… tools only exist in relation to the interminglings they make possible or that make them possible. The stirrup entails a new man–horse symbiosis that at the same time entails new weapons and new instruments. Tools are inseparable from symbioses or amalgamations defining a Nature–Society machinic assemblage. They presuppose a social machine that selects them and takes them into its ‘phylum’: a society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools.
Similarly, the semiotic or collective aspect of an assemblage relates not to a productivity of language but to regimes of signs, to a machine of expression whose variables determine the usage of language elements. These elements do not stand on their own any more than tools do.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, in Law, After Method (via 20yardsoflinen)