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Assemblage

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The word in English fails to capture the meaning of the original agencement, a term that refers to the action of matching or fitting together a set of components (agencer), as well as to the result of such an action: an ensemble of parts that mesh together well. (DeLanda, 2015, p. 1)

Most recent explorations#

Assemblage "a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled". Comes from the French work agencement which translated into arrangement, fitting, and "fixing". Suggesting an active on-going process of assembling. Arguments about this translation and relationship with the word assemblage.

Origins with Deleuze and Guattari developed further by others: Latour, Callon, DeLanda, and Bennett. Work by Bennett influential.

An approach for "studying the ontological diversity of agency". Understanding how the capacity to act (agency) is distributed across a "socio-material network of people, things, and narratives".

Takes a relational view on social reality. Human actions arises out of the "shifting interdependencies from material, narrative, social and geographical elements"

Deluze and Guattari#

An assemblage (agencement in French) is a dynamic, heterogeneous collection of elements that come together (articulate) in varying speeds to form a temporary, functional whole that has effects. Assemblages are not fixed structures or essential identities; they are constantly shifting, evolving, and adapting based on the interactions (articulations) of their components.[1]

D&G offer explanations of how assemblages are formed.

DeLanda#

Builds on D&G

Resources#

Early working#

Origins with Deleuze and Guattari

  • assemblage possibly better translated as "working arrangement" (Luik et al, 2018)

Muller (2015) starts with a definition from Deluze

It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’.It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 69 [1977])1

And then offers this summary

In other words, assemblage is a mode of ordering heterogeneous entities so that they work together for a certain time. (p. 28)

Muller (2015) positions DeLanda's work as an attempt to construct an assemblage theory. Compared to Deleuze and Guattari see the assemblage concept as "a provisional analytical toolrather than a system of ideas geared towards and explanation that would make it a theory" (Muller, 2015, p. 28)

Five constituent features of assemblages (Muller, 2015, p. 29)

  1. Assemblages are relational

    Arrangements of different entities linked together for forma a new whole.

  2. Assemblages are productive

    They produce new "territorial organisations, new behaviours, new, expressions, new actors and new realities". They don't mimic or represent other realities.

  3. Assemblages are heterogeneous

    They are socio-material. Made up of human/non-human, nature/culture actors. No assumption of what can be related.

  4. Assemblages are caught up in a dynamic of deterritorialisation (split/carry it away) and reterritorialisation (stablisation)

    As they emerge assemblages establish territories, hold together, but subsequently mutate, modify, and break apart.

  5. Assemblages are desired

    It's the desire (the purpose?) that holds the disparate components together. Components that otherwise are "fragmentary and fragmented".

Critical elements#

Luik et al (2018) identify two critical elements from Deleuze

  1. Heterogeneity of the parts
  2. interactions of those parts and their intensificiation of each other

Luik et al (2018)

...assemblage is not merely a form of content consisting of a collection of different objects, but a collection of interactions in their midst, evoking, as its form of expression, a new sythensised power greater than the sum of its parts (p. 1271)

Key concepts#

Formalisation#

a point of attention in using assemblage...is formalisation, which can be used to understand what keeps the assemblage intact and what can transform it. (Luik et al, 2018, p. 1271)

Two formalisations in Deluzian terms of assemblage. The assemblage is the productive intersection of them

  1. form of content - actions, bodies and things
  2. form of expression - affects, words, ideas

These are interdependent and irreducible. Content is not a thing, but a complex state of "things, bodies and action". Expression is not words, but "a set of statements, discources and ideas arising in the social field"

Configuration of bodies#

Assemblages include objects of all types. Human, object, and immaterial. It is not static. Composed of the relations amongst the capacities of the various components/parts.

Co-functioning#

Is what holds the assemblage together. It's only unity. A symbiosis or sympathy.

It's not formal or legal connections that are important. But the alliances, allows. It is changeable, fleshly, inconstant. Fluid, ephemeral and unpredictable.

Check out#

  • sociotechnical assemblage [40]
  • sociomaterial assemblage [36]

  • data assemblage [24]

  • Hannon's bit

References#

Luik, J., Ng, J., & Hook, J. (2018). "More than just Space": Designing to Support Assemblage in Virtual Creative Hubs. Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 1269--1281. https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196758

Müller, M. (2015). Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material Power, Politics and Space. Geography Compass, 9(1), 27--41. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12192

References#

DeLanda, M. (2015). Introduction. In Assemblage Theory. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/media/resources/9781474413640_Assemblage_Theory_-_Introduction.pdf