From examinations of prehistoric burial to understanding post-industrial spaces and heritage practices, the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is gaining increasing importance within archaeological thought. Their concept of 'assemblages' allows us to explore the past in new ways, by placing an emphasis on difference rather than similarity, on fluidity rather stasis and unpredictability rather than reproduceable models. Assemblage Thought and Archaeology applies the notion of assemblage to specific archaeological case studies, ranging from early urbanism in Mesopotamia (...) to 19th century military fortifications. It introduces the concept of assemblage within the context of the wider 'material turn' in the social sciences, examines its implications for studying materials and objects and urban settlements, and explores its consequences for the practice of archaeological research and heritage management. This innovative book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students of archaeological theory and researchers looking to understand this latest trend in archaeological thought, although the case studies will also have appeal to those whose work focusses on material culture, settlement archaeology and archaeological practice. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, (...) like collage, which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory into the contemporary biological context. I begin by laying out at some length what I take to be the defining features of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. I consider this to be a worthwhile endeavour in its own right, and so dedicate a large portion of this paper to producing a clear account of what it is that characterises an assemblage. Then I provide a reading of Deleuze and (...) Guattari's critical conception of the organism as a kind of assemblage typified by an especially restrictive, self-regulating form of functional integration. This restrictiveness comprises what I take to be the first pole of organic life. Then I reconsider Deleuze and Guattari's positive comments about ‘non-organic life’ in this context, as a feature internal to the organisation of organic life instead of something to be set against it. I theorise this mostly in terms of symbiosis. I take the significance of symbiosis, consisting in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘shared deterritorialisation’, to comprise the second pole of organic life. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of how Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage-based conception of organism might be thought to anticipate and accommodate some of the contemporary research on biological individuality. (shrink)

What do we mean when we talk of an 'assemblage' in contemporary theory? Any and every thing, or more precisely, any and every kind of collection of things, could now be called an assemblage. The constant and seemingly limitless expansion of the term's range of applications begs the question, if any and every kind of collection of things is an assemblage, then what advantage is there is in using this term and not some other term, or indeed (...) no term at all? What makes an assemblage an assemblage, and not some other kind of collection of things? This book advances beyond this impasse and offers practical help in thinking about and using assemblage theory for contemporary cultural and social research, in order to: - Answer the question: what is assemblage theory? - Explain why assemblage theory is necessary - Provide clear instructions on how to use assemblage theory The first book of it's kind, Ian Buchanan's guide maps the beginnings of a brand new field within the humanities. (shrink)

The article enters a heated debate about the ideals and organization of the postmodern left. Hardt and Negri, two key figures in this debate, claim that their concept of the multitude — a revolutionary, proletarian body that organizes singularities — integrates the insights of Deleuze and Lenin. I argue, however, that Deleuze anticipated and resisted a Leninist appropriation of his political theory. This essay challenges the widely accepted assumption that Hardt and Negri carry forth Deleuze’s legacy. At the same time, (...) the essay advocates Deleuze’s concept of left assemblages — protean political bodies working for freedom and equality — as a valuable but underappreciated contribution to the liberal-democratic tradition. (shrink)

Colonization has traditionally been studied as a monological and definitive period. This article seeks to problematize its analysis by means of the so-called ‘philosophy of desire’ and ‘rhizomatic thinking’, enriching them, in methodological terms, by the Actor-Network-Theory. In this vein, an alternative explanation of the colonial regime is offered by emphasizing how it assembled several worlds—Indigenous and Europeans—guided by a desiring-production that put originary accumulation before anything else; a standpoint that also enables a discussion about the network of colonial education (...) deployed in the Audiencia de Quito, which can be evidenced by a revision of some actions of the Augustinian order during the sixteenth century. In conclusion, education was deeply related to colonial assemblage that was continuously deterritorializing the ‘New World’ and the indigenous cultures that inhabited it. (shrink)

The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies. In this paper I draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore what happens to the drug using body when it is rethought as a machinic assemblage. Following an exploration of how the body of the drug user is put (...) together and stratified as a subject, and a careful manoeuvre through the bleak conception of the ‘drugged body’ provided by Deleuze and Guattari, I begin to map out some ethical alternatives. I argue that a body should, ultimately, be valued for what it can do (rather than what is essentially ‘is’), and that assemblages should be assessed in relation to their enabling, or blocking, of a body’s potential to become other. (shrink)

