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Deleuze and Guattari use a lobster to illustrate the "double pincered" fitting of segments of content with segments of expression performed by the double articulation of the assemblage.[1]

An assemblage (French agencement; sometimes translated as "arrangement") is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their books Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-80) and Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature (1975).[2] In their critical "schizoanalytic" theory, the concept of the assemblage replaces the Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of the complex and the drive.[3] Desire, they claim, is determined by assemblages.[4] The assemblage offers a theoretical means to elaborate the multiple and collective dimensions of our unconscious: "not ego as subject", Deleuze explains, but rather "these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements"[5] The assemblage is also used more broadly in their work to analyze a wide range of social, historical, cultural and psychological phenomena; examples include the assemblages of the State apparatus and the war machine, the despotic assemblage and the authoritarian assemblage, courtship assemblages, including that of courtly love, game assemblages, the classical, romantic and modern assemblages of music, assemblages formed by the novels of Beckett, Kafka and Proust, both a masochist's and Little Hans' "becoming-horse" assemblages, the La Borde psychiatric clinic, and the feudal assemblage.[6] Among others, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Manuel de Landa have used the concept in their writings.

Definition of an assemblage

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Deleuze defines an assemblage as "a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them." Its terms are unified only through their "co-functioning" together.[7]

An assemblage is arranged along an horizontal and a vertical axis. A distinction between "expression" and "content" forms two segments that intersect along the horizontal axis of an assemblage.[8] These segments are each, themselves, multiplicities: "'discursive multiplicities' of expression and 'nondiscursive multiplicities' of content."[9] This conception of the horizontal axis of the assemblage relates both to the semiotics of Louis Hjelmslev, from whom Deleuze and Guattari take the distinction between content and expression, and to Michel Foucault's theory of discourse.[10] In an assemblage (in contrast to the "strata," or what Foucault calls "historical formations"), expression forms a semiotic system, which they term a "regime of signs," while content forms a "pragmatic system", an ensemble of interacting actions and passions.[11]

Along its horizontal axis, an assemblage intertwines the relations of a regime of signs with a state of forces.[12] "of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another" Deleuze and Guattari call the discursive multiplicities of expression a "collective assemblage of enunciation," while the non-discursive multiplicities of content are referred to as a "machinic assemblage of bodies."[13]

stabilize / carry away

Not signifier/signified, not superstructure/base (nor cause and effect?)-> flat.

What do we mean by flat? -> Interactions. Having established semiotic/pragmatic, etc. bifurcation, need to explain their theory of relation between matter and signs - interchangeable. Then add: relates to Nietzschean active/passive, will to power, etc. Massumi's clarification: A power relation determines which is which. The Event (The Logic of Sense). Perspectives. Fractal & non-totalizing.

Caveat: need to reconcile matter-sign ideas with horizontal/vertical axis idea. Matter-sign interaction is the function of the diagram. (Peirce). (Collect quotations for particle-sign interactions on the talk page that accompanies this article)

Foucault's visibilities. Articulated with Bergson in Cinema books.

Its vertical axis "has two poles or vectors":

Insofar as form content/expression, they envelop a territorality (1980, 555).

[O]ne vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differentiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in reciprocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that conjugate." (1980, 160)

Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies--a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal territories and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the Crusades.[14]

References

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  1. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 74-5). The original illustration appears on p.44.
  2. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1972), (1975), and (1980). Agencement is translated as "arrangement" in Guattari (1984).
  3. ^ Guattari (1984, 288) and Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 253, 286). The schizoanalytic theory of desiring-production is most fully elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Œdipus (1972).
  4. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 253).
  5. ^ Deleuze (xxxx, 275-6; trans. modified).
  6. ^ See Deleuze and Guattari (1980, ); for Guattari's identification of La Borde clinic as an assemblage, see Guattari (1984, 161).
  7. ^ Deleuze and Parnet (1977, 69).
  8. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 97-8).
  9. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 74).
  10. ^ Deleuze provides an analysis of Foucault's theory of discourse in his Foucault (1986).
  11. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 555); on the strata as historical formation, see Deleuze (1986, 47-69).
  12. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 79).
  13. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 97-8).
  14. ^ Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 98).

Sources

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  • Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1977. Dialogues II.
  • Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1972. Anti-Œdipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476953.
  • ---. 1975. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature 30. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0816615152.
  • ---. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945.
  • Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 0140551603.
  • ---. 1992. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. Trans. of Chaosmose. Paris: Editions Galilee. ISBN 0909952256.
  • ---. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270198.
  • ---. 1996. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270309.
  • Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Swerve editions. Cambridge, USA and London: MIT. ISBN 0262631431.
  • Venn, Couze. 2006. "A Note on Assemblage." Theory, Culture & Society.


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