Facts, Fictions and the Alma Mahler Machine: A Schizoanalysis

Abstract

1 In Deleuzian thought, an assemblage is a coming together of all things and beings—corporeal and incorporeal, animate and inanimate, and organic and inorganic—in the moment of their formations as connections rather than as static objects or bodies that exist inside a pre-determined template, such as the assemblage of a jigsaw puzzle. The assemblage is linked with the idea of the machine. For Deleuze, a machinic assemblage is always in flux and movement, continuously made up of multiple machinic connections. The abstract machine is used as a tool for thinking about the way in which connections come about, and the way in which they are apt to change and transform their connections. The machinic assemblage is often fuelled by desire, and hence conceived as a desiring machine. For Deleuze, as Carfoot writes, ‘life is actually a machine: all of life is made up of multiple machinic connections from which we form our image of the world’. See Gavin Carfoot, ‘Deleuze and Music: A Creative Approach to the Study of Music’ (master’s thesis, University of Queensland, 2004), 70.