Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of

an Illusion

Ian Buchanan University of Wollongong

Abstract
If the development of assemblage theory does not need to be anchored
in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as increasingly seems to be the case
in the social sciences, then cannot one say that the future of assemblage
theory is an illusion? It is an illusion in the sense that it continues to
act as though the concept was invented by Deleuze and Guattari, but
because it does not feel obligated to draw on their work in its actual
operation or development, it cannot lay claim to being authentic. That
this does not trouble certain scholars in the social sciences is troubling
to me. So in this paper I offer first of all critique of this illusory synthetic
version of the assemblage and accompany that with a short case study
showing what can be gained by returning to Deleuze and Guattari.
Keywords: assemblage theory, ontology of policy, infrastructure policy,
actant, agencement, indigenous housing

I. Assemblage as Received Idea

One cannot help but wonder how different the uptake of Deleuze and
Guattaris concept of agencement would be if it had not been translated
as assemblage and an alternate translation such as arrangement
(which is my preferred translation [Buchanan 2015: 383]) had become
the standard? It may be that assemblage theory as we know it today
would never have taken off, which would be a pity because the field is
enormously productive and it has brought into its orbit a huge range
of questions and problematics that might otherwise never have been

Deleuze Studies 11.3 (2017): 457474

DOI: 10.3366/dls.2017.0276
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/dls
458 Ian Buchanan

considered. But at least we would not be faced with the problem of

how to re-think a concept that has all but become a received idea
(as Flaubert put it), that is, an idea that is so well understood it no
longer bears thinking about in any kind of critical way. Unfortunately,
the consensus understanding of the concept has been shaped as much
(if not more than) by a plain language understanding of the English
word assemblage as it has by any deep understanding of the work of
Deleuze and Guattari. This is particularly evident in the social sciences
where there is a strong and I will argue undue emphasis on the idea of
assembling as the core process of assemblages. This is compounded
by an apparent consensus that assemblage theory is one of those
concepts like deconstruction and postmodernism that no longer owes its
development to a specific authorial source. While it is hard to fault the
latter view in that one should be free to re-make concepts, its detachment
from Deleuze and Guattaris thinking has led to a considerable loss of
clarity and cohesion in the concept.1
The fact that the English word assemblage is not Deleuze and
Guattaris own word, but an artefact of translation, is rarely, if ever,
brought into consideration, and where it is it tends to be dismissed
as unimportant, which perhaps explains the emphasis on assembling
as the central concern of assemblage theory. There are a number of
problems with this view of things, not least the fact that assemblage
in English does not mean the same thing as agencement in French.
Not only that, it is itself a loan word from French, thus adding to
the confusion. As Thomas Nail (among others) has shown, agencement
derives from agencer, which according to Le Robert & Collins means
to arrange, to lay out, or to piece together, whereas assemblage
means to join, to gather, to assemble (Nail 2017: 22; but see also
Buchanan 2015: 383). The difference between these two definitions
is perhaps subtle, but by no means inconsequential: we might say
the former is a process of composition whereas the latter is one of
compilation; the difference being that one works with a pre-existing set
of entities and gives it a different order, whereas the latter starts from
scratch and builds up to something that may or may not have order. A
compilation may be a heap of fragments, whereas a composition cannot
be.2 The solution, however, is not as simple as insisting that Deleuze
and Guattari should (or as some would have it, can) only be read in
the original French, which is not practical for all readers in any case,
because, as I will show, this same plain language approach also applies
to straightforward terms like multiplicity and territory. The solution,
in my view, is to return to Deleuze and Guattaris work.
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 459

I will take as my case in point an essay by two human

geographers, Tom Baker and Pauline McGuirk, Assemblage Thinking as
Methodology: Commitments and Practices for Critical Policy Research
(2016), one of the richest, most comprehensive and sophisticated
accounts of assemblage theory as it is deployed in the social sciences yet
written, and therefore a perfect and anything but straw man example
of the kind of work I am talking about. In spite of its considerable
sophistication, it has completely detached the concept of assemblage
from Deleuze and Guattari and replaced it with a synthetic accumulation
of readings of readings of Deleuze and Guattari. Ironically, the kind
of genealogical reading Baker and McGuirk say is part and parcel of
assemblage thinking is completely absent from their own use of the
concept. Instead of tracing the concept back to a point of origin, they
pull together a heterogeneous ensemble of quotes about the concept of
the assemblage from a vast trawl-through of the secondary literature.
It is therefore unsurprising, but telling that in defining the concept
of the assemblage Baker and McGuirk do not refer to the work of
Deleuze and Guattari, which is mentioned but not cited. In a footnote
they clarify that for their purposes assemblage thinking refers to a
diverse set of research accounts that may or may not engage directly
with formal theories of assemblage, such as those of Deleuze and
Guattari, or DeLanda (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 15, n.1). Without
any anchor in Deleuze and Guattaris work the concept floats off into
an alternate universe in which all contributions to the discussion are
treated as equally valuable and there is no arbitration between the
strong and the weak versions, never mind the accurate and the wrong
versions.
Baker and McGuirk define the assemblage as a gathering of
heterogeneous elements consistently drawn together as an identifiable
terrain of action and debate (drawing on the work of Tanya Li),
noting that its elements include arrangements of humans, materials,
technologies, organizations, techniques, procedures, norms, and events,
all of which have the capacity for agency within and beyond the
assemblage (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 4). They also say, citing
J. Macgregor Wise, that the assemblage claims a territory, and that
it is realized through ongoing processes of deterritorialization and
reterritorialization, such that assemblages are continually in the process
of being made and remade (4). To which they add Colin McFarlanes
suggestion that the popularity of assemblage results in large part from
its understanding of the social as materially heterogeneous, practice-
based, emergent and processual (4).
460 Ian Buchanan

