The Rise of the Machines: Deleuze's Flight from Structuralism

In this paper, I offer an account of the conceptual shift that occurs between the work completed by Gilles Deleuze prior to 1969 and his later work with Félix Guattari, beginning in 1972 with AntiOedipus. Against previous interpretations, which have concentrated on the developments initiated by Deleuze, I argue for the primary importance of Guattari’s influence, especially his insistence on a theory of ‘machinic processes’. The importance of these processes is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari’s move away from theories of structuralism. In order to carry out this task, I offer a close reading of Guattari’s essay “Machine and Structure.” This essay was first written as a review of Deleuze’s acclaimed work in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and formed the basis for Deleuze and Guattari’s first meeting. In the concluding sections of the paper, I show how the integration of the concept of the machine allows Deleuze and Guattari to develop a theory of the unconscious that operates outside of the boundaries traditionally set by structuralist analysis. In 1969, before the pair had met, Félix Guattari reviewed Gilles Deleuze’s two most recent texts, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, in an essay later published under the title ‘Machine and Structure’ (Guattari 2015).1 In this review, Guattari offers a direct criticism of the form of structuralism found in Deleuze’s work and then aims to go beyond it by making a distinction – one unexamined in the works under consideration – between the category of ‘structure’ and that of ‘machine’. As such, the explicit aim of Guattari’s essay is to demonstrate that “each contingent structure is dominated... by a system of machines” (2015, 318). Taking ‘Machine and Structure’ 1 Initially written as a lecture for Lacan’s Freudian School in Paris in 1969, the paper was rejected, but later published in French as ‘Machine et Structure’ (Guattari 1972).