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).

A second, art-historical sense must be distinguished from this ontological one. Assemblage is also the name of the twentieth-century art practice descending from Duchamp's readymades: the combination of found, ordinary objects into artworks. In Meninato's account, "with the notion of the assemblage, Duchamp introduced an alternative approximation to what constitutes the realization of interior space and the ambiguous status of architectural elements, where the emphasis is placed in metaphorical and allegorical associations rather than formal or spatial configurations" — the art-historical assemblage as one of the avenues from which installation art and the tableau descend. Where the Deleuzian assemblage is an ontology (what anything is: a proximity grouping), the art-historical assemblage is a practice (a displacement-and-combination of ordinary objects); they meet in the anti-organic premise that meaning arises from arrangement and interrelation, not from fabricated new form. This wiki treats the Deleuzian sense as primary and the art-historical sense through readymade and tableau.

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.
• Kim Dovey — the place-theoretical application and the concept's most systematic architectural-urbanist rendering: place as territorialized assemblage ("All places are assemblages"), the tetravalence (materiality/expression × territorialization/deterritorialization) applied to streets, suburbs, kampungs and courthouses; assemblage theory as the escape from "the reduction of place to text, to materiality or to subjective experience" (2010).

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.
• Readymade — the art-historical assemblage's unit operation (Duchamp's displaced ordinary object); the tableau's generalization of it to scene-scale.
• Add-on — the prefab assemblage: su11's add-ons as "a habitable puzzle consisting of several functions, including object, furniture, and space" — interchangeable heterogeneous units combined by the homeowner; the Composite House "an equalization of all elements."
• 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 of the Deleuzian sense: 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.
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the art-historical sense: Duchamp's assemblage as "an alternative approximation to what constitutes the realization of interior space… where the emphasis is placed in metaphorical and allegorical associations rather than formal or spatial configurations"; the assemblage-to-tableau-to-installation-art lineage; the mimetic tactics ("displacement, rotation, fragmentation, or dislocation of ordinary objects") offered to interior architecture and adaptive reuse. See readymade, tableau.
• Inside the prefab house (Schneiderman 2018) — the prefab assemblage: the chapter's own term for its unit-concepts — Fuller's Dymaxion Bathroom as "an early example of a complete interior prefabricated assemblage"; the three case houses considering "the notion of the prefabricated assemblage by means of programmed interior elements and space-making devices"; su11's add-ons "as a habitable puzzle consisting of several functions, including object, furniture, and space," interchangeable and combined by the homeowner, culminating in "composite elements of interior, furniture, structure, and exterior" and "an equalization of all elements." Where Meninato's assemblage re-means displaced objects, Schneiderman's assembles manufactured ones — the non-hierarchical arrangement realized industrially. See add-on, prefab-interior.
• Death of the architect (Berger 2018) — the assemblage in the appropriation toolbox: with collage, bricolage, montage, and pastiche, one of the art techniques interior architecture "could apply and appropriate" — named among the practices that "unsettled our preconceived notion of things/objects and their place in time." See appropriation, readymade.
• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the assemblage's interior-design application, preceding Gough by fourteen years: the interior defined in the assemblage vocabulary — "the interior concerns 'capacities to affect,' rather than it being defined or described by fixed moments or things such as geometry, order, artifacts and objects. But it becomes events, 'in assemblages that are inseparable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life'" (Deleuze & Guattari quoted, p. 343); the assemblage's terms enumerated domestically — "The desk and reading, the room and anger, the door and coming and going, the threshold and pausing" (p. 341); and the body from which the concept is extended — the Deleuze-Guattari body "not in terms of binary opposites but as a 'discontinuous, non-totalisable series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, speeds and durations,' through 'the body without organs'" (p. 340, via Grosz). Where Gough assembles architecture from flows and Meninato from displaced objects, Taylor assembles the interior from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life — the assemblage as the interior's ontology and the ground of the haecceity-thesis ("Could interior be thought of as haecceity?"). See haecceity, becoming-interior, event-space.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the assemblage's culture-scale form, assembled from Lefebvre: "Culture is a complex aggregate of meanings, complexly articulated to an equally complex aggregate of texts (thought broadly), and both in turn complexly articulated to yet another complex aggregate of practices" (p. 394, "by way of" Lefebvre's The Production of Space, note 14) — the culture-assemblage as triple aggregate (meanings, texts, practices), each "complexly articulated" to the others; and its territorial vocation: "Cultures are ways of territorializing, the ways one makes oneself at home," existing "only in their expressions (and their repetition)," so that "a culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations" (p. 394) — the assemblage's non-reducibility ("Culture is judged by its operations, not by the possession of products," de Certeau & Giard quoted p. 394) carried to the social scale. Where Gough assembles architecture and Taylor the interior, Wise assembles culture — meanings, texts and practices articulated into the ways one territorializes. See home, milieu, everyday-life.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's place-theoretical systematization and this page's most sustained urban application: "In the most general sense an 'assemblage' is a whole 'whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts' (De Landa 2006: 5). It is perhaps best seen as a 'state of affairs' in contrast to a 'thing'" (p. 16); the street worked example — "It is the relations of buildings–sidewalk–roadway; the flows of traffic, people and goods; the inter-connections of public to private space, and of this street to the city, that make it a 'street'" — "All places are assemblages" (p. 16); the two axes (materiality/expression; territorialization/deterritorialization) and the claim that "What we call 'sense of place' is a phenomenon that connects or spans this materiality/expression dimension; it cannot be reduced to an essence nor to social construction" (pp. 16–17); assemblage theory as the refusal of "all forms of reductionism – both the reduction to essences and reduction to text" (p. 16); the Desire section reading power through flows of desire beyond Foucault (p. 14); the abstract machine/diagram (the shopping mall's dumb-bell) and Alexander's pattern language reclaimed as proto-assemblage theory (pp. 27–28); the Pentagon/WTC resilience example ("there is no one-to-one mapping of the social onto the spatial," p. 21); and the whole case-study apparatus (suburbs, kampung, Koolhaas, courthouses, heroin geographies, Monas, Bangkok) as the assemblage-method's demonstration that "places are cases." See becoming, place-identity, spatial-segmentarity, informal-urbanism.
• source-notes/erdman-2018-altered-estates

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?
• Dovey's synthesis proposal — "The rules of the habitus can be read as codes of the assemblage" (p. 7) — couples this page to habitus: Deleuze explains "how things change" while Bourdieu explains "why they do not." Can the two be integrated into one theory of place, or does the couplet (like Dovey's own hedge) merely park the contradiction?