Assemblage

Definition

Assemblage (the Deleuzo-Guattarian machinic assemblage, agencement) names a "more or less open set of things that interrelate" — a proximity grouping of independent, heterogeneous terms that is "neither mechanical nor organic." As Deleuze and Parnet put it: "Mechanics is a system of closer and closer connections between dependent terms. The machine by contrast is a 'proximity' grouping between independent and heterogeneous terms." An assemblage operates by symbiosis (the wasp-orchid, the stirrup-horse-knight of the feudal assemblage), is "collective" from the outset, and is not reducible to its tools or technology. In the architectural use developed by Tim Gough, the assemblage is the positive, non-Cartesian ontology of architecture: the machinic interplay of people and place — a haecceity (Duns Scotus's "thisness," taken up by Deleuze) that is "the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate." The term is also central to the Deleuze-Guattarian distinction between the primary plane of consistency (haecceities, intensities, lines of flight) and the derived plane of organisation (forms and subjects).

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — the machinic assemblage, haecceity, plane of consistency vs. plane of organisation, and the transformation of Foucault's dispositif of power into "assemblages of desire."
• Tim Gough — the application of the assemblage to bread-and-butter architecture: "architecture is always in the middle," a machinic assemblage of people and place whose poetry inheres in it; the alloplastic stratum.

Related Concepts

• Flat Ontology — the assemblage is the concrete form of a flat/immanent (Spinozist) ontology that refuses the split between mind and body, high and low.
• Everyday Architecture — the bread-and-butter work of the office as a series of overlapping assemblages (legal, contractual, social, political).
• Thing-Ontology — the ontological status of the heterogeneous "particles" (things, people, institutions) that an assemblage brings into interplay.
• Deterritorialisation — the "line of flight" as the primary, creative element of the assemblage.
• Ecology — the assemblage as an ecology of interplaying elements rather than a determined mechanism.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architecture is Always in the Middle (Gough 2015) — the fullest statement: bread-and-butter architecture as machinic assemblage, haecceity, alloplastic stratum, plane of consistency vs. plane of organisation.
• Flows of Capitalism, Flows of Architecture (Gough 2018) — architecture as a multiplicity of flows and an "haecceity"; the "surplus value of a code."
• Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — the Deleuzian spatial thought in which the assemblage is situated.

Open Questions

• Can the assemblage ontology retain a critical-normative ground, or does its refusal of the high/low split and its transformation of power into desire risk neutralizing the very "evil" architectures (concentration camp, panopticon) Gough himself acknowledges?
• How does the assemblage concept — via the alloplastic, social stratum — escape the "overly physicalist, materialist and formal" architectural Deleuzism that Douglas Spencer critiques?