Reassembling International Theory

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Reassembling
International Theory:
Assemblage Thinking
and International
Relations
Edited by

Michele Acuto
Senior Lecturer in Global Networks and Diplomacy,
University College London, UK
and

Simon Curtis
Lecturer in International Politics, University of East
Anglia, UK

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
Selection and editorial matter © Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis 2014
Individual chapters © their contributors 2014
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
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permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN: 978–1–137–38396–9 PDF

ISBN: 978–1–349–48072–2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Contents
Notes on Contributors vii

1 Assemblage Thinking and International

Relations 1
Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

Part 1 Theories of Assemblage

2 The Carpenter and the Bricoleur 17
A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and
Aihwa Ong

3 Tracing Global Assemblages, Bringing

Bourdieu to the Field 25
A Conversation with Rita Abrahmsen and
Michael Williams

4 Assemblages and the Conduct of Inquiry 32

A Conversation with Stephen J. Collier

Part 2 Ontologies of Assemblage

5 Cognitive Assemblages and the Production
of Knowledge 40
Nick Srnicek

6 Global Assemblages and Structural Models

of International Relations 48
Olaf Corry

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 v
vi Contents

Part 3 Methods of Assemblage

7 Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules
of Thumb 58
Christian Bueger

8 Energizing the International 67

Debbie Lisle

9 Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of

Possibility 75
Roland Bleiker

Part 4 Materialities of Assemblage

10 Security in Action: How John Dewey Can Help Us
Follow the Production of Security Assemblages 83
Peer Schouten

11 Welcome to the Machine: Rethinking Technology

through Assemblage Theory 91
Antoine Bousquet

Part 5 Politics of Assemblage

12 The Onto-Politics of Assemblage 99
David Chandler

13 Agencement and Traces: A Politics of Ephemeral

Theorizing 106
Xavier Guillaume

14 The Assemblage and the Intellectual-as-Hero 113

Mark B. Salter

Conclusions: Assemblage Theory and Its Future 118

Graham Harman

References 131

Index 142

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Notes on Contributors
Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School
of Public and International Affairs at the University of
Ottawa, was previously Lecturer in the Department of
International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth,
and has authored Security Beyond the State: Private Security
in International Politics with Michael Williams.
Michele Acuto is Senior Lecturer in Global Networks and
Diplomacy in the Department of Science, Technology,
Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) at University
College London, and Fellow in the Institute for Science,
Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford. He is
the author of The Urban Link and editor of Negotiating Relief
and Global City Challenges.
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations in
the School of Political Science and International Studies
at the University of Queensland, and is the author of
Aesthetics and World Politics.
Antoine Bousquet is Senior Lecturer in International
Relations in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck
College, University of London. He is the author of The
Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields
of Modernity.
Christian Bueger is Lecturer in International Relations
in the Department of Politics at Cardiff University and
was previously Leverhulme Fellow at the Greenwich
Maritime Institute in London and Fellow at the Institute
for Development and Peace in Duisburg.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 vii

viii Notes on Contributors

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations and Research

Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the Department of
Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, and edi-
tor of the Routledge book series Studies in Intervention and Statebuilding.
Stephen Collier is Associate Professor of International Affairs at the
New School, New York, USA.
Olaf Corry Lecturer in International Relations at the Open University.
He was post-doctoral researcher at Cambridge University and obtained
his PhD in International Relations from the University of Copenhagen
in 2006. He is the author of Global Polity.
Simon Curtis is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of
East Anglia. He was previously Michael Leifer Scholar in International
Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His
research interests are in international theory and international history.
He is currently working on a monograph entitled Global Cities and Global
Order.
Xavier Guillaume is Lecturer in the Department of Politics and
International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author
of International Relations and Identity.
Graham Harman is Distinguished University Professor at the American
University in Cairo. He is the author of The Quadruple Object, editor of
the Speculative Realism book series at Edinburgh University Press, and
(with Bruno Latour) coeditor of the New Metaphysics book series at
Open Humanities Press.
Debbie Lisle is Senior Lecturer in International Relations and Cultural
Studies in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy
at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of The Global Politics of
Contemporary Travel Writing.
Aihwa Ong is Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Southeast
Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author
of Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty.
Mark Salter is Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University
of Ottawa University of Ottawa, and is the editor of Politics at the Airport
(2008) and Research Methods in Critical Security Studies.
Saskia Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia
University and Co-Chair of The Committee on Global Thought, Centennial

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 Notes on Contributors ix

visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and is the author of

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.
Peer Schouten is PhD Candidate in Global Studies at the University
of Gothenburg and Editor-in-Chief of Theory Talk. He holds a BA in
Language philosophy (University of Amsterdam), a BA in Portuguese
Studies (University of Utrecht) and an MA in International Relations
(Complutense University of Madrid).
Nick Srnicek is Teaching Fellow in the Department of Geography at
University College London, and PhD Candidate in the Department of
International Relations at the London School of Economics and coeditor
of Millennium: A Journal of International Studies.
Michael Williams is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and
International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and was previously
Professor of International Politics in the Department of International
Politics at Aberystwyth. He is the author of Realism Reconsidered: The
Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 1
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.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

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 perspec-
tives 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 accom-
modating the various hybrids of material, biological, social and tech-
nological 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): abstrac-
tions 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?

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

In this volume we invite a range of IR scholars to reflect upon what possi-

bilities 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 vol-
ume, 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 anthro-
pology 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 conversa-
tion 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 influen-
tial. 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 unwill-
ingness to privilege either the social or the material, its resistance
to totalizing systems of thought and the reification of entities, and its

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

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 his-
tory 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 devel-
opment of an ontology that includes assemblages as one of its core enti-
ties, 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

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

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 methodologi-
cal 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 tech-
nological 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 mate-
rial 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 peren-
nial 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 think-
ing, 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 think-
ing 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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

the concept of assemblage as a tool with which to unpick the dynam-

ics 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 articula-
tions 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 strate-
gies 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 dis-
courses and meanings in her pursuit of the dynamics of social change.
But in Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour, we have self-conscious meta-
physical 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

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

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 enti-
ties 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 state-
hood. 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 predict-
ability that we find in the rationalist IR paradigm. In such theories, sys-
tems 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 corpora-
tions, 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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

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
assemblages developing around climate science or financial markets,
it is the entire assemblage that acts – and these are assemblages that
include in their components not just individual persons and groups
and their knowledge, but also the technological tools and measuring
instruments that have been developed to allow modelling and inter-
vention in the market and the climate: data collection tools, computer
models, software and data sets. This concept of distributed agency,
with its attendant decentring of the human subject of modern liberal
thought, and as part of the wider turn to post-anthropocentrism or

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

post-humanism (Cudworth and Hobden 2011), makes some scholars

distinctly uncomfortable with the implications of assemblage thought,
a view reflected here in the chapter by David Chandler.

