Learning/Unlearning Assemblage

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

(white blood cell is to united states as sun is to milky way galaxy)

"In assemblages you you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs."[1]

[1] Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006. 179.

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

(image of galaxies billions of light years away) (an image of the past)

“Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.”[1]

“Lines of flight are those tendencies that would continue dismantling the assemblage if they would remain “turned on.”” [2] 

[1] Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 24.

[2] Saldanha, Arun. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. 26. 

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

"Matter’s intrinsic changeability means that it is never totally knowable, but also that it can lend itself to many different kinds of understandings, uses, and arrangements. Thinking with and through the virtual not only exposes the multiplicities of relations and movements that go into the transformation and cohering of entities such as organism, species, class, sex, or race. It also keeps what is possible for the future open for contestation and amendment."[1]

[1] Saldanha, Arun. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. 27.

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

"The Big Bang did not occur as an explosion in the usual way one thinks about such things, despite what one might gather from its name. The universe did not expand into space, as space did not exist before the universe. Instead, it is better to think of the Big Bang as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. The universe has not expanded from any one spot since the Big Bang--rather, space itself has been stretching, and carrying matter with it."[1]

"Assemblages do not adhere to external anthropocentric logic because their logic is self-produced in their constant expansion and implosion."

[1] Choi, Charles Q. "The Universe & Big Bang Theory." SPACE.com. N.p., 21 Mar. 2013. Web.

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

"Standing before you, I ingest you. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting your exhaled air, your sloughed skin, and the skin of the tables, chairs, and carpet in this room."[1]

[1] Chen, M. Y. "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17.2-3 (2011): 265-286. 280.

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

LearningToUnlearn/UnlearningToLearn

            One of the main issues taken up in materialist theorizing is how to de-center the all-knowing human subject. Materialism aims to challenge our ideas of  subjecthood and objecthood by complicating our understanding of agency. Materialist theorists argue that every thing has agency, but we have previously failed to conceptualize matter in this way because our understanding of agency is so anthropocentric.

            In Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina, Nancy Tuana proposes the concept of “interactionism,” which “acknowledges both the agency of materiality and the porosity of entities.”[1] The main tenet of interactionism is that “the basic units of existence are phenomena (rather than physical objects) that are emergent from interactions.”[2] This concept of interactionism ties in well with Jane Bennett’s definition of assemblages as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations.”[3] Assemblages are not simply made up of various “stuff,” they are groupings of “vibrant matter.” This matter is agentic and thus produces constant interaction within and between assemblages.[4]  Bennett writes:

Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. And precisely because each member-actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly “off” from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open-ended collective, a “non-totalizable sum.[5]

What defines assemblages and holds them together is not necessarily the physical proximity or direct contact of their parts, but rather coherence through interaction. Deleuze argues that coherence is an emergent property of assemblages.[6]  In other words, the fact of their coherence stems from their very existence. Assemblages do not adhere to external anthropocentric logic because their logic is self-produced in their constant expansion and implosion. This fundamental quality of assemblages challenges our ability to ever truly “know” them.

            In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, critical education theorist Paulo Freire challenges the human ability to fully “know” anything. Freire refers to current methods of educating as the “banking model” of education. Within this model, there is a hierarchy of knowers; teachers hold knowledge and students receive it.  Freire writes that “the more completely he fills the receptacles, the better a teacher he is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.”[7] The teacher has a monopoly on “real knowledge” and “talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable.”[8] Students are not presumed to possess any knowledge except that which they absorb from the teacher. Freire argues that, “implicit in the banking concept is the assumption of a dichotomy between man and the world: man is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; man is spectator, not re-creator.”[9] Freire advocates for a more collaborative and less hierarchical form of education. He writes:

In problem-posing education, men develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in process, in transformation.[10]

This kind of education disavows the existence of a knowledge hierarchy and seeks to validate experiential knowledge.  Freire hopes that:

In this way, the problem-posing educator constantly re-forms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students—no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration and re-considers his earlier considerations as the students express their own. The role of the problem-posing educator is to create, together with the students, the conditions under which knowledge at the level of the doxa is superseded by true knowledge, at the level of the logos.[11]

Rather than reifying pre-existing knowledge (doxa), critical pedagogy aims to encourage new knowledge formation through the process of inquiry (logos). Here, Freire is essentially calling for a valuing of the knowledge we gain through interaction.

            Assemblages produce their own knowledges and logics through interactions in much the way Freire’s students do. Their reality is constantly shifting and as a result they are constantly producing new knowledge and knew ways of knowing. We can never fully “know” an assemblage because it is making sense of itself as we are trying to make sense of it. This understanding of knowledge-making/assemblage-making/assemblage-knowledge-making through interaction insists that there is only ever “partial knowledge.”