For Baker and McGuirk the assemblage is primarily a

methodological-analytical framework so its application demands an
explicitly methodological discussion, something which in their view is
sorely lacking in the literature (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 4, 5). This is
the most important (and frustrating) part about Baker and McGuirks
project. While I do not agree with the particulars of their way of
constructing a methodological-analytical framework out of the concept
of the assemblage, I nonetheless support very strongly the necessity of so
doing. I would add that in my view explicitly methodological discussions
of the assemblage are sorely lacking in the secondary Deleuze and
Guattari literature too. It is to the particulars of Baker and McGuirks
methodological-analytical framework that I now want to turn. They
write:

Assemblage methodologies are guided by epistemological commitments

that signify a certain interrogative orientation toward the world. Though
abstract, these commitments inform inclusions, priorities, and sensitivities,
which together constitute the field of vision brought to bear on empirical
phenomena. Sifting through the substantial number of accounts using
assemblage thinking [note again the fact they do not refer to Deleuze
and Guattari], we can identify four commitments common to those
using assemblage methodologically. These are commitments to revealing
multiplicity, processuality, labour, and uncertainty. (Baker and McGuirk
2016: 6; my emphasis)

As I will show, the detachment from Deleuze and Guattaris work seems
to compel a plain language approach which, to borrow a term from
translation studies, puts them at the mercy of several false friends, that
is, words that look like they should mean one thing but in fact mean
something else.
Commitment to multiplicity is, for Baker and McGuirk, an
interpretive strategy for setting aside the presumption of coherence and
determination that reigns in certain quarters of contemporary policy
studies. It holds to the idea that all social and cultural phenomena
are multiply determined and cannot be reduced to a single logic.
More particularly, in a policy context, it points to the practical co-
existence of multiple political projects, modes of governance, practices
and outcomes (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 67). This means policy
outcomes cannot be linked in a linear way to a specific determination,
but have to be treated as contingent, or, at any rate, indirect. There are
three problems here: firstly, we have to be careful not to conflate the
content (policy) with the form (assemblage) because however incoherent
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 461

a policy formation may be in the eyes of its critics, as an assemblage it

must as a matter of necessity tend towards coherence, that being one
of its essential functions (the problem of unity and diversity is central to
Deleuze and Guattaris account of the assemblage [Deleuze and Guattari
1987: 435]). Secondly, the assemblage is a multiplicity, but this does
not mean it is multiply determined. It refers to a state of being, not its
actual process of composition, and there is no reason at all why it cannot
have a single or singular logic.3 Thirdly, while it is true assemblages are
contingent, their outputs are not. Indeed, what would be the point of the
concept if this was the case? As Deleuze and Guattari say, given a certain
effect, what kind of machine (assemblage) is capable of producing it?
(Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 3.)
The commitment to multiplicity is enacted via a second commitment
to what they call processuality, which Baker and McGuirk define
(again borrowing liberally from a diverse body of secondary literature)
as what happens in an assemblage. At first glance they seem to be
saying assemblages assemble, that they draw together disparate elements
and combine them in a provisional fashion; they may tend towards
stabilisation, or not, but regardless exist in a state of constant flux:

In methodological terms, a focus on the processes through which assemblages

come into and out of being lends itself to careful genealogical tracing of
how past alignments and associations have informed the present and how
contemporary conditions and actants are crystallizing new conditions of
possibility. (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 7)

