A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari begins by defining a few terms in assemblage theory. D&G write in a way that’s a little over my head, so I have to break it down sentence by sentence and rebuild what I think they’re talking about. If there’s some error in my understanding, I’d like to be made aware.
Rhizomes, assemblages, and networks have been popping up all over my reading recently, so this is just part 1 in a series about a bigger topic.
An assemblage is a dynamic collection of elements that form a heterogeneous whole. The elements of an assemblage are not limited to being only physical. Social, conceptual, and abstract elements can also constitute an assemblage. In addition to being dynamic and heterogeneous, assemblages are relational- the importance of an element is proportional to how it relates to other elements. Finally, assemblages are productive in that they produce some sort of output.
Cities are one type of assemblage. They are made up of the land that they exist on, the people that live there, the system of governance, the transportation, the food that gets imported and so on. People are born and move away, roads degrade over time and new buildings get built at the edges of town or on vacant lots- cities are dynamic. Elements of a city bear relations to each other and interact with one another. Finally, cities produce multiple types of output, cultural, economic, and so on.
Other examples of assemblages are human beings, scientific theories, and this lovely pot of Taiwanese wulong tea I’m brewing.
Assemblages are evolving, heterogeneous arrangements of elements that come together for some function before dissipating.
Lines of articulation are elements of an assemblage that serve to stabilize, structuralize, and stratify. They therefore can form hierarchies, categories, and identities inside of the assemblage. Lines of articulation are responsible for domination and control inside an assemblage.
In the city example above, the lines of articulation are the land, the roads, the government, and zoning laws (though I’m sure we could think of a few more). In the human body, the bones are a line of articulation.
An obvious line of articulation in a Marxist critique of the economy would be the means of production. The means of production, according to Marx, do provide the structure of how we produce commodities, but also introduce some hierarchy or stratification to society through their ownership by the bourgeois class.
Lines of flight are forces or elements in an assemblage that cause destabilization or “deterritorialization”. They are forces of transformation or escape. Lines of flight give rise to new possibilities, new connections, and new configurations by disrupting existing structure.
Continuing with the city as an assemblage example, acts of nature can be lines of flight- a tornado can destroy part of a city displacing the people that live there. An earthquake can take down buildings or collapse bridges. Other lines of flight could be political unrest, mass migration in or out, changing laws or governments, or big investment in some industry in the city.
Lines of flight aren’t necessarily destructive, they simply provide the impetus for the connections in an assemblage to rearrange themselves. Lines of flight can lead to the new- new forms of art or expression, new life in a biological system.
An assemblage is a dynamic system, an interplay, between lines of articulation and lines of flight.
We will continue to explore these concepts and how they relate to other topics (physics, taoism, politics) in the future. I think it will take my mind a long while to fully put the pieces together, but I’m excited to see where it goes.
Stuff Cam Wrote 