Assemblage (philosophy)

Assemblage (from everyday French: agencement, - arrangement, layout, "a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled") is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and subsequently taken up by other theorists, such as Bruno Latour and Michel Callon who developed Actor-network theory, Manuel DeLanda in his work on assemblage theory, and Jane Bennett who combines Latour with Deleuze and Guattari forming her own assemblage theory. Bennett’s assemblage thinking has influenced: Environmental philosophy (e.g., Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects), Political theory (e.g., William Connolly’s work on complexity and politics), and New materialism (e.g., Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad).

Assemblage is a philosophical approach for studying the ontological diversity of agency, which means redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a socio-material network of people, things, and narratives. Also known as assemblage theory or assemblage thinking, this philosophical approach frames social complexity through fluidity, exchangeability, and their connectivity. The central thesis is that people do not act predominantly according to personal agency; rather, human action requires material interdependencies and a network of discursive devices distributed across legal, geographical, cultural, or economic infrastructures.

The similarities among these versions include a relational view of social reality in which human action results from shifting interdependencies between material, narrative, social, and geographic elements. The theories have in common an account for emergent qualities that result from associations between human and non-humans. In other words, an assemblage approach asserts that, within a body, the relationships of component parts are not stable and fixed; rather, they can be displaced and replaced within and among other bodies, thus approaching systems through relations of exteriority.