Sensorial Assemblages: Affect, Memory and Temporality in

Assemblage Thinking

Yannis Hamilakis

Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of assemblage, but in more recent years they
have started problematizing it in interesting and innovative ways, beyond its common con-
notations of aggregation. Sociologists such as Manuel DeLanda and political philosophers
such as Jane Bennett have been key influences in this move. These authors had adapted and
modified the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In this article, an assemblage of
sorts itself, I propose that we need to return to that original Deleuzian body of thinking and
explore its richness further. Assemblages, temporary and deliberate heterogeneous arrange-
ments of material and immaterial elements, are about the relationship of in-betweenness.
I further suggest that sensoriality and affectivity, memory and multi-temporality are key
features of assemblage thinking, and that assemblages also imply certain political effects.
The omission of these features in the archaeological treatments of the concept may lead to
mechanistic reincarnations of systems thinking, thus depriving the concept of its poten-
tial. Finally, I explore these ideas by considering communal eating and feasting events as
powerful sensorial assemblages.

In May 2014, a rather provocative and extremely in- in 1927, was abandoned and out of use since 2004,
teresting art installation was staged in Brooklyn, New and was to be demolished soon after the end of the
York: a series of sugar sculptures, created by the artist exhibition. But the sensorial memory of its heyday
Kara Walker and entitled A Subtlety or the Marvelous was still very much present and strong, as the open-
Sugar Baby. The main exhibit was a white, sugar- ing line from the New York Times article indicated. In-
coated sculpture of a black woman on her knees, deed, before you even entered the building, you were
stretching 75 feet, and clearly imitating an Egyptian engulfed by its olfactory history, and you could see
sphinx (Fig. 1). The woman was depicted completely inside it the molasses dripping from the walls. Dur-
naked apart from the headscarf, which identified her ing the show, the small black sugar sculptures were
as a black, female manual worker. Around it, there slowly and gradually melting, leaving the sticky sub-
were some smaller sugar sculptures of black children, stance on the hands of the visitors.
carrying bananas and baskets (Fig. 2). The artist stated This powerful art piece works at different reg-
that the inspiration came from the miniature sugar isters: the sensorial and affective, the historical, the
sculptures that used to accompany royal and aristo- political. It is a statement about the histories of west-
cratic medieval feasts (called subtleties) and which ern taste, and their entanglement with the Caribbean
were consumed by the participants (Mintz 1985). plantations, with colonialism and slavery; it is also
When the New York Times reported on this ex- about the racial undertones of our desire for white,
hibit, they opened their story with the phrase [T]he refined sugar. It evokes, in that sense, the work of an-
smell hits you first: sweet but with an acrid edge, like thropologists such as Sidney Mintz (1985), who, in his
a thousand burned marshmallows.1 This is because classic study on sugar, demonstrated the culinary and
the installation was staged at Dominos disused sugar sensorial basis of western colonialism. At the same
refinery, on the Brooklyn waterfront. The factory, built time, the whiteness of the sculpture plays with our

Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27:1, 169182 

C 2017 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

doi:10.1017/S0959774316000676 Received 17 February 2016; Accepted 1 November 2016; Revised 31 October 2016

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 Yannis Hamilakis

Figure 1. (Colour online) Kara Walkers A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino Sugar Factory,
Brooklyn, 2014. (Photograph: Victoria L. Valentine, culturetype.com)

preconceived notions of high civilization as embod- grand size, and above all its strong olfactory emis-
ied in Greco-Roman white marble, adding, however, sions, the black female artist, the visitors to the ex-
a further twist by shaping this piece as an Egyptian hibition, but also the sensorially evoked memories of
sphinx. And yet, walk around the sculpture and you slavery, colonialism, and Euro-centrism, and of the
realize that the artist wanted also to allude to the various originary pasts, often cited and recalled in
gender and sexual dimensions of slavery, colonialism popular identity discourses and material landmarks:
and consumption, as well as the mythologization and from the white marble of Greco-Roman civilization to
the sexualized objectification of black women today the ambivalence of Egypt and Egyptomanias, to the
(Fig. 1). white memorials in the Washington (DC) Mall. These
There is much more that can be said about this materially induced evocations were deliberately as-
striking work, but I have referred to it here by way of sembled by the artist and her team, but undoubtedly
introduction because it can be seen as a potent assem- in that assemblage several components would have
blage which at the same time evokes, with is force- emerged involuntarily, and would have become part
ful materiality, the central points of this article: that a of that temporary arrangement: the involuntary mem-
fundamental property of all assemblages is their sen- ories and associations of the people who worked for
sorial and affective import; that assemblages are ar- it, and the various memories of the audience, for ex-
rangements of material and immaterial entities; and ample. And through the new memories of the experi-
that they are also about material and sensorial mem- ence, both the material (such as the photos taken) and
ory, as well as about the engendering of diverse tem- the immaterial, this assemblage would have enabled
poralities; and finally, that assemblages necessitate new assemblages to emerge elsewhere, well after the
the deliberate agency and intervention of social ac- original sculptures would have melted away, and the
tors. In the case of this installation, the assemblage building been demolished. I will return to this work
was composed of the sugar sculptures, the building later on, but before that I will elaborate on the key fea-
of the sugar refinery with its industrial texture, its tures of assemblages mentioned above. Finally, I will

