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Assemblage Theory
Manuel DeLanda provides the first detailed overview of the assemblage theory found in germ in Deleuze and Guattari's writings. Through a series of case studies DeLanda shows how the concept can be applied to economic, linguistic, and military history as well as to metaphysics, science, and mathematics.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published May 25, 2016
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317 people want to read
About the author
Manuel DeLanda
30 books184 followersManuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952), based in New York since 1975, is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, Manuel De Landa focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 14, 2017
This is an audacious survey of the heuristic and explanatory value that Assemblage Theory (a branch of Speculative Realism) brings to a range of fields, including mathematics, science, history, linguistics, and of course politics. Not having studied advanced mathematics, I got lost in the final three chapters, but the approach of drawing from mathematical and scientific discoveries--a la biomimicry--to guide metaphysical theory seems fruitful and exciting.
The sections of the book and my major learnings from each follow:
INTRODUCTION
--Important concepts introduced include relations of interiority (innate, like genetics) and exteriority (contingent, like political alliances); territorialization (as initial alliances) vs. coding (a more concrete formation, e.g. The Constitution); parameters, e.g. a stratum being both highly territorialized and highly coded, or an assemblage as becoming territorialized and not yet highly coded; virtuality as something real but not actual; the structure of possibility space as a model of an assemblages potentiality and dispositions; individuation processes; emergent properties as arising from the interaction of components of an assemblage; the need to discard transcendence and essence in favor of immanence; and assemblages of assemblages rather than reified generalities like "society."
ASSEMBLAGES AND HUMAN HISTORY
--"assemblages have a fully contingent historical identity, and each of them is therefore a historical identity."
--"assemblages are always composed of heterogeneous components"
--"assemblages can become component parts of larger assemblages"
--"assemblages emerge from interactions between their parts," but also exerts downward causality once formed
--Braudel's distinction between a market economy and capitalism where the former represents "trade that uses prices set by impersonal forces," and the latter is any economic activity in which supply and demand are being manipulated
--Marx's critical assumptions that 1. Industrial workers were the only source of economic value, and 2. Machines are merely the coagulated labor of the workers who assembled them are debunked with assemblage theory's insight that "machines are not just a product of labor but, much more importantly, of engineering design and science."
--"A new left may yet emerge from these ashes but only if it recovers its footing on a mind-independent reality and if it focuses its efforts at the right social scale; that is, if it leaves behind the dream of a Revolution that changes the entire system."
ASSEMBLAGES AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGES
--"we must replace the reified generality 'language' with a population of individual dialects coexisting and interacting with individual standard languages."
--The concepts of deterritorializing and decoding are illustrated in the bastardization of Latin, and the concepts of reterritorializating and recoding are illustrated in the formalization of writing systems of dominant dialects centered around European capitols like Paris.
--Assemblage theory is aligned with Zellig Harris's model of words being related in exteriority by frequency of co-occurrence to challenge Noam Chomsky's theory of the "existence of a universal grammar, a constant core common to all languages, evolved genetically and residing in our brains."
ASSEMBLAGES AND THE WEAPONS OF WAR
--"by modeling armies as assemblages of assemblages and allowing each nested level to have its own parameters, we can capture the complex interactions between levels."
--phalanx flattened to 2-3 men deep--> "" to one man deep-->tight formations were abandoned in favor of platoons.
--"extensive" is used for properties like length, area, or volume that can be added to each other yielding only a quantitative change; "intensive" is applied to properties in which addition may result in a qualitative change, e.g. speed, temperature, pressure, concentration, voltage. "Threshold effects" may occur at critical points of intensity.
--the "American system of manufactures" replaced flexible skills of the workshop with rigid routines and homogenization of metals in pursuit of predictable behavior and interchangeable parts so that weapons could quickly be repaired on the battlefield.
ASSEMBLAGES AND SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE
--This chapter presents Kant's view that, "reason must approach nature with the view . . . of receiving information from it, not however, in the character of a pupil who listens to all that his master wishes to tell him, but in that of a judge that compels the witness to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose," and then dispenses with the view for being limited to 'major' scientific fields, e.g. physics, and not applying to 'minor', assemblage-style sciences, e.g. chemistry.
--A scientific field is an assemblage of a domain of objective phenomena, a community of practitioners, and specialized laboratory equipment and machines.
--Assemblage theory sees science as endlessly expanding rather than converging onto a holism.
--Problems and solutions in the history of chemistry as a minor field: salts resulting from reactions of acids and bases-->recovering components of residual salts; realizing that the relative proportions of substances mattered-->weighing before and after; isomeric substances-->spatial arrangement.