Eukaryotic mRNAs are monocistronic, and therefore mechanisms exist that coordinate the synthesis of multiprotein complexes in order to obtain proper stoichiometry at the appropriate intracellular locations. RNA‐binding proteins containing low‐complexity sequences are prone to generate liquid droplets via liquid‐liquid phase separation, and in this way create cytoplasmic assemblages of functionally related mRNAs. In a recent iCLIP study, we showed that the Drosophila RNA‐binding protein Imp, which exhibits a C‐terminal low‐complexity sequence, increases the formation of F‐actin by binding to 3′ untranslated (...) regions of mRNAs encoding components participating in F‐actin biogenesis. We hypothesize that phase transition is a mechanism the cell employs to increase the local mRNA concentration considerably, and in this way synchronize protein production in cytoplasmic territories, as discussed in the present review. (shrink)

Using Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007), this article illustrates how an affective mode of address is encouraged when one attends to the ways in which on-screen cinematic audio-visual spectacles are produced through the interaction of different bodies on-screen. Affective cinematic encounters open up other ways of understanding the female body as productive assemblages of everyday affective interactions and relationalities with other bodies within material culture. Particularly, I demonstrate an affective mode of address that attends to the interaction of cinematic objects (...) and how they are constructed, arranged, and engaged with on-screen to reveal hidden dynamics to characters’ relationship and overarching narratives off-screen. (shrink)

This essay explores the gendered lifestyle of early twentieth-century physics and chemistry and shows how that way of life was produced through linking science and home. In 1905, the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius married Maja Johansson and established a scientific household at the Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry in Stockholm. He created a productive context for research in which ideas about marriage and family were pivotal. He also socialized in similar scientific sites abroad. This essay displays how scholars in (...) the international community circulated the gendered lifestyle through frequent travel and by reproducing gendered behavior. Everywhere, husbands and wives were expected to perform distinct duties. Shared performances created loyalties across national divides. The essay thus situates the physical sciences at the turn of the twentieth century in a bourgeois gender ideology. Moreover, it argues that the gendered lifestyle was not external to knowledge making but, rather, foundational to laboratory life. A legitimate and culturally intelligible lifestyle produced the trust and support needed for collaboration. In addition, it enabled access to prestigious facilities for Svante Arrhenius, ultimately securing his position in international physical chemistry. (shrink)

Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is to show that the political assemblage should be productively distinguished from both the limiting concepts of proceduralist and identitarian politics. One can broadly define (...) proceduralist politics as being grounded in autonomous individuals pursuing their own self-interests under the standardized rules of the political game. Identitarian politics is a mode of communitarian... (shrink)

Each of the antiretroviral drugs that are currently used to stop the progression of HIV infection causes its own specific side effects. Despite the expansion, multiplication, and simplification of treatment options over the past decade, side effects continue to affect people living with HIV. Yet, we see a clear disconnect between the way side effects are normalized, routinized, and framed in clinical practice and the way they are experienced by people living with HIV. This paper builds on the premise that (...) new approaches are needed to understand side effects in a manner that is more reflective of the subjective accounts of people living with HIV. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, it offers an original application of the theory of ‘assemblage’. This theory offers a new way of theorizing side effects, and ultimately the relationship between the body and antiretroviral drugs (as technologies). Combining theory with examples derived from empirical data, we examine the multiple ways in which the body connects not only to the drugs but also to people, things, and systems. Our objective is to illustrate how this theory dares us to think differently about side effects and allows us to originally (re)think the experience of taking antiretroviral drugs. (shrink)

This article examines algorithmic content moderation, using the moderation of violent extremist content as a specific case. In recent years, algorithms have increasingly been mobilized to perform essential moderation functions for online social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, including limiting the proliferation of extremist speech. Drawing on Katherine Hayles’ concept of “cognitive assemblages” and the Critical Security Studies literature, we show how algorithmic regulation operates within larger assemblages of humans and non-humans to influence the surveillance and regulation (...) of information flows. We argue that the dynamics of algorithmic regulation are more liquid, cobbled together and distributed than it appears. It is characterized by a set of shifting human and machine entities, which mix traditional surveillance methods with more sophisticated tools, and whose linkages and interactions are transient. The processes that enable the consolidation of knowledge about risky profiles and contents are, therefore, collective and distributed among humans and machines. This allows us to argue that the cognitive assemblages involved in content moderation become a cobbled space of preemptive calculation. (shrink)