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 Sensorial Assemblages

Figure 2. (Colour online) Kara Walkers A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino Sugar Factory,
Brooklyn, 2014. (Photograph: Cat Laine, paintedfoot.com)

present a case study from Bronze Age Crete, showing D&Gs work, the assemblage is closely linked to other
how such an understanding of the concept can bear concepts, such as the rhizome, which embodies non-
fruit. genealogical, non-hierarchical thinking, juxtaposed to
the arboreal mode of thought (Deleuze & Guattari
From assemblage theory to assemblage thinking: 1987, 328), or the idea of the event, the rupture that
back to Deleuze is brought about by the coexistence and articulation
of heterogeneous elements. In other words, the as-
As Hamilakis and Jones claim in the introduction to semblage was already in its inception, an assemblage
this thematic issue, many recent archaeological ren- of concepts. It is upon us to piece together a loose,
derings and uses of the concept of assemblage follow provisional definition from several fragments, single-
mostly DeLandas (e.g. 2006) assemblage theory and authored and co-authored books, interviews and so
Bennetts (2010) reincarnation of the idea. It will be on, and explore the various evolving deployments of
worth, however, going back to the original discussion the idea, whether it is in studies on Kafka, in dis-
on the assemblage by Deleuze and Guattari (hence- cussions of psychoanalysis, or in treatments on the
forth D&G). Obviously, this is my own, situated read- becoming-animal: the immanent force, the potential-
ing of their work, filtered through positions I have ity, the drive (or, as I explain below, the desire) that
developed on sensoriality, affectivity and temporal- enables a being to become a multiplicity, an assem-
ity over the years (see, in particular, Hamilakis 2013). blage, not by filiation nor by imitation, but by alliance
Nowhere in D&Gs oeuvre is there a very clear defini- (Deleuze & Guattari 1987, 239; see also Viveiros de
tion of the concept, and this is deliberate. Such an act Castro 2014, 16061).
would have been out of step with the overall message Here are some relevant passages:
of their whole work, which, time and again, invites What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is
us to start from the middle and avoid easy and clear- made up of many heterogeneous terms and which
cut answers. It is also important to remember that, in establishes liaisons, relations between them, across

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 Yannis Hamilakis

ages, sexes and reignsdifferent natures. Thus, the can replace the idea of behavior, and thus with re-
assemblages only unity is that of co-functioning spect to the idea of assemblage, the nature-culture
It is never filiations which are important, but al- distinction no longer matters But an assemblage
liances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of de- is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous
scent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. Magi- elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position,
cians are well aware of this. An animal is defined less etc., both natural and artificial elements. The prob-
by its genus, its species, its organs, and its functions, lem is one of consistency or coherence, and it is
than by the assemblages into which it enters. Take an prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take
assemblage of the type man-animal-manufactured on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among
object: MAN-HORSE-STIRRUP. Technologies have very different things, an intensive continuity can be
explained that the stirrup made possible a new mil- found. (Deleuze 2007, 179)
itary unity in giving the knight lateral stability
This is a new man-animal symbiosis, a new assem- Multiplicity and heterogeneity emerge as key features
blage of war, defined by its degree of power or free- of assemblages, therefore. They are arrangements of
dom, its affects, its circulations of affects: what a set interpenetrating bodiesvariously conceivedthat
of bodies is capable of. Man and the animal enter co-function and cohere: the pollinating insect and the
into a new relationship, one changes no less than the flower, the wasp and the orchid, is an example that is
other, the battlefield is filled with a new type of af- often used by D&G to illustrate an assemblage. Their
fects In the case of the stirrup, it was the grant of
co-functioning is at least partly achieved because as-
land, linked to the beneficiarys obligation to serve
semblages enact distinctive spatialities, plateaus of in-
on horseback, which was to impose the new cav-
alry and harness the tool in the complex assemblage
tensity (a term borrowed from Bateson: Deleuze &
of feudalism The feudal machine combines new Guattari 1987, 212; Shaw 2015): self-vibrating entities
relationships with earth, war, the animal, but also that do not lead to a climactic end. For example, D&G
with culture and games (tournaments), with woman describe their book as a rhizomatic structure that is
(courtly love); all sorts of fluxes enter into conjunc- composed of a thousand plateaus.
tion. How can the assemblage be refused the name I would argue, however, that there are three fur-
it deserves, desire? (Deleuze & Parnet 1987, 6970) ther features of assemblages which hold special im-
The minimum real unit is not the idea, the concept or portance, and which we have, especially in archae-
the signifier but the assemblage. It is always an assem- ology, mostly overlooked: the affective/sensorial, the
blage which produces utterances The utterance mnemonic/temporal, and the political. These should
is the product of an assemblagewhich is always not be seen as independent, but rather as inter-
collective which brings into play within us and out- connected. These are also the features that I consider
side us, populations, multiplicities, territories, be- essential for a reconfigured, relational archaeology. I
comings, affects, events The difficult part is mak- will say a few words on each, below.
ing all the elements of a non-homogenous set con-
verge, making them function together. Structures
i) The affective/sensorial
are linked to conditions of homogeneity, but assem-
blages are not. The assemblage is co-functioning, it In D&Gs thinking, every assemblage is simultane-
is sympathy, symbiosis Sympathy is not a vague ously and inseparably a machinic assemblage and an
feeling of respect or of spiritual participation: on the assemblage of enunciation (Deleuze & Guattari 1987,
contrary, it is the exertion or the penetration of bod- 555). I read this to mean that, in addition to the ma-
ies, hatred or love Bodies may be physical, biolog- terial components that are brought together and ar-
ical, psychic, social, verbal: they are always bodies or ranged to produce a co-functioning entity, there are
corpora. (Deleuze & Parnet 1987, 512) other components, which are seemingly immaterial,
In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, var- but which require materiality to be enacted: I am refer-
ious combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you ring to discourses, memories and affects, not just lin-
also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole guistic utterances and signs. As the authors say else-
regimes of signs. The relations between the two are where, there is no machinic assemblage that is not a
pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not social assemblage of desire, no social assemblage of
by productive forces and ideology, but by hodge- desire that is not a collective assemblage of enuncia-
podges and verdicts. Hodgepodges are combina- tion (Deleuze & Guattari 1986, 82). And in one of the
tions of interpenetrating bodies. (Deleuze 2007, 177) passages above they go so far as to say that desire
There are two ways to suppress or attenuate the dis- can be taken as the true name of the assemblage.
tinction between nature and culture. The first is to It is clear that desire is a key term in the con-
liken animal behavior to human behavior But stitution of assemblages; in fact, desiring machines
what we are saying is that the idea of assemblages (machines in the sense of deliberate arrangements,

