“Abstract machines … are everywhere at once, by being somewhere nowhere, by always being able to be present/absent in a position of non-efficient abolition…”
– Félix Guattari, Problems
In his 1981 seminar Problems, the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Pierre-Félix Guattari set out to explore the titular beings within the framework of assemblage theory. In particular, he examines them side-by-side with what he calls the universe of abstract machines – highly paradoxical entities that nevertheless are central to his system. Throughout the lecture, he takes from Freud, economics, thermodynamics, and more to develop them, providing one of his clearest explorations of both concepts within his work as a whole. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of some of his arguments, offering a view into Guattari’s often obscure theorising.
However, as some background, some information on the basis of the theory itself would likely be useful. Although Guattari’s definitions can get much more technical, assemblages are fundamentally arrangements of heterogeneous components. Originally introduced as a way to broaden the study of group phantasy in a clinical context, implicating non-human elements, Guattari would eventually come to see almost everything in the world as constituting an assemblage in some way or another. From institutions to people themselves, the framework can be applied to a vast array of situations.
When it comes to this article, there are four main sections. It begins with an introduction to the typology Guattari uses when approaching problems, separating them into four species and three colonies. This is followed by an exploration of the relationship between problems, relativity, and what exactly he means in his discussion on speeds, outlining the role of space and time in the lecture. Finally, in the third section, the focus turns away from the universe of problems and onto that of abstract machines, introducing Guattari’s infamous concept of a plane of consistency.
Problematic Colonies
“A zoology of problems needs to be established, since … problems have different consistencies due to the different assemblages that carry them.”
– Félix Guattari, Problems
Problems, Guattari tells us, are gregarious beings. They have a tendency to clump together and form colonies, amongst which there are three main varieties: concretions, complexions, and problematic assemblages. However, any approach to Guattari’s so-called problematic ethology must first go through his zoology, where problems are defined according to their relationship with assemblages in general. In particular, problems are split into those that are subjective, material, territorial, or machinic – a set of dimensions that defined his early formulations of assemblage theory.
Beginning with the subjective, this is where people are considered to be problems in their own right or to themselves. They have a completely problematic existence, insofar as they are tied to problems, almost acting as their own worst enemies. Guattari’s examples for this include things like shyness, anxiety, and schizophrenia, all of which affect subjectivity in one way or another. Territorial problems are somewhat similar. The level of phenomena like ‘problem children’, you aren’t quite a problem to yourself here, but rather generate or make problems in a certain field, like in an institution, school, family, and so on.
In contrast to these two dimensions, the machinic and material are a bit different. With the first, you encounter and run into problems, whilst – with the second – it’s a question of having or catching them. In Guattari’s view, there is a terrible tendency amongst psychoanalysts and therapists more generally to reduce everything down to this material level. It’s thus that he sees it as necessary for schizoanalysis and institutional psychotherapy to have some recognition of what kind of problems are at play.
Beach covered in concretions
“Everything that causes problems is extinguished, with a considerable attraction towards this return to the initial state. Over time, what remains is … the fact that there is nothing to say.”
– Félix Guattari, Problems
With this in mind, the first kind of colony, concretions, are defined by existing around what Guattari calls a black hole – the possibility of a collapse. Here, there is a fundamental desire not to have problems and to have never had them. In psychoanalytic terms, the black hole at the centre of concretions acts like a kind of ‘death drive’, where it tries to get to an initial, unproblematic state that lacks any kind of disturbance. To this end, it puts binary oppositions like good and bad into play, making it so that problems can essentially be destroyed.
With the second kind of colony, complexions, the situation is only subtly changed . Instead of being abolished, problems become a part of assemblages. However, this is caveated by the fact that the assemblage essentially trumps or, to borrow Guattari’s phrasing, ‘structuralises’ them. What this means is that they essentially get worked into the dynamics of the system as a whole. His examples come from family therapy, where everything works normally unless the problems underlying the familial assemblage are specifically pointed out. Instead of a black hole state, there is a ‘steady state’, orbiting the namesake of the former like a far-away planet.
Problematic assemblages contrast these quite dramatically, with the problem being in control. Using a phrase borrowed from the thermodynamics of Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, they have a tendency to produce far-from-equilibrium semiotisations – mutations that radically change the assemblage in question. This is where the concept of deterritorialisation becomes important: a process that breaks down previous limits and organisation and allows for creative change. Whilst in concretions, there’s a catastrophic process of deterritorialisation through rushing into it via a black hole, and whilst in complexions, it is minimised, problematic assemblages accept deterritorialisation, making use of it to proliferate problems.