Small, mundane technologies, such as stethoscopes, medicinal bottles, labels, cleaning and dispensing equipment, are integral to the practice of western herbal medicine in the UK. A focus on such technologies reveals the dynamic character and porousness of medical systems and allows us to identify cultural interactions. In this photo essay, based on long-term anthropological research, I explore an assemblage of everyday technologies used by WHM practitioners and the ways in which these technologies contribute to shaping diagnostic stories, to performing (...) medical legitimacy and invoking herbal traditions. The biomedical, herbal and domestic technologies-in-use come into view as vibrant and dynamic objects with highly contingent meanings and identities. Their absorption into this non-biomedical therapy supports the performance of medical legitimacy, authority, tradition and professionalism, while the use of everyday domestic objects may signal female-coded practices of care. This demonstrates the adaptability of a medical practice situated at the margin of mainstream healthcare and subject to ongoing technological and ideological influence. The strategic integration of this assemblage of everyday technologies into WHM contributes, I suggest, to evoking a competent, trustworthy and time-honoured medical practice, which is simultaneously inscribed with multiple tensions, ambiguities and contestations. (shrink)

Chemicals have penetrated everyday lives of men who have sex with men as never before, along with new online and mobile technologies used to seek pleasures and connections. Poststructuralist (including queer) explorations of these new intensities show how bodies exist in the form of (political) surfaces able to connect with other bodies and with other objects where they may find/create a function (e.g., reproduce or disrupt hegemonies). This federally funded netnographic study explored how a variety of chemicals such as recreational (...) drugs, pharmaceuticals and steroids are contributing to the construction of gay, bisexual and other men having sex with men (GBMSM) communities and their interactions with idealized masculinities in the age of increasing technology. Five major thematic categories emerged from our analysis: (1) assembling bodies and technologies, (2) becoming orgiastic, (3) experiencing stigma, (4) becoming machinic and (5) negotiating practices. Our analysis explores how and why GBMSM pursue excesses of pleasure and connection through the assemblages they make with sexualized drug use, online platforms and other men. (shrink)

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... (shrink)

In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this (...) posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound, how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently. (shrink)

In this article I take the notion of the mobility assemblage as a theoretical lens through which I consider entanglements between refugee and migrant women on the move, intense experiences of gendered labour, and affective encounters in crossing borders and following lines of flight. The analysis revolves around the life-story of a young refugee woman, who recounts her experiences of travelling to Greece. What emerges from her narrative is a whirl of lines of flight that deterritorialize her from patriarchal (...) regimes, harsh border practices, labour exploitation and the pain of separation on a plane of remaking her present and reimagining her future. (shrink)

The touristic place provides discourses that are worth examining as to which how the management of the site, its internal contestation and development, as well as experiences of its visitors. Examining a heritage of the ancient Majapahit kingdom in Java, this article discusses the assemblage of tourism and religious sites and the extent the site serves as a reservoir for interreligious dialog in contemporary Indonesia. It tries to point out how interreligious dialogue is at work in this site and (...) how surrounding communities participate and respond to the perseverance of the site. Finally, accentuating Swidler’s theory of dialogues, this paper looks at the practice of interreligious dialogue at a touristic site and how religious harmony is negotiated by Buddhist and Muslim through the site and the construction of “the other” by both religious communities. (shrink)

This paper seeks to bypass assumptions that researchers in critical algorithmic studies and urban studies find it difficult to study algorithmic systems due to their black-boxed nature. In addition, it seeks to work against the assumption that advocating for transparency in algorithms is, therefore, the key for achieving an enhanced understanding of the role of algorithmic technologies on modern life. Drawing on applied assemblage thinking via the concept of the urban assemblage, I demonstrate how the notion of urban (...) assemblage can work as an alternative way to explore the distributed and potential dimensions of what has been termed as Urban AI phenomena. Rather than seeing Urban AI phenomena as black-boxed, unknown and opaque, the notion of urban assemblage locates such entities within the wider contests of the city: urban places, communities and politics, where human-algorithmic relationships gather and disperse. In addition, this approach focuses on the potentialities of Urban AI phenomena—how algorithmic systems can operate differently through different aspects of the city—which can be seen to manifest new forms of resistance, collective actions and democracy. I use a case study of an algorithmic system designed to facilitate digital democracy—vTaiwan—to exemplify how assemblage methodology foregrounds the role of cities as spaces and places for exploring the democratic possibilities of algorithmic systems. This paper concludes with discussion of how the assemblage methodology contributes to serve as a bridge between critical algorithm studies and recent studies of platform urbanism. (shrink)