--The becoming major and becoming minor is what's important to assemblage theory, conceptualizing science as existing in phases of development.
ASSEMBLAGES AND VIRTUAL DIAGRAMS
--"Lines of flight" mark the directions along which an assemblage can become deterritorialized, and these constitute virtual diagrams, which are a part of assemblages.
--A "phase diagram" is a map of intensive thresholds.
--A diagram in general can be defined as the structure of a possibility space, "a structure given by topological invariants like dimensionality, connectivity, and distribution of singularities," in addition to being given the ontological status of a virtuality.
ASSEMBLAGES AND REALIST ONTOLOGY
--concrete assemblages must be considered to be fully independent of our minds, and social assemblages to be independent of the content of our minds, placing assemblage theory squarely in ontological realism.
--Aristotle propounded the 'hylomorphic model,' which states that essences acting as formal causes originated everything. Assemblage theory challenges this model in three ways: 1. by replacing a passive matter with a materiality possessing its own active powers, like chemical substances with the capacity to affect and be affected by other substances; 2. by replacing the notion of a formal cause resembling that which it causes to form by topological forms that do not resemble what they cause to form because they are actualized divergently, and 3. by replacing the essential properties necessary to belong to a category with the emergent properties of a whole that are contingent on the interactions between its parts.
--The cascade of individuation resulting from stellar nucleosynthesis illustrates this nicely as the extensive (size) and intensive (temperature) gradients of stars define their capacity to act as assembly factories for atoms of different species.
--A "cascade of broken symmetries" is the virtual diagram of the possibility space of potential change.
--The goal is a metaphysical approach in which the world begins as a continuum of intensity that becomes historically segmented into species, or assemblages of reproductively isolated communities.
--Embryology is where we find the evolutionary individuation procedure in biology, the tetrapod limb being a good example of an "undifferentiated virtual limb that can be actualized as a bird's wing, as the single-digit limb of a horse, or as the human hand."
--similar to the individuation of Romance languages accelerated by the collapse of the Roman empire, "a mass extinction caused by a meteor striking the planet emptied many positions in the existing food webs and created opportunities for mammalian differentiation."
ASSEMBLAGES AS SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS
--"the conditions of the problem precede the finding of solutions, and the solutions are only as good as the problem they are supposed to solve."
--"the conditions of the problem not only precede (and define the adequacy of) a solution, they also survive it: a problem has an autonomous existence, as a virtual entity, and continues to exist even after actual solutions are found."
--"problems are not only independent of their solutions, but have a genetic relationship with them: a problem engenders its own solutions as its conditions become progressively better specified."
--"a computer is built from the bottom up out of millions of And-gates, Or-gates, and Not-gates."
--"the conjunction of discrete mathematics and digital computers has increased the repertoire of formal resources that can be used to explore possibility spaces, and should therefore contribute towards a trend for a greater appreciation of virtual structure: even the earliest simulations, like Monte Carlo simulations, allowed us to follow a process until it reached a singularity."
New words learned:
--Ductility: The capacity to yield without breaking
--Ostension: an act or process of showing, pointing out, or exhibiting
--Apodictic: Uncontroversial certainty
--Molar: Opposite of 'molecular,' i.e. Macro
--Prehensile: capable of grasping
--Conspecific: a member of the same species.
The sections of the book and my major learnings from each follow:
INTRODUCTION
--Important concepts introduced include relations of interiority (innate, like genetics) and exteriority (contingent, like political alliances); territorialization (as initial alliances) vs. coding (a more concrete formation, e.g. The Constitution); parameters, e.g. a stratum being both highly territorialized and highly coded, or an assemblage as becoming territorialized and not yet highly coded; virtuality as something real but not actual; the structure of possibility space as a model of an assemblages potentiality and dispositions; individuation processes; emergent properties as arising from the interaction of components of an assemblage; the need to discard transcendence and essence in favor of immanence; and assemblages of assemblages rather than reified generalities like "society."
ASSEMBLAGES AND HUMAN HISTORY
--"assemblages have a fully contingent historical identity, and each of them is therefore a historical identity."
--"assemblages are always composed of heterogeneous components"
--"assemblages can become component parts of larger assemblages"
--"assemblages emerge from interactions between their parts," but also exerts downward causality once formed
--Braudel's distinction between a market economy and capitalism where the former represents "trade that uses prices set by impersonal forces," and the latter is any economic activity in which supply and demand are being manipulated
--Marx's critical assumptions that 1. Industrial workers were the only source of economic value, and 2. Machines are merely the coagulated labor of the workers who assembled them are debunked with assemblage theory's insight that "machines are not just a product of labor but, much more importantly, of engineering design and science."
