Area (2011) 43.

2, 124127

doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01004.x

Assemblage and geography

Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane
Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE Email: [email protected] Revised manuscript received 17 February 2011 In this introduction to the special section on Assemblage and geography, we reect on the different routes and uses through which assemblage is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular denition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations. Key words: assemblage, relations, heterogeneity, difference

Assemblage and geography

Assemblage is being increasingly used in a wide range of geographical scholarship. Alongside partially connected terms such as network, milieu or apparatus, the term has become a familiar part of the lexicon of contemporary social-spatial theory. Recent work has described quite different substantive phenomena in terms of assemblage: adaptation assemblages (Head 2010), buildings as assemblages (Rose et al. 2010), regional assemblages (Allen and Cochrane 2007), or the assemblage of the geopolitical social (Cowen and Smith 2009), to name but a few examples. Of course, the deployment of the term is not unique to geography; far from it. Not only has the term had a longstanding specialist use in archaeology, ecology and art history, it is also now part of the conceptual vocabularies of other social sciences and humanities (see Marcus and Saka 2006; Phillips 2006). In this special section we pause amid this proliferation to consider the different uses of the term in contemporary human geography. In doing so we aim to debate the theoretical, empirical and critical purchase assemblage might bring to geographical work, asking what the term enables us to think and do. Our starting point in this collection is not to dene, x or legislate for what assemblage should mean, but to reect on the remarkable diversity with which the term has come into use. Indeed, by inviting contributors who use the term in quite different ways, we have set up the issue to keep hold of this diversity. Put bluntly, there is no single correct way to deploy the term, nor does

any one theoretical tradition or style hold an exclusive right to it. That said, there are some commonalities in how assemblage is being deployed that hint at what the term might enable us to do. The term is often used to emphasise emergence, multiplicity and indeterminacy, and connects to a wider redenition of the socio-spatial in terms of the composition of diverse elements into some form of provisional socio-spatial formation. To be more precise, assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements that may be human and non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural. In broad terms, assemblage is, then, part of a more general reconstitution of the social that seeks to blur divisions of socialmaterial, nearfar and structureagency (DeLanda 2006). In this use, deploying the term assemblage enables us to remain deliberately open as to the form of the unity, its durability, the types of relations and the human and non-human elements involved. Indeed, we could understand the contemporary enthusiasm for assemblage theory as a response to ambivalence toward the a priori reduction of social-spatial relations and processes to any xed form or set of xed forms. Hence the deployment of the term by geographers to understand the formation of a range of spatial forms such as regions (Allen and Cochrane 2007), scales (Legg 2009) or territories (Painter 2010). More specically, assemblage appears to be increasingly used to emphasise four inter-related sets of processes (McFarlane 2009). First, assemblage emphasises gathering, coherence and dispersion. In particular, this draws

