Assemblage Theory and Method

An Introduction and Guide

Ian Buchanan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350015562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

What do we mean by 'assemblage' in contemporary theory? The constant and seemingly limitless expansion of the concept's range of applications begs the question, if any and every kind of collection of things is an assemblage, then what advantage is there is in using this term and not some other term, or indeed no term at all? What makes an assemblage an assemblage, and not some other kind of collection of things? This book advances beyond this impasse and offers practical help in thinking about and using assemblage theory for contemporary cultural and social research, in order to: - Answer the question: what is an assemblage?
- Explain why assemblage theory is necessary
- Provide clear instructions on how to use assemblage theory Ian Buchanan maps the beginnings of a brand new field within the humanities.

1

The Problem of Strata

When Charles Darwin decided to accept Captain FitzRoy’s invitation to join the HMS Beagle’s voyage to South America he was equally excited about the prospect of exploring new and strange geological formations as he was of finding new and strange species of plants and animals. And though he tends to be remembered for his writing about animals, particularly his theory of how they evolved, it should not be forgotten that he also wrote extensively on geology because it was his interest in the nature of the earth’s crust that drove him to rethink the natural history of the earth’s inhabitants. As an earnest young university student, Darwin had the opportunity to entertain one of his professors, the geologist Adam Sedgwick, at his family home in Shrewsbury, prior to their planned fieldwork trip to the North of Wales to explore its geology. Keen to impress his illustrious mentor, Darwin told him the story of a local manual labourer’s discovery of a tropical shell found in a nearby gravel pit. Sedgwick laughed at him. ‘If the shell was genuinely embedded there, said Sedgwick, it would overthrow everything that was known about the superficial deposits of the Midland counties.’¹ Sedgwick concluded it must have been left there by someone and took no further interest in it. Darwin, however, never stopped thinking about it and never forgot this episode. In later life he would recall being astonished that Sedgwick was not excited by this strange fact, as he was, and disappointed that he was willing to simply dismiss as aberrant anything that didn’t agree with his sense of how things are and therefore must be. By contrast, Darwin, who was an avid and early reader of Charles Lyell, who would go on to become one of the most renowned geologists of the Victorian era (unsurprisingly Sedgwick had no time for Lyell), was willing to set aside everything that was thought to be known about geology – including of course all the theologically inflected knowledge about the subject – in order to explain this one curious fact. What is interesting about this moment, for our purposes here, is that the geology of the earth was not well understood in Darwin’s time, and it was a long way from attaining the status it has today of scientific knowledge. As such, it was subject to theoretical speculation.

As the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould reminds us, it was ever thus and remains so today. Science advances via speculation, which it then tries to prove (or falsify) via experimentation. Although our technology today is vastly more sophisticated than anything the Victorians could call upon, we remain just as reliant on theoretical speculation to resolve what may appear to be purely material problems today as we did in Darwin’s time. ‘Reality does not speak to us objectively, and no scientist can be free from constraints of psyche and society. The greatest impediment to scientific innovation is usually a conceptual lock not a factual lack.’² Gould’s book Wonderful Life, a marvellous history of the discovery, interpretation and reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale, the vast trove of fossils which provided the first evidence of the so-called Cambrian explosion, offers an extended demonstration of this point and in doing so reiterates the importance of the problem identified above, namely the problem of presupposition, only on a much grander scale. As Deleuze said, it is a delicate problem, not easily overcome because one is not usually aware of the degree to which one is in the grips of a presupposition.³ There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the story of the discovery and more especially the first interpretation of the Burgess Shale. The honour of finding the Burgess Shale fossils goes to Charles Doolittle Walcott, then head of the Smithsonian, who stumbled across them in a quarry in British Columbia in the late summer of 1909. His discovery changed the course of modern palaeontology, or at least it would have done if ‘Walcott [hadn’t] proceeded to misinterpret these fossils in a comprehensive and thoroughly consistent manner arising directly from his conventional view of life. In short, he shoehorned every last Burgess animal into a modern group, viewing the fauna collectively as a set of primitive or ancestral versions of later, improved forms.’⁴ Walcott’s twofold error (to put it into philosophical terms) was to assume that the present can explain the past and that the past must have a representative today in however changed form.