But as this quote makes clear, something quite different is meant

by processuality. It names, rather, a concern for genesis but how
something comes together and how it operates once it does are
quite different issues (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 152). But that
is not the only problem here. One wonders how this interpolation
of what I assume is Foucaults concept of genealogy (rather than
Nietzsches, or even Deleuzes version of Nietzsche) can be squared with
the aforementioned commitment to non-linearity? More importantly,
though, the whole idea of a genealogy of the assemblage stands in
flat contradiction of Deleuze and Guattaris account of the assemblage,
which is focused on the question how does it work? and not what does
it mean? much less where does it come from? (Deleuze and Guattari
1983: 109).4
The commitment to revealing the labour needed to produce and
maintain assemblages is said by Baker and McGuirk to echo Deleuze
and Guattaris original term agencement roughly meaning putting
462 Ian Buchanan

together or arrangement later translated to assemblage (Baker and

McGuirk 2016: 7), but in fact it echoes the plain language understanding
of assemblage as the putting together of things, as their subsequent
clarifications of this point make apparent. They go on to say, again
borrowing widely, assemblages are not accidental, but knowingly and
unknowingly held together and they are always coming apart as much
as coming together, so their existence in particular configurations is
something that must be continually worked at (7). Ultimately, what this
commitment reveals is that policy and policy-making [is] a laboured-
over achievement (8). Without wishing to dispute their conclusion
here there can be no doubt policy and policy-making is a laboured-
over achievement I do want to say for the sake of understanding the
concept of the assemblage that the labour required to sustain a particular
instance of an assemblage is a kind of local area problem that should
not be confused with the actual operation of the concept itself. The
assemblage itself is, by definition, self-sustaining: it requires labour to
actualise it, to be sure, but its existence does not depend on that labour.
There is constant slippage between what we might call actually existing
assemblages and the concept of the assemblage in Baker and McGuirks
account such that the former tends to stand in the place of the latter
and the difference between the two vanishes. When that happens the
concept becomes adjectival rather than analytical, it describes rather
than defamiliarises, which defeats the purpose of having the concept in
the first place.
The fourth and final commitment is to uncertainty and the temptation
to know too much. Such a position involves accepting that, rather than
producing Archimedean accounts of the world as it is, social research
can only produce situated readings and, therefore, must make modest
claims (Baker and McGuirk 2016: 8). Interestingly, this is not something
Deleuze and Guattari advocated. In fact, they argued for precisely the
opposite view: as they put it, the only problem with abstraction is that
we are not abstract enough. One cannot arrive at the assemblage by
means of a situated account because the contents of an assemblage do
not necessarily disclose the form of an assemblage; similarly, we need to
be wary of assigning every local variety of an assemblage an independent
identity distinct from the abstract assemblage. Paradoxically, there is
no surer way of winding up in the knowing too much space that
assemblage thinking is supposed to avoid than the approach Baker and
McGuirk recommend because such self-limiting analyses presume to
know in advance what knowing enough and therefore what knowing
too much looks like. It is precisely this kind of analytic cul-de-sac that
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 463

Deleuze and Guattari were trying to avoid by saying we need to be

experimental in our approach. What many readers find infuriating in
their work is precisely their blatant refusal to stick to making modest
claims. On the contrary, they make bold, global claims and in the process
force us to think differently about the world.

II. Returning to the Assemblage

Using some real-world examples drawn from the work of the
Australian policy ethnographer Tess Lea, I want to offer a different
view of the assemblage, one that is drawn directly from the work
of Deleuze and Guattari rather than secondary sources. Four key
differences from Baker and McGuirks account of the assemblage will
be apparent: firstly, the assemblage is not a thing in the world it is
assemblages that explain the existence of things in the world, not the
other way round; secondly, assemblages are structured and structuring
(not purely processual), that is one of their principal processes; thirdly,
assemblages have a logic, an operational sense if you will, that can be
mapped one always knows what is possible and what is not possible
within a given assemblage; and, lastly, assemblages always strive to
persist in their being, to use a Spinozist turn of phrase they are subject
to forces of change, but ultimately they would always prefer not to
change (this is why deterritorialisation is always immediately followed
by reterritorialisation).
Infrastructure good and bad is the product of countless small decisions
by many thousands of people over many decades. Those decisions,
however well intentioned and well thought through, are not made in
a vacuum. Of necessity, they are made in a context defined by a set
of constraints to do with cost, existing infrastructure, topography, trade
agreements, and countless other factors too numerous to even attempt to
tabulate here, that ultimately blurs the line between the intended and the
unintended, the fated and the accidental. The result is a curious state
of affairs that is neither the product of deliberate, conscious design,
nor the product of a sequence of random, ad hoc experiments, but
somehow a combination of the two. It is, in this sense, a highly unstable
object that requires a supple ontology to describe it. To begin with, and
perhaps most importantly, we have to stop thinking of infrastructure
and infrastructure policy in teleological terms because it has neither a
clear-cut beginning nor a logical endpoint (Lea 2014: n.p.). This, in turn,
challenges us to re-think the ontology of policy.
464 Ian Buchanan

Rather than see policy as a blueprint, that is, as a static

document or model which guides the construction of specific pieces
of infrastructure, Lea argues that policy is an organic or as I prefer,
a wild force, a biota which thrives on the heralding of cataclysms
and thus the cumulative need for policy beneficence (Lea 2014: n.p.).
I like this notion of wild policy, because of the impromptu,
seat-of-the-pants, policy-on-the-fly image it conjures up that goes
well beyond the rather tame non-linear feedback loop model of
formulationimplementationreformulation DeLanda suggests as a
means of accommodating the widely acknowledged gap between policy
formulation and implementation. As he says, this model works for his
purposes because it allows for fluidity in the policy-implementation
process but still retains the possibility of assessing outcomes (DeLanda
2006: 85). Leas position is much more radical than this because
she wants us to dispense with the fantasy (implicit in DeLandas
formulation) that policy can be thought in systemic terms and evaluated
by wiser critics after the fact, thus failing to think outside the
logic of the system being critiqued. As Leas work demonstrates,
the formulationimplementationreformulation model is intrinsic to
policys own idea of itself (in Deleuzian terms, one could say it is
policys image of thought [Deleuze 1994: 131]). In its self-reflexive
moments such as so-called policy reviews policy is sometimes willing
to admit that things have not gone as planned, but even this is
mere self-deception because the idea of intentions gone awry pretends
there was no foundational opacity within original policy forecasts
(Lea 2014: n.p.).
However, as much as I like the image of wild policy I want to set
aside the organic model Lea uses to frame it because as several key
critiques of organic models have amply demonstrated it returns us all too
swiftly to the very thing we wanted to escape from in the first place, that
is, teleology. Instead I want to reimagine it in terms of wild analysis,
which is Freuds term for apparently psychoanalytic diagnoses and
treatments formulated by untrained physicians. He is particularly wary
of physicians who have a smattering of psychoanalytic knowledge, but
have not mastered the subtleties of the actual practice of psychoanalysis
itself, which despite its pretensions to scientificity was and remains
an art form. In a way, though, the master himself was as much a
practiser of wild analysis as the lay practictioners he chastises because
psychoanalysis itself is wild as Nicholas Spice captures beautifully in
this inspired description of the psychoanalytic scene (i.e. the encounter
between analyst and analysand):
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 465

Analyst and patient are two people who start to dance without knowing
which dance it is that they are dancing or even if they share the same
understanding of what a dance might be. But still they dance, and though
in time they get used to each others steps they never do find out which dance
it is. So the patient has to give up his need to know what the analyst thinks
about him, since there is no way he can ever find this out, and the analyst
must give up every ordinary human means to convince the patient that she
really does have his best interests at heart. (Spice 2004: n.p.)

This, I think, better expresses the basic claim Lea wants to make
about policy, namely that policy-making is (1) born in ignorance;
(2) an adaption to circumstances rather than a rational solution to a
specific problem; (3) subject to constant scepticism and suspicion; and
(4) propped up by mutually agreed upon illusions of coherence. Wild
analysis calls for the antidote of schizoanalysis (which is assemblage
theorys other name). Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the assemblage
answers to a number of the issues raised by Lea, but we must be
careful to distinguish it from the kinds of distorted versions of it
elaborated above, which are all too often imbued with precisely the
kind of artificial coherence Lea wants us to escape. There is no point
in exchanging wild analysis for wild schizoanalysis. If policy is to be
understood as an assemblage, as I want to suggest it should be, then
we have to first of all grasp that the assemblage is not a thing and
it does not consist of things. I would even go so far as to say the
assemblage does not have any content, it is a purely formal arrangement
or ordering that functions as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 45). It does not consist of relations; rather,
it is a relation, but of a very particular type.
To conceive of policy as an assemblage means seeing it purely in terms
of the kinds of arrangements and orderings it makes possible and even
more importantly the set of expectations it entails. To see it this way we
need to separate policy as a conceptual entity from its myriad iterations
as this or that policy for example, infrastructure policy, health policy,
transport policy, and so on but also from all sense of outcomes and
outputs. We also have to see so-called policy decisions as components
of the policy assemblage and not as some kind of climactic moment in
the life of a policy. Policy decisions are part of the form of the policy
assemblage, not the content. By questioning the very idea of policy Lea
has enabled us to see it in a new light. As Lea shows, policy-making is
rhizomatic, it takes place in the middle of things, but always pretends
otherwise because it is locked into an image of itself as a special type of
agency (assemblage) that defines and measures progress. When policy
466 Ian Buchanan

looks at itself it only sees beginnings and endings, starting points that
lack intentionality (a situation that stands in need of rectification) and
finishing points that are fully intended (a changed situation). In the
middle is action, and though policy claims to function as a guide to what
happens it eschews all responsibility.

III. Assemblages and Actants

In spite of the fact that the concept of the assemblage quite explicitly
takes its structure from the work of the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev,
the one Deleuze and Guattari describe as a dark prince descended
from Hamlet (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 43), assemblage theory
consistently looks to science, particularly cybernetics, systems theory
and complexity theory, as both the source of Deleuze and Guattaris
inspiration and the point of reference that gives the concept its meaning.
For instance, in his two books devoted to assemblage theory (A New
Philosophy of Society and Assemblage Theory) DeLanda does not
mention Hjelmslev. Baker and McGuirk do not mention Hjelmslev
either. Not only does this omission obscure the fact that Deleuze
and Guattari drew upon a wide variety of non-scientific sources in
their formulation of the concept of the assemblage, it also forgets
that Deleuze and Guattari were quite explicit in saying that they were
not interested in (re)producing science; they wanted their work to
be thought of as nothing but philosophy. The concept, as Deleuze
and Guattari would later write, has no referent (i.e. something in the
real world that it refers to and draws its meaning from), something
else assemblage theorists of the realist persuasion conveniently forget
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22).
Of these other sources the most important insofar as the assemblage
is concerned was structuralist linguistics, including its dark precursor
Russian Formalism. Guattari, particularly, was an avid reader of
Mikhail Bakhtin and his putative alter ego Valentin Voloinov, a fact
reflected in dozens of footnotes throughout his work. Deleuze, too, was
clearly inspired by their work, as can be seen in his cinema books (the
sensory-motor scheme is clearly narratological in inspiration). Ironically,
the one scholar to emphasise this connection was the one person who
might have been expected to and perhaps even forgiven for seeing only
the science side of Deleuze and Guattaris work, and that is Bruno
Latour. Latour explicitly links his conception of agency and hence the
concept of the assemblage which he takes from Deleuze and Guattari
and adapts to his own purposes to Greimass narratological concept of
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 467

the actant (Latour 2005: 54). I want to suggest that Latours insight that
agency can and should be thought in narratological terms is helpful in
deepening our understanding of Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the
assemblage. Not the least because it returns us all the more surely to
Hjelmslev, a key inspiration for Greimas in any case. Greimas helps to
put Hjelmslev back in his proper light as a structuralist linguist, which
is important because it cuts through the illusory veil of scientificity that
has been wrapped around the concept of the assemblage by many of
its erstwhile admirers. As I will briefly illustrate, Greimass concept is
perfectly consistent with Deleuze and Guattaris famous instruction that
we should ask not what something means, but only how it works, for
this is exactly Greimass question too.
The degree to which the two concepts actant and assemblage are
congruent becomes apparent the moment their respective definitions are
read side by side. Firstly, the actant:

If we recall that functions, in the traditional syntax, are but roles played by
words the subject being the one who performs the action, the one who
suffers it, etc. then according to such a conception the proposition as a
whole becomes a spectacle to which homo loquens treats himself. (Greimas,
quoted in Jameson 1972: 124)

And as Jameson points out, for Greimas it is this underlying dramatic

structure which is common to all forms of discourse, philosophical
or literary, expository or affective (Jameson 1972: 124). This will
need more detailed explication, which I will provide in a moment,
but before I do that I want to quickly juxtapose it with a brief quote
from Deleuze and Guattari just to make apparent the degree to which
their thinking is inspired by the same concern to distinguish between
superficial appearances and deep structures of action:

A formation of power is much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much

more than a language. Rather, they act as determining and selective agents, as
much in the constitution of languages and tools as in their usages and mutual
or respective diffusions and communications. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 63
my emphasis)

The essential insight of the concept of the actant is that the organising
structure of a text (in the broadest possible sense of that word, which
can of course encompass both policy and the built environment, our
two concerns here) is at once that which allows for maximum variation
and that which itself resists all variation (Jameson 1972: 1239). It is
in this precise sense a singularity at the heart of a multiplicity. It has
468 Ian Buchanan

both an internal limit and an external limit, that is, boundaries which
cannot be crossed without becoming something different from what it
was. The internal limit refers to the sum total of possible variations it can
accommodate; while the external limit refers to the restrictions history
itself places on the number of possible variations. Analysis consists of
bringing these limits to light. It is important to remember, too, that the
actant is a narratological concept. So it always refers to a process of
transformation rather than a static situation, or, to put it another way,
it is generative not descriptive.
Leas ethnography of the debate that went on behind closed doors in
the implementation phase of Australias Strategic Indigenous Housing
and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) offers a real-world example of the
actant as organising structure. Launched in 2009 with considerable
fanfare and a seemingly bottomless well of money, SIHIP was supposed
to fix once and for all (the echoes to be heard here of final solution
are of course fully intended) the parlous state of indigenous housing
in northern Australia. With a budget of almost $650 million, the
programme was supposed to provide 750 new houses and refurbishment
of a further 2,500 houses for Indigenous people in seventy-three
communities across the Northern Territory. But almost from the
beginning it ran into serious problems as cost overruns and blatant
corruption on the part of white building contractors turned the whole
thing into a boondoggle of misused public funds. It was a public relations
disaster, a virtual running sore that could not be remedied, because
the constant rorting of the programme pushed up the unit cost of the
individual houses being built to the point where urban Australians (i.e.
white middle-class voting Australians) began to express resentment at
the amount of money being spent on houses for black people living
in the bush. The build cost of houses in remote parts of Australia is so
high that even modest homes are extremely expensive and by implication
appear to be luxurious and undeserved to uneducated urban
eyes.
I assume I need not comment here on the all too obvious undercurrent
of racism fuelling the national outburst of ressentiment the SIHIP fiasco
occasioned, but it should be clear I hope that not only is racism
central to the political fall-out and response, but it also has a material
dimension that, as Lea amply documents, finds its purest and most
baleful expression in ontology. In order to bring costs down and get
the whole mess out of the media spotlight, the politicians and senior
bureaucrats charged with fixing things invited the building contractors
who had hitherto failed to deliver appropriately costed houses to
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 469