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 Sensorial Assemblages

configurations) was the name that D&G gave to experiential field. Needless to say that sensorial expe-
the concept in its initial formulation in Anti-Oidipus rience, perceived as an affective force, has been cen-
(Deleuze & Guattari 1983). Their concept of desire is tral to Deleuzian thinking, as testified by the unusual
different from our contemporary, common-sense one, move for a philosopher to dedicate two volumes to the
which emphasizes lack, longing for something miss- perceptual and affective/sensorial modality of cin-
ing; they rather see desire as production (cf. Buchanan ema (Deleuze 1986; 1989).
2011), as a drive, a force with real, actual effects in
the world. This productive force of desire, a force that ii) The mnemonic/temporal
leads to becomings and emergences, is clearly con- Another key element of the assemblage in addition to
nected with the Spinozan idea of affect, the affections affectivity and sensoriality is memory, and the tem-
of the body by which the bodys power of acting is poral as mnemonic experience. Much has been writ-
increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at ten on social and material memory in archaeology re-
the same time, the ideas of these affections (Spinoza cently, and there is no need to elaborate at length here
1996, 70). Spinoza lists desire (as drive) first in his (e.g. Hamilakis 2013; Jones 2007; Olivier 2011; van
catalogue of affects, together with various emotions Dyke & Alcock 2003). My comments, however, will
(1996, 10412). Affect thus connects agency with sen- address memory as temporality, material remember-
sorial and emotive impact. ing and forgetting as a way of conceptualizing time
The anti-Cartesian thought of Spinoza has been through materiality. More specifically, I want to ask:
a key influence for Deleuze, who declared (1988, 17) what kind of temporal relationships does the assem-
that Spinoza offers philosophers a new model: the blage enact, and what does this mean for our own, ar-
body. For him, in Spinozas thought, bodies and be- chaeological notions of temporality?
ings are defined primarily by their capacity to af- The discussion on archaeology and temporality
fect and be affected, not by any formal characteristics has recently moved beyond our chronometric, lin-
(Deleuze 1988, 45). I have argued elsewhere (Hami- ear time, beyond even the time perspectivism that
lakis 2013) that sensoriality cannot be separated from some scholars have been advocating (e.g. Bailey 2007),
affectivity: in other words, that the primary role of the and certainly beyond the linear-versus-cyclical time
senses is not to allow the organic body to operate, but of some anthropological approaches (cf. Lucas 2005;
to enable affectivity, to establish affective connections, 2015; Olivier 2011). It is my contention that assem-
to allow us to be touched by other bodies, by things, blage thinking allows us to develop this thinking fur-
by the atmosphere, and by the world in general. ther and produce a temporal understanding which
Sensoriality and sensorial archaeology, as I have will be more attuned to the nature of matter and
suggested, go beyond interiority and exteriority, be- to our archaeological object of study. The assem-
yond external sensorial stimuli which are received bling/arrangement of diverse bodies, things, affects,
and processed by the internal domain, by mind. senses and memories involves by implication the
They prioritize instead the sensorial field, a state commingling and the contingent co-presence of di-
in-between, between bodies, things, substances, ele- verse temporal moments; this is a multiplicity of
ments, the atmosphere. And this is where sensorial- times, of various pasts and various presents, but also a
ity and Deleuzian assemblage thinking meet. Deleuze multiplicity of temporal modalities: geological times,
(in a dialogue with Parnet), for example, notes that archaeological/historical times, human experiential
[i]t is not the elements or the sets which define the times, non-human animal experiential times.
multiplicity. What defines it is the AND, as something But before we inquire as to the temporal im-
which has its place between the elements or between plications of the assemblage, we will need to reflect
the sets. AND, AND, ANDstammering (Deleuze on the nature of time, beyond the linear and succes-
& Parnet 1987, 34). It is clear here that what he con- sive time which is often dominant in modernity. Else-
siders as crucial in assemblages is not any constituent where (e.g. Hamilakis 2013, 11924), I have talked
parts, nor the relationship between the parts and the about an alternative ontology of time, based on the
whole, but the condition and the relationship of in- work of Bergson and on Deleuzes Bergsonism (1991),
betweenness (cf. Ingold 2015, 14753). Like desire, af- but modifying it to account for the insights gained by
fectivity in general is a productive force which coheres working with materiality, with the socio-politics of the
the different elements of the assemblage; but such a past and with archaeological ethnography (cf. Hami-
force is put into motion by sensoriality, meant not as lakis 2011). This is time as co-existence rather than
a mechanical biological process, nor as a set of stim- succession, whereby all pasts co-exist within a
uli, but as the affective condition of life, as the em- condensed and virtual formand contained by the
bodied and affective action that energizes the whole present moment. This is the Bergsonian, durational

