BENJAMIN BAS

When we think of desire, we often think of a mental state within an individual, I desire this thing or this person. Desire is always something that is lacking in me, something that needs to be fulfilled, something negative. For Deleuze, desire is not this lack, it is an active vital force. In this short essay, I will explore the Deleuzian concept of desire and how it links to the concept of an assembly.

In common parlance, desire has become a pejorative, the antithesis of rationality, something to be controlled and suppressed. Deleuze critiques this use, desire is not merely a psychic force that exists because of a lack. When I say I desire this shirt the desire is constituted because of the object of desire, the shirt instils me with desire. Deleuze rejects this and says: you never desire something specific, you desire an ensemble.

I do not desire the shirt, I desire a specific relation between me the shirt and the context in which I can wear it, a certain landscape he calls it. And it is not that I desire this ensemble, I desire from within this ensemble. When I desire to drink, it never means I only want to drink, it means I want to drink within a specific context; with friends, or alone relaxing, to get courage in a social situation etc. Desire always flows within an arrangement, within an assemblage or ensemble, whatever you want to call it. Desire is here always something constructive, it builds this assemblage, when someone says “I desire this” they are constructing a reality. Desire does not come from a lack within, but is a productive force, and for Deleuze we are desiring machines.

This argument stems from a disagreement with psychoanalysis that Deleuze breaks down in three points:

1 The unconscious is not a theatre of representation. Instead, it is a factory, it incessantly produces.

2 Desire is closely related to delirium, to a degree desire means to become delirious. Delirious action for Deleuze has nothing to do with what the psychoanalysts had made of it, it is not something that happens because of your relationship with your mother or father. Instead, you become delirious over the whole world, all aspects of the world, race, climate, anthropology, history etc. It is geographical and political, not familial. This is why when we see someone who has become “crazy” it is incredibly reductive to say: “This is because of your relation to your parents”. Instead, we need to situate that person within the complex assemblage of the world they live in. I am not depressed because of something that happened in my youth, the reason is much more accurately explained through the societal, political, and geographically situated positions of me as an individual. This is not to say that one’s youth does not have an impact, but to reduce every psychological problem to the familial, as Freud did, is reductive of the complexity of an individual.

3 Desire always constitutes itself within an assemblage, never to a single factor.

Let us look deeper at what an assemblage is. The word assemblage is a translation from the French word agencement which means to lay-out or to arrange, it is a construction. To assemble means something like to join two things together as a whole, there is a subtle difference here. An arrangement is not the same as a joint gathering, an assembly forms a unity out of parts, while agencement is an arrangement of heterogeneous elements. It is thus a multiplicity instead of a unity, it has no essence to it no essential quality that makes it form a unity, it is merely an event of a coming together. This is an important distinction because the function of the concept of assemblage is precisely to be an alternative to the logic of a unity. A unity is an organic whole where all the parts work together to reproduce its unity, for example, a body. All the organs work together performing their function in order to create the harmony of the whole organism that is the body. The heart outside of the body does not function as a heart, and the body without a heart does not function as a body. What these parts are a part of, is given in advance. They are what they are because of the preconceived function they have within the preconceived unity of the body. A unity is thus not open to recombination that would redetermine, not only the unity, but also the function of the part. The parts only exist within a crystallized structure of this unity.

With an assembly, parts exist independently of their unity, here the parts become mechanisms.

“This is what constitutes the character of mechanism, namely, that whatever relation obtains between the things combined, this relation is extraneous to them that does not concern their nature at all, and even if it is accompanied by a semblance of unity it remains nothing more than composition, mixture, aggregation, and the like”

Hegel

The key thing is thus that assemblies have flow to what they are, and what they are is dependent on the arrangement of its multiplicity of parts. It is neither part nor unity, it is as Deleuze calls it a “fragmentary whole”. It is its own relation, and it is this relation that is important. An assembly has no essence as it always changes, if you want to know what it is you have to look at its configuration as it presents itself as an event to you.

In relation to the social domain, Deleuze explains what an assemblage is by adhering 4 elements to it (although he isn’t tied down to this number of elements). Firstly, it refers to a state of things; it is not about an abstract café, but about me liking this café with these people in this state. Assembling is finding the state of things that works for you.

Secondly, it refers to styles of enunciation, statements. An assembly implies a style of enunciation.

Thirdly, it implies a territory, we all choose or create our territory, if I walk into an unfamiliar room I start looking for a territory. This is the comfortable spot, the spot that fits me.

Lastly, there are processes that make it possible to leave these territories or processes of deterritorialisation.

So in short, it is something that talks about a state of things that is situated within a territory that has a certain style of enunciation yet is not crystallised as it has these movements of deterritorialisation. So an assembly assembles and disassembles, territorializes and deterritorializes, it flows. Between these parts, desire flows.

Desire as desiring production has this constructive force to it, but it also has a destructive side. A desiring-machine (us humans) functions as a circuit breaker that can break up larger assemblages, its constructive element necessarily breaks up and reterritorializes other assemblies of connected machines. Together these desiring-machines form social-machines, there are no desiring-machines outside the social-machines they form and there are no social-machines without the constitutive elements of the desiring-machines.

This means that an assemblage of a desiring-machine always breaks up a larger social-machine. We see now that we as individual are always situated and part of larger structures, our interactions with things outside of us constitute us and constitute the social field, the plane in which we can interact with others and other things. In this way, the central point of the individual becomes less important and fades away as something that is part of an assembly and is an assembly in itself. Desire has no object, and it also has no subject, within the machine one cannot really distinguish the unconscious subject from the order of the machine itself.

Bibliography

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. A&C Black.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). What is philosophy? Columbia University Press.

Hegel, G. (2017). Science of logic. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform.

Nail, Thomas. (2017). What is an Assemblage?. SubStance. 46. 21–37. 10.3368/ss.46.1.21.

SUB-TIL. (2020, 18 april). L’Abécédaire de GILLES DELEUZE : D comme désir (HD) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLlSRFLThYw