The concept of assemblage plays a crucial role in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In a 1980 interview with Catherine Clément, Deleuze describes their invention of the concept of the assemblage as the “general logic” at work in A Thousand Plateaus. However, despite its thirty years of influence on political theory, this “general logic of the assemblage” still remains obscured by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari never formalized it as a theory per se, but largely used it ad hoc throughout their work. This fact continues to pose problems for theorists today who wish to deploy something like a theory of assemblages, but also admit, as Manuel DeLanda does, that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage “hardly amounts to a fully fledged theory” (DeLanda 3). This position allows DeLanda to relegate “Deleuzian hermeneutics” to the footnotes and focus on developing his own “neo-assemblage” theory, “not strictly speaking Deleuze’s own” (DeLanda 4).
However, for those who want to know what Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory is, DeLanda’s answer is not quite satisfying. Thus in order to render Deleuze and Guattari’s general logic of assemblages more accessible for political theorists today as part of the current special issue of SubStance, this paper develops a formalization of their theory of assemblages invented in A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? The thesis of this paper is that, contra DeLanda, Deleuze and Guattari do in fact have a fully fledged theory of assemblages.
At present and to my knowledge, this is the first full-length journal article to focus exclusively on Deleuze and Guattari’s formal theory of assemblages. By concentrating on the structure of the theory apart from any specific kind of assemblage or application of assemblage theory such as linguistic, sociological, biological, or geological, this paper shows, in a relatively brief manner, the core formal operations shared by all kinds of assemblages and to clarify in what precise sense all assemblages are political. Elsewhere I have shown at length how this general logic of assemblages can be used as a method of concrete political analysis,1 but the focus of this paper is to show the theory behind the analysis. In short, this essay does for the concept of the assemblage what Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben did for Foucault in their essay “What is a Dispositif?”: it extracts [End Page 21] from a large body of work the core formal features of its operative methodology or logic.
Book of the day – Anti-Oedipus: A Thousand Plateaus
Today’s Book of the Day is A Thousand Plateaus, written by Gilles Deleuze with the contribution of Félix Guattari in 1980. I have read the 1987 English translation, published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was renowned for his metaphysical inquiries into difference, repetition, and becoming. A student of Hegel, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson, his early works…
Almost the first words of Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory include this intriguing statement:
This somewhat austere book can be read in parallel with the much lighter Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant (1998), Paris ville invisible, which tries to cover much of the same ground through a succession of photographic essays. It’s available online in English…
Intersectionality has been a really influential framework in activist and feminist movements - these readings discuss the limits of this framework as a theory of oppression and identity. The critiques in the readings are fairly similar, Jasbir Puar's one is a bit dense, so it would be cool to unpack that one together. Anna Carastathis' has similar critiques of identity but more thoughts on feminist praxis. I'm including a blog post I wrote halfway through writing my thesis to include research/writing from an Aotearoa context. I hope it's not too much to read, I think if you read one, you'll get a gist of some of the others.
Readings:
“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory by Jasbir Puar
The invisibility of privilege: the critique of intersectional models of identity by Anna Carastathis
Migrating thoughts: rethinking intersectionality through (age)ncy by Meng Zhu
Homogenization proves a ready and effective remedy for the problems attending difference. The now-defunct media retailer Borders invented, I think, the insipid mash of music and books and movies described by Myles, and Amazon took it one step further, adding blenders and socks and toilet paper to the mix. Myles makes it easy to grasp the late-capitalist durée that fostered these developments, likening it to a sort of self-subsistent organism or excrescence—a wart detached from the body that somehow continues to grow, let’s say. Fax machines grew into smartphones and tablet PCs and all the other technologies that pipe zeroes and ones around the planet. The effect of all this untrammeled growth and consolidation is to recast us humans as carbon-based correlates of our real selves, which are stored on servers and sold to the highest bidder, our lumpy flesh reduced to nothing but walking and talking transmitters of information. This is why you often hear our contemporary moment described as the Information Age: It’s the invisible numeric substrate of what all of us, not just the astronauts, suck through straws.
An object-oriented reading of Eileen Myles, with reference to Manuel DeLanda. Everybody's on this train now!
Not acknowledging the hybrid nature of social mechanisms can be a source of misunderstanding and mystification in social science. For example, social activities in which means are successfully matched to ends are traditionally labeled as 'rational'. But this label obscures the fact that these activities involve problem solving skills of different kinds (not a single mental faculty like 'rationality') and that explaining the successful solution of practical problems will involve consideration of relevant causal events, such as physical interactions with the means to achieve a goal, not just calculations in an actors head. Similarly, when giving traditional routines as explanations one may reduce these to ritual and ceremony (and label these 'irrational'), but this obscures the fact that many inherited routines are in fact problem-solving procedures which have been slowly refined by successive generations. These practical routines may be overlaid by ritual symbolism, while at the same time being capable of leading to successful causal interactions with material entities, such as domesticated plants and soil.
Manuel DeLanda - A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (p. 24)