What Walcott did not allow for (because he couldn’t imagine it or conceptualize it, just as Sedgwick could neither imagine nor conceptualize that Shrewsbury had once been under the ocean) was the extinction of phyla. It is now estimated that fifteen or so different phyla are evident in the Burgess Shale, perhaps more, of which only four can claim modern ancestors, but Walcott failed to notice this because he assumed the past must be symmetrical with the present. He assumed that everything he found must have a modern representative, so he overlooked genuine differences in kind, reducing them to mere differences of degree, in order to preserve his key presupposition about the absolute number of phyla.⁵ As such, he never realized just how incredible his discovery really was. Because of the esteem in which Walcott was held in his own lifetime, it wasn’t until several decades after his death that fresh eyes re-examined his discoveries and began to piece together the radical truth that eluded him. For Gould this story is interesting for a number of reasons, as a cautionary tale about the perils of not challenging one’s presuppositions, as a scientific adventure story every bit as thrilling intellectually as an Indiana Jones film (minus the whips and Nazis, of course), but most importantly as supporting evidence of his own hypothesis that evolution was not gradual and progressiv e as Darwin had supposed but contingent and brutal. ‘The history of life is a story of massive removal followed by differentiation within a few surviving stocks, not the conventional tale of steadily increasing excellence, complexity, and diversity.’⁶ What strata tell us, according to Gould, is that history is profoundly contingent, a view that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly support. ‘A historical explanation does not rest on direct deductions from laws of nature, but on an unpredictable sequence of antecedent states, where any major change in any step of the sequence would have altered the final result.’⁷ This, I will argue, is central to how we should begin to think about strata: it maps the relations of dependency that exist between various moments in history that taken together produce the present as we know it.

As Gould argues, though, relations of dependency must also take into account that which has disappeared from history – our present is the sum both of the paths taken and the paths not taken. In short, we should not assume that the assemblages of today are more perfect forms of the assemblages of yesterday. What this detour via Gould helps us to see, which I want to suggest is critical to understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s deployment of the concept of strata, is that strata are first of all a way of problematizing appearances. Strata are the conceptual means of transforming that which seems to have been given by either god or nature into something that is the product of multiple processes and forces over time. Strata transform nature into history and history into nature. Strata are the product of the manifold processes that have over time constructed and produced the thing we call nature, whether by that we mean human nature or nature as wilderness. We have to be careful not to reverse this historicizing process by overemphasizing the apparent ‘naturalness’ of strata, that is, by forgetting that ‘strata’ refers to a concept that enables us to see and think about a certain type of process, the production of nature, not the thing itself. Quite literally, until the Danish scholar Nicolas Steno (Niels Steensen) proposed to think about the layering of rocks he saw in his travels around Italy as strata that had been formed in a particular sequence, no one saw anything but rocks they assumed had been formed all at once in the moment of the earth’s creation.⁸ His speculation defamiliarized the Tuscan landscape, punctuating its apparent timelessness with the segmentations of science and history. His conclusion, however, was altogether unscientific and ahistorical; in his mind, the existence of geological stratification proved that the world had indeed been inundated with water, just as it says in the Bible.⁹ The lesson to be drawn from this, then, is not that we can use stratigraphy to understand contemporary society, as though it somehow resembles geological formations.¹⁰ Rather, the lesson is that in order to begin to analyse contemporary society we need to construe it as a problematic field. Just as Darwin wondered how a seashell came to be in a gravel pit in the Midlands, so we need to wonder how it is that our world is populated by similarly inexplicable phenomena from President Trump to K-pop and look for a systematic explanation.

To begin with, though, we need to start by problematizing the notion of stratification itself because it is far from clear how one should define it, much less use it. And yet, as I will argue, it is absolutely pivotal to any possible use of the concept of the assemblage. Stratification has received comparatively little attention in the secondary literature on Deleuze and Guattari. There are two reasons for this neglect, I suspect: for a start it seems kind of obvious what it means, it appears to be basic high school geology after all, so there’s no apparent need to inquire too deeply as to what Deleuze and Guattari actually meant by it; and, because it seems kind of obvious what it means there is no apparent reason to interrogate anyone else’s deployment of it either. However, judging by the various quite scanty attempts to define it in the secondary literature it isn’t very well understood at all. In fact, given how divergent the various accounts of strata are I think we can safely jettison the idea that its meaning is obvious. That most attempts to explain stratification fall back on elementary geography is itself a dead giveaway that the concept has neither been interrogated nor understood because it ignores the simple fact that evolutionary biology and language philosophy are also called upon by Deleuze and Guattari in their construction of the concept of stratification. It also misses the fact that it is acoustics (which to be fair isn’t specifically mentioned) that is the most useful point of reference for understanding strata even though three key acoustical concepts are repeated like a refrain throughout: waves, frequency and resonance. Strata are not inert, in other words, as DeLanda and others seem to think, and certainly cannot be thought of as frozen assemblages as he put it.¹¹