            Accepting the reality of partial knowledge not only challenges our conceptions of who among us can “know” and what we can “know”, but also challenges the distinction we have created between knowers (human subjects) and knowns (material objects). In a lecture entitled Beyond Ethnographic Entrapment: Theorizing Native Studies Andrea Smith spoke about her somewhat conflicted feelings regarding the fight for including Native and Indigenous Studies departments in university curriculum. She argued that searching for recognition within academia requires putting the power to acknowledge and recognize native studies as legitimate in the hands of racist institutions. This creates a dichotomy where the white supremacist institution is the keeper of knowledge and the racialized other is a knowable object. Smith argues that the act of deciding which things are “knowable” has always been a colonial project.[12] Freire similarly argues that within the banking model of education teachers/knowers view the “cognizable objects” as their “private property.”[13] Within Freire’s concept of problem-posing education, teachers instead view objects as sites of reflection. We thus, not only need to challenge how much we can “know” about a thing, but how we decide which things we attempt to “know” in the first place.  

            Challenging our preconceived notions of which things can know and which things can be known, involves blurring the boundaries between these categories.  In Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections, Mel Chen takes up the boundaries between human subjects and those they have identified as objects. Chen says:      

Sara Ahmed writes extensively about her orientation toward a table of hers and that table’s orientation toward her. “We perceive the object as an object, as something that has‘ integrity, and is ‘in’ space, only by haunting that very space; that is, by co-inhabiting space such that the boundary between the co-inhabitants of space does not hold. The skin connects as well as contains….Orientations are tactile and they involve more than one skin surface: we, in approaching this or that table, are also approached by the table, which touches us when we touch it.” I first must agree, but then find that what she nevertheless still presumes in this work is the proper integrity of her body and of the table, an exclusion of molecular travel that permits her to position one thing against another. Yes, she is talking mainly about the perception of integrity, but my contention here is that percepts are to some degree bypassed, for instance, by the air itself. Standing before you, I ingest you. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting your exhaled air, your sloughed skin, and the skin of the tables, chairs, and carpet in this room.[14]

Chen argues that we need to challenge the very idea that there are discrete “knowable” entities. We have already established that the objects we attempt to know are no more knowable than we (the supposed subjects) are. Chen pushes us further to consider that we do not really even exist as separate entities from the “objects” we attempt to know. We are porous, constantly breathing in and absorbing the world around/within us, as well as being breathed in and absorbed by the world.

            In other words, we are assemblages. We are wholes containing various parts (the minutia of which we cannot fathom), and parts of various wholes (the vastness of which we cannot know).  Arun Saldanha writes:

Matter’s intrinsic changeability means that it is never totally knowable, but also that it can lend itself to many different kinds of understandings, uses, and arrangements. Thinking with and through the virtual not only exposes the multiplicities of relations and movements that go into the transformation and cohering of entities such as organism, species, class, sex, or race. It also keeps what is possible for the future open for contestation and amendment.[15]

Though this essay has been a project in understanding/learning/knowing assemblages, it is clear that an intrinsic aspect of assemblages is that they are un-understandable/learnable/knowable. It seems that if this is really meant to be about the nature of assemblages, it must conclude with a call to unlearning and unknowing. Rather than being disappointed by our conceptual loss of all-knowing-power, perhaps we can delight in the future possibilities held within the nuanced vastness and minutiae of the world’s interactions.

  [1] Tuana, Nancy. "Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina." Material Feminisms. Comp. Stacy Alaimo and Susan J. Hekman. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008. 188-213. 191.

[2] Tuana, 191.

[3] Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 23.

[4] Bennett, 34.

[5] Bennett, 24.

[6] Deleuze, 179.

[7] Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman. Ramos. London: Penguin, 1972. 58.

[8] Freire, 57.

[9] Freire, 62.

[10] Freire, 70.

[11] Freire, 68.

[12] Smith, Andrea. "Beyond Ethnographic Entrapment: Theorizing Native Studies." Pitzer College, Claremont. 29 Oct. 2014. Lecture.

[13] Freire, 68.

[14] Chen, M. Y. "Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17.2-3 (2011): 265-286. 280.

[15] Saldanha, Arun. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2007. 27.

[learningunlearningassemblag-blog]

WhatIsAnAssemblage?

Gilles Deleuze defines an assemblage as “first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements.”[1] Assemblages contain “states of things, bodies, hodgepodges…utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs.”[2] An assemblage is a grouping of things that somehow relate to one another (or even relate to one another in their non-relation). Each assemblage is simultaneously a whole made of various parts and also a part within various other whole assemblages. A part can have a different function and meaning in each assemblage it is “plugged into.” Thus, every whole is a part and every part is a whole, and every whole/part can simultaneously be a different whole/part in relation to each part/whole it exists with.

[1] Deleuze, Gilles, and David Lapoujade. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006. 179.

[2] Deleuze, 176.