--"A new left may yet emerge from these ashes but only if it recovers its footing on a mind-independent reality and if it focuses its efforts at the right social scale; that is, if it leaves behind the dream of a Revolution that changes the entire system."
ASSEMBLAGES AND THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGES
--"we must replace the reified generality 'language' with a population of individual dialects coexisting and interacting with individual standard languages."
--The concepts of deterritorializing and decoding are illustrated in the bastardization of Latin, and the concepts of reterritorializating and recoding are illustrated in the formalization of writing systems of dominant dialects centered around European capitols like Paris.
--Assemblage theory is aligned with Zellig Harris's model of words being related in exteriority by frequency of co-occurrence to challenge Noam Chomsky's theory of the "existence of a universal grammar, a constant core common to all languages, evolved genetically and residing in our brains."
ASSEMBLAGES AND THE WEAPONS OF WAR
--"by modeling armies as assemblages of assemblages and allowing each nested level to have its own parameters, we can capture the complex interactions between levels."
--phalanx flattened to 2-3 men deep--> "" to one man deep-->tight formations were abandoned in favor of platoons.
--"extensive" is used for properties like length, area, or volume that can be added to each other yielding only a quantitative change; "intensive" is applied to properties in which addition may result in a qualitative change, e.g. speed, temperature, pressure, concentration, voltage. "Threshold effects" may occur at critical points of intensity.
--the "American system of manufactures" replaced flexible skills of the workshop with rigid routines and homogenization of metals in pursuit of predictable behavior and interchangeable parts so that weapons could quickly be repaired on the battlefield.
ASSEMBLAGES AND SCIENTIFIC PRACTICE
--This chapter presents Kant's view that, "reason must approach nature with the view . . . of receiving information from it, not however, in the character of a pupil who listens to all that his master wishes to tell him, but in that of a judge that compels the witness to reply to those questions which he himself thinks fit to propose," and then dispenses with the view for being limited to 'major' scientific fields, e.g. physics, and not applying to 'minor', assemblage-style sciences, e.g. chemistry.
--A scientific field is an assemblage of a domain of objective phenomena, a community of practitioners, and specialized laboratory equipment and machines.
--Assemblage theory sees science as endlessly expanding rather than converging onto a holism.
--Problems and solutions in the history of chemistry as a minor field: salts resulting from reactions of acids and bases-->recovering components of residual salts; realizing that the relative proportions of substances mattered-->weighing before and after; isomeric substances-->spatial arrangement.
--The becoming major and becoming minor is what's important to assemblage theory, conceptualizing science as existing in phases of development.
ASSEMBLAGES AND VIRTUAL DIAGRAMS
--"Lines of flight" mark the directions along which an assemblage can become deterritorialized, and these constitute virtual diagrams, which are a part of assemblages.
--A "phase diagram" is a map of intensive thresholds.
--A diagram in general can be defined as the structure of a possibility space, "a structure given by topological invariants like dimensionality, connectivity, and distribution of singularities," in addition to being given the ontological status of a virtuality.
ASSEMBLAGES AND REALIST ONTOLOGY
--concrete assemblages must be considered to be fully independent of our minds, and social assemblages to be independent of the content of our minds, placing assemblage theory squarely in ontological realism.
--Aristotle propounded the 'hylomorphic model,' which states that essences acting as formal causes originated everything. Assemblage theory challenges this model in three ways: 1. by replacing a passive matter with a materiality possessing its own active powers, like chemical substances with the capacity to affect and be affected by other substances; 2. by replacing the notion of a formal cause resembling that which it causes to form by topological forms that do not resemble what they cause to form because they are actualized divergently, and 3. by replacing the essential properties necessary to belong to a category with the emergent properties of a whole that are contingent on the interactions between its parts.
--The cascade of individuation resulting from stellar nucleosynthesis illustrates this nicely as the extensive (size) and intensive (temperature) gradients of stars define their capacity to act as assembly factories for atoms of different species.
--A "cascade of broken symmetries" is the virtual diagram of the possibility space of potential change.
--The goal is a metaphysical approach in which the world begins as a continuum of intensity that becomes historically segmented into species, or assemblages of reproductively isolated communities.
--Embryology is where we find the evolutionary individuation procedure in biology, the tetrapod limb being a good example of an "undifferentiated virtual limb that can be actualized as a bird's wing, as the single-digit limb of a horse, or as the human hand."
