quality of power, have already been made (i.e. selected).

Thus the distinction between affirmative and negative types of will to power

threatens to slip into an essential difference between types of potency. Yet the

distinction between types of power was supposed to be a function of selection:

making is (supposed to be) selecting.

The relative absolute

Ultimately then, the quantitative difference in power on the basis of which

selection is supposed to operate requires a qualitative difference whose reason

or ground is ontological, which is to say, already actual or in effect. Thus the

25
operative criterion for selecting between degrees of actuality, or powers of

acting, turns out to be rooted in the quality, not quantities, of power:

affirmativeness. If selection is the affirmation of affirmation (as in Deleuze’s

account of the dice-throw), then an assemblage’s self-affirmation is effectively

indistinguishable from that of the plane of consistency. Given this ambiguity, one

might ask: Can we distinguish between personal self-affirmation and the

impersonal self-affirmation of the machinic unconscious?

In the second of the two passages mentioned above (which occurs on the last

page of the book), Deleuze and Guattari openly acknowledge the difficulty of

measuring an assemblage’s degree of proximity or distance vis-à-vis the ‘pure’

abstract machine:

‘On the alloplastic [anthropic] strata, which are particularly propitious for

the assemblages, there arise abstract machines that compensate for

deterritorializations with reterritorializations, and especially for

decodings with overcodings or overcoding equivalents. We have seen in

particular that if abstract machines open assemblages they also close them.

An order-word machine overcodes language, a faciality machine

overcodes the body and even the head, a machine of enslavement

overcodes or axiomatizes the earth: these are in no way illusions, but real

machinic effects. We can no longer place the assemblages on a quantitative

scale measuring how close or far they are from the abstract machine of the

plane of consistency.’ (ATP 514, translation modified, my emphasis)

Thus while conceding the difficulty of measuring degrees of connectivity and

consistency, Deleuze and Guattari attribute this difficulty to the imperialism of

26
the anthropic strata – in other words, to the anthropomorphization of the earth.

Yet the overcoding, enslavement, and axiomatization they allude to here may be

symptoms of their own underlying equivocation between personal and

impersonal self-affirmation; an ambiguity reiterating the reversibility between

voluntarism and determinism, concrete and abstract, relative and absolute,

which we have already noted. The ‘pure’ abstract machine is consistency as point

of indiscernibility between saying and doing, the absolute development of the

enveloped. But the alloplastic strata generate abstract machines that re-envelop

what has been developed on the physical and biological strata: every sign

becomes signifying, every haecceity is subjectified, every smooth space is

striated. This systematic re-envelopment renders it difficult if not impossible to

measure an assemblage’s degree of development vis-à-vis the abstract machine

or plane of consistency. A fatal indiscernibility is inaugurated such that it

becomes impossible to say whether the absolute is in the relative (the abstract in

the concrete), or the relative in the absolute (the concrete in the abstract).

This predicament points to a still deeper problem. In order to stave off this

indiscernibility, it must be possible to measure degrees of deterritorialization

relative to an absolute movement – the full body of the earth, the

Deterritorialized, the cosmic egg, etc. 11 This is the absolute in terms of which we

measure degrees of deterritorialization and types of assemblage. Thus, the

absolute ‘expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even

11‘[W]hat is primary is an absolute deterritorialization, an absolute line of flight,

however complex or multiple—that of the plane of consistency or body without
organs (the Earth, the absolutely deterritorialized). This absolute
deterritorialization becomes relative only after stratification occurs on that
plane or body: It is the strata that are always residue, not the opposite.’ (ATP 56)

27
express a quantity that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses

only a type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A

movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it relates ‘a’ body

considered as multiple to a smooth space that it occupies in the manner of a

vortex.’ (ATP 509) Absolute movement – the torque of a vortex – is qualitatively

different from relative movement as well as the measure of relative movement.

But the retention of this absolute movement seems to violate the prohibition on

transcendence precisely insofar as relativity is defined negatively as a

diminuition, a limitation or relativization of absolute movement. How can we

measure the relativization of movement negatively as a diminuition of absolute

movement unless we can specify the positivity of absolute movement

independently of its limitation? Vortical torque may have the absoluteness of an

intensive quality, but why should this particular quality of movement be the

defining characteristic of the absolute? Its qualitative absoluteness remains

relative to that of every other quality of movement. (Despite their Spinozism,

Deleuze and Guattari reject the thesis that determination is negation.) Thus the

distinction between relative and absolute remains relative because there is no

immanent access to the absolute that would bypass the strata (which is to say,

the absolute’s self-limitation).

