User:DoctorMabuse/Sandbox10

Deleuze and Guattari use a lobster to illustrate the "double pincered" fitting of segments of content with segments of expression performed by the double articulation of the assemblage.

An assemblage (French agencement; sometimes translated as "arrangement") is a philosophical concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their books Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-80) and Kafka: Toward a Theory of Minor Literature (1975). In their critical "schizoanalytic" theory, the concept of the assemblage replaces the Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of the complex and the drive. Desire, they claim, is determined by assemblages. The assemblage offers a theoretical means to elaborate the multiple and collective dimensions of our unconscious: "not ego as subject", Deleuze explains, but rather "these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements" The assemblage is also used more broadly in their work to analyze a wide range of social, historical, cultural and psychological phenomena; examples include the assemblages of the State apparatus and the war machine, the despotic assemblage and the authoritarian assemblage, courtship assemblages, including that of courtly love, game assemblages, the classical, romantic and modern assemblages of music, assemblages formed by the novels of Beckett, Kafka and Proust, both a masochist's and Little Hans' "becoming-horse" assemblages, Freudian assemblages of listening and modelisation, the La Borde psychiatric clinic, and the feudal assemblage. Among others, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Manuel de Landa have used the concept in their writings.

Definition of an assemblage

Deleuze defines an assemblage as "a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them." Its elements may belong to many different orders: "biological, social, machinic, gnoseological, or imaginary." They are unified only through their "co-functioning" together. Guattari argues that the notion of the assemblage is "larger than structure, system, form, process, etc."

An assemblage is arranged along an horizontal and a vertical axis.

Horizontal axis of an assemblage

A distinction between "expression" and "content" forms two segments that intersect along the horizontal axis of an assemblage. These segments are each, themselves, multiplicities: "'discursive multiplicities' of expression and 'nondiscursive multiplicities' of content." This conception of the horizontal axis of the assemblage relates both to the semiotics of Louis Hjelmslev, from whom Deleuze and Guattari take the distinction between content and expression, and to Michel Foucault's theory of discourse. In an assemblage (in contrast to the "strata," or what Foucault calls "historical formations"), expression forms a semiotic system, which they term a "regime of signs," while content forms a "pragmatic system", an ensemble of interacting actions and passions.

Along its horizontal axis, an assemblage intertwines the relations of a regime of signs with a state of forces. "of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another" Deleuze and Guattari call the discursive multiplicities of expression a "collective assemblage of enunciation," while the non-discursive multiplicities of content are referred to as a "machinic assemblage of bodies."

Not signifier/signified, not superstructure/base (nor cause and effect?)-> flat.

What do we mean by flat? -> Interactions. Having established semiotic/pragmatic, etc. bifurcation, need to explain their theory of relation between matter and signs - interchangeable. Then add: relates to Nietzschean active/passive, will to power, etc. Massumi's clarification: A power relation determines which is which. The Event (The Logic of Sense). Perspectives. Fractal & non-totalizing.

Caveat: need to reconcile matter-sign ideas with horizontal/vertical axis idea. Matter-sign interaction is the function of the diagram. (Peirce). (Collect quotations for particle-sign interactions on the talk page that accompanies this article)

Foucault's visibilities. Articulated with Bergson in Cinema books.

Vertical axis of an assemblage

stabilize / carry away

Its vertical axis "has two poles or vectors":

Insofar as form content/expression, they envelop a territorality (1980, 555).

Quotations

[O]ne vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differentiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in reciprocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that conjugate." (1980, 160)

Taking the feudal assemblage as an example, we would have to consider the interminglings of bodies defining feudalism: the body of the earth and the social body; the body of the overlord, vassal, and serf; the body of the knight and the horse and their new relation to the stirrup; the weapons and tools assuring a symbiosis of bodies--a whole machinic assemblage. We would also have to consider statements, expressions, the juridical regime of heraldry, all of the incorporeal transformations, in particular, oaths and their variables (the oath of obedience, but also the oath of love, etc.): the collective assemblage of enunciation. On the other axis, we would have to consider the feudal territories and reterritorializations, and at the same time the line of deterritorialization that carries away both the knight and his mount, statements and acts. We would have to consider how all this combines in the Crusades.

