The Pintupi Dreaming-Machine

The collaborative works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have had far reaching influences across a wide range on disciplines, discursive formations and creative practices. In a reactionary manner Deleuze and Guattari sought to break free of rigid structures, Hegelian dialectics, existential transcendence, non-falsifiable constructs and reified totalities. Adopting a highly idiosyncratic methodology and writing style they preceded to dismantle the imposed order of previous theory prior to offering a series of flexible plateaus which may act as generative catalysts to new rhizomic (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) and nomadic (ibid) modes of thought and creativity. Seeking to escape social and psychic repression and “the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault 2011: xv) Deleuze and Guattari challenge an array of theoretical and political preconceptions in the hope of providing a flexible approach to ontology, art and philosophy. Of the vast array of notions developed in their works the concept of a machinic assemblage has possibly held the greatest influence upon the Anglophone world. I will here seek to examine the usability of this notion in relation to the ethnographic case of The Pintupi Dreaming.

We may start with a few remarks regarding the nature of machinic assemblages in order to provide a working definition which will be elaborated further as the discussion progresses. An assemblage may be considered as a complex web of heterogeneous multiplicities engaged in “relations of exteriority” (DeLanda 2011: 10) with other inter-assemblages and infra-assemblages. Each multiplicity is self-subsistent, that is to say it is not defined by any one assemblage, nor is any one assemblage merely defined by the aggregate of its components. The relations of exteriority inherent to the nature of assemblages mean that any segment may be removed from one and plugged into another, or may simultaneously operate between assemblages: inter-assemblage. Further, one assemblage may contain another within, being linked by lines of flight and flows: infra-assemblage. The lines of flight and flows between the segments of any given assemblage, inter-assemblage or infra-assemblage are the significant features, rather than the material matter of the segments which are engaged with one another; as such they are to be considered in terms of “the difference of the affections of the substances” (Spinoza 1992: 33). All assemblages have emergent and immanent properties, they effect and are affected by the affective attributes, intensive states and movements of singularities, multiplicities and further assemblages; they are rhizomic - they do not operate according to a preordained structure or order.

A machine is that which affects, initiates or stops a flow between the segments of an assemblage; they act as “a system of interruptions or breaks” (Deleuze & Guattari 2011: 38). Machines produce flows, but also interrupt and reassimalate them; each machine is in relation to another which will receive its produced flow and according to its embedded code reconstitute it as a segment of the assemblage; “every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected, but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of a flow in relation to the machine connected to it.” (ibid: 39). It is through machines that assemblages are altered, new ones constituted and strata made. The machines can be considered as intermediaries between the flows which constitute an assemblage. Considering the constant flux between flows and machines within an assemblage it can never said to be fully static, but rather operates constantly in a mode of “becoming” (Deleuze 2011: 4), an endless process of alteration with no start or end and no subject distinct from itself.

This brief outline may serve as an introduction to notion of an assemblage which we shall now seek to demonstrate by reference to Pintupi cosmology. The Dreaming, for the Pintupi, acts as “the ground or foundation of the visible, present-day world” (Myers 1991: 49); it constitutes a cosmological space through which places, people and objects are conceived. It is not considered to be fictitious, there is not category for fiction in Pintupi language; neither is it merely dreaming or dreams, through dreams people may access The Dreaming which is an alternate plane of being to the physical. The Pintupi “speak of conception and birth as the emergence of an individual from the plane of The Dreaming onto the physical, phenomenal plane of existence” (ibid: 50). It is not considered to be a metaphorical relationship but one which is distinctly real, rather than coming into existence from non-existence the birth of people through The Dreaming is seen as transference to yutirringu: becoming visible (ibid). The Dreaming also constructs space and place; occurrences in The Dreaming converge upon the visible or physical plane and constitute landmarks and places. Everything in existence is considered “to have always existed” (ibid: 51) in The Dreaming, which is outside time and visible space. The Dreaming links the cosmos to the physical order of things; phantasm to physicality, incorporeal to corporeal.

The Dreaming lends itself well to assemblage theory. It acts as an assemblage operating between the ordered physicality of things and the unordered Cosmos. At one limit of intensity this “machinic assemblage faces the strata” (ibid: 4) - the rigidly ordered subjects of the physical world. On an alternate limit “it also has a side facing a body without organs” (ibid) – an unordered, unsubjectified, smooth, continuous, undifferentiated, topological space which knows only potentials and intensities. When dreaming the Pintupi act as dreaming-machines, interrupting and affecting the flows from the Cosmos to the physical world. In dreaming the Pintupi engage in “deterritorialization” (ibid: 371) a process which destabilises the assemblages fixed identity opening it up to new potentialities, flows, and becomings, introducing it to the intensities of the body without organs. In dreaming we see a “becoming-intense” (ibid 256-341) of the Pintupi; they open themselves up to the intensive possibilities of the Cosmos or body without organs. When engaging dreaming-machines “one’s ‘spirit’ (kurrunpa) travels apart from the body and observes things not ordinarily within the field of sensory perception” (Meyers: 51). The cage of humanity and yutirringu is escaped as the subjectivity of the singular Pintupi dreaming-machine opens itself up to The Dreaming; alongside this becoming-intense of the Pintupi dreaming-machine we see a “becoming-animal” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004 256-341) in it’s escape of human subject. In their dreams the Pintupi deterritorialize through a process which “destabilizes spatial boundaries” (Delanda 2011: 13), be it of the yutirringu plane or of the identity of the human subject. The dreaming-machine acts upon flows between the strata and the Cosmos deconstructing the rigid strata to the potentialities of The Dreaming.