What is stratification? I want to give several answers to this question because I think it serves a number of different purposes in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, not all of which are signposted and not all of which are explicitly intended by the authors. My priority, though, will be to try to give as accurate a technical definition of it as I can based on a detailed reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work. But before I do that I want to try to give a ‘big picture’ view of it because it is my sense – my personal experience, I should perhaps say – that the more one drills down into the technical details of Deleuze and Guattari’s inventions the harder it is to see how they work in the world beyond their pages. We are at constant risk of becoming ‘stuck’ on a detail like Bergotte and his little patch of yellow in Vermeer, or Vintueil and his ever elusive little phrase. Deleuze and Guattari specify that there are three types of strata – the geological, the biological and the alloplastic or what I will call the techno-semiological (i.e. humans) – each of which is composed of a different combination of two key variables, content and expression. Importantly, the relation between these two variables is different for each stratum. This has two crucial implications: it means that there is no direct correspondence between the different strata – one stratum cannot be used to explain another – and that each one has different capacities not necessarily shared by the others (which reinforces the necessity of the previous point). The most important function of the strata I would argue is that they problematize and map the terrain of human existence in a very particular way that can perhaps be visualized along the lines of three dimensional chess, providing we modify the rules so that only the pieces on the top level are capable of moving across all the planes. It amounts to saying, ‘we’ humans depend on the properties of the earth for our existence (geology) and ‘we’ depend on the properties of our bodies for what ‘we’ can do on the earth (biology), but ‘we’ constantly exceed those limits in the outpourings of our minds. This is the essential difference between geological and biological strata and the techno-semiological stratum – the production of signs (both symbols and language) enables the third stratum to translate the other two and in a sense range beyond them.¹² The third stratum is ‘alloplastic’ whereas the first and second are ‘homoplastic’.¹³

In other words, contra DeLanda, assemblage theory does not avoid essentialism, it entrenches it at its very heart: geology, biology and techno-semiology are formed differently, they evolved differently, and are defined by an organization of relations that is specific to each stratum.¹⁴ The distinction between the two major variables, content and expression, is different on each stratum, which in turn means that the way each stratum develops is also different. The geological stratum proceeds via induction, the biological stratum proceeds via transduction and the techno-semiological stratum proceeds by translation. In each case, what is essential is the increased autonomy of expression and hence the capacity for deterritorialization. In the geological stratum, the distinction between content and expression corresponds to the distinction between the molecular (content) and the molar (expression) and can be understood in terms of orders of magnitude.¹⁵ The molar in this instance is an expression of the molecular. But this distribution does not hold as we move onto the biological stratum. Orders of magnitude continue to be important, but now expression is linear and autonomous from content – the sequencing of the DNA is what gives shape to the organic stratum. It is no longer a matter of volume. Now content and expression are found in both the molecular and molar orders.¹⁶ The techno-semiological stratum is different again. Whereas the organic stratum is defined by spatial linearity, the techno-semiological stratum is defined by superlinearity – language, to give only the most privileged example, is not just a matter of a linear sequence of words and phrases, it also entails synthesis because words combine to form meanings, which are ephemeral events rather than composites of materials, and these combinations can be changed at will (breaking the rules of language produces poetry).¹⁷ What interests Deleuze and Guattari, though, is the way these essentially different strata impact on each other without ceasing to be essentially different from each other (see Steno’s first rule of strata).

‘Maps should be made of these things’ Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘organic, ecological, and technological maps one can lay out on a plane of consistency.’¹⁸ These maps should identify what I will call (following Hjelmslev) orders of dependency. ‘The principle of analysis must … be a recognition of … dependences. It must be possible to conceive of parts to which the analysis shall lead as nothing but intersection points of bundles of lines of dependence.’¹⁹ That is to say, analysis should proceed by breaking down an object to its smallest components or terminals as Hjelmslev calls them. For Hjelmslev analysis consists in the ‘description of an object by the uniform dependences of other objects on it and on each other. The object that is subjected to analysis we shall call a class, and the other objects, which are registered by a particular analysis as uniformly dependent on the class and on each other, we shall call components of the class.’²⁰ Hjelmslev goes onto say that the components can be related in one of two ways: either by means of conjunction – for example, by combining the letters ‘p’, ‘e’ and ‘t’ to form the word ‘pet’ – or disjunction – for example, by recognizing that we could substitute a different letter at any point in that chain to form a new word.²¹ As such, the mapping of orders of dependency needs to take into account what I will call a power of selection to explain why one component is included and not another. We can use these two principles – order of dependency and power of selection – as a rudimentary navigational aid, a bit like a compass made from magnetized pin on a cork, to assist us in making our way through the dark waters of the mostly implicit methodological aspects of assemblage theory. It gives us two very useful questions to ask as a way of beginning our analysis of a specific social and cultural phenomenon: first, what is the class of object we are dealing with and what are its components? – this is a question of scale, that is, where does an object begin and end? – and, second, what type of relation obtains between the components? and what gives the class consistency? – this is a question of hierarchy and selection, that is, which components belong to a particular class and which do not? Both content and expression exhibit these two principl es.

Deleuze and Guattari’s inter...