Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 143

Deleuze and Guattari's concept of machines is broadened out and
developed as part of a more general discussion of what they call
'assemblages'- by which they mean combinations of heterogenous
elements, composed of both matter and bodies - and enunciation
or utterance. 28 What also defines assemblages are the nature of
movements governing their operation, which involves both moves
towards territorialization and to deterritorialization and 'lines of
flight' through which the assemblage becomes something else.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two different kinds of
assemblage, both of which are 'multiplicities', another key Deleuzo-
guattarian term. 29 Deleuze defines multiplicities as either numerical
or qualitative. The former, for which the term 'molar' is also
used, are divisible, unifiable, totalizable, and organizable, while the
latter, to which the term 'molecular' is applied, are intensive and
cannot change their dimensions or magnitudes without changing
their nature. 30 The distinction between the two kinds of assem-
blage is exemplified in Deleuze and Guattari's description of the
arboreal and the rhizomatic in the introduction to Mille plateaux .
Arborescent systems, trees and such, are unifiable objects, with
clearly defined boundaries. By contrast rhizomatic systems, which in
biology are typified by tubers, grass or weeds, lack these qualities
of definition and unity and are by contrast fuzzy, indeterminate,
and connect to other multiplicities, and change in nature. 31 The
rhizome, more than any other figure in Deleuze and Guattari's
rich vocabulary, has been co-opted into the discourse of our current
technoculture. Though Deleuze and Guattari are careful not to
ascribe any superior virtue to the rhizome it clearly resonates with
contemporary concerns with networks and numerous commenta-
tors have unequivocally described the Internet as rhizomatic.
For some the work of Deleuze and Guattari offered new ways
of thinking about class struggle and revolutionary praxis that were
appropriate to the contemporary context of a postmodern capital-
ism dominated by information communication technologies. This