Towards a Relativity of Problems
“[I]t is through the detour of these lines of persistence that transistence institutes itself between totally heterogeneous universes.”
– Félix Guattari, Assemblages, Transistences, Persistences
Having now established the framework Guattari uses to think about problems, it’s possible to examine what actually distinguishes their universe from that of abstract machines. The central concepts here are persistence and transistence, with the former being the main focus of this section. Fundamentally, as Guattari describes in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, this is sort of like a memory of being. Although these concepts were not important to his project at the time of Problems, persistent relationships exist between what he calls flows and territories – entities that are territorialised in the sense of having limits in time and space.
To give an example of territories, these might take the form of a classroom. This persists within the walls of a certain building and is designated as such for a certain time. It’s possible for some elements to undergo processes of deterritorialisation, but – for the most part – these are only relative in nature. They remain in the metabolism of the assemblage that carries them, still linked to other persistent components. Returning to the theme of problems, Guattari declares – much to the discontent of his audience – that they can, at most, move at the speed of light. In the system he proposes, this is a fundamental axiom: problems, as primarily persistent entities, cannot violate the sacrosanct principles of physics.
However, with all this being said, persistent phenomena are not simply static. In conjunction with relative deterritorialisation, Guattari introduces what he calls the speed of persistence, which – when high enough – allows persistent phenomena to move outside of their territoriality and potentially expand. To demonstrate this, he offers the example of the problem of capitalism’s development. It began by being territorialised and fixated around the world-economies, small entities like Venice and Genoa. Its speed of persistence then allowed it to expand to provinces of the Netherlands and the London area. However, it struggled when it came to larger entities, like France on the scale of nations. Its speed of persistence was too low to territorialise them effectively.
René Thom, a mathematician who examined the smoothing of time
“Following René Thom, it even seems possible one can 'take back one's throws, since [abstract machines] would be able to operate a sort of 'smoothing of time' in the direction of both the past and future.”
– Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious
Compared to this persistence, transistence is a much more elusive concept. It concerns what cannot necessarily be caught within spatio-temporal coordinates, cutting across both time and space. Entities with a high transistence – or an absolute transistence in the case of abstract machines – are able to essentially bring about what Guattari terms a smoothing of time by changing the past as well as the future. As a kind of rupture, they put prior events into a new light – Christianity, as he says in The Four Unconsciouses, acted to place the whole problem of religions before it into question, modifying them retroactively.
To demonstrate the interplay between persistence and transistence, Guattari uses the example of a poem taken as a problem in the sense that it has to be constructed, assembled, or arranged. In the particular case he is interested in, this problematic poem has a very weak persistence. It only occupies a tiny territory. However, it also has a very strong transistence. This allows it to implicate the most diverse of domains. Likewise, at the beginning, surrealism also had a weak persistence, but transversed all sorts of fields. Even outside of simply art and literature, for example, it was linked to psychology and – more specifically – psychoanalysis.
These cases starkly contrast a set of entities he describes as mathematical idealities. Taking the form of things like equations, there are some examples that have a high transistence, such as the Pythagorean theorem. However, many others do not. As he explains, an ideality might have a massive persistence and be taught in universities all over the world, yet still not contain the transversal properties of the previous example of the poem. It’s stuck within a certain delimited territory, having no bearing on things outside of the mathematical field from which it originated. With these two dimensions in mind, it is now possible to tackle abstract machines themselves.
Transistence on the Plane of Consistency
“If you realise problematic conditions, voilà! Yes, the abstract machine was there: Pythagoras, the square root of b2-4ac, it was there all along! All you had to do was bring persistence into the equation.”
– Félix Guattari, Problems
Abstract machines are fundamentally incisive. They introduce breaks into systems and completely modify them. However, they are also difficult to pinpoint. In Guattari’s account, abstract machines exist completely outside of the coordinates associated with assemblages. Whilst, as discussed earlier, problems are only relatively deterritorialised, these are absolutely so. Although it’s possible to pinpoint their emergence with certain events (like Pythagoras’ discovery of his famous theorem), they aren’t restrained in the same way territorialised entities are. As soon as Pythagoras made his discovery, it suddenly became possible to see it in all the triangles that came before. Likewise, as an example, after certain breakthroughs in technology are able to alter the future in the way they rearrange possibilities.
