Assemblage

The concept of assemblage (agencement in French) is rooted in the work of the theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in 1987. Additionally, it was the subject of further theoretical developments by Manuel DeLanda in 2016. Contrary to the notion of system or apparatus that generally implies some kind of organisation and regulation capacity, an assemblage is much looser and suggests; according to John Allen “the heterogeneous groupings of different parts without actually forming a coherent whole”. Typically, assemblages bring together various components that either play a material role (such as people, organisations, locales, objects and technologies) or an expressive one (such as beliefs, narratives, laws and symbols). The parts that are matched together may thus differ in nature and origin. Furthermore, the relations that link the parts of an assemblage together are not defined and made permanent by their functions or properties but emerge from arbitrary choices, alliances and co-functioning. The origins of an assemblage are thus historical and circumstantial. Finally, assemblages are always in a continuous process of movement and transformations insofar as they are subject to the contradictory forces of territorialisation and deterritorialization. In this perspective, territorialisation is the historical process of delineation and homogenization by which an assemblage temporarily stabilizes itself. In contrast, deterritorialization relates to the intervention, or appearance, of components that disturb established relations and destabilize an assemblage, eventually opening up new possibilities for reterritorialization.

In recent years, assemblage thinking has gained currency in the social sciences and humanities...