The determination of a technical object

强调技术或事物内生的力量，并指出这些看似的单一对象同样应该被视作可拆解的整体：
The way in which the authors express this idea, however, seems to deny any autonomy to the components of an assemblage. As the above quotation continues, for example, Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘technical objects have no distinctive intrinsic characteristics’. If by that one means that there are no necessary and sufficient properties characterising weapons and tools as general categories, then we may agree with that assertion. Entities like ‘the weapon’ and ‘the tool’ are only reified generalities and as such have no place in assemblage theory. But to say that a technical object remains entirely undetermined runs the risk of transforming the concept of assemblage into something like a Hegelian totality in which the very identity of the parts is constituted by their relations in the whole. But as we have seen, the very definition of assemblage involves relations of exteriority, that is, relations that respect the relative autonomy of the parts. To avoid this problem it is important to distinguish two different ways in which technical objects may be characterised: by their properties and by their capacities.
No doubt the progressive differentiation of technical objects was guided by the social assemblages (farms, armies, temples, workshops) of which they were parts. But they nevertheless retained their own properties, a fact that explains, for example, how they could be detached from one assemblage and plugged into another, as when firearms were transferred from sedentary armies to nomad ones. And technical objects have their own history, in the sense that the pace of technological development may accelerate relative to that of institutional development, forcing the latter to catch up. [...] Thus, we must preserve both bottom-up and top-down forms of causality within assemblage theory, and never conceive of the latter as determining the very properties of an assemblage’s components.
Earlier in this chapter we criticised the authors’ assertion that a technical object is entirely undetermined outside of the social assemblages in which it is used, and argued that while a social assemblage (a community or an organisation) does select what capacities of a technical object are exercised, it does not fully determine its properties. Grouping capacities and properties under the term ‘traits’ obscures this important distinction. We also suggested that the very term ‘technical object’ should be dropped as a separate concept and that we should always deal with assemblages of assemblages, technical objects themselves being nothing but assemblages.