--similar to the individuation of Romance languages accelerated by the collapse of the Roman empire, "a mass extinction caused by a meteor striking the planet emptied many positions in the existing food webs and created opportunities for mammalian differentiation."
ASSEMBLAGES AS SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS
--"the conditions of the problem precede the finding of solutions, and the solutions are only as good as the problem they are supposed to solve."
--"the conditions of the problem not only precede (and define the adequacy of) a solution, they also survive it: a problem has an autonomous existence, as a virtual entity, and continues to exist even after actual solutions are found."
--"problems are not only independent of their solutions, but have a genetic relationship with them: a problem engenders its own solutions as its conditions become progressively better specified."
--"a computer is built from the bottom up out of millions of And-gates, Or-gates, and Not-gates."
--"the conjunction of discrete mathematics and digital computers has increased the repertoire of formal resources that can be used to explore possibility spaces, and should therefore contribute towards a trend for a greater appreciation of virtual structure: even the earliest simulations, like Monte Carlo simulations, allowed us to follow a process until it reached a singularity."
New words learned:
--Ductility: The capacity to yield without breaking
--Ostension: an act or process of showing, pointing out, or exhibiting
--Apodictic: Uncontroversial certainty
--Molar: Opposite of 'molecular,' i.e. Macro
--Prehensile: capable of grasping
--Conspecific: a member of the same species.
November 13, 2021
math in my philosophy reee (reread imminent)
June 15, 2020
Kind of like a 'speculative realist' version of systems theory.
There is some heavy lifting here - but interesting enough to move on to his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
There is some heavy lifting here - but interesting enough to move on to his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
December 18, 2024
Never thought I would have to read philosophy of physics but at least I can now understand 0.5% of Deleuze
April 14, 2022
Strange attempt to lock down the fluidity of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages into something very stable and analytical. Also I couldn’t help notice that only THREE of over a hundred references are to work by women. Useful to know what this is, but it’s certainly not the way I want to use assemblages in my own work.
July 12, 2024
Fue interesante la descomposición de la teoría social que hace, usando los conceptos de territorializacion y desterritorializacion de D&G para poder entender las relaciones de exteriorización o interiorización en la creación de nuevos grupos. Es un libro que explora una pregunta importante de cómo pensar las organizaciones más allá del binomio de la escala, sino en el entremedio, a través de los acomplamientos expresivos (lenguajes)...
Hay una parte que me pareció muy rara, y es que en parte va hablando sobre las confrontaciones entre grupos por los recursos. Ahí creo que sigue asumiendo la perspectiva económica de los recursos limitados, y traza un thelos o bien explica que fue mediante una territorializacion del éxtasis que los movimientos sociales fueron adoptando identificaciones grupales expresivas (y dejaron de quemar fabricas por ejemplo), me dio un poco de paja esa parte
Hay una parte que me pareció muy rara, y es que en parte va hablando sobre las confrontaciones entre grupos por los recursos. Ahí creo que sigue asumiendo la perspectiva económica de los recursos limitados, y traza un thelos o bien explica que fue mediante una territorializacion del éxtasis que los movimientos sociales fueron adoptando identificaciones grupales expresivas (y dejaron de quemar fabricas por ejemplo), me dio un poco de paja esa parte
April 11, 2022
This was very much over my head most of the time! I persisted to the end in an attempt to hit some kind of insightful moment where it all came into view, but alas!
The ‘Assemblages & Human history’ chapter was probably the least difficult and I shall try A new philosophy of society in a hope to make a bit more sense of Assemblage Theory as it applies to human and organisational systems.
Good luck if you pick this up! Maybe I’ll return to it some time.
The ‘Assemblages & Human history’ chapter was probably the least difficult and I shall try A new philosophy of society in a hope to make a bit more sense of Assemblage Theory as it applies to human and organisational systems.
Good luck if you pick this up! Maybe I’ll return to it some time.
September 1, 2018
It was slow for me, but after going over it and listening to several lectures, things began to concretize and I've found it useful in multiple contexts.
August 5, 2020
Straightforward theory of Deleuzian assemblages, clarified and made consistent.
July 1, 2021
First 4 chapters were cool and then we got to the math stuff
November 11, 2021
Nice reading experience.
July 16, 2025
explain deleuze to me and don't dumb it down!!
didn't finish chapters on linguistics and war.
some interesting insights, particularly liked chapters on history and virtual diagrams.
didn't finish chapters on linguistics and war.
some interesting insights, particularly liked chapters on history and virtual diagrams.
January 1, 2017
Delanda's book on Simulation was fantastic. This one not so much. I couldn't get through it, I can't tell if he misses Assemblage theory or if assemblage theory is nonsense.
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