"abstract machines are precisely what they claim to be : they are abstract because conceptually and ontologically distinct from material reality yet they are fully functionning machines nonetheless, that is, they are agencies of assemblage, organisation and deployment... The argument, stated simply, is as follows: to every organised entity there corresponds a microregime of forces that endows it with its general shape and programme. Every object is a composition of forces, and the compositional event is the work or expression of an abstract machine."
Nice recap (and simplification) of Deleuze by Sanford KWINTER, The Hammer and the Song, in The Diagrams of Architecture, edited by Mark Garcia, AD Reader, John Wiley & Sons, London, 2010, p. 124