re: machines

If "Machines" is part of a conceptual tool box, and that tool box is
historical, is there anytime that Deleuze and Guattari's disclaimer that
"machine" is not a metaphor not true?  Or is the concept so tied to the
text that this would be an 'unhistorical' reading?  (And what effect
does this then have upon the notion of a 'conceptual tool box.'?)
    Its always striking for me to read "machine" and "production" in
Anti-Oedipus.  I want to read these terms in the context of the text,
but on the other hand, its hard to escape the dominance of these terms
in modernism and the importance of these terms not only in Marxism, but
to the spirit of 'the cure' in psychoanalysis.  I wonder, sometimes,
what it means to take these tensions in the text at the level of being
'concepts,' outside of an historical toolbox (is this possible for
concepts??), on the one hand, and the concepts as being outside of
historical tropes (as in claiming that "machine" is not a metaphor), on
the other.  (And what is the concept of a conceptual toolbox, anyway, if
not a metaphor?--a metaphor for what, the text??
    When is a metaphor not a metaphor?(When it's a text???)    And how
would one know (especially in Anti-Oedipus)? Are metaphors allowed in
schizoanalysis (despite the metaphor of production)?
                                        Ron