Assemblage (philosophy)

Assemblage is an ontological framework developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, originally presented in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Assemblage theory provides a bottom-up framework for analyzing social complexity by emphasizing fluidity, exchangeability, and multiple functionalities through entities and their connectivity.^[1] Assemblage theory asserts that, within a body, the relationships of component parts are not stable and fixed; rather, they can be displaced and replaced within and among other bodies, thus approaching systems through relations of exteriority ^[1]

Understanding Assemblage Through Agencement

The term assemblage, in a philosophical sense, originally stems from the French word agencement, whose meaning translates narrowly to English as "arrangement", "fitting, or "fixing".^[2] Agencement asserts the inherent implication of the connection between specific concepts and that the arrangement of those concepts is what provides sense or meaning. Assemblage, on the other hand, can be more accurately described as the integration and connection of these concepts and that it is both the connections and the arrangements of those connections that provide context for assigned meanings.

John Phillips argued in 2006 that Deleuze and Guattari rarely used the term assemblage at all in a philosophical sense, and that through narrow, literal English translations, the terms became misleadingly perceived as analogous. The translation of agencement as assemblage that "give[s] rise to the connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate elements of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it." ^[2]

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari draw from dynamical systems theory, which explores the way material systems self-organize, and extend the theory to include social, linguistic, and philosophical systems in order to create assemblage theory.^[3] In assemblage theory, assemblages (or relationships) are formed through the processes of coding, stratification, and territorialization. Any one philosophical context never operates in isolation. ^[2]

Deleuze and Guattari use the term "constellation" when they talk about assemblage. A constellation, like any assemblage, is made up of imaginative contingent articulations among myriad heterogeneous elements.^[4] This process of ordering matter around a body is called coding.^[3] According to Deleuze and Guattari, assemblages are coded by taking a particular form; they select, compose, and complete a territory.^[4] In composing a territory, there exists the creation of hierarchical bodies in the process of stratification.^[3] Drawing from the constellation metaphor, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the constellation includes some heavenly bodies but leaves out others; the included bodies being those in close proximity given the particular gathering and angle of view.^[4] The example constellation thus defines the relationships with the bodies in and around it, and therefore demonstrates the social complexity of assemblage.

Territorialization is another process of assemblage theory, and is viewed as the ordering of the bodies that create the "assemblage".^[3] Assemblages territorialize both forms of content and forms of expression. Forms of content, also known as material forms, include the assemblage of human and nonhuman bodies, actions, and reactions. Forms of expression include incorporeal enunciations, acts, and statements.^[4] Within this ordering of the bodies, assemblages do not remain static; they are further characterized by processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Deterritorialization occurs when articulations are disarticulated and disconnected through components "exiting" the assemblage; once again exemplfying the idea that these forms do not and can not operate alone^[4] Reterritorialization describes the process by which new components "enter" and new articulations are forged, thus constituting a new assemblage.^[4] In this way, these axes of content/expressive and the processes of territorialization exist to demonstrate the complex nature of assemblages.

DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity

Philosopher Manuel DeLanda has adopted the concept of assemblage in his book A New Philosophy of Society (2006). In his book, DeLanda draws from Deleuze and Guattari to further argue that social bodies on all scales are best analyzed through their individual components. Like Deleuze and Guattari, DeLanda’s approach examines relations of exteriority, in which assemblage components are self-subsistent and retain autonomy outside of the assemblage in which they exist ^[5] DeLanda further expands upon Deleuze’s assemblage theory and relations of exteriority by suggesting that assemblage components are organized through the two axes of material/expressive and territorializing/deterritorializing.^[5] Further, a third axis exists of genetic/linguistic resources exists to define the interventions involved in the coding, decoding, and recoding of the assemblage.^[5] However, DeLanda further asserts that the social does not lose its reality, nor its materiality, through its complexity.^[1] In this way, assemblages are effective in their practicality; assemblages, though fluid, are nevertheless part of historically significant processes. In that way, DeLanda offers a reconfiguration of the Deleuzean concepts that provides a more robust theoretical framework for analyzing assemblages that can be seen as more practical in use.

Packer and Wiley, Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks

In Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, Jeremy Packer (University of Toronto Mississauga) and Stephen Wiley (North Carolina State University) use assemblage as a way to describe a unique model of mobility and networking. ^[6] They discuss the immaterial nature of communication — through signs, symbols, messages and meanings — in a compiled version of a communication and rhetoric symposium held at North Carolina State University in 2009. In itself the book is an example of a sort of scholarly assemblage; combining ideas, scholarship, real-world experiences and a physical text in the series of essays expanding, in part, of the works of Deleuze and Guattari.

Featured in this text is John Macgregor Wise (Arizona State University) whose research focuses on culture and technology, with a specific emphasis on assemblages in the modern era as they relate to the Internet and the increasingly growing technology sphere. He argues that these new assemblages, featuring components in the "clickable world", should be seen as assemblages of attention. The formation of connections and distribution of focus is crossed through "body, brain, tool, and environment," each collaborating and competing for attention while being given meaning. This once again exemplifies the nature of assemblages and how each form or component can never act in isolation, further expanding Deleuzean and Guattarian ideology.^[2]

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