Block: This term resembles assemblage. It’s not a question of an infantile complex, but the crystallization of systems of intensities that traverse psychogenic strata and are susceptible of operating through perceptive, cognitive or affective systems of all kinds. An example of an intensity block: musical refrains in Proust, “Vinteuil’s little phrase.”

Collective enunciation: linguistic theories of enunciation focalize linguistic production on individuated subjects, even if language, in its essence, is social and moreover, connected diagrammatically onto contextual realities. Beyond individuated instances of enunciation therefore we must reveal collective assemblages of enunciation [agencements collectifs d’énonciation]. Collective cannot be understood here only in the sense of social grouping; it also implies the inclusion of a variety of collections of technical objects, material or energetic flows, incorporeal entities, mathematical or aesthetic idealities, etc.

What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liasions, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns--different natures. Thus, the assemblage's only unity is that of co-functioning: it is symbiosis, a "sympathy." It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. [Deleuze and Parnet 1977, 69]

First, in an assemblage there are, as it were, two faces, or at least two heads. There are states of things, states of bodies (bodies interpenetrate, mix together, transmit affects to one another); but also statements, regimes of statements: signs are organized in a new way, new formulations appear, a new style for new gestures . . . . [Deleuze and Parnet 1977, 70-71]

Only one side of the assemblage has to do with enunciation or formalizes expression; on its other side, inseparable from the first, it formalizes contents, it is a machinic assemblage or an assemblage of bodies. Now contents are not "signifieds" dependent upon a signifier in any way, nor are they "objects" in any kind of relation of causality with the subject. They have their own formalization and have no relation of symbolic correspondence or linear causality with the form of expression: the two forms are in reciprocal presuppposition, and they can be abstracted from each other only in a very relative way because they are two sides of a single assemblage. We must therefore arrive at something in the assemblage itself that is still more profound than these sides and can account for both of the forms in presupposition, forms of expression or regimes of signs (semiotic systems) and forms of content or regimes of bodies (physical systems). This is what we call the abstract machine, which constitutes and conjugates all of the assemblage's cutting edges of deterritorialization. [TP: 141]

The assemblage has two poles or vectors: one vector is oriented toward the strata, upon which it distributes territorialities, relative deterritorializations, and reterritorializations; the other is oriented toward the plane of consistency or destratification, upon which it conjugates processes of deterritorialization, carrying them to the absolute of the earth. It is along its stratic vector that the assemblage differentiates a form of expression (from the standpoint of which it appears as a collective assemblage of enunciation) from a form of content (from the standpoint of which it appears as a machinic assemblage of bodies); it fits one form to the other, one manifestation to the other, placing them in reciprocal presupposition. But along its diagrammatic or destratified vector, it no longer has two sides; all it retains are traits of expression and content from which it extracts degrees of deterritorialization that add together and cutting edges that conjugate. [TP: 145]

Being crystallises through an infinity of enunciative assemblages associating actualised, discursive components (material and indicative Fluxes, machinic Phylums) with non-discursive, virtual components (incorporeal Universes and existential Territories).

See also

• Dispositif

Sources

• Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1977. Dialogues II.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1972. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of L'Anti-Oedipe. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476953.
• ---. 1975. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature 30. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Trans. of Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0816615152.
• ---. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Vol. 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 2 vols. 1972-1980. Trans. of Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit. ISBN 0826476945.
• Guattari, Félix. 1984. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 0140551603.
• ---. 1992. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995. Trans. of Chaosmose. Paris: Editions Galilee. ISBN 0909952256.
• ---. 1995. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270198.
• ---. 1996. Soft Subversions. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Trans. David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1570270309.
• Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Swerve editions. Cambridge, USA and London: MIT. ISBN 0262631431.
• Venn, Couze. 2006. "A Note on Assemblage." Theory, Culture & Society.