reconsider the very meaning and actual substance of the concept of a

house. Behind closed doors the builders were told everything is on the
table:
With . . . the invitation to put it on the table, the discussion quickly turned
to ways of building lower-cost houses at speed by lopping off such seemingly
discretionary design features as louvered windows and sunhoods, internal
flashings for waterproofing, or disabled access. In the flurry of designing
and then undoing the designs for appropriate housing, it was the sound of a
built house falling apart in the non-specifiable future that could not compete
with the noise of a threatened-and-defensive government in the here and now.
(Lea 2014: n.p.)

As Lea argues, by putting everything on the table the government

effectively gave the builders a free hand to determine not only what
constitutes the indigenous housing assemblage in the abstract or
conceptual sense (thus redefining its internal limits), but also what
constitutes an appropriate dwelling for an Indigenous person in an actual
material sense (thus redefining its external limits). But, she asks, is a
house still a house if as was often the case with the houses built under
the auspices of SIHIP it is not connected to water? Is it still a house if
it does not have adequate temperature control or any means of cooling
it down in the year-round hot weather northern Australia experiences?
Is it still a house if the sewage pipes are not connected to a sewage
system? (Lea and Pholeros 2010: 187190.) These are the internal limits
of the housing assemblage, and under normal circumstances it would
be impossible to ignore these limits and still call the result a house.
But in this instance, with all the rules quite consciously suspended,
a new assemblage was brought into being. But the more important
assemblage-related question is: according to what criteria is it acceptable
and legitimate to not only build houses of this materially substandard
variety but also to expect the intended occupants to not only live in
them but express gratitude for the privilege?
This question cannot be answered unless we look further afield than
the materials themselves. Lea uses the actual materiality of matter in the
most literal and granular sense in a dialectical fashion to expose the fault
lines in the expressive dimension. By examining in detail the properties
of water, for example, and its implications for building houses in tropical
locations, she exposes the critical shallowness of policy thinking which
is more focused on ticking boxes in the expressive sphere than it is in
creating enduring, liveable houses in the material sphere. Material for
Lea is akin to Jamesons concept of the political unconscious, it points to
470 Ian Buchanan

an unthought dimension in policy formation; it also offers the occasion

to write glorious sentences (which I willingly cite below). And in many
ways these two operations exposing an unthought, creating exciting
new types of sentences could be said to sum up (in a metacommentary
sense) the new materialist movement:
In monsoonal environments, walls suck in rainwater, forcing bricks and
mortar to loosen their seemingly fast embrace, with each new striation forging
a sweaty path for corrosion. Salt in mortar built with (substandard) building
sand encourages waters entry points. Water softens the muscularity of
support beams; and when it dances on metal, shows itself to be an electrolyte,
capable of strengthening its conductive properties by taking carbon dioxide
from the air and creating carbonic acid, able to dissolve iron. Even better if
the water is salt-loaded, be it from the liberation of salts in artesian waters
as pastoralists and miners pull more and more liquid from the subterranean
earth, or as spray from coastal waters. Salty water and acidified water are
electrolytes on steroids, able to deconstruct the functionality of load-bearing
steel frames at far greater speeds. (Lea 2015: 377)

As I have tried to indicate, there are two separate processes at work in

this example: on the one hand, there is a set of questions about what
constitutes a house in a material-semiotic sense, which corresponds to
the internal limit of the actant; on the other hand, there is a set of
questions about what constitutes an appropriate dwelling in an ethico-
political sense, which corresponds to the external limit of the actant.
By looking at the house in this way, as an actant rather than an
apparatus, our attention is directed in a very particular way: it asks us to
reverse the usual way of seeing material material is not, on this view of
things, a condition of possibility, as it tends to be in most so-called new
materialist accounts; rather, it is anything which can be interpolated and
accommodated by the concept. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, drawing
on Hjelmslev, material must always be produced; it does not simply exist
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 435). We have to resist the empiricist
tendency to treat material as given and instead ask the more properly
transcendental-empiricist question: how and under what conditions does
matter become material?
In an Australian context, bricks, timber, pressed iron and fibreboard
all seem like proper materials for house-building, whereas mud, straw,
bark, plastic bottles and car bodies do not. But in fact there is no intrinsic
reason why these other materials should be excluded. Greimass
question, then, which I want to suggest is also Deleuze and Guattaris
question, is: what are the limits to what can and cannot be counted
as material for a particular actant and how are these limits decided?
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 471