Following this process of deterritorialization we see “reterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) in the return from The Dreaming to the yutirringu plane. In the transformation of an intensive potential in The Dreaming to a strata in the yutirringu plane the unformed becomes formed, the body without organs becomes an organism, by means of territorialization mediated through the dreaming-machines of the Pintupi cosmological assemblage. The birth of a person moves from “’sitting as a Dreamtime being’” (Myers 1991: 50) to “’becoming body’ or ‘becoming a human being’” (ibid), they are reterritorialized from the totally deterritorialized space of intensive potentials that is The Dreaming onto the yutirringu plane. A non-subjected potential becomes a subject, a Dreamtime being a body. The potential for this newly territorialized body has always existed in the unordered totality of the Cosmos. This reterritorialization stabilises segments of the machinic assemblage, homogenising, subjectifying and ordering potentials into strata. A flow operates, mediated by the dreaming-machine, from the unordered body without organs to the strata, introducing newly formed or altered strata to the “milieu” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 58): the environment in which the strata, organisms and subjects operate and territorialize.

The machinic assemblage of The Dreaming acts as a “territorial assemblage” (ibid: 368), by territorializing people, places and objects. The dreaming-machines of the Pintupi “swing between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a deterritorializing movement that on the contrary connects them with the Cosmos” (ibid: 371). It constitutes territories in the form of both people and places. The Pintupi speak of a “large hill in the Kintore Range, for example, as the body of a monitor lizard” (Myers 1991: 48). In The Dreaming, this monitor lizard killed a group of women and children after which he raised his head and turned to stone, “the hill that arose is known as Yunytjunya, in reference to the exposure of the lizard’s throat (yunytju)” (ibid). This hill is of “the Refrain” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 344): a territorial expression. The milieu of The Dreaming and the milieu of yutirringu interact creating “territorial motifs and counterpoints [which] explore potentialities of the interior and exterior milieu” (ibid: 350). The hill is expressive; it expresses the relation between milieu, marks territory and events. Through the dreaming-machines of The Dreaming assemblage we see “a transcoding of milieus that can be considered both to constitute a stratum and to effect reverse causalities and transversals of destratification” (ibid: 370). This transcoding of milieus from the Cosmos to the strata acts in an expressive manner. The lines of flight and flows of The Dreaming assemblage capture the potentials of the body without organs “by territorializing it, fixing it in place” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 86). Dreaming-machines open up the assemblage to territorializing potentials, strata and milieu, constituting counter points and motifs such as Yunytjunya.

This process can only be achieved through machinic effects. The singular Pintupi opens up a becoming-animal, a becoming-intense and operates as “a machine that is plugged into an assemblage and had been freed through deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 367). This territorialization produces an expressive statement in the transcoding of milieus by converting the molecular substance of The Dreaming to molar strata. In plugging into The Dreaming assemblage we see a “becoming-expressive” (ibid: 348), a “becoming of a cosmos” (ibid: 386), a flow which territorializes by “harnessing cosmic forces in the deterritorialized material” (ibid: 379). This expressive act constitutes a territorial assemblage but equally falls back onto the social assemblage; both affect one another, it harnesses the potentials of the body without organs and the productivity of dreaming-machines. In the works of Deleuze and Guattari productivity is fuelled by desire, every machine, atom, assemblage, singularity and multiplicity has its own desires which are instrumental in creative and expressive processes; it is not based upon lack or want, rather it is “desire that produces” (Lyotard 2004: 13) . Desire fuels machines which in turn alter the lines of flight of any given assemblage, “there is no machinic assemblage that is not a social assemblage of desire, no social assemblage of desire that is not a collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986: 82). The Dreaming assemblage harnesses the forces of desire by means of dreaming-machines; the desires of the dreaming-machines are affected, coded and territorialized by the socius and the socius is affected, coded and territorialized by the dreaming machines. There are deeply intertwined relationships of inter-assemblages and infra-assemblages.

By means of dreaming-machines, we see an actualization of virtual sensations. When in Dreamtime “the virtual image evolves towards the virtual sensation, and the virtual sensation towards real movement” (Bergson 2004: 168), and this real movement creates strata. Through The Dreaming assemblage the virtual sensations and intensities of the Cosmos crystallise onto the yutirringu plane. In this process The Dreaming acts as “a topological space which undergoes a progressive spatial and qualitative differentiation to become the metric space represented by a fully formed organism” (DeLanda 2010: 62). The unconscious desires of Pintupi dreaming-machines experienced when in Dreamtime are brought forth to the conscious and act upon the actual, yutirringu plane. This crystallization of desire and constitution of strata in turn falls back onto and affects the dreaming-machines and their becomings influencing further crystallizations, “the virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual” (Deleuze 1989 :148). The Dreaming, and the Pintupi dreaming-machines mediate between the virtual intensities and potentials of the Cosmos and the actual strata of the physical plane.