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 Yannis Hamilakis

time, which does not imply continuity, but rather co-

presence. Past and present are both modalities or di-
mensions of duration, as Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 176)
put it on her study on Bergson. Matter may be unsta-
ble and plastic, rather than fixed and unchanging, but
at the same time one of its most fundamental prop-
erties is its ability to last, to endure. Durational time
as memory is thus enacted and engendered through
matter. For archaeologists, this is easier perhaps to un-
derstand, considering the complex and multiple lives
of things: the diverse times in which they become the
centre of sensorial attention, and the objects of use,
modification, reuse, and so on.
To continue with another Deleuzogram, past,
present, and future are not dots in the line of time,
but rather inter-penetrating and commingled planes.
In that sense, every given present carries with it all
pasts, but, of course, through the selective process of
memory, only specific pasts are conjured up at any
specific present moment (cf. Al-Saji 2004, 214). This
selective process can be both conscious and deliber-
ate (the production of remembering and forgetting
through materiality, engendered by social actors), as
well as unconscious: the Proustian triggering effect, Figure 3. (Colour online) Bergsons cone of memory
the sudden and involuntary resurfacing of experi- (Bergson 1990): S denotes the present moment, whereas
ential moments, enacted by materiality through the A-B, A-B, A-B denote the various temporal planes of
senses. the past, all contained, in a condensed form, in the present.
Bergson has illustrated this relationship with his
famous cone (Fig. 3), where the apex of the cone,
which stands for the present, condenses all pasts and sensorial and affective intense attention, to be able to
co-exists with them. At the same time, as perception hear it properly.
is coeval with memory (cf. Virno 2015, 11), and as Given this ontology of multi-temporality de-
every perception is full of memories (Bergson 1990), scribed above, what are the temporal implications of
the present co-exists not only with all pasts but also the heterogeneous arrangement we encounter in an
with its own memory. Bergson, however, makes a dis- assemblage? Assemblages by definition will accentu-
tinction between virtual and actual co-existence. All ate the multiplicity of times, resulting in a more com-
pasts co-exist virtually with the present, but only cer- plicated but perhaps more interesting temporality. In
tain pasts are actualized at specific occasions. As far as assemblages, we will expect to encounter many tem-
human experience is concerned, in this process of ac- poral moments, and, more importantly, many dura-
tualization, sensoriality and affectivity are crucial: at tional rhythms; think, for example, of the durational
specific moments, certain planes of the past, or tem- rhythm of a human body and that of a stone archi-
poral occasions embedded in matter, voluntarily or tectural block: how they enact different time scales
involuntarily, acquire sensorial intensity and affective (human/biological versus geological and archaeolog-
weight, and they thus become actual pasts. This is a ical time), how their processes of transformation fol-
process of inter-subjective, social memory whereby low different temporal patterns (relatively fast trans-
various rhythms of duration become attuned and syn- formation of the human body, versus much slower
chronized. It is because of the multi-sensorial entan- transformation of the architectural block), how the as-
glement of humans with matter and of the affective semblage of the human body after death gets trans-
import of such entanglement that we are able to ac- formed into another kind of assemblage much faster
tualize certain pasts. Alia al-Saji (2004, 223) uses a compared to an assemblage of an architectural block,
hearing metaphor to describe this process: durational and so on.
time, he says, is polyphonic, as we are able to hear To continue with the theme of polyphony, assem-
many different voices at the same time, but we need blages are extremely large and diverse choirs, open to
to select or tune in to a specific one, and give it our a vast range of possibilities. Their attempted harmony