Greimass implication is that one cannot look to the material itself to

find the answer; instead, one has to examine the actant what are its
requirements? What expectations does it create? This in turn leads us to
the external limit and the role history itself plays in shaping what can
and cannot become the proper material of an actant. Now the issue is
less what material is suitable for house-building and more what material
is fitting, where fitting is an ethico-political judgement about what
kinds of houses people ought to live in.
These same two dimensions are to be found in Deleuze and Guattaris
concept of the assemblage and although they have different names
their operation is almost exactly the same, but with one important
twist: both the dimensions themselves and the relation between them
are purely arbitrary (something else the new materialists and the
realists neglect in their appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari). As
Hjemslev puts it, the two dimensions are defined only by their
mutual solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise.
They are defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposed
functives of one and the same function (Hjelmslev, quoted in
Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 45). The first dimension (equivalent
to the internal limit of the actant) is the form of content, but it
is also known as the machinic assemblage of bodies; the second
dimension is the form of expression, but it is also known as
the collective assemblage of enunciation (88). At its most basic
the assemblage combines nondiscursive multiplicities and discursive
multiplicities the combination is not total or exhaustive, one
dimension does not map onto the other without remainder, something
always escapes. This is because they are dimensions of an active, ongoing
process, not a static entity. Deleuze and Guattaris concepts are complex
syntheses (meaning one cannot trace back a pure line of derivation, there
is always an inexplicable leap) of a range of ideas drawn from a wide
variety of sources, so their names change as they evolve and take on
board additional components. In this case the name change reflects the
combination of Hjelmslevs ideas (form/content) with that of the Stoics
(bodies/attributes) and the work of Leroi-Gourhan (tools/signs) (63).
These distinctions cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between
things: What should be opposed are distinct formalizations, in a state
of unstable equilibrium or reciprocal presupposition (67).
Foucaults analysis of prisons itself inspired by Deleuze and
Guattaris work, as Foucault remarks in an admiring note in the preface
to Discipline and Punish is an exemplary illustration of how this works
in practice according to Deleuze and Guattari:
472 Ian Buchanan

Take a thing like the prison: the prison is a form, the prison-form; it is a
form of content on a stratum and is related to other forms of content (school,
barracks, hospital, factory). This thing does not refer back to the word
prison but to entirely different words and concepts, such as delinquent and
delinquency, which express a new way of classifying, stating, translating
and even committing criminal acts. Delinquency is the form of expression
in reciprocal presupposition with the form of content prison. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 66)

How should this model of thought be applied? The preferred method,

Deleuze and Guattari write, would be severely restrictive (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 67), by which they mean we should (1) seek to determine
the specific conditions under which matter becomes material (i.e. how
bricks, timber and steel are determined to be the proper material for
housing as opposed to mud, straw and wrecked cars); and (2) seek to
determine the specific conditions under which semiotic matter becomes
expressive (i.e. how it is decided that a specific arrangement of materials
is fitting for a person to live in and another arrangement is not).
Here I must clarify that for Deleuze and Guattari, expression, or better
yet becoming expressive, does not mean simply that something has
acquired meaning(s) in the semiotic sense; rather, it refers to the fact
it has acquired a performative function. In the example above, the label
delinquent is not merely symbolic, it frames a person as deserving the
treatment he or she receives. It is clear that indigenous functions in the
same way as Leas analyses make abundantly apparent, the assemblage
indigenous housing is very different in its formulation to what we might
think of as regular housing (a phrase I use purely for convenience
without any wish to defend it).
That these two formalisations are arbitrary and mobile can be seen in
the fact that both vary considerably from country to country and more
especially from one class perspective to another. The modest suburban
home is a mansion to the slum-dweller, and the slum-dwellers shanty is
a mansion to the rough-sleeping homeless person; by the same token, the
suburban home is fitting for a middle-class white person, just as the
shanty is in the eyes of that same middle-class white person fitting
for a poor person, particularly one living in a remote part of the country
where he or she is literally out of sight and out of mind. Formalisation
means there is a unity of composition, or, to put it another way, there is
an underlying principle of inclusion and exclusion. But the principle of
inclusion and exclusion for one dimension (content) can be and often is
in conflict with the principle of inclusion and exclusion for the other
dimension (expression). But what is of central importance and the
 Assemblage Theory, or, the Future of an Illusion 473

reason why the assemblage is such a powerful concept is the issue of

what it takes to yoke together these two dimensions in the first place: this
is what the assemblage does. We have to stop thinking of the concept of
the assemblage as a way of describing a thing or situation and instead
see it for what it was always intended to be: a way of analysing a thing
or situation.