The question remains: why does absolute movement relativize itself? If the

absolute is a quality of movement, rather than a quantity, what accounts for this

difference in quality from the viewpoint of that which is already relative? The

problem is that Deleuze and Guattari maintain a traditional qualitative

conception of the absolute while insisting that this quality is neither negatively

28
defined (as infinite vis-à-vis other finite qualities) nor wholly inaccessible and

transcendent vis-à-vis the relative and immanent. They want to be able to specify

absoluteness as a determinate quality of movement. But the differences in the

qualities of intensity – intensive matter’s expressive traits – cannot be

absolutized without absolutizing the relations between bodies within which they

manifest themselves. The notion of absolute intensity is limitative vis-à-vis the

continuums of intensities, but Deleuze and Guattari want to invert the relation

between absolute and relative to define relative intensity limitatively in regard

to absolute intensity. Thus they have to give a positive account of limitation on

the basis of a negative account of the unlimited, or the absolute, since the latter is

precisely that whose positive characteristics are defined negatively in relation to

its own limitation: de-territorialized flows, a-signifying particles, non-formal

functions, formless matters. The body without organs does not lack anything, but

what it does not lack can only be defined in terms of that which falls short of it,

that which is not full, that which is limited with regard to it, i.e. the stratified.

Thus destratification presupposes stratification; but stratification only makes

sense with regard to a concept of the destratified whose positive characteristics

are drawn exclusively from the strata.

Conclusion

The consistency of machinic pragmatics stands or falls with the theory of

stratification. The latter is in many ways a magnificent construction, drawing

creatively on an impressive array of scientific work (most notably that of

29
François Jacob, Jacques Monod, René Thom, and Ilya Prigogine.) 12 Yet it remains

wholly speculative for all that. Its dazzling ingenuity should not blind us to the

very obvious questions it continues to beg: How do they know? Why should we

believe that reality is really like that? Dismissing these questions as Kantian hang-

ups is a facile rhetorical maneuver, unworthy of the seriousness of the book’s

philosophical ambition. Without stratification, the consistency of A Thousand

Plateaus unravels: it is the single thread tying together its fantastically intricate

lines of thought. Yet it is the thread that cannot be verifiably tethered to anything

outside the book.

Thus, for all its paeans to the primacy of exteriority, A Thousand Plateaus is

ultimately a self-enclosed, self-sufficient construction; but one rooted in a

gesture of negation that it cannot avow or integrate within itself. What it rejects

is representation, together with its ‘arborescent’ dichotomies between inside

and outside, subjectivity and objectivity, truth and falsity. It tries to purify this

rejection of negation by construing rejection as selection and negation as a

quality of power. Thus the rejection of representation (together with all its

dichotomies, oppositions, and negations) is not supposed to be a denial but a

mere effect or consequence of the book’s selection of affirmation over negation.

Rather than seeking to justify itself, this is a book that insists on affirming its

own power, which is precisely the power of affirmation. But as we saw, the

attempt to reduce negation to affirmation and denial to selection rests upon the

12Nevertheless, the parochialism of this list should give us pause: all French, all
writing in the 1970s. Can a theory so ambitious afford so narrow an evidential
base? The other chief inspiration is of course the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev,
originator of the distinction between content and expression.

30
affirmation of a difference between affirmative and negative power which turns

out to be all but essential. Differences in the quality of power (affirmative or

negative) turn out to be fundamental differences in being. By the same token,

making the difference between affirmation and negation turns out to be

indiscernible from accepting it as something that is already given; which is to

say, representing it. This indistinction testifies to a fundamental inconsistency,

which might also be called a contradiction, between what the book says and what

it does. Despite its extraordinary ingenuity, A Thousand Plateaus cannot give a

wholly positive account of the limit between the relative and the absolute, the

finite and the infinite. This is to say that its systematic disavowal of dialectics,

negativity, interiority, and transcendence leads it to hypostatize the difference

between negative and positive, inside and outside, immanence and

transcendence, into a brute given, an ultimately transcendent datum:

stratification. Everything in the book relies on giving a positive sense to the de-

in destratification, or delimitation, but this positive sense is merely the inversion

of the limitation of absolute movement that it cannot but presuppose as its

starting point: stratification. Thus the book absolutizes limitation in a forlorn

attempt not to define the absolute limitatively. Circumventing negation and

mediation, which is to say, the constraints of justification, it seeks to install itself

immediately (or immanently) in between the relative and the absolute, but in

doing so ends up absolutizing in-between-ness. But can this absolute in-

between-ness be so confidently contrasted with the utilitarian compromise

which is the fabric of the everyday?

31