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 Sensorial Assemblages

may or may not be achieved, but in any case, the im- ments, including a new political subject, which can
portant is to understand which voices, that is, which bring about liberation (cf. Tambio 2009).
temporal instances become sensorially and affectively But the political implications of the assemblage
dominant, and why. The political implications of such are not only to do with the biography and the polit-
selection are also worth exploring, as I will be show- ical hopes of its proponents, nor solely with the so-
ing in the next section. Furthermore, given that the cial climate in which they worked. They are also im-
same constituent parts of an assemblage may engen- manent to the concept itself; they emerge from its
der and activate different modes of mnemonic time defining features and elements. Firstly, the assem-
in different assemblages, it is important for us to un- blage/arrangement is political in the sense that it is
derstand why specific times are actualized in specific a deliberate (but not necessarily always intentional)
assemblages. Finally, the wider the range of temporal co-presence of multiplicities, albeit one which can
possibilities, the more open will be the field of emerg- engender and activate involuntary processes, mem-
ing situations, events, new arrangements. ories, and affects. Let us recall that D&G used the
Indeed, change is immanent in the constitution term agencement to define assemblages (Philips 2006),
and the temporality of the assemblage: for a start, which evokes deliberate arrangement, not an acci-
the articulation and the alliance of heterogeneous el- dental co-presence. That deliberate act of bringing to-
ements that make up an assemblage enable new sit- gether assumes the ability and power of a social agent
uations and possibilities to emerge, material, social to do so, it entails certain prerogatives, but it also
and political. Furthermore, assemblages are contin- brings about certain social and political consequences.
gent and temporary, and have the endless gener- Secondly, affectivity, sensoriality, or desire as a
ative potential to lead to new configurations, new productive force (all key elements of the assemblage)
assemblages. Finally, as with the example of the hu- are political, in the sense of biopolitics and biopower,
man body and the architectural block above, change initially discussed by Foucault (e.g. 2010), but elab-
as endless transformation at different time scales is orated upon by a number of more recent theoreti-
immanent to the constituent elements, and thus to the cians, including Agamben (e.g. 1998) and Esposito
assemblage as a whole. (e.g. 2013). This is power operating in the arena of
the sensing and sensed, affecting and affected human
body. It is both constraining (through institutions and
iii) The political apparatuses), as well as enabling, affirmative biopo-
It is worth remembering that the original intellectual litical power (cf. Esposito 2013). It is no coincidence
context of the Deleuzian and Guattarian term of as- that some scholars find certain affinities between the
semblages coincided with a politically intense mo- assemblage and the Foucaultian concept of the appa-
ment for the authors, and for their social milieu (cf. ratus (e.g. Legg 2011).
Dosse 2010). D&G were both politically engaged in- Thirdly, assemblages are political since their sen-
tellectuals, strongly influenced by Marxist thinking, sorial and affective force is subject to the rules of what
and with a clear desire (in the Deleuzian sense) to re- J. Rancire (2004) has called the distribution of the
juvenate that body of thought. The subtitle of their sensible: the rules that govern what is allowed to
major works, Anti-Oidipus and A Thousand Plateaus, be sensed and what not, and what is determined as
also betrays their anti-capitalist spirit. Their writings worth perceiving sensorially and recalling mnemoni-
aimed at deconstructing and theoretically undermin- cally, and what not. Finally, the actualization of dis-
ing totalizing political regimes and ideologies, from tinctive modes of time, the mnemonic selection of
fascism to capitalism. Their thought on the assem- certain instances and the forgetting of others will pro-
blage developed against the background of late 1960s duce political effects, as distinctive times can operate
Paris, with the student and popular uprising of May instrumentally to valorize events, ancestors and sit-
1968 as the key defining event. D&G were thus aim- uations past and present, whereas the forgetting of
ing, amongst other things, not to only understand the others can erase difficult or inconvenient truths. The
workings of capitalism and its production of subjec- selection of the components that can form an assem-
tivities, but also to come up with ideas and schemes blage thus will result in specific sensorial/affective
which can counter the static and totalizing logic of and temporal affordances and engender distinctive
both the capitalist State and the bureaucracy of the tra- political effects: it can enable certain futures to emerge
ditional left-wing parties. Their assemblage thus was and others to disappear. Yet, sensorial memories
not simply an attempt to understand how temporary and affectivities are not easy to tame and subjugate
material and immaterial arrangements create political entirely, due to the anarchic nature of the senso-
effects, but also how we can produce novel arrange- rial and the involuntary power of memory. It is no