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 124127, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Authors. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Assemblage and geography attention to the labour of assembling and re-assembling sociomaterial practices that are diffuse, tangled and contingent. In this respect, assemblage emphasises spatiality and temporality: elements are drawn together at a particular conjuncture only to disperse or realign, and the shape shifts as anthropologist Tania Murray Li (2007, 265) has put it according to place and the angle of vision. Assemblage therefore involves an orientation to assembling and disassembling, as relations form, take hold and endure, but they also may change or be disrupted. Second, assemblage connotes groups, collectives and, by extension, distributed agencies. Assemblages are not organic wholes, where the differences of the parts are subsumed into a higher unity. As Jane Bennett (2005) has persuasively argued, assemblage names an uneven topography of trajectories that cross or engage each other to different extents over time, and that themselves exceed the assemblage. This raises questions about where agency, causality and responsibility lie in assemblage, and about how they should be conceived. Third, following Li (2007), in contrast to Foucauldian notions like apparatus, regime or governmental technology, assemblage connotes emergence rather than resultant formation. Part of the appeal of assemblage, it would seem, lies in its reading of power as multiple co-existences assemblage connotes not a central governing power, nor a power distributed equally, but power as plurality in transformation. Fourth, and in common with some but not all renditions of the term network, an emphasis is placed on fragility and provisionality; the gaps, ssures and fractures that accompany processes of gathering and dispersing. The proliferation of the term assemblage is, then, only understandable in the context of what can be broadly termed a constructionist account of social-spatial relations. While there are many roots to the term assemblage, it is possible to identify a series of inspirations for its deployment. The most obvious reference points for assemblage as a concept include an after actor-network theory literature (Latour 2005; Hinchliffe 2007; Hetherington and Law 2000) and the emphasis in Deleuze and Guattari on the event of agencement (e.g. Thrift 2007; Anderson and Harrison 2010). Leaving aside the differences between these styles of thought, and the many debates surrounding each, both share an initial orientation to how [t]hings have to be put together (Latin compnere) while retaining their heterogeneity, that is how common worlds have [t]o be built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable and diverse composite material (Latour 2010, 3, 4). Beyond these currents there has been a wide variety of uses of the term that share this emphasis on composition, but deploy assemblage slightly differently as a descriptor, ethos and concept. If we consider each of these uses in turn, then

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we can begin to get a sense of differences in how the term is being deployed. First, assemblage is used as a descriptor for some form of provisional unity across differences. For the most part this use relies on taken-for-granted dictionary denitions of the term (e.g. Sassen 2006). In particular, the link between assemblage and, on the one hand, the state of being gathered or collected and, on the other, a number of things gathered together. Once deployed in this way, assemblage may then be connected up to a potentially limitless array of concepts and used in relation to any provisionally structured formation. The risk is that literally anything comes to be described as an assemblage. We do not think such a use is exactly wrong, more that it carries the risk that an emphasis on form replaces formation, assemblage as noun replaces assemblage as verb. In other words, it loses sight of what we take to be the key task of an assemblage-based analysis of social-spatial relations: to understand assembling as a process of co-functioning whereby heterogeneous elements come together in a non-homogeneous grouping. Recognising this risk, the more careful uses of the term as a descriptor have employed it to understand the formation of specic geographies. In urban geography, for instance, it has been used both as a descriptor of sociomaterial transformation (e.g. Gandy 2005; Faras and Bender 2009; Swyngedouw 2006), and to describe the relations between travelling policies and their localised substantiations (e.g. Allen and Cochrane 2007; McGuirk and Dowling 2009; McCann and Ward 2011). Second, assemblage is used as a concept that takes on its meaning and function in relation to other concepts and conceptual problems. The use here is usually derived from an encounter with Deleuze and Guattaris (1986 1987) elaboration of the concept. This conceptual use has many links with assemblage as descriptor; in particular the emphasis on the process of arranging or tting together a set of heterogeneous elements that the French agencement has and the sense that assemblages are provisional contingent wholes (Braun 2008). There are also some differences though. Rather than being used synonymously with network or some other relational term, assemblage has a specic meaning and set of functions. In Deleuze and Guattaris (1987, 406) terms an assemblage is a constellation of elements that have been selected from a milieu, organised and stratied. Assemblages can be divided on two axes. The rst is between a machinic assemblage of desire and a collective assemblage of enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 81). The former refers to a collection of qualities, things and relations; the latter to a collection of languages, words and meanings. A provisional unity is produced through the co-functioning (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 52) of words, passions, things and so on. Unlike in some other forms of relational

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 124127, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Authors. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