Being completely deterritorialised beings, abstract machines also have the property of moving at infinite speeds. More specifically, their speed of transistence is absolute. Unlike persistent idealities, which exist in a certain delimited time and space, abstract machines are able to be everywhere at once. Guattari says that they are somewhere nowhere in the sense that they have no fixed coordinates, but instead can exist as possible across the whole field of real entities. He gives the example of transporting the conditions of a problem an infinite number of light years into the galaxy. Even before the transfer occurs, the answer is already possible in the location. Whilst this might all sound quite paradoxical and bizarre, some context on what Guattari is implicitly responding to might be useful.
Henri Bergson, a philosopher who critiqued the possible
“Let us be done with great systems embracing all the possible, and sometimes even the impossible! Let us be content with the real, mind, and matter.”
– Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind
Although he never mentions him explicitly, it seems that Guattari is essentially responding to another process philosopher, Henri Bergson, who was deeply critical of the concept of the possible. For Bergson, the modality is problematic because it firstly presupposes that the real is more than it and secondly reduces existence down into a kind of mechanical unfolding of a predetermined program. On the first point, he argues that the possible is only the real with the addition of a thought that propels it back into the past. His example is of Macbeth, which only became possible to be written exactly as such for all of time after Shakespeare was already done with it.
On the second point, if there is a relationship of resemblance between what is possible and what is real (in other words, if the possible is exactly the same as the real, but with existence added), then there is no creativity involved in the universe. There’s simply the passage from one, already determined element to another. This point is actually developed by Guattari himself. As he explains, if you think about a certain system, it is sometimes possible to predict what will happen in advance. There are a certain number of terms that can be arranged and rearranged in only so many different ways. This is what Guattari calls a possibilistic field and, if this was all there was, there would be no room for innovation or creative mutation.
It’s here that abstract machines and the field of fuzzy possibles comes in. Acting as breaks within the possibilistic fields, they introduce an act of reshuffling into them. The emergence of the microprocessor, for example, radically altered what could be predicted or imagined in a technological system. Taking this alongside the case of the Pythagorean theorem, what Guattari means by the smoothing of time becomes more apparent. He is fully aware of the paradoxical nature of the possible, but – instead of rejecting it on that basis – he seeks to rehabilitate it through accepting its problematic characteristics. Fuzzy possibles are those that cannot be calculated in advance. More than simply actual, they are virtual or potential – they don’t necessarily resemble the real, reintroducing the creative aspect of the universe.
The Andromeda Galaxy
“There is a universal field of abstract machines that covers the whole of every problematic. It is a guarantee of consistency, outside every coordinate and outside every territory.”
– Félix Guattari, Problems
Although his views would change quite radically, it can be said that abstract machines form a plane of consistency insofar as they cover absolutely everything whilst still being outside of specific spatio-temporal coordinates. As a continuum, they ensure the consistency of problems and other idealities by always being there as solutions, ready to articulate them together. However, Guattari is careful to avoid making abstract machines transcendent or somehow separated from the problems that they work on. Instead, they assimilate new elements and mutate according to the interplay between real entities. This keeps fields of fuzzy possibles from ever becoming mechanistic and closed themselves – in other words, this maintains their status as fundamentally immanent.
In Problems, he concludes the penultimate section of the lecture by discussing an important aspect of this theory of abstract machines. Namely, you can’t simply hide behind them. Ultimately, they’re closely linked to far-from-equilibrium semiotisation, acting as the pressure that makes it possible. However, they also have a negative side. Abstract machines and black holes are actually one and the same. The only difference is that one has an infinite speed and the other has a null speed. As a psychoanalyst, Guattari focuses on the clinical. Here, it may seem that a patient is branching out in all directions, linking to abstract machinism that can aid them overcome some of their symptoms, but still – at some point – have a major collapse and regress. To paraphrase almost exactly, a deterritorialisation guided by an abstract machine can collide with a black hole, destroying everything.
It’s thus that it is necessary to take a balanced approach to the universes of problems and abstract machines. There are all kinds of problematic species and colonies, along with multiple forms abstract machines can take. With persistence and transistence, it was seen how different speeds can influence processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation. With the zoology, the importance of working out what kinds of problems are in play was emphasised. In the ethology, the question of far-from-equilibrium semiotisation came into play. Together, even beyond the mostly philosophical aspects examined here, this hints at how Guattari’s work on assemblage theory can extend to an actual, concrete practice. Although he is sometimes overshadowed by his collaborators, like Gilles Deleuze, Guattari is by no means a less innovative or fascinating theorist.
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