The elaboration of Pintupi cosmology I have here offered as a means of demonstrating the usability of assemblage theory digresses from Myers’ original thesis which states that “as in Plato’s Cave … the concept dichotomizes the world” (1991 :69). Myers’ conclusion suggests the strata of the yutirringu plane come into existence through a vertical axiomatic relationship to a metaphysical plane of existence comparable to Platonic forms. In this model Dreamtime beings come into physical existence through an “operation that precedes the discovery of essence precisely because it calls upon it” (Foucault 1980: 167). Such an explanation would ignore the fact, which Myers himself acknowledges, that “Human and Dreaming action each contribute to the definition of landscape” (1991: 55). Rather than seeing the convergence of the virtual, deterritorialized, topological space of The Dreaming and the actual, territorialized, stratified space of yutirringu as an interconnected series of affective relationships it is seen as a reflection of immutable eternal essences. This view regards yutirringu as “a faithful reflection of a static world of beings” (Delanda 1999: 31) located in The Dreaming. We must agree with Myers when he states that when in Dreamtime “what one sees is believed to have always existed” (1991: 51); but we diverge from his thesis in stating that what is seen existed only as an insensitive potential of subconscious desire and the unordered Cosmos, rather than as a preconceived, preordained entity, for as he himself states “they remain open to enormous interpretive possibilities” (ibid: 52). This wide-ranging interpretive possibility is due to the affective relationship between singularities, multiplicities and the coding, intensive states, and potentials of what has here been referred to as Pintupi dreaming-machines.

Through the utilisation of a machinic assemblage as a means¹ of elaborating the notion of The Dreaming we are brought to an explanation which, rather than seeing an axiomatic relationship between a metaphysical plane of the Platonic variety and the physical yutirringu plane, falls closer to a Spinozan ontology. This view would not see the yutirringu plane as “imposed by an embracing cosmic order” (ibid 1991: 69) consisted of totalizing metaphysical entities, but as a product of specific affective process harnessing the infinite potentials of the cosmos and constituting them as tangible objects. From this model The Dreaming is an intensive “substance constituting infinite attributes” (Spinoza 1992: 31), what Spinoza refers to as God (ibid). This infinite substance holds infinite potentials which are actualized by the Pintupi dreaming-machines producing corporeal entities by extension and territorialization of the intensive stated of The Dreaming; these corporeal entities, hitherto referred to as strata, “are either attributes of God or (Ax.1) affections of the attributes of God” (ibid: 40) brought into yutirringu by flows of The Dreaming assemblage. This view would not see Dreamtime as a preordained totalizing occurrence but as a singular, affective process subject to modes of “individuation” (Jung 2010: 75) and endless becomings.

We have here sought to offer a demonstration of the usability of assemblage theory in relation to The Pintupi Dreaming. At this point it is important to note that the theoretical framework used here to elaborate The Dreaming can only ever be a means of generating further understanding rather than a totalizing, complete end in itself. To attempt to use assemblage theory as a final explanation would misunderstand the very nature of the notion of a machinic assemblage by constituting it as a totalized imposed model of reality which would ignore the singularity of reality. In the application of this theoretical apparatus it must be remembered that “assemblage theory does not presuppose the existence of reified generalities” (DeLanda 2011: 26), nor is it “meant as an end in itself, but as a means to elucidate the proper ontological status of the entities that are invoked by sociologists and other social scientists” (ibid: 8). The concepts utilised here, and in assemblage theory, such as machines, singularities and multiplicities, should be used as generative methodological tools which may produce an understanding of social relations which acknowledges the individuality of each society, person and process.

This final point, regarding the status of assemblage theory as a means not ends, is vital if the notion of a machinic assemblage is to be of any use. To use assemblage theory as a totalising, final explanation would be to strip it of any theoretical or political utility constituting it as a “referential axis” (Deleuze & Guattari) comparable to Hegelian Universals or the Freudian Oedipus complex, both of which are devoid of any “falsifiability” (Popper 2010: 17) and are imposed upon reality. Applications of assemblage theory which avoid this danger of totalisation can be found in the works of Actor-Network-Theorists who consider it “necessary to scrutinize more thoroughly the exact content of what is ‘assembled’ under the umbrella of a society” (Latour 2007: 2) by making use of “a very special brand of active and distributed materialism of which Deleuze, through Bergson, is the most recent representative” (ibid: 129). Such applications of assemblage theory make no assumptions and seek to examine singular modes of individuation and becoming. The construction of assemblage theory as a system offering final explanations must be avoided and we must remember that “the will to a system shows a lack of honesty” (Nietzsche 2007: 8), for an imposed system disregards reality and handpicks supportive information². Bearing this in mind, we may state, that the notion of a machinic assemblage can be a theoretically useful one provided it does not come a generalised totality or final explanation in itself.

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(Source: plurality-press.info)