Food and life are intimately entangled. To grasp the underlying complexity of this seemingly simple statement, this article first introduces the approach to food/eating as an assemblage enacted by various heterogeneous components, and further develops it by engaging with actor network theory and material semiotics. Thereafter the focus turns to ‘entanglement’, as inspired by quantum physics, to elicit the basic dynamics of the entanglement of food and more-than-human beings, conceived of as involving mutual and differential becomings within and among (...) assemblages. The article illustrates these entangled becomings by drawing upon examples from Sri Lanka, which in an intercultural philosophical fashion serve to establish an articulation (in the sense of a connection) between the proposed abstract approach to food and some basic premises of Buddhism and Ayurveda, a South Asian health system. Overall, the article crafts a conceptual toolbox and performs ontological groundwork wherein food and human beings as entangled assemblages provide a productive, refined, and sensitive research apparatus for the intimate study of more-than-human life and organization while also spurring novel theorizations through food/eating. (shrink)

Jacques Rancière, it seems to me, is right: politics are rare. Democratic political action makes manifest the part that has no part—not as a protest against the policing order but its rejection through the affirmation of the equality of speaking beings. How can such an affirmation be supported? How can it endure? Perhaps affirming this democratic commitment can find, through the notion of assemblages, an ally, a space encouraging its manifestation and eluding capture by that which speaks in its name (...) and allots it its place. But what notion of assemblages will best serve this democratic commitment? Manual DeLanda’s theoretical development of the notion first... (shrink)

Many non-heteronormative Malaysian men find themselves on the receiving end of political, socio-cultural, and religious condemnations of their sexual identifyings and expressions. Their lived realities are often considered invalid, including from religious and theological perspectives. This article is a queer socio-theological project that examines the lived realities of six non-heteronormative Malaysian men who speak up and talk back on their sexualities and spiritual sensibilities. Using a Constructivist Grounded Theory Methodology, and aided by the theological musings of Marcella Althaus-Reid and a (...) document of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences as analytical frameworks, this article analyzes and theologizes the complex processes of transcendent/desire, or negotiations of the “Profoundly More” and sexuality in the narratives of these men. This article suggests that transcendent/desire can be imaginatively assembled in three interrelated forms: as embodied connections with the transcendent; as a vocation; and as an imperative to flourish. (shrink)

Contemporary changes in the domain of knowledge production are usually seen as posing significant challenges to ‘the University’. This paper argues against the framing of the university as an ideal-type, and considers epistemic gains from treating universities as assemblages of different functions, actors and relations. It contrasts this with the concept of ‘unbundling’, using two recent cases of controversies around academics’ engagement on social media to show how, rather than having clearly delineated limits, social entities become ‘territorialised’ through boundary disputes. (...) The conclusion extends this discussion to the production of knowledge about social objects in general. (shrink)

Some variants of Object-Oriented Ontology define entities in terms of their powers. Such variants are rooted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “machinic assemblages”. This article asks whether such entities can be metaphysical primitives with regard to similarity and change. This is the case if no further existents are needed to account for these two features of reality. According to Levi Bryant’s machine-oriented ontology, entities defined in terms of powers are such primitives. According to Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage (...) theory, they are not. DeLanda therefore holds that further metaphysical primitives must exist. After reconstructing the key features of the theories involved, I argue that Bryant’s position is ultimately more parsimonious, and that DeLanda’s theory confuses epistemological models with ontological realities. (shrink)

In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they are made entirely of glass. Combining new documentary evidence, funded by the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the research presented here uncovers their extraordinary significance to the global extension of (...) nineteenth century capitalism through the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy; the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker, Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising but significant connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass, this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market capitalism, and how the means of production was transformed in vitreous proportions. (shrink)

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in information and computer science and reinterpret their debates to develop a critical intervention into the (...) public controversies concerning data-driven security and digital surveillance. The paper offers a two-pronged contribution: on the one hand, we challenge the credibility of security professionals’ discourses in light of the knowledge that they supposedly mobilize; on the other, we argue for a series of conceptual moves around data, human–computer relations, and algorithms to address some of the limitations of existing engagements with the Big Data-security assemblage. (shrink)

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a (...) break with the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin. (shrink)