IV. Conclusion
As Deleuze and Guattari say:
thinkers who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but
functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of
the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim to take
as their models. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 51)

Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not
simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For
Deleuze and Guattari, the critical analytic question is always: given
a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to
produce it? As I have tried to indicate in the foregoing discussion of
Leas analyses of indigenous housing policy in Australia, this question
should be understood as having two interrelated dimensions: on the one
hand, it asks: what are the material elements bodies in the broadest
possible sense that consitute this thing, how are they arranged, what
relations do they entail, what new arrangements and relations might they
facilitate? On the other hand, it also asks: how is this arrangement of
things justified and more importantly legitimated, what makes it seem
right and proper? In this way it points to different kinds of entities,
non-discursive and discursive (or better yet, performative) that have
been yoked together. However, it must be emphasised here that the
assemblage is the yoke, not the product of the yoke. This is why the
comparison with Greimass concept of the actant is valuable: it helps us
to see that the assemblage is a virtual entity with actual effects.

Notes
1. A key side effect of this detachment, which I am unable to pursue here, is the
isolation of the assemblage from the concepts of the body without organs and
the abstract machine which are in fact inseparable in Deleuze and Guattaris
work. See Buchanan 2015.
2. I use this analogy in my critique of Jane Bennetts use of the concept of the
assemblage. See Buchanan 2016.
474 Ian Buchanan

3. For example, see my discussion of Deleuze and Guattaris analysis of Little Hans
in Buchanan 2013.
4. Although Deleuze was interested in the problem of genesis, it is not a central
concern in his collaborative work with Guattari. The opposite is true. As their
discussion of the Wolf Man makes clear, the problem they have with Freud is
precisely that he insists on tracing all symptoms back to a point of origin rather
than deal with them on their own terms (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 31).

References
Baker, Tom and Pauline McGuirk (2016) Assemblage Thinking as Methodology:
Commitments and Practices for Critical Policy Research, Territory, Politics,
Governance, DOI i0.1080/21622671.2016.1231631.
Buchanan, Ian (2013) Little Hans Assemblage, Visual Arts Research, 40, pp. 917.
Buchanan, Ian (2015) Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents, Deleuze Studies,
9:3, pp. 38292.
Buchanan, Ian (2016) What Must We Do about Rubbish?, Drain Magazine, 13:1,
< http://drainmag.com/what-must-we-do-about-rubbish/ > (accessed 17 April
2017).
DeLanda, Manuel (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and
Social Complexity, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London:
Athlone Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia, trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Flix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network
Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lea, Tess (2014) From Little Things, Big Things Grow: The Unfurling of
Wild Policy, E-Flux, 58, < http://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61174/from-little-
things-big-things-grow-the-unfurling-of-wild-policy/ > (accessed 17 April 2017).
Lea, Tess (2015) What Has Water Got to Do with It? Indigenous Public Hous-
ing and Australian SettlerColonial Relations, Settler Colonial Studies, 5:4,
pp. 37586.
Lea, Tess and Paul Pholeros (2010) This Is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of
Indigenous Housing, Public Culture, 22:1, pp. 187209.
Nail, Thomas (2017) What is an Assemblage?, SubStance, 46:1, pp. 2137.
Spice, Nicholas (2004) I Must Be Mad, London Review of Books, 26:1,
< http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n01/nicholas-spice/i-must-be-mad > (accessed 17
April 2017).
 Your short guide to the EUP Journals
Blog http://euppublishingblog.com/

A forum for discussions relating to

Edinburgh University Press Journals

1. The primary goal of the EUP Journals Blog

To aid discovery of authors, articles, research, multimedia and reviews published in Journals, and as a
consequence contribute to increasing traffic, usage and citations of journal content.

2. Audience
Blog posts are written for an educated, popular and academic audience within EUP Journals publishing fields.

3. Content criteria - your ideas for posts

We prioritize posts that will feature highly in search rankings, that are shareable and that will drive readers to
your article on the EUP site.

4. Word count, style, and formatting

Flexible length, however typical posts range 70-600 words.
Related images and media files are encouraged.
No heavy restrictions to the style or format of the post, but it should best reflect the content and topic
discussed.

5. Linking policy
Links to external blogs and websites that are related to the author, subject matter and to EUP publishing
fields are encouraged, e.g.to related blog posts

6. Submit your post

Submit to ruth.allison@eup.ed.ac.uk

If youd like to be a regular contributor, then we can set you up as an author so you can create, edit, publish,
and delete your own posts, as well as upload files and images.

7. Republishing/repurposing
Posts may be re-used and re-purposed on other websites and blogs, but a minimum 2 week waiting period is
suggested, and an acknowledgement and link to the original post on the EUP blog is requested.

8. Items to accompany post

A short biography (ideally 25 words or less, but up to 40 words)
A photo/headshot image of the author(s) if possible.
Any relevant, thematic images or accompanying media (podcasts, video, graphics and photographs),
provided copyright and permission to republish has been obtained.
Files should be high resolution and a maximum of 1GB
Permitted file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx, key, mp3, m4a,
wav, ogg, zip, ogv, mp4, m4v, mov, wmv, avi, mpg, 3gp, 3g2.