Reassembling International Theory

Assemblage Thinking and International Relations

Simon Curtis, M. Acuto

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137383952
• eBook ISBN: 9781137383969
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

What can 'assemblage' thinking contribute to the study of international relations theory? This study seeks to investigate how the various debates on assemblages in social theory can contribute to generating critical considerations on the connections and dissociation of political agency, physical world and international dynamics.

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Assemblage Thinking and International Relations

Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

Abstract: In this introduction to the volume we locate the growing interest in assemblage thinking for international relations in its intellectual and historical context. Arguing that many different approaches to assemblage thinking exist, and eschewing the temptation to try to pin this style of thought down to a fixed theoretical perspective, we try to allow this volume to be an exploration of the potential for these ideas to transform international theory. We outline the multiple intellectual roots of assemblage thinking, and we show how some have treated it as an ontological position, while others have used it in a more tactical way in their research programmes. We then go on to consider the political stances for which assemblage thinking offers resources.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969.

Introduction

Many scholars grappling with the problem of how to conceptualize the social world have been drawn to the figure of the ‘assemblage’. One of the attractions of this style of thinking is that it offers a radical break from many existing theories that seem to have run up against their limits in a period of rapid social change. As the pace of transformation has quickened in areas such as biotechnology, climate science or the global financial markets, a pressing need has developed for theoretical perspectives and methodologies that can enable us to understand the impact of the changing configurations of the natural and the social worlds.

Assemblage thinking offers an approach that is capable of accommodating the various hybrids of material, biological, social and technological components that populate our world. It moves away from reified general categories and ill-defined abstract concepts beloved of modernist thought (state, market, city, society and capitalism): abstractions that have made successful analysis of contemporary crises, and, as a result, effective political intervention, problematic. Assemblage thought also moves away from the anthropocentrism that characterizes the vast majority of historical and political writing, replacing it with a form of materialism that lays emphasis upon the creative capacities of matter and energy, and the processes that instantiate them in their great variety of forms, including those that emerge in social interaction. The ‘human’ comes to be seen as component, not the limit, of society: doors, traffic lights and animals also take centre stage in a series of accounts where social interaction is a heterogeneous affair linking actors of all sorts, whether human or not. As such, ‘assemblage’ is an approach that mostly takes its place in the recent revival of materialism¹ and the turn to relationalism.²

International Relations theory is something of a latecomer to assemblage ideas. By engaging assemblage views of society and space, researchers in human geography and anthropology have already made important steps towards understanding what it means practically to deploy the figure of the ‘assemblage’ to unpack complex socio-cultural processes such as those of neoliberalism (see Ong and Collier 2004) and intricate socio-technical realities such as those that characterize cities (see Farias and Bender 2011). Can parallel developments be prompted in IR? Can the ideas of assemblage and assembling further the refinement of international theory as discipline and practice?

In this volume we invite a range of IR scholars to reflect upon what possibilities are offered by assemblage thinking for the study of world politics, as well as what its limits and aporias may be. Our hope is that the present volume, in addition to serving as a brief introduction to assemblage thinking, will also operate as the beginning of a productive conversation for scholars trying to open up new avenues for the study of international politics.

However, a preliminary and caveat is necessary before jumping into the exploration of these avenues. As discussions in geography and anthropology have already pointed out, we can now legitimately talk of many styles of assemblage thinking – a feature that makes this approach less of a theory and more of a repository of methods and ontological stances towards the social. We seek to encompass the diversity of approaches to assemblages that have developed. We do not wish to limit the conversation to any one perspective: here you will find the assemblage thinking recovered from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1987), considered in parallel with approaches that have been developed in quite different contexts, such as in the study of Science, Technology and Society (STS), where Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) has become increasingly influential. Moving closer to the core of IR, the work of Saskia Sassen (2006) has been an important milestone in applying assemblage ideas to the history of international transformation, while scholars such as Aiwa Ong and Stephen Collier (2005), Michael Williams and Rita Abrahamsen (2009) have recently attempted to trace the formation of global assemblages. Here, via three conversations with the editors, these thinkers reflect on the way they use assemblage thinking in their own work, and what value it may hold for the development of international theory.

In this spirit, we do not wish to offer a comprehensive definition of assemblages in this introduction. It is true that the various approaches discussed here seem to share some agreement as to what an assemblage is: a compound of artefacts and people (Law 1999), a cofunctioning of heterogeneous parts within a provisional whole (Anderson 2011), or in Deleuze’s (2002: 69) well known statement:

What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms ... the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations that are important, but alliances, alloys.

Here we find some clues to the value of assemblage thought: its unwillingness to privilege either the social or the material, its resistance to totalizing systems of thought and the reification of entities, and its insistence on the provisional nature of all assemblages as historically contingent entities.