Analytical tactic
Importing the figure of the assemblage into IR can therefore help to fur-
ther destabilize reified meaning and anthropocentric rationalities, while
prompting a reassessment of the ontologies of the discipline. Thinking
with assemblages is, however, not just an exercise in developing new
theoretical stances on the nature of being. These ontological consid-
erations are foreshadowed, in much assemblage theory, by a variety of
applied methods that make this ‘new philosophy of society’ (DeLanda
2010) into a complex of empirical stances too. Assemblage, to put it
simply, is as much a toolkit of analytical tactics as it is a set of ontological
assumptions. If assemblage views tend to depict a more heterogene-
ous (i.e. contingently socio-technical, where ‘things’ can act too) and
indeed ‘messier’ picture of how global affairs unravel, these views also
come with several methods on how to unpack this intricate picture of
society. As Bueger points out in his contribution to this volume, invok-
ing assemblages does not only require us to acquaint ourselves with the
ontological stances described above, but it also demands a recognition of
a series of empiricist projects that see these worldviews being applied to
in-depth analyses.
Assemblage is in this sense a method. As noted above, the very genesis
of ‘assemblage thinking’ as a modus operandi for the social sciences brings
evidence of this way of operating, being itself a composite of complex
and diverse ideas coming from political philosophy, sociology and
STS, making up for a theory of assemblages that is itself an assemblage
of views and methods. Yet, how can we then understand the empirical
challenge of thinking with assemblages?
For many of those that could be deemed ‘assemblage theorists’ this
approach has as much to do with rethinking as it does with unpacking
and unveiling. Sassen for instance, as she notes in the following chapter,
sees assemblages as ‘an analytic tactic to deal with the abstract and the
unseen’. Assemblage, as an empirical approach, calls upon us to confront
unproblematic categories such as those of ‘the state’ or ‘the city’ or routi-

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 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

nized realities like those of global finance, and pull them apart into the
components of their assembled wholes.
In human geography, where a similar debate on the value of thinking
with assemblages has occupied the pages of key journals, this approach
has mostly emerged as a ‘mode of response’ to perceived limitations of
current ways of geographical thinking, both in the sense of assemblage
as ‘critique’ and of assemblage as ‘orientation’ (McFarlane and Anderson
2011; Acuto 2011). Assemblage thinking, several contemporary human
geographers argue, is a response to tensions within relational thought
itself (Anderson et al. 2012; Dittmer 2013). It allows us to think through
processes of composition and decomposition, and as such is attractive
to critical geographers precisely because it allows us to see how different
spatial forms, processes and orders hold together. Drawing on the herit-
age of Deleuzian and Foucauldian thinking, assemblage thinking tends
to push for the problematization of the ordinary and the deconstruction
of wholes and totalities, such as the ‘global’ into contingent realities
where society is, even if temporarily, stabilized in networks, institutions
and routines. Assemblage becomes a way of investigating the social, not
just a philosophical stance on it. For instance, by depicting assemblage
thinking as a ‘style of structuration’, Jane Bennett demanded greater
attention to how ‘throbbing confederations’ of humans and ‘vibrant
materials’ are ‘able to function despite the persistent presence of ener-
gies that confound them from within’ (2010: 23). Representing both the
descriptor of the relation between the parts of ‘a volatile but somewhat
functional whole’ and at the same time the analytical principle by which
we can make sense of such a ‘confederated’ complex, assemblages are in
Bennett’s case mobilized to tell the story of how socio-technical networks
come together, persist and fail. Somewhat similarly to Latour and Callon’s
version of Actor-Network Theory, and somewhat more systematically
than DeLanda’s more philosophical ruminations on society, assembling
and disassembling is what the social theorist does to convey the stabili-
ties and fluidities of the world one is trying to describe. In this sense, the
analytics of assemblage are embedded in an account of immanence and
change. As a modus operandi for the social scientist, assemblage thinking
demands substantial tolerance for the fluidity of society.
Yet, as a challenge to many existing accounts of social processes,
assemblage thinking is not free from methodological critiques. Many
see inherent analytical dangers of thinking with assemblages. As a
method for unpacking categories, this approach can easily fall prey of

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

a self-reinforcing process of endless deconstruction, never reaching

what is from the start an impossible end: assemblages like ‘the state’,
once opened, bear the risk of unveiling other ‘smaller’ totalities which,
in their turn, might also hold internal realities in need of disentan-
glement, eventually resulting in the question of where to stop assem-
bling and disassembling, and how. This kind of critique embodies a
number of dissatisfactions with assemblage thinking’s inherent risk
of privileging description over prescription, undisciplined narrative
versus theoretical research aimed at highlighting predictable realities,
or even, as Chandler suggests in his chapter in this volume, risks the
‘erasure’ of human aspirations in a quintessentially assembled world.
Actor-Network-Theory has often been criticized for these potential
shortcomings, and other assemblage strands are equally vulnerable
to such critiques. Yet, rather than acknowledging these as unsolv-
able confrontations, or providing some overarching solutions to such
quandaries, we have decided to allow for the variety of approaches
represented in these pages to find their own voice amidst the limits of
theorizing with assemblages. Here we seek to turn these contrasts into
a signifier of an important and yet often overlooked element of this
line of thinking: the politics of assembling.

The politics of assembly

Assemblage thinking emerges then as a potentially very productive tool
for unpacking and recasting the boundaries of the ‘political’ and the
‘international’. Nevertheless, as noted above, assemblage as a theoretical
orientation has been raising more than a few proverbial eyebrows in
social theory. This criticism, however, is not simply a mirror of academic
quarrels: along with methodological underpinnings of ‘thinking with
assemblages’ also comes normative stances and political orientations.
What does assemblage mean politically? It seems crucial to us here, and to
many authors later, to point out how assembling and reassembling poli-
tics also implies a politics of assembling, and a politics of the assemblies
that this worldview convenes in its tales. For instance, in his contribution
to the volume, Mark Salter reminds us that theorists working from this
particular worldview tend to become ‘partisan[s] for assemblage theory’
while potentially forgetting that the manner of intervention the intel-
lectual deploys to make sense of the world is after all a ‘deeply political’

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 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

affair in itself – a view espoused by many of the contributors, as in Mike

Williams and Rita Abrahamsen’s case.
There are indeed, as Guillaume notes in his chapter, deep conceptual
politics behind the choices of assemblage thinking. As the chapters in
Part 1 of the volume highlight, normative choices abound in the variety
of ontological takes towards assemblages. Some threads persist across
the landscape of ‘assemblages’, but analytical and theoretical differences
also remain an indisputable feature of this mode of thinking. Not least,
then, assemblage thinking is by default characterized by an internal con-
frontation amongst ways of assembling and, as we would like to suggest
here, potentially diverse political orientations that reverberate through
the various ‘generations’ of assemblage theorists. Working in the shadow
of Deleuze and Guattari, as for instance in DeLanda’s case, bears not
just diverse empirical connotations but also normative flavours: from
those entrenched in the mix of Foucauldian precepts such as Stephen
Collier and Aihwa Ong to the Bourdieusian solution to the challenges
of grounding assemblage typical of Williams and Abrahamsen. So,
then, can we even speak of an ‘assemblage theory’ as a coherent system
of ideas intended to explain specific realities? The jury on this matter is
still very much out. DeLanda’s contributions have gone a long way in
terms of elaborating a philosophical position for assemblage thinking,
but, as noted in the previous two sections, ontologies and epistemologies
of this lineage only bear similarities, not conformity. If anything, many
chapters in this volume seem to hint at the opposite, painting a view of
assemblages as tactics, sensibilities, ontological stances or metanarrative
tools rather than pointing at assemblage as an -ism in an IR sense.
Amidst this variety, where some consistency persists, politics are
certainly not tempered down. For example, assemblages, in their het-
erogeneity and flattening tendencies, necessarily push towards further
pluralism in the accounts and critiques of the international. Additionally,
the commitment to critique found in assemblage work is itself a politi-
cal orientation. Sassen’s project of ‘making visible’ that which has been
obscured by the master categories of modern thought seems to be driven
by a desire to know the origins of dominant assemblages (‘city’, ‘state’ and
‘finance’), and what holds them in place, so that we might have a firmer
basis for critique of those forms. In this sense it is certainly worth noting
that Deleuze held political commitments to anti-hierarchical forms of
political and social assemblage, a stance catalysed by the events of May
1968 in France, and the social movements that they gave birth to. We

