In the context of a connective synthesis, a machine or a chain of associations works only when it breaks down. It works by breaking down, continually, by having the flow it produces interrupted and consumed by another that is inevitably produced by it.
“Breaking down” in the French original is actually “detraquée.” The word suggests not so much a malfunction but the impression of something gone awry, derailed. The “breaking down” of a machine is tantamount to the detours of slips, dreams, and symptoms that psychoanalysis has rightly marked as not so much proofs of the unconscious but rather products of its inner workings. As much as they are compromise formations designed to appease the demands of the secondary process, slips, dreams, and symptoms are odd, slippery.
The question that has so far preoccupied psychoanalysis has been the identification and resolution, or at least containment, of the conflict that underlies such formations through a retrograde analysis; schizoanalysis marks them not only as effects but as causes and machines as well. How can they be re- or differently aligned? What can they be made to produce? What new sounds, significations, or formations do they point to? The question of effect and machine is always double: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” (3).