So, instead of trying to pin the concept down in the first instance, we hope to allow this volume to be an exploration of what we might mean when we talk about assemblages, allowing the various contributors to develop the term as they see fit. A plurality of assemblages are discussed in these pages: cognitive assemblages, security assemblages, socio-technical assemblages, martial assemblages and conceptual assemblages. There are many points of similarity to be observed, and many connections to be made, between the various approaches. But there are also points of difference, contention and incompatibility. In this way, we hope that the volume shares the characteristics of the Deleuzian rhizome, operating as an open system that facilitates debate, developing new points of contact between theoretical traditions.

Assemblage thinking

It will be apparent from the approach set out that any intellectual history of ‘assemblage’ must have a tangled genealogy. Indeed, assemblage thought draws upon developments of huge importance in a number of intellectual fields. Deleuze and Guattari are crucial figures in the development of an ontology that includes assemblages as one of its core entities, a position sketched out in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze, it has been argued, belongs to ‘an orphan line of thinkers’, stretching back into the history of philosophy, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson: a ‘deviant current’ flowing against the canon, ‘tied by no direct descendence but united by their opposition to State philosophy’ (see Massumi’s forward to Deleuze and Guattari 1987: x). But Deleuze also drew inspiration from a number of developments in scientific thought that matured in the twentieth-century such as the development of the non-linear sciences, with their battery of concepts: open systems, complexity, emergence and non-linear dynamics. He also made use of the tools that had been developed to describe such phenomena, drawing upon developments in mathematics (manifolds, attractors, transformation groups and the topological study of spaces of possibility) and biology (population thinking and selection). These form some of the foundations for a way of conceptualizing the various entities of the natural and social world as assemblages of heterogeneous components that are always transient and open, and in process, never solidifying into a closed totality or system. More recently, Manuel DeLanda (2010, 2006, 2002, 1997) has taken Deleuze’s arguments and developed a more comprehensive ‘theory of assemblages’ that, although meeting objections from some Deleuzians as being against the spirit of the original work, nevertheless has provided a clarification of Deleuze’s ideas and the intellectual resources reinforcing them. As his most recent book (2011) makes clear, the rapid development of computer technology is also vital here in facilitating the methodological tools that enable scientists to uncover the dynamics of assemblages.³

Just as the dynamics of science and technology were crucial for Deleuze’s materialist philosophy, STS has also developed a parallel interest in what we might term assemblages. As noted above, these have taken several philosophical shapes and methodological forms, ranging from more literal (and rare) applications of the Deleuzian term itself to variations such as ‘actor-network’ or ‘actant’ aimed at conveying the intertwined and post-anthropocentric form of society. We would argue that the difference between these terms is one of emphasis rather than kind. For instance, ANT, born as a response to the problems of technological determinism and anthropocentrism, opened up the material object as an arena of study. It considered how people and their material artefacts combine to produce historically specific orders. The strongest recent statement of an ANT view of assemblages has come from Bruno Latour (2005), who sought to develop a ‘sociology of connections’ of heterogeneous material and social elements in which neither the material or social are given priority. Latour has long argued (1993) that the “bracketing” of the natural and social worlds, the separation of subject and object that underpinned the scientific revolution, has been a perennial delusion of modern thought. In his focus on process, association, rationality and hybridity, Latour echoes many of Deleuze’s ontological suppositions, and deploys actor-network forms of assemblages as means to disentangle social processes from the constraints of modernist thinking, recharting the geography of the social as embedded in endless connections amongst ‘actants’, that is things, people and ideas that shape that very geography.

In the past decade, working within the paradigm of assemblage thinking from historical, sociological and anthropological trajectories, we have also seen thinkers such as Saskia Sassen, Aiwa Ong and Stephen Collier using this mode of thought to uncover the construction, and the disassemblage, of social formations. Sassen (2006) has deployed the concept of assemblage as a tool with which to unpick the dynamics of how the modern world emerged from the social structures of the premodern world. She then employs it to chart how global assemblages are being constructed from the very components that comprised the modern world, as those components are reoriented to different projects beyond the national assemblage. Similarly, Ong and Collier (2004) also seek to understand the governance logics of the diversity of the ‘global assemblages’ that have emerged in recent decades, as articulations through which economic, technological and social forms gain significance transnationally (Collier 2006). Further demonstrating the composite nature of assemblage thinking, Ong and Collier also draw on Foucauldian concepts in their emphasis on the technologies and strategies of governing instantiated in these assemblages. Sassen, Ong and Collier, but also Latour and Deleuze have been progressively invoked in contemporary IR writing. These approaches are implicit critiques of many of the theories, concepts and tools that we currently have for understanding social change and the reconfiguration of institutions – they evidence a dissatisfaction with the closed systems and reifications that IR scholarship in particular has been all too willing to tolerate. Yet what sort of ‘theory’ do they promote in international thinking?

