Assemblage

From Geography

Assemblage

Assemblage (French ’assambler’: to collect) refers to a collection of different things, and also to the process of collecting them.

Deleuze on assemblages in an interview about his book 'A Thousand Plateaus': In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs.

The collection of items may seem strange because there is no central organizing principle. Yet somehow the objects have been brought together. It makes the observer wonder about how they cohere. The identity of the objects does not depend on their role in the assemblage. If an object would be taken out of the assemblage and placed in another assemblage, it would not lose its identity.

In an assemblage, there is no central point, no central organizing principle, and this was also the case in Deleuzes view of society. At this point he completely disagrees with Foucault, who used the Panopticon to explain the central organizing principle of power in society. Assemblage focuses on the fluidity of things, how things can be exchanged and how things can have multiple functions.

Created by Judith Nijenhuis, s3009270

References

- University of Texas at Austin. (n.d.). Assemblage Theory. Vinddatum 22 September 2011, op Texas Theory wiki http://wikis.la.utexas.edu/theory/page/assemblage-theory

- Larvalsubjects. (2009). Deleuze on Assemblages. Vinddatum 22 September 2011, op http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/deleuze-on-assemblages/