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

have already described how Deleuze opposed his ‘rhizomatic’ philoso-

phy to the traditional Western cannon. Deleuzian thought developed, as
all philosophical systems must, within a particular political context, and
he himself had political commitments to which his radical philosophy
was a contribution. Deleuze and Guattari wrote, then, in the context
of leftist struggles, while, at the same time, seeking to break with the
dialectical elements of the philosophical system that inspired Marx. This
commitment is even more apparent in the biography of his sometimes
collaborator Felix Guattari, who was a militant member of the leftist
movement, with an interest in novel forms of communist practice. Both
were attracted to the autonomist Marxism of which Italy was a hotbed
in the 1960s (Anderson et al. 2012: 178). The bottom-up self-organizing
dynamics of Autonomism finds its scientific echo in the complexity con-
cepts that Deleuze was influenced by. Yet, does this mean that thinking
with assemblages levels the playing field for more egalitarian political
stances? Does it help us deconstruct and advocate against established
socio-political hierarchies and economic injustice as well as it might do
with macro-categories and established notions?
It seems to us that, for all its limits and loose boundaries, assemblage
is charged with critical and political possibilities. For example, the ques-
tion of agency within and of assemblages might inevitably raise new
questions about the nature of power, but this does not mean that the
inner analytical quandaries of assembling disappear. The materialist
ontology (or at least an ontology including a form of materialism) that
foregrounds many assemblage stances, and the distributive notions of
agency that, from Latour to DeLanda, chart influence and mutual con-
stitution in the heterogeneous world depicted by assemblage thinkers,
necessarily leads to key metatheoretical challenges. As Jane Bennett has
observed in her work, analytical challenges might ultimately also be a
matter of prior ‘political judgments’ by the intellectual:
should we acknowledge the distributed quality of agency in order to
address the power of human-nonhuman assemblages and to resist a politics
of blame? Or should we persist with a strategic understatement of material
agency in the hope of enhancing the accountability of specific humans?
(Bennett, 2010: 38)

Different normative propensities on this matter, even in the presence of

similar (and by all means not always equal) ontological and empirical
stances, do eventually lead to a diversification in the genus of assemblage

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 Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis

theorists and assemblages accounts. If this is true of social theory, a

normatively charged realm such as that of IR theory is no less prone to
look into the political underpinnings of what it means, practically not
just theoretically, to think with assemblages.
As with the challenge of analytics, the recent experience of human
geography might be instructive here. Discussing the implications of
assemblages on socio-spatial analysis, Anderson et al. (2012) have stum-
bled upon the very same challenges raised by Bennett’s concerns. As
they note, the intellectual’s ethical or political obligations to the world
under scrutiny, whether in the ‘contained’ assemblages of a suburban
neighbourhood or in the diffused realities of global finance, do eventu-
ally demand that ‘we cut and specify causality within assemblages in
order to attribute responsibility and blame’ (Ibid.: 186). Bennett (2010:
ix), herself, sees the normative implications of assemblage thinking,
with its recovery of the dignity of material objects, as pushing towards
a more ecological sensibility, and away from ‘the image of dead or
thoroughly instrumentalized matter [which] feeds human hubris and
our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption’.
Recently the attraction of assemblage thinking for activists within
social movements has been apparent. Russell et al. (2011) specifically
pose the question: what can assemblage thought do to empower political
projects seeking social transformation? What they want specifically from
assemblage thinking is then a resource with which to build anti-capitalist
forms of social organization – a stance that, again, has readily apparent
links with autonomous Marxism.
However, the ways in which assemblage thinking has been yoked
by some to a political project of autonomy, emancipation and self-
organizing worker dynamics are by no means the only possibilities to use
assemblage thinking in the theory and practice of politics. A rhizomatic
or network form is itself no guarantor of progressive politics. As Castells
(1996) has argued in his work on the network society, networks can be
directed to any goal. A networked form of assemblage might equally
be turned to the purposes of terror or criminality as to the goals of a
progressive social movement. And, as some contributors to this volume
note, assemblage thinking might in itself not be as amenable to the type
of theoretical clarifications and analytical simplifications needed for spe-
cific political projects. As it helps us to raise political questions and grap-
ple with the need to conceptualize causal stability along with dynamic
change and fluidity, assemblage thinking might, after all, remain a collage

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 Assemblage Thinking and International Relations 

of various and evolving interpretations, always greater than the sum

of its many parts, always in change. It is in this somewhat paradoxical
nature that assemblage thinking has pushed us, as many others before, to
search for some preliminary answers and theoretical evolution through
the comfort of collaborative academia. Far from being an exhaustive
primer for the IR student keen to learn a textbook version of ‘assemblage
theory’, this volume has instead offered us a chance to put assemblage
thinking under the spotlight, question its boundaries, origins and limits,
and discuss, collectively, why it is an intriguing idea for the scholar of
international politics. One could then hope that, in light of the ‘internal’
diversity among assemblage approaches and the potential for reflexivity
about the purpose of assembling, assemblage thinking will treasure the
‘careful humility’ (to borrow from Salter’s chapter) it has demonstrated
potential for, and promote humble but critical takes on the assembled
nature of the international.

Notes
 The recovery of the material components of social formations is one of
the key objectives of assemblage thought. This, however, is part of a wider
movement towards a ‘new materialism’, which seeks to step beyond the limits
of ‘historical materialism’ and the over-determination of human labour
processes and modes of production.
 As a set of ideas associated with a focus on process and relations, it has been
argued that the turn to assemblage is itself a signifier of a wider crisis or
impasse in relational thought, a crisis for which it offers resources to think
through the relationship between stability and transformation, structure and
agency (Anderson et al. 2012: 172).
 New technological capacities deriving from the digital revolution and the
modelling power of computers must also then be seen as a crucial driver
of assemblage thinking. But, more than this, as Bousquet argues here,
assemblage thinking has the radical potential to reconceptualize the way we
think about the relationship between technology and society, bringing with
it a rejection of the ‘conventional dichotomy between the technical and the
social’, and setting ‘both domains in flux’.
 The term individual here points at more than the ‘human individual’: in
this ontology individuals may be biological organisms, but they may just
as well be species, or ecosystems, or cities, or states, or actor-networks of
heterogeneous components unified by their provisional co-functioning.

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Part 1
Theories of Assemblage

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 2
The Carpenter and
the Bricoleur
A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and
Aihwa Ong

Abstract: In this conversation with the editors, Saskia

Sassen and Aihwa Ong reflect back on their different
experiences of ‘thinking with assemblage’. They discuss
the issue of deploying this approach as an analytic tactic
to unveil the unseen and to unpack macro-categories.
Referring back to some of their main works in the past few
years, they remind us of the challenges of cross-disciplinary
translation and the need for ‘untheoretical’ and grounded
approaches even to global applications of the word
‘assemblage’. Reflecting on their respective differences,
as a carpenter of social theory and and a bricoleur
anthropologist, they consider the role of the assemblage
theorists vis-à-vis one’s own assemblage of theory, field and
theoretical assumptions.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

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 A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and Aihwa Ong

How do you use and understand assemblages in your own work?

SS I should say that it is not so much about understanding what an
assemblage is. Thinking of assemblages is an analytic tactic to use formats
which enables me to bring into the picture pieces of what are, in more
conventional thinking, thought of as fullyfledged institutions. What if
I just want one part of these institutions, one part of them because I see
in it an emergent reality that cannot be housed? In my case it all started
with finance: I could not simply reduce finance to the financial firms or
to the financial markets.
AO Me too. I am an anthropologist, so what I am really interested in
is conceptual work, as opposed to actually developing macro-theory ori-
ented towards looking at defining features of the epoch, so to speak. As
you know, anthropologists work in diverse contexts of transformation
and we have long questioned the idea that different places in the world
are merely instantiations of single accounts like, say, Marxist theory. At
the same time because we are working on contemporary periods, we
want to understand what do we mean when we say something is ‘global’.
In terms of ‘assemblage’ I owe a lot to Stephen Collier and our early
discussions about anthropology. For us it is a question of how to develop
methods or concepts to actually discuss how there are variable contexts
in the world that are constituted through ‘the global’. How do we define
that? In response to this, Stephen and I developed the concept of ‘global
assemblage’ as a space of enquiry, not as a theory but a way to ‘frame’ our
analysis, to put it rather simply.
SS Yes. For me, before method, assemblage is an analytic tactic to deal
with the abstract and the unseen. First, my basic notion is to situate it
so that it is not an abstract condition in a time where stabilized mean-
ings are actually becoming unstable. The economy, the government, the
family and the city – all these basic powerful categories are becoming
less stable than they were during the Keynesian period in the West and
I am sure that there are alternative versions of that in other parts of the
world. As a research practice, assemblage allows me not to throw those
powerful categories out of the window but actively destabilize them.
The Global City and The Mobility of Capital and Labour are about that. I
was respectively destabilizing the categories ‘city’ and ‘immigration’.
Now, in Territory Authority Rights I am further destabilizing the mean-
ings enclosed in the ‘state’ and the ‘global’. Along with confronting the
abstract, a second part of this analytic tactic is to ask myself, when I

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 The Carpenter and the Bricoleur 

invoke one of these powerful categories, ‘what am I not seeing?’ A cat-

egory is collectively produced, it has been ‘sorted out’, and because it is
so influential in its power to explain (not simply describing everything,
but as a way of sorting and as a distillation) it is hiding a lot of stuff.
That is why I always say that my zone for research and for theorization is
actually ‘in the shadow’ of powerful categories.