Ontology

We should stress that not all scholars want to go so far as DeLanda does in making assemblages the building blocks for an entire ontology or metaphysical system. Sassen for one, as her contribution to this volume makes clear, eschews such lofty considerations in her insistence that she uses assemblage as a methodological tool to destabilize established discourses and meanings in her pursuit of the dynamics of social change. But in Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour, we have self-conscious metaphysical operators shaping empirical considerations. If, as Colin Wight (2006: 2) has argued, ‘politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’, we need to ask: of what features does an assemblage ontology partake, and why might such an ontology offer an improvement on those that IR scholar’s have held?

Assemblage theory is driven in large part by dissatisfaction with the dominant ontologies that have characterized social theory, including international theory. One of the defining characteristics of mainstream approaches to IR has been state-centrism. Assemblage theory’s most obvious promise is that it rules out such reification: it seeks to replace such abstractions with concrete histories of the processes by which entities are formed and made to endure. Something like ‘the state’ can only be talked about in terms of the heterogeneous elements that comprise specific historically situated states, and the processes and mechanisms that provide it with the emergent properties and capacities of statehood. The same holds true for ‘capitalism’ the ‘city’ or ‘society’ – these categories are too blunt to offer the fine-grained analysis of concrete historical processes and entities that assemblage thinking forces us to focus on.

Traditional thinking in IR has, building from the reification of states as units, tended to emphasize simple and relatively closed systems, leading to the familiar assumptions about equilibrium, cyclicality and predictability that we find in the rationalist IR paradigm. In such theories, systems are commonly seen as no more than the sum of their parts – thus ruling out emergent properties. Shifting to the type of complex-systems paradigm that assemblages offer opens up a new theoretical vista, and engages fully with concepts such as emergence, non-linearity, openness, adaptation, feedback and path-dependency (Bousquet and Curtis 2011). Although predictability in complex systems is tightly constrained, the possibilities for analysis of the system’s historical development offer a much richer resource for understanding transitions from one systemic configuration to another.

One of the useful results of thinking this way about parts and wholes is that we are left with a ‘flat ontology’ of individuals (Latour 2005). Any assemblage, as a concrete historical individual, has the same ontological status as any other assemblage, regardless of size or scale.⁴ Given that IR has moved in the general direction of pluralist conceptions of the international system, this ontology can provide a valuable starting point for the analysis of various social actors, including transnational corporations, institutional networks, epistemic communities, nation-states, cities and terrorist networks, which are often kept separate in theories founded on ontologies that make them incommensurable. In DeLanda’s sketch of the nested formation of different assemblages, larger wholes always emerge from the interaction of heterogeneous parts at a lower level of scale. This process of assemblage takes place repeatedly at various scales, as larger entities emerge from arrays of smaller components: individual persons emerge from a range of sub-personal components, communities emerge from the interaction of individuals, institutions and networks emerge from the interaction of communities, cities emerge from these networks and institutions, and states emerge from networks of cities as well as other networks and institutions. In this way, assemblages become the component parts of other assemblages, and the previously reified notion of society may be viewed as a historically specific assemblage of assemblages, open to transformation.

The upward movement of processes of assemblage through these various (always provisional) wholes should not lead us to discount the causal power of ‘structures’. Although assemblage theory offers a bottom-up perspective, it also contains an account of emergent top-down causality – the ability of entities at larger scales to react back on the parts that comprise them. As DeLanda (2010: 12) makes clear, ‘once a larger scale assemblage is in place, it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and resources for its components’. This bears similarity to the conception of structuration in Anthony Giddens’s work (1984) or morphogenesis in Margaret Archer’s work (1995), but here it is the concept of emergent capabilities that explains the structuring capacities of heterogeneous social entities. Sequence and temporality become vital: assemblages are born into a pre-existing configuration of other assemblages – so although theoretically we are asked to follow the upward movement of processes of assemblage, social reality is actually inherently non-linear. Assemblage thinking is thus comfortable with modelling structures while seeking to undermine structuralism.

It is also important to note that an assemblage approach to agency asks important questions about where agency is to be found. When we talk about the agency of an assemblage of heterogeneous social and material elements we deal with a form of agency that is both emergent and distributed across the entire assemblage (Dittmer 2013). As Nick Srnicek argues here, in his consideration of the cognitive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Assemblage Thinking and International Relations
• Part 1  Theories of Assemblage
• Part 2  Ontologies of Assemblage
• Part 3  Methods of Assemblage
• Part 4  Materialities of Assemblage
• Part 5 Politics of Assemblage
• References
• Index