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 Yannis Hamilakis

coincidence that Deleuzian assemblage thinking has mon to see researchers linking them to the Latourian
inspired a number of recent political treatises, includ- ANT (Actor Network Theory), the problems of which,
ing Hardt and Negris work on the multitude as the especially its at times apolitical or conservative na-
heterogeneous, nomadic political force of our times ture (cf. Skirbekk 2015), its difficulty or inability to
(e.g. see Hardt & Negri 2009, 1878; cf. Tambio 2009), explain change, and its often mechanistic tendencies,
or Judith Butlers recent theorizing of the assembly as have been well rehearsed by a number of scholars,
a plural and diverse, embodied and performative col- including Tim Ingold (see 2011, esp. chapter 7), and
lectivity (Butler 2015). Graham Harman (2009), among others. It is my con-
Assemblages and assemblage thinking thus al- tention here that such deployment of the concept, de-
low us to re-conceptualize the social, moving away void of sensoriality, affectivity, memory/time and the
from tired dichotomies such as the individual and political, is an impoverished understanding of it. As-
the collective or structure and agency, being at the semblages as temporary co-presences, deliberate ar-
same time much more sophisticated and inclusive rangements, and articulations of things, beings, enun-
than structuration theory or Bourdieus habitus. They ciations, memories and affects, brought together and
also allow us to explore both the material and the enacted as such by sensoriality, can in fact provide a
immaterial, and talk about the condition of the in- more valid alternative to the most mechanistic uses of
between, of the processes that happen, the relation- ANT, and network thinking in general.
ships that are forged and the possibilities that emerge To return to the example with which I opened
in the midst of things, senses, memories and affects. this article, Kara Walkers installation became an as-
More importantly, they are broad enough to allow semblage of things and beings, as well as one of mul-
their combination with other bodies of thinking, al- tiple memories, enunciations and citations. As all as-
though we should be aware of the danger of treat- semblages, this was a temporary arrangement, a con-
ing them as extremely generic concepts that can be tingent co-presence. The exhibition ended in July 2014
applied to everything and anything, depriving them and the refinery building has since been demolished,
thus of any interpretative and critical power. to make space for prime, riverside real estate. The
I have claimed above that the immaterial, sen- immense publicity it received and the huge impres-
sorial, affective and temporal/mnemonic dimension sion it made internationally, in other words its pow-
of the assemblages and their political impact and na- erful affectivity, are due to the sensorial field it cre-
ture are key, defining features. Without them, assem- ated, and the political effects it engendered. The in-
blages are aggregations of material or information, stallation would not have worked in the same way in
similar to the ones envisaged by systemic thinking another building. The history of the sugar refinery, its
in the 1970s. These key features are often missing living, vibrant, sensorial presence, with the molasses
from many archaeological writings on the topic, al- dripping from its walls and the scent of sugar engulf-
though the present special section goes a long way to ing the bodies of the visitors as well as the bodies of
rectify the situation (see also Harris 2014, on assem- the sugar sculptures, reinforced the affective impact
blages and affect). Tim Pauketat, reviewing recently of the sugar sculptures themselves. At the same time,
for this journal a spate of books on archaeological the- the coupling of taste and eating with sexual exploita-
ory, lamented the fact that our ontological turn does tion and violence, and the uncomfortable histories of
not go far enough, and that we often produce homog- slavery and colonialism that this assemblage materi-
enizing and ahistorical narratives. He concludes that ally evoked, gave it a rare political efficacy; it made
The solution to this persistent problem, on one hand, it such a powerful intervention in the contemporary
is to open up the discussion to include more than moment. This sensorial and affective assemblage ac-
things. We need to make an affective turn toward the- tualized several temporal planes and evoked many
orizing the qualities of things, moments and experi- centuries of exploitation of black people: it gathered
ences as well, thinking more about the memory-work together in the factory space Africa, the Caribbean,
and affordance inherent to certain qualities of ma- British Empire and the USA, while the ripples it gen-
terials than these four volumes do. (Pauketat 2015, erated, both in the art world and in the public sphere,
911, emphasis added) were felt globally, in this article, for example. Part
In archaeology, we often tend to think of the assem- of its political efficacy resulted from its ability to en-
blage as purely a machinic arrangement, and an ag- gender and bring side by side the time of Pharaonic
gregation of heterogeneous components with agen- Egypt, the time of Greco-Roman antiquity (evoking
tic power, within a flat ontology. In other words, we the white marble sculptures), the time of slavery and
tend to consider them as similar to networks, often de- colonialism, and the contemporary moment. This
void of affect and political import. Indeed, it is com- arrangement of temporal planes destabilized the

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 Sensorial Assemblages

current consensus over race and questioned the per- inorganic matter, is an intensely multi-sensorial af-
ception of time past as gone, lapsed, forgotten. Yet fair. We often think of eating as a matter of taste, or
this was not only a temporary assemblage, but a taste and smell, or taste, smell and touch. Contrary
constantly flowing, evolving and unstable one. Not to the paradigm of the five senses, however, sensorial
only were some sculptures (the smaller, black ones) modalities are in fact infinite, and inherently synaes-
melting during the exhibition, but some visitors thetic; they work in unison, not in an individuated
responses, in taking provocative, sexualized selfies manner (Hamilakis 2013). During cooking and eat-
with the main sculpture, for example, re-enacted the ing, several recognized and unrecognized senses are
centuries-old link between sugar, race, bodily desire involved, combined and commingled: from the vari-
and exploitation. These could be read as undermining ous kinds of vision, to hearing, and to a whole range
the artists political message, or alternatively, as popu- of other modalities such as temperature, kinaesthesia,
lar challenges to the seriousness of contemporary art. the sense of place and locality and the meta-sense of
This being a socially and historically situated art in- embodied and sensorial memory: memories of pre-
tervention, however, constitutes a specific kind of as- vious occasions of commensality and conviviality, as
semblage, and it is not meant here as a blueprint, a well as the prospective remembering which is gener-
generic model for all assemblages. Assemblages are ated through eating and can be recalled at a future oc-
unique and singular configurations. casion (cf. Seremetakis 1994; Sutton 2001; 2010).
The sensorial assemblages of eating are defined
Feasting as a sensorial assemblage by the flow of substances, memories and affects
through bodies of various kinds. And through that
Kara Walkers installation was also about food and flow, two further fundamental processes are at play.
its sensorial dimension. In this final section, I will ex- The first is the process of mutual transformation: both
plore further the sensoriality of the assemblage by dis- food substances and bodies are transformed, become
cussing the social practice of eating and drinking, and something else. As Jane Bennett put it (2010, 49): eat-
their archaeological manifestations. My archaeologi- ing appears as a series of mutual transformations in
cal reference-point is a feature excavated in West Crete which the border between inside and outside becomes
(at Nopigeia, Drapanias) with material dated to the blurry: my meal both is and is not mine; you both
Late Bronze Age (Late Minoan IA, c. 1500 bce),2 such are and not what you eat. The second process is to
as tens of thousands of plain conical cups, cooking do with the blurring of boundaries between subject
pots, a few quern stones, incense burners and animal and object, between the eating human and the eaten
bones and shell, apparently remnants of a series of substance. As food substances flow in and out of bod-
feasting episodes, all gathered and hoarded in a linear ies, and as food becomes us, transforming itself and
ditch feature in the countryside (Fig. 4): a deliberately transforming us at the same time, not only does the
dug ditch, at least 35 m in length, c. 60 cm in width and boundary between inside and outside become blurry,
11.5 m in depth. This is the period in the Bronze Age but also the binarisms of the subject and object, and of
of Crete which is often called Neopalatial, and one an active human and the passive and inert food sub-
which is characterized by large-scale events of feast- stance, fall apart. This is a human-food assemblage,
ing and drinking, possibly linked to intense faction- a process of becoming-food, which in its turn con-
alism (cf. Hamilakis 1999; 2002). The area around this tributes to the production of further, broader assem-
deposit is not really known archaeologically, and it is blages. Both food and humans are living assemblages
not clear where the people who are responsible for this to start with, but through this nesting process of as-
deposition came from. semblage making, bodies and their individual organs,
Whereas often in archaeological discourses food separate food and drink substances, material culture
is instrumentalized as fuel, or, in the more charita- and space, cease to exist as autonomous, bounded en-
ble versions, as both biological and symbolic resource, tities and become part of a unified affective and sen-
what in fact defines eating is a participatory relationship sorial field. That is why the sensorial assemblage of
between humans and food substances. Let us consider eating encourages us to shift from corporeality to sen-
the assemblage of eating: for a start(er), every human soriality, or better to a trans-corporeal sensoriality, the
is not one entity, but an assemblage on her own, an sensoriality of the in-between. Such a sensorial as-
arrangement of flesh and bones, various organisms, semblage thus enacts a trans-corporeal landscape, an
microbes and bacteria, as well as memories and expe- accumulation and arrangement of collective and tem-
riences, not to mention the various material/sensorial porary individuations, as noted by Gilbert Simondon,
prostheses. The transformation and ingestion of sub- a key influence on Deleuzian assemblage thinking (cf.
stances, which involves assemblages of organic and Combes 2013, xxi).