It sounds like what you want to get from this notion of assemblage is
something that helps you to understand transformation and perhaps
even historical turning points.
SS Exactly, assemblages help to understand transformation but also
helps me to make visible the disassembling of existing institutional
domains and collective understandings. For this reason I do not locate
my theorization there in the category assemblage. For me it is a meth-
odological issue: How can I discover? I think that is one difference that
maybe Aihwa and I have. People think that I am a Deleuzian because I
use the term ‘assemblage’. I am using it more like a ‘carpenter’ than as a
Deleuzian. I really am a bit of sui generis so I am disruptive in that sense
because I am not a Deleuzian, I am not a Foucauldian and I am not a
Marxist. I am doing my own stuff and I am having a lot of fun with it as
a kind of ignorant carpenter.

Aihwa? Do you recognize this difference?

AO Obviously my and Stephen’s idea of assemblage was inspired
by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and the whole idea
of ‘vibrating plateau’ that is constituted by lines of flight and lines of
departure. Social realities are crystalized by dynamic kinds of articula-
tion and disarticulation of flows of ideas, practices, technologies, actors
and institutions. It is not a theory: assemblage is a way of reframing
our inquiry, to grasp perhaps critical interacting elements that would
help us in analysing what is happening. We are trying to capture things
that are always in the midst of unfolding so the very value, for me,
of a global established strategy of enquiry as a concept is that it takes
into account contingency and uncertainty in a way perhaps that large
theories do not because they have causal determinants in one way or
another. In other words, to go back to Deleuze and Guattari and the
idea of vibrating network of interactions and relationships they sug-
gest, assemblages do not just happen. It is not just the patterning of
the flight of the bumblebee, but also an effect of human decisions ...

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 A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and Aihwa Ong

crucial, then, is this kind of profound sense of the vibration of relation-

ships. From this viewpoint, I am looking at the play of power and how
the play of power and its strategies and tactics are shaping new kinds of
spaces of contention.

So essentially Saskia is saying ‘I deploy assemblage as a tactic to

dismantle some established categories’. It sounds somewhat similar to
what Aihwa is saying in respect to anthropology.
AO Yes, but that could be true in respect to all of the social sciences.
Think of the nineteenth century categories of economy, society, govern-
ment and culture, which for anthropologists was one of those categories
that were sort of unthinkingly used as a unit of analysis while dealing
with extremely variable and dynamic environments all the time. As
anthropologists we are what I would call engaged in a form of ‘low-level’
theorizing, although I do not like calling it ‘theory’ because we are not
just trying to explain but rather we are trying to stay close to practices in
the sense of observing. Yet we cannot explain everything. So, in a sense,
the concept of assemblage is driven by one’s own problem and mode
of enquiry. These are going to determine the way one configures the
elements that are going to, in a sense, be part of one’s own assemblage.
That is why I say the space of problematization and intervention is the
space of the assemblage, and this is not just true of the scholar but also
of practitioners – the experts, as it were – whose job it is to configure a
space of problematization and they do this through the assembling, reas-
sembling, disassembling of different tools, different ideas that can work
to solve the problem. She talked about the carpenter and I am going to
talk about the Bricoleur ...
SS The Carpenter and the Bricoleur, right!
AO ... because of Lévi-Strauss’ idea that anthropology is in fact ‘arti-
sanal’ in nature that you actually grab the tools that are at hand. You
do not go for an externally imposed formula and try to reproduce it
in some way, but rather you are grabbing tools at hand to study what’s
before you. So it is a kind of ‘collage’ that is emerging. The very things
that you assemble to solve a problem to configure this space of inter-
vention are going to give it a distinctive character, even though there
is a very global element involved in it. That, for me, is very important
because it helps us to understand the variability of globalized situations
around the world.

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 The Carpenter and the Bricoleur 

SS Right. It just struck me that, in my work up until now, it is a bit

the opposite in the sense that I want to start with very well established
categories, and I want to ‘do a job’ on them. Practically I could also use
‘assemblage’ for the less identifiable and the less institutionalized, but
right now it is the highly institutionalized that catches my eye. To go
back to your interest in the ‘trajectories’ of genealogies, I think that a
lot of existing theory has a strong sense of an origin but then it tends to
simply hang in with that. In that sense we can recognize it. This is some-
thing I have been very interested in – trajectories. I want to take also
arbitrary little things. My equivalent to the non-highly institutionalized
that Aihwa was referring to, is elements that seem like nothing, certainly
in a given present but, if you actually try to track them, you can see that
there are important and hidden trajectories.

To what extent does assemblage make us have to go back and examine

our historiographies?
SS That is partly a practical question. I decided that to understand
the historical process I could not stick with nation states, so I had to
find other categories, but significantly weighty ones that can illuminate
whole sort of worlds, if you want. I chose territory, authority, rights and
I chose authority, not power, and territory, not land: each one of those
terms has already all kinds of complexities in it. The incentive was the
dominance of the debate on the national versus the global, the only way
to understand the global, if I wanted to simplify within this established
field, is to say that the ‘national’ is something because the ‘global’ is there,
but I think Aihwa has much to say about this.
AO Yes. When Stephen and I came up with the concept of ‘global
assemblage’, why did we call it ‘global’ when we could have just called it
‘assemblage’, which is much more elegant. This was a move to signal that
we wanted to look at the dynamism of global forces and relationships,
identify those actual components that manifest our universal modernity.
By specifying how global elements interact with situated practices beliefs
and politics, we show that together, they put at stake what it means to be
human today. So it clearly returns to the question of the human condi-
tion in a globalized modern world in a Weberian sense actually. It is not
merely about assemblage just for the sake of mapping a space of enquiry,
but also to see how the circulation of modern forms actually helps to
transform a wide range of socio-political cultural environments and

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 A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and Aihwa Ong

at the same time makes that all rather distinctive while, yet, we are all
somewhat unified by a state of being modern.

So, how do you confront the boundaries of your assemblages? There

must be an important relationship then between the idea of an
assemblage and the idea of where the borders of that assemblage start
and stop.
SS Yes. For instance in my When Territory Deborders Territoriality I
develop an argument where I deal with the notion that the question of
territoriality, or if you want the legal construct the sovereign authority
of the state, is becoming increasingly a shrunken category and part of it
is precisely that. What I want to recover there is the notion that territory
is a far more significant category today than territoriality, which is truly
a system of power. As an assemblage, it is falling apart and its brutality is
excessive. I try to avoid using the term neoliberal and so out of that then
comes the ungoverned territory, so the expulsions looks at that shrinking
of this effective authority. I mean, when we think of the authority of the
liberal state it comes also with wealth, it comes with all kinds of things
and so it is a shrunken thing and it is not kindly at all and it is deeply
linked with this corporate act. The ungoverned territory is precisely that
which escapes the formal power of the state but is also invisible to the
formal eye of the state. All kinds of counter-hegemonic movements fall
in that category. They are there but they are not visible to the formal eye
of the law and the state. This ‘misalignment’ between territory and the
legal constructs that are encasing the sovereign authority of the state over
its territory – territoriality – are critical. Thinking them as assemblages
allows me to make visible how territory cannot be reduced to either
national territory or state territory, and allows me to expand the category
of ‘territory’ to a measure of conceptual autonomy from the nation-state.