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Anderson and McFarlane 1 What difference does assemblage thinking make to relational thought? What claims about relation and their terms are specic to assemblage theory in comparison with other forms of relational thought that also place emphasis on composition? 2 How to understand the specic ways in which heterogeneous elements are gathered into some form of provisional whole (through concepts such as articulation, translation/transduction or in terms of alliances or co-functionings)? 3 How to conceptualise the unity of an assemblage if assemblages are not organic wholes? How does the term assemblage relate to other ways of naming socialspatial formations (such as network or apparatus)? 4 How do relatively durable orders repeat and endure? Likewise, how to conceptualise and attend to the processes whereby either the elements that compose an assemblage change or assemblages themselves change? 5 What implications for politics and ethics does an emphasis on ontological diversity and processes of composition have? How does assemblage thinking and theory allow or invite us to encounter the world? And what are the limits of that style or ethos of engagement? We have brought together a wide group of contributors to address these and a range of other issues through a series of short commentaries. Our aim is to stage a conversation between different uses of assemblage by including people who are using the term in often very different ways, ranging from urban and postcolonial geography to non-representational theory and actor-network theory. As such, the collection will reect on the different investments, promises and dangers that assemblage presents to social-spatial theory. By gathering together a range of uses of assemblage, we also aim to demonstrate how terms emerge, develop and change in encounter with different empirical contexts and in relation to different theories. As such, the issue will open up various answers to the questions of what the term assemblage can do, how it provides an orientation for research and action, and what it promises geography and social-spatial theory more broadly. While we do not seek to offer a straightforward resolution to the many threads, tensions and contradictions that will emerge in this debate, we seek in the concluding remarks to consider where the collection leaves us for thinking with and through a notion of assemblage within geography. Acknowledgements
Our thanks to two anonymous referees for comments on the introduction, Madeleine Hateld for her help in putting the issue together, Kevin Ward for his advice and enthusiasm, and the contributors for making editing the special section a very smooth, enjoyable process.

thought, the heterogeneous parts are not fully determined by their position within a relational conguration. The second axis involves a distinction between (re)territorialising and deterritorialising movements as heterogeneous parts come together and come apart. Assemblages always claim a territory as heterogeneous parts are gathered together and hold together. But this can only ever be a provisional process: relations may change, new elements may enter, alliances may be broken, new conjunctions may be fostered. Assemblages are constantly opening up to new lines of ight, new becomings. Deleuze takes care to stress that these two movements are caught up in one other: everything happens between the two (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 54). Perhaps the most exciting work that has attempted to think (re)territorialisations and deterritorialisations together has been on social differences such as sexuality and race (Lim 2010; Puar 2007; Saldanha 2010). Moving away from a framing of difference in terms of intersectionality, this embryonic work nds in the concept of assemblage an analytic for understanding the organisation of bodies and the force of difference. Third, and cutting across its use as a descriptor and concept, assemblage also suggests a certain ethos of engagement with the world, one that experiments with methodological and presentational practices in order to attend to a lively world of differences (Swanton 2010; Lorimer 2010). Montage, performative methods, thick description, stories all have been used by geographers and others in an attempt to be alert to processes of agencement (Phillips 2006; Stewart 2007; Swanton 2010). Rather than the testing of a pre-existing hypothesis, work that deploys assemblage experiments in the sense that it opens the researcher up to risk, embraces uncertainty, expresses something of the fragility of composition, and strives to listen to what Deleuze and Guattari term the sound of a contagious future, the murmur (rumeur) of new assemblages of desire, of machines, and of statements, that insert themselves into the old assemblages and break with them (1986, 83). In short, part of the reason assemblage is being increasingly used across a wide range of contexts is its very manipulability: it can be used as a broad descriptor of disparate actors coming together, as an alternative to notions of network emerging from actor-network theory, as a way of thinking about phenomena as productivist or practice-based, as an ethos that attends to the social in formation, and as a means of problematising origins, agency, politics and ethics. As one would expect given this diversity, there are some emerging differences and tensions as the term is drawn into connection with different theorists, issues, sites, concerns and problems. These revolve around a set of questions that will repeat sometimes foregrounded, sometimes in the background across the seven commentaries that make up the special section:

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 124127, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Authors. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Assemblage and geography References

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Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 124127, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Authors. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)