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 Yannis Hamilakis

Figure 4. (Colour online) The feasting deposit at Nopigeia, Drapanias, West Crete. (Photograph: Author, 2004.)

The material gathered by archaeologists from other material culture, from cooking vessels to space
this ditch seems to have been accumulated during dis- and to the natural and anthropogenic environment.
tinct feasting events, several of them it seems, since But these are not the only participants in the assem-
soil micromorphology has shown that the ditch was blage of eating: the affectivity and conviviality of col-
filled in gradually, not in one go (MacPhail 2005). Eat- lective consumption, the memories that come with it,
ing and drinking, as we know, are primarily social the utterances that are expressed and exchanged, are
practices, and in each assemblage of feasting various some others.
embodied beings and entities participated: bodies of This assemblage evokes and materializes in
several humans (each an assemblage of its own), bod- the arena of consumption the various locales from
ies of animals to be sacrificed and consumed, bodies which plants, animals and the associated substances
of food which had been assembled by combining or- originate, the places where the other participants
ganic and inorganic matter, and of course bodies of were coming from and the previous memories and

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 Sensorial Assemblages

experiences that were cited and recalled in each spe- sorial assemblage of eating can generate further bio-
cific eating occasion. The affective outcomes and the political power. We are aware of feasting as a bio-
memories created at each temporary eating assem- political means in prehistory, but there is also the liber-
blage can subsequently be dispersed elsewhere, but ating, affirmative biopolitics, beyond the biopolitics as
not before they imbue the specific locale with the in- domination, and the suppression of the human body
tense, experiential effect of the occasion. Such locales by an apparatus. The various collective and commu-
thus will harbour the memories of these occasions, nity kitchens that have sprung up in the UK and in
which can be cited and re-enacted in the future. These Europe in the past few years of severe austerity is
memories, materialized through the hoarded feasting one such example of affirmative power, generated in
remnants, would have constituted an important com- the biopolitical arena of eating. They are temporary
ponent of the feasting assemblage. Place-memories assemblages, but their effects are long lasting: they
and material memories, along with peoples embod- affirm not only the biological survival of people in
ied memories, would have produced a place-specific need, but also the production, at least potentially, of a
polychronic temporality and would have made this new collective subjectivity: an assemblage of political
assemblage distinctive, compared to other feasting agents which operates beyond and against neoliberal
sensorial assemblages. capitalism.
It should have become obvious from the above The sensorial assemblages generated by the se-
that every assemblage may be ephemeral, but its ries of feasting events in that Cretan locality around
enactment of temporality is more complex. For a 1500 bce would have had far-reaching implications
start, since every sensorial perception is replete with for the communities living in the area and beyond,
the memories of previous perceptions, all sensorial such as the forging of alliances, the negotiations of so-
modalities are multi-temporal. Moreover, in assem- cial roles and power relations (the potential aggran-
blages, the actualization and re-enactment of spe- dizing of certain individuals who would have per-
cific past affective and mnemonic occasions produce formed the role of hosts and providers, for example),
a new affective experience in the present, an expe- the exchange of things, information, memories and
rience which is not mono-chrononic, nor linear and partners, the creation of affective bonds. These assem-
successive, but simultaneously polychronic, enact- blages would have generated other events, other as-
ing time as co-existence. What temporal planes were semblages, no doubt with lasting social and material
actualized in these feasting occasions? The previ- effects. The political landscape of Crete at that time
ous feasting events in this locality would, no doubt, was particularly dynamic and turbulent, with vast ex-
have been evoked and mnemonically enacted, open- penditure of material resources in building projects, in
ing up the sensorial/mnemonic field to the politi- material culture and art, and in the hosting of large-
cal economy of remembering and forgetting: memo- scale feasting events, but also frequent and rapid de-
rable events involving many humans and many an- structions pointing to intense factionalism and mate-
imals to be sacrificed and cooked, including some rial wars. In this landscape, it was the locales that had
rare and highly valued ones, such as the wild goat a long history of communal gatherings and consump-
of Crete (Capra aegagrus cretica), remnants of which tion events which became the architecturally and ma-
were found in this ditch, including part of a skull terially elaborate palatial centres, that is, ceremo-
preserving a set of impressive horn cores, and which nially central places (Hamilakis 2013). In this po-
was deposited at the bottom of the ditch (cf. Hami- litical process, the sensorial assemblages of commu-
lakis & Harris 2011); excessive quantities of food and nal feasting events which enabled the coherence of
alcoholic drinks to be consumed; and possibly leg- mnemonically loaded places with the affectivity pro-
endary speeches and performances. Comparisons be- duced during eating and drinking would have been
tween past and present events would have been in- of crucial importance. The articulation of place, mem-
evitable. The mnemonic planes of the past would have ory, and trans-corporeal sensoriality would have led
been reshuffled, rearranged and recreated, now co- to new emergences, new becomings, including the es-
alescing with the new memories of the present and tablishment of the neopalatial material and social
future. formations.
But the trans-corporeal landscape which is be- Note, however, that the human actors who par-
ing enacted and materialized by the sensoriality of took each time of these sensorial assemblages had de-
eating is also an assemblage shaped by bio-politics: cided, before they dispersed, to hoard some of their
food substances possess agency on their own; they material memories in the ground: deliberately and
often determine and elicit our responses. But the af- carefully to bury in a ditch some of the parapher-
fective and mnemonic bonds produced in the sen- nalia of the feasting events, thus producing another