What do you think, Aihwa?

AO Well, the issue of sovereignty and its borders are also very interest-
ing to me in this sense. Just very simply, authority has to be performed,
even when authorities are enshrined like in Buckingham Palace. My
focus is on the performance and the practice – the exercise of power.
I am really interested in the way these things are animated by everyday
practice that include institutional practices and the uses of money and
technology and knowledge to substantiate that kind of authoritative
image. One difference with Saskia that, perhaps, we can highlight is that

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 The Carpenter and the Bricoleur 

I look at governing technologies in many different ways I guess. I look at

governing without the government, where you do not need a state insti-
tution or written law to be involved in governing. Hence, even though
places are ostensibly ungoverned they might actually be regulated by
different actors.
SS I agree completely with you.

How do these theoretical foundations play out in your empirical work?

SS Well, in so far as it is, as I like to say, an analytical tactic or utility,
I am very keen not only on expanding the meaning of territory but also
expanding the meaning of how such terms that have been co-opted,
like ‘utility’. ‘Assemblage’ is actually a great word and it does sound so
‘untheoretical’ and so non-academic. I think of it as a utility and so I
think that Aihwa also agrees along these lines, that it depends on one’s
mode of enquiry. Yet by definition, from my perspective, if assemblage
is going to have explanatory power it will exclude stuff. In other words,
when an assemblage is detected or one force it on a messy reality or a
reality that is debordering its own institutional format, it has a temporal-
ity. It is not going to be forever whereas long-established institutions have
a kind of life of their own. Institutions are, as I like to say, invitations not
to think. We say ‘the state’ or ‘the economy’. It is almost an invitation not
to interrogate them, and so I see assemblages as just the opposite. They
are also an invitation to interrogate one’s own assemblage. What are the
edges? How does it hang together? What is falling out? Assemblage is
it in itself an unstable formation against a certain institutional stability
and it allows particular insights. That is why it is not theory but really an
instrument. That is my approach and why I need it desperately because
in all my research projects I am moving across so many pre-existing
conceptual borders.
AO Yes, I think that in fact assemblage as a concept is better than
assemblage as a ‘theory’. I think very few people today believe in metathe-
ories of any kind because they are so aware of the kind of unfoldings and
different kinds of variety of trajectories of social change. So assemblage
as a concept is particularly useful because it is actually much more
modest and honest, but also at the same time highlights our weaknesses
as social scientists or social analysts of different kinds. In the past we
tried to understand very fluid, indeterminate and heterogeneous social
realities in terms of given frameworks and trajectories of social change,

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 A Conversation with Saskia Sassen and Aihwa Ong

and those are actually very rigid kinds of projections that we put on the
past or on the contemporary, whereas assemblage is a much more care-
ful, modest admission that we can only grasp a pretty limited part of
unfolding contemporary life. One could actually mobilize the concept of
assemblage to look at the past and that would perhaps provide a much
more penetrating understanding of certain discussions of the past. The
importance of assemblage for me is that it is a question. It forces the
analyst to confront what he or she is trying to study as a question and
not just something that has already been predetermined by the past or
predetermined by our theories or categories.
SS Yes, I agree completely with that.

So, is assemblage a reflexive method?

AO Yes. I think it is a good observation to say there is a built-in mod-
esty that arises out of a poverty of theory ((laughs)). I think that one
strength of the idea of assemblage is that it focuses on relationality not
just of actors, but actually relationality of things and people. As a reflexive
method, assemblage incorporates the interaction between the observer
and the observed, and acknowledges that the observer changes the very
conditions by the mere act of observing. As second order observation,
the concept of assemblage emphasizes the reflexive practices of modern
subjects as they reflect upon global forms, call them into question,
gain critical insights and devise their own kind of solution to situated
problems of how one should live, politically, collectively and ethically, in
global times.

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 3
Tracing Global Assemblages,
Bringing Bourdieu to the Field
A Conversation with Rita Abrahamsen and
Michael Williams

Abstract: In this conversation with the editors, Rita

Abrahamsen and Michael Williams describe how
assemblage ideas are deployed in their analysis to trace the
changing configurations of global security. Relying on their
experience with Security Beyond the State, they describe
how theoretical work on assemblages has been useful to
them in ordering their empirical investigations of security
actors in Africa, where traditional Western-centred
concepts have been unequal to the task of understanding
the evolving nature of security provision. Assemblages,
they argue, can move us beyond the simplistic notion
that African state weakness is behind the rise of private
security actors in the region. In their method of tracing
the emerging complex global assemblages of state and
non-state, public and private, global and local actors, they
destabilize traditional ideas about the nature of geopolitics.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 A Conversation with Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams

How do you use assemblages in your own work?

RA For us, the global security assemblage is very much a descriptive
term. We don’t take that much theoretical baggage with the term and I
think that allows for a great deal of freedom. But, it may well also come
with certain tensions. The question is ultimately: are these productive
tensions that allow you to do interesting things and generate important
insights? In our work on global security assemblages, the empirics
came first and the theory second. So, as we were looking at the shifting
relationship between public and private, the global and the local, in the
field of security, we found a series of dense connectivities that we did not
initially expect. It was this empirical material that led us towards think-
ing in terms of assemblages, so as to be able to explain and analyse what
was taking place and what this meant for our understanding of the state
and for security provision. In this sense, I think the beauty of thinking
in terms of assemblages is that it allows empirical research itself to be
theoretically productive.
MW The first direction that we looked in was network theory. But it
just didn’t seem to allow us to grasp what it was that we were seeing in
the increasing role of private actors in security and their relationships
with public actors across the globe. So the idea of an assemblage as a
disaggregated structure with both material and ideational dimensions,
that are put together in a Bricolage, and that functions as a systematic
whole (but not with the same kind of unity that one tends to find in net-
work theory), was exactly what made it constructive for us. There is a
certain network centricity to the idea of a network almost by definition,
and when we began to look at the concrete practices of commercial,
largely non-military, security companies, we simply didn’t find that kind
of almost linear logic. So it’s the lack of linearity in the connectivities in
an assemblage that we found incredibly interesting and useful.

Did you draw on any other works deploying assemblages?

MW One of the formulations that really made sense to us was the way
in which Sassen uses assemblage. Like her, we thought it would be pos-
sible to get tangled up in the whole question of what an assemblage is
and the different philosophical traditions surrounding it. You can be a
Latourian, you can be a Deleuzian. But, I think she says somewhere in
Territory, Authority, Rights that what she actually wants just the simple
descriptive term. For us I think that was actually very analytically liber-

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 Tracing Global Assemblages, Bringing Bourdieu to the Field 

ating. So it became less theory heavy than anything that we’ve done in
our different work before.
RA But its also important to note that we combine the idea of global
assemblages with a Bourdieusian analysis of forms of capital and power,
and how this function and structure the specific global security assem-
blages we investigate.
MW In a way, then, there were two matters sitting outside our analysis.
One was network analysis and network theory, that we didn’t look at,
and the other one was actually Bourdieusian field theory. Bourdieusian
field theory is incredibly hard to apply to the global scale. I mean, it’s just
very difficult to see how you think of a field within properly rigorous
Bourdieusian terms and yet still see it operating globally. So, to some
extent, what assemblages allowed us to do was to delink Bourdieusian
analytic concepts from their anchoring in field theory, and try to reart-
iculate them within an assemblage conception. There is, then, a certain
degree of conceptual slippage in our works between field theory and
assemblage theory.

So, how did these theoretical foundations play out in your empirical
work?
RA We did our empirical research mostly in African settings, where
you have to deal with a very different version of this thing called the
state. Once you’re dealing with the public and the private, and the
global and the local in an African setting, the traditional, Western-
centric conception of the state will no longer do. So one question
becomes, how do you capture the state and security provision in a
non-traditional or non-European setting? The idea of assemblages
allowed us to capture the more decentralized nature of the African
state: to say something about its relationship to citizens and to secu-
rity, particularly in a context where private security firms are playing
ever more prominent and sometimes controversial roles. In this way,
the notion of an assemblage proved to be incredibly useful because
it allowed us to ‘de-abstract’ the African state, to look at the actors
and relationships that were actually doing the security work, as well
as the forms of cooperation and competition between them. One of
the things we reacted against was the predominant idea that African
states were weak and incapable and that security privatization could
be understood simply as global private networks filling in the void

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 A Conversation with Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams

left by weak, incapable public structures. Empirically it just wasn’t

that simple, and we wanted to try to theorize what was happening
to states. As a conceptual framework, assemblages turned out to be
a very effective way to analyse and explain what’s been happening to
African states through neoliberal processes.
MW We try to connect shifts in global governance that have taken
place mostly in the Western part of the world to the shifts that are tak-
ing place in Africa, and to trace those connections. It isn’t only that the
global acts on Africa and then you get the results of passive reaction.
But, at the same time, some of the transformations come from within
the advanced economies – and that’s also where the big private security
companies emerged. Via the assemblage concept we begin to unfold
some of those connections. If, for example, you look at the operations
of the big oil companies, as we did in Nigeria, it is clear that the capac-
ity of a company like Chevron to operate in a place like the Niger Delta
is inconceivable without the existence of global security assemblages –
and the ability of Chevron to continue to operate is incredibly impor-
tant to various global actors, right from the strategic concerns of the
American government down to the shareholders of Chevron. So the
connectivity within and between the assemblages is really important
for us.

Are there any other analytical advantages in using assemblages versus

networks?
MW A further thing that we felt network theory did not allow us to
do was to talk about the specificity of the state. This is where coming
at this from a security angle made a real difference, because one can
talk about the disaggregation of the state, or the partial disassembly of
the state in very concrete terms. In the Niger Delta, to stick with that
example, public and private security forces often collaborate to a point
where it can be difficult to draw a clear line between the two. But what
we might call the ‘securitiness’ of the state – the historical centrality
of security in the constitution of the modern state – remains a com-
ponent of state functioning, of state life, that is quite specific. Even if
you look at a deeply disassembled African state, and even if that state is
partially disassembled in the ways that security gets provided, the sym-
bolic and practical and political value of security for the state remains
something that absolutely conditions the relations. So the process of
disassembly is not simply neutral. The Nigerian state, for example, has

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 Tracing Global Assemblages, Bringing Bourdieu to the Field 

all kinds of problems, but when it chooses to wield violence it’s actually
remarkably capable of doing so. So the question isn’t: are you capable
of wielding violence? The question is what kind of violence are you
capable of wielding and is that violence actually counter-productive for
the other things you’re trying to do? The integration of global private
security actors with public forces generates capacities that neither
could exercise on their own, for better or worse. If you can grasp the
partial disassembly of the state and its interaction with global, private
actors you can actually see how what is happening is not a simple case
of the privatization of the state, but something much more complex.
And you can do so in ways that allow you to maintain the agency of the
state without reducing the process to a previously thought-out strategy
of the state.
RA Another good example would be the Cape Town City Improve-
ment District, where we find a very interesting and intricate global
security assemblage consisting of, amongst others, the national police,
the city police, private security companies, and where security is in
some ways outsourced to the world’s biggest private security company,
Group4Securicor. The relationship between G4S and the public police
in Cape Town is very closely interlinked, in numerous different ways.
In our work we trace the emergence of this global security assemblage,
as ask what it means for the sovereignty of the South African state?
What does it mean for who gets secured in the urban space of Cape
Town? It is a very strong illustration of how the public and the private,
and the global and the local, are assembled differently from what
one would normally expect to find when we think about the public
monopoly of security. It also shows how the state and its authority are
not necessarily – or simply – weakened by processes of privatization,
but instead reconfigured or reassembled in new and significantly dif-
ferent ways....
Certainly, the Cape Town case study is also a good illustration of
the materiality of global security assemblages. The City Improvement
District is connected to, and to some extent supported by, a surveil-
lance structure, which involves extensive urban CCTV coverage – but
the urban CCTV coverage was actually both conceived of and paid for
by the business development district, who then donated it to the city
of Cape Town. The security system is now run by Group4Securicor, in
cooperation with the city police. So there is a whole new set of material
structures, and a degree of surveillance that is probably only possible

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 A Conversation with Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams

through the integration of public and private resources and technical

capabilities. In other words, it’s not simply a private security surveil-
lance system, but a specific combination of a public and private spatial
surveillance structure. The Cape Town case shows how the materiality of
the surveillance has changed the urban space, especially in terms of the
people it has forced out of the city. Many people, including street people,
street kids, beggars, informal traders, have been pushed out because they
are now seen as a security threat and targeted as such by the surveillance
technologies.

How do you define the boundaries of your global assemblages?

MW The answer that we have to that question comes as a conse-
quence of the kind of hybrid approach we have between field theory
and assemblages. You can draw boundaries in terms of fields. Fields do
have boundaries. Fields and boundaries are drawn by expertise, they are
drawn by the stakes of the game that actors struggle over, and they’re
drawn by the forms of capital that allow entry and capacity within
the field. Entry in to the field is not free, and entry to the field is not
neutral – especially in something like a security field, where beyond a
certain fairly low threshold the symbolic and material costs of entry are
considerable and the investments quite high. I think the field allows us
to capture these boundaries, relationships and tensions in a way that an
assemblage alone maybe doesn’t.
RA Yes, in our work, it became very clear that global security assem-
blages cannot be seen as nice harmonious entities. Hence, the addition of
a Bourdieusian analysis of capital and power within and between assem-
blages. Its possible to conceive of this as a weakness of some analyses that
draw on assemblage theory: that this mode of thought can lack a conceptual
framework to show how these struggles take place. So, to do that we put in
Bourdieu and that helped us think about power, struggle and politics.

How are you taking the concept of global assemblages forward in your
current work?
RA We’re now trying to think about assemblages in more geopolitical
terms. We’re currently working on a project on resources and security
where what we’re seeing is the emergence of a new form of geopolitics
that is more assemblage-based and that includes actors that are not
normally seen as part of doing foreign policy, security and geopolitics.

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 Tracing Global Assemblages, Bringing Bourdieu to the Field 

So NGOs for example: the relationship between NGOs, multinational

corporations and governments. We think we are seeing new global
assemblages emerging around this, and that it leads potentially to a
very different and interesting way of understanding current geopoli-
tics, as a concrete, but not necessarily fully conscious element of state
policy.
MW To give you an example, in Canada there’s been a very contro-
versial move by the current government to bring together the develop-
ment side of Canadian foreign policy, Canadian mining companies
and Canadian NGOs into distinct partnerships whereby the mining
companies will facilitate the NGOs doing community development
work. The community development agency or the NGOs will do com-
munity development work not necessarily driven by the concerns of
the mining company, but nonetheless operating in the same context as
the mining company. And the state will provide funding for that. The
initiative for this has come completely out of the government, not out
of the private sector and not out of the NGOs. The state is, however,
telling NGOs that this is the way in which the future of development
policy is going and therefore if they want to be funded by the govern-
ment they had probably better get on board. So what you’re seeing
there then is a new assemblage in which three different components
(a development industry, multinational mining companies and often
global NGOs) are being integrated in the production and securing of
resource operations which are absolutely central to powerful northern
states: this is assemblage as geopolitics – and it is becoming ever more
prevalent....
RA It is also a field of struggle. Not all NGOs support these kinds of
initiatives, and some actively oppose them. Some mining companies see
them as positive, others view them as the private being brought into what
are and should remain public activities. Some parts of governments are
deeply sceptical. So, as always, an assemblage is not a neutral network. It
is a field of struggle embodying complex power relations, shifting struc-
tures and strategies, and normative implications. As always, it is deeply
political.