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 Yannis Hamilakis

assemblage. In so doing, they would have encoun- sorial assemblages, all are unique configurations, but
tered the remnants of previous feasting episodes, the with variable affective intensity, and the sensorial as-
material memories of previous events. That poly- semblages of communal consumption are some of the
chronic, cumulative, buried assemblage of c. 1500 bce, most affectively intense and efficacious.
composed of material and immaterial elements, gave
rise to another assemblage today, produced at the time Notes
of excavation. In addition to the buried components,
it included us as excavators, our own material and in- 1. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/arts/
strumental apparatus such as the scale and the north design/kara-walker-creates-a-confection-at-the-
sign, and the various archaeological aspirations and domino-refinery.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 November
2016).
affective bonds and investments around this archae-
2. The excavation was carried out by the Ephorate of An-
ological project. Even that assemblage is no longer. tiquities of West Crete under the direction of Dr Maria
Some of the material has been moved to archaeo- Vlazaki. In 2004, a team of staff and students from the
logical storerooms, and is subject to processes of bu- University of Southampton participated in the excava-
reaucratic logic, research routines, and to the contin- tion and carried out a series of analytical procedures,
ually accumulating dust. Yet every assemblage leads including sampling for soil micromorphology and or-
to multiple new emergences, and to new assemblages, ganic residue analysis, as well as extensive sampling
not only in archaeological storerooms, but also in var- for archaeobotanical and other organic material: see
ious publications, including this one. And through Andreadaki-Vlazaki (2011); Hamilakis & Harris (2011).
them, the material memories of the Bronze Age mo-
ments I evoked here, their durational qualities, the Acknowledgements
affective impact of these intense, convivial, eating,
drinking, and intoxicating occasions are still with us, I am grateful to the editor and to the two anonymous refer-
and they will be for some time. ees for their detailed and constructive criticism on an early
version of this article.
Conclusion
Yannis Hamilakis
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
This article has assembled a series of multi-temporal
and the Ancient World
occasions, vignettes, examples and thoughts, aiming
Brown University
not only at demonstrating the efficacy and potential
60 George Street
of assemblage thinking for archaeology as both a de-
Providence, RI 02912
scriptive/analytical and an interpretative approach,
USA
but also at stressing the need to consider the senso-
Email: [email protected]
rial/affective, the mnemonic/temporal, and the polit-
ical nature of assemblages, features which contribute
to the immense power of the concept. I am not advo- References
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 Yannis Hamilakis

Virno, P., 2015 [1999]. Dj Vu and the End of History (trans. University, USA. His main research interests are sensorial-
D. Broder). London: Verso. ity and affectivity, food consumption as an embodied expe-
Viveiros de Castro, E., 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a post- rience, archaeological ethnography, and the politics of the
structural anthropology (trans. P. Skafish). Minneapolis past in the present. He also works on Aegean prehistory
(MN): Univocal. and co-directs the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and
Archaeological Ethnography Project. His more recent books
Author biography are Camera Kalaureia: An archaeological photo-ethnography
(with F. Ifantidis: Archaeopress, 2016) and the co-edited
Yannis Hamilakis is Joukowsky Family Professor of Ar- volume Camera Graeca: Photographs, narratives, materialities
chaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown (with Ph. Carabott & E. Papargyriou, Ashgate, 2015).

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