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 4
Assemblages and the
Conduct of Inquiry
A Conversation with Stephen J. Collier

Abstract: In this conversation with the editors, Stephen

Collier reflects on his engagement with assemblage
thinking in his collaboration with Aihwa Ong on ‘global
assemblages’ and in his work on vital systems security.
Looking forward to the various contributions from the
central part of the book, Collier discusses the use and
misuse of assemblage thinking and comments on its
potential IR applications. Providing a bridge between the
theoretical reflexivity of the two previous conversations
and the thematic chapters ahead, Collier raises questions of
adjacency and entanglement with the ‘field’ by assemblage
theorists.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Assemblages and the Conduct of Inquiry 

How do you understand assemblages in your own work? How do these

theoretical foundations play out in your empirical work?
SC When Aihwa and I took this term up in Global Assemblages we were
engaging with current discussions around globalization. In the 1990s
there was a huge amount of push and pull over really big questions: Were
the phenomena associated with globalization really new? Was globaliza-
tion liberatory or did it simply reconfigure old forms of exploitation?
Was globalization rendering the nation-state obsolete? These debates
seemed a bit stuck, in part because the questions were too broad and
the concepts being used to address them were too unwieldy. So we were
looking for ways to address the problems raised in the globalization
debates without resolving these big issues.
That said, I agree with Aihwa – and with others you have interviewed
here – that we did not intend to bring along a complex theoretical
apparatus when we referred to assemblages. We had a more pragmatic
aim of getting a particular set of debates moving again. Or, perhaps it
would be better to say that we wanted to show how the kind of work
collected in Global Assemblages was already providing a different way
into these issues. Actually this is a very important point. There were
24 chapters in this book, and the concept of assemblage featured in
exactly one of them – that was our introduction. So the point was abso-
lutely not to provide an exposition of ‘assemblage theory’ and to show
how it could be applied. Rather, we invoked this term to characterize a
style of inquiry we found in this work that drew on diverse theoretical
resources.
Having said that, I want to make a couple points about what we imag-
ined the contributors to Global Assemblages were and were not doing,
because I think it points to some core issues one confronts in taking up
this rubric.
The first point is that we did not mean for the term to suggest a new
particularism. We were not arguing that the contributions just showed
how things come together in accidental, contingent and unique ways –
through ‘immanently fluid and ever changing’ processes, as Xavier
Guillaume puts it here. In fact, the contrary is true. We wanted to show
that the contributions identified novel but potentially enduring configu-
rations of heterogeneous elements, and invented concepts to describe
them. So the volume was an attempt to collect new tools of inquiry –
concepts that are not universally applicable but that are significant
beyond the sites or cases the contributors were working on.

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 A Conversation with Stephen J. Collier

The second point is related. We did not see the contributions to Global
Assemblages as primarily negative or deconstructive. It is true that many
of them show that concepts such as globalization or neoliberalism or
capitalism or whatever are just too big, too unwieldy, and too imprecise
to provide insight in many situations. But the critical work they per-
formed was to be found somewhere else: in the discerning reflection
made possible by a better conceptual apparatus. So once more, the accent
is on a kind of reconstruction that is made possible by new concepts that
change how we understand things, how we perceive the possibilities and
constraints of particular situations.
Let me add one final thought about how I have taken up assemblage
thinking in my own research. I have been particularly interested in how
assemblages gain stability, consistency and scale. So, for example, I am
writing a book right now with Andrew Lakoff about what we call vital
systems security. We show that vital systems security first comes together
in the context of nuclear preparedness planning in the early Cold War.
A relationship is established among a number of disparate elements –
techniques, organizational patterns, forms of political and technical
reflection and so on. These relationships then stabilized and were repro-
duced in other domains. By the 1960s and 1970s you find vital systems
security apparatuses in natural disaster policy, pandemic preparedness
planning, homeland security, and other areas. So we are building up to a
pretty broad claim about the shape of contemporary government, about
contemporary biopolitics. This relates to a problem that Stephen Legg
(2011) has recently explored: How might we think about apparatuses as
a particular kind of assemblage that is prone to reterritorialization, scal-
ing and governing? How do things gain a function of reality, or a truth
effect? How is it possible for them to be scaled up, or to move across
apparently diverse domains? And then, what kind of concepts can we
invent to constitute them as objects of critical inquiry?

How do you think this might differ from the views of IR theorists (as
represented in this volume)?
SC Well, the contributions here are very diverse. So maybe the more
pertinent question concerns the range of approaches. Some authors here
are obviously using assemblage thinking as primarily a deconstructive tool.
Others are trying to figure out how it might recast and improve existing
concepts and questions, to frame them differently. This latter approach
is closer to my own interests. So, for example, I am very drawn to Nick

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 Assemblages and the Conduct of Inquiry 

Srnicek’s exploration of monetarism. As I read it, the aim of his piece is

not in the first instance to expose monetarist assumptions as false but to
account for the conditions of their acceptability. This does involve a decon-
structive moment. His account does not accept that monetarism simply
got things ‘right’ where a previous Keynesianism had been wrong – being
able to account for stagflation seems to be a necessary but not sufficient
condition. But there is also a reconstructive moment: What technical and
institutional conditions made it possible for monetarist propositions to gain
an authoritative status? Obviously both moments are important, and it is
probably helpful to think of them in some kind of productive relationship.

Looking at the discussions in the volume, what do you think ‘thinking

with assemblages’ might contribute to the study of the international?
SC I am an outsider to this field, so I can’t really answer this question.
But let me make an observation based on my impression from reading
the chapters here and from reading some bits of critical IR in other
contexts.
One thing that has often struck me about critical IR is the extent to
which it takes conventional IR as the primary target against which the
instruments of criticism have to be turned. You see this tendency in
at least some of the contributions here. Assemblage thinking is valu-
able first of all as an alternative to conventional IR, which is taken to
be too positivistic, too attached to a realist ontology or a rationalistic
model of action. As an aside, for me this has always presented a kind
of ‘barrier to entry’ into critical IR discussions. They sometimes seem
to be wrapped-up in a very inward-looking conversation. But in any
case I’m not sure that this is the most interesting contribution that
assemblage theory can make in thinking about the international.
Let me give one well-worn example. One very frequently hears the claim
that IR theory takes the nation-state for granted as a ‘container’ of socie-
ties, as a coherent entity that can act, that can have strategy and rational
choice, and that a more dynamic ontology would recognize more fluidity
and flow, as well as the contingency of this nation-state form. Of course
there are many important phenomena in the world today that cannot be
understood by this particular figure of the nation-state; if the national
state is taken for granted many of these phenomena will be obscured. But
seen from any historical perspective one of the remarkable things about
the world today is that these things called nation-states are basically uni-
versal – almost everyone on earth lives in one – they do contain things we

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 A Conversation with Stephen J. Collier

call societies that have substantial effective reality, and the governments of
these nation-states can organize coherent action at an astonishingly large
scale. That doesn’t mean we should think of the state as a pre-existing real-
ity that is in the natural order of things. But it is an important feature of our
order of things. For me the role of assemblage theory should be to account
for these reality-effects of the nation-state – their conditions of possibility,
their principle of reality – rather than endlessly pointing out that there is
nothing natural about the nation-state, or that it is a gratuitous assumption
of IR theory, or that it doesn’t account for everything.
This suggests a somewhat different relationship between assemblage
thinking and IR theory. It does not mean we have to see conventional
IR theory as a transparent window on an objective reality and accept its
assumptions. Rather, it suggests – again – that we should try to grasp
the conditions of acceptability and intelligibility of IR theory. So I am
drawn to the chapters here that take ‘conventional IR’ not as the primary
object of criticism but as one part (and it is important to emphasize
only one part) of the thing to be accounted for: the constitution of the
international. This approach also draws our attention to other forms of
reflection, types of authorized expertise, practices, institutions, material
structures, and so on, that are involved in constituting the international.
To me these are the questions provoked by assemblage thinking, and I
do see a bit of a tension between this way of proceeding and some con-
ventions of critical IR – perhaps more than is recognized.

What are the drawbacks/limits of these approaches? Could IR learn

from any other existing approaches?
SC I see a lot of pitfalls in the way that assemblage thinking has been
taken up in various fields. One is that in some cases the premises are
taken as the result. A scholar posits a dynamic and fluid ontology and
then continually discovers contingency and fluidity, or keeps tracing
how associations are assembled to show how associations are assembled,
or that they are assembled rather than pregiven, natural or self-evident
facts of the world. So again, the methodological starting point is also the
finding. To be either effective or convincing assemblage thinking has to
get beyond this.
So what does that look like? A number of the contributions in this
volume emphasize an ‘empirical’ or ‘empiricist’ moment, but I’m not sure
that is the right term. Actually, in Global Assemblages, thanks in part to the
intervention of Marilyn Strathern, Aihwa and I tried to avoid reference

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 Assemblages and the Conduct of Inquiry 

to the ‘empirical’ altogether. Among other things, it fails to distinguish

between two very different ways of proceeding. There is the ANT pro-
gramme, where you trace associations, follow the actors. The critical
scholar or Actor-Network Theorist is not supposed to ‘add’ anything to
the description, as Latour puts it. For me that is not a realistic account
of inquiry that can claim some interest or significance. As Olaf Corry
argues (following Kenneth Waltz – a nice provocation!) assemblage
thinking, too, has to ‘strategically focus on a few, consequential things’
out of an infinite range of possibilities. This means that the assemblage
thinker does indeed have to add something, and to take responsibility
for the kinds of simplifying assumptions she or he makes. My view is
that this entails concept work as both the product of inquiry and as a
source of tools for further inquiry.
Relatedly, for my taste there is too much time spent on abstract theo-
retical elaboration in discussions of assemblages and assemblage thinking.
Or maybe it would be better to say that there is too much time spent
on theoretical elaboration that is divorced from discussions of how to
conduct inquiry, or that actually motivates inquiry. I’m just not sure we
need another sub-discipline to throw itself into expositions of Latour or
Deleuze or whomever else. But we do need more work on what successful
assemblage thinking looks like. This is one of the reasons that I like to keep
Foucault in mind as an assemblage thinker. Of course, Foucault has some
bracingly clear things to say on a theoretical or methodological register.
But his methodological reflections are always motivated by his investiga-
tions of particular assemblages or apparatuses. We really look to Foucault
for the extraordinary array of concepts and distinctions he introduces
in defining and analysing military-diplomatic apparatuses, disciplinary
apparatuses, apparatuses of polize, apparatuses of security, and so on. These
concepts and distinctions make it possible to redescribe or reconstruct
major elements of our contemporary reality and our history in a way that
changes our understanding, allows us to think in a more discerning, and,
in that sense, critical way. We need more reflection on how that works,
since it is not exactly straightforward. To put it a bit provocatively, we need
more Foucault, less Latour. I imagine plenty of people would disagree.

Is assemblage a reflexive method? Are international, and more broadly

social, theorists confronting the ‘politics’ of thinking with assemblages?
SC Well obviously this depends on what one means by ‘reflexive’ – I
suppose you mean to ask whether social theorists are thinking about

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 A Conversation with Stephen J. Collier

what they are doing when they are thinking with assemblages. On one
level, this is obviously the case. There is more self-reflection and self-
criticism in this area than in most, and the contributions here make that
perfectly clear.
That said, there is a tendency in some work to apply this reflection in a
fashion that is uneven or asymmetrical. Antoine Bousquet makes a nice
point when he suggests that social constructivist approaches tend to take
the background of society for granted. Assemblage thinking is of course
entirely different from social constructivism; in some ways directly
opposed. But similar problems sometimes appear. Critics’ terms get a
pass – they are exempt from scrutiny. So you see references to ‘liberalism’
or ‘neoliberalism’, ‘the modern European West’, or the ‘Enlightenment’
were invoked as though (and here I am following Latour) they have
obvious points of reference and can explain other things in the field. But
is there such a thing as the ‘modern European West’ that the assemblage
thinker can constitute as a target of criticism, and of which they are not
part? I am sceptical.
So my instinct is to position assemblage thinking a little differently, in
terms of complicity, entanglement or what Paul Rabinow calls adjacency.
I really like the point that Roland Bleiker makes on this score: there is no
reason to think that ‘critical’ approaches are going to be any less univer-
salizing than what are often called ‘positivistic’ approaches, or that ‘hard’
methods can’t be incorporated into assemblage thinking. It’s a great sug-
gestion: assemblage thinking using statistics – or formal models! I don’t
know what they would look like, but it is very intriguing.
Xavier Guillaume makes what to me is an essential point: the ‘hetero-
geneous elements’ that make up an assemblage include forms of political,
ethical and technical reflection. In my view, those must include our own
forms of critique; as Tom Boland (2013) recently put it, critique, too, is a
thing of this world. This implies that we should understand assemblage
thinking not as an alternative to ‘conventional’ approaches so much as a
way of relating critically and reflectively to these approaches: sometimes
trying to give an account of them, understanding their conditions of
acceptability; sometimes providing critical reflection on their assump-
tions and on their limits; and perhaps sometimes enlisting them as tools
of inquiry.

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 Part 2
Ontologies of Assemblage

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 5
Cognitive Assemblages and
the Production of Knowledge
Nick Srnicek

Abstract: This chapter aims to examine how assemblages

can develop the concept of epistemic communities for a
technological era. It begins by briefly outlining the two
concepts, and then constructs the notion of a cognitive
assemblage: those assemblages that have the function of
producing some piece of knowledge. Particularly in politics,
this is becoming an increasingly important factor for our
perceptions of the global, with the spread of big data,
computer modelling, and data analytics. The main section
of the chapter demonstrates how epistemic communities
fail to account for this material aspect of cognitive
assemblages, and how cognitive assemblages can provide
a lens for explaining and theorising these new actors. It
concludes by briefly highlighting the political issues that
emerge in this new world of cognitive assemblages.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Cognitive Assemblages and the Production of Knowledge 

Introduction
In this paper I want to try and demonstrate some of the qualities assem-
blage thinking brings with it by showing how it can develop the notion
of epistemic communities. First, and most importantly, what I will call
‘cognitive assemblages’ builds on epistemic communities by emphasiz-
ing the material means to produce, record and distribute knowledge.
This chapter will focus on this aspect and try to show what this means
for understanding knowledge production in world politics. Throughout
this, I will follow recent work on the concept and take epistemic com-
munities (and cognitive assemblages) to mean more than simply a group
of scientists. Instead the term invokes any group that seeks to construct
and transmit knowledge, and to influence politics via their expertise in
knowledge, though not necessarily policy (Davis Cross 2013). The value
of this move is that it recognizes the necessity of constructing knowledge
in all areas of international politics – the process of producing knowledge
is not simply encased in highly technical areas, but is instead utterly
ubiquitous.

Materiality
Constructivism has, of course, emphasized this more general proc-
ess as well, highlighting the ways in which identities, norms, interests
and knowledge are a matter of psychological ideas and social forces.
In Emanuel Adler’s exemplary words, knowledge for International
Relations ‘means not only information that people carry in their heads,
but also, and primarily, the intersubjective background or context of
expectations, dispositions, and language that gives meaning to material
reality’ (2005: 4). Knowledge here is both mental (inside the head) and
social (distributed via intersubjective communication).
The problem with this formulation of what knowledge is (and what
distinguishes the approach taken here from traditional constructiv-
ist approaches) is that decades of research in other disciplines have
shown this to be a partial view of the nature of knowledge. Instead,
knowledge has come to be recognized as being comprised of a het-
erogeneous set of materials, of which only a small portion are in fact
identifiably ‘social’ or ‘in our heads’. It is precisely this heterogeneity –
and more specifically, the materiality of knowledge – that assemblage

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 Nick Srnicek

thinking focuses our attention on. Knowledge is inseparable from

measuring instruments, data collection tools, computer models
and physical models, archives, databases and from all the material
means we use to communicate research findings. Highlighting the
significance of these material means of knowledge production, one of
the major factors which separated prescientific minds from scientific
minds was the technologies that became available during this period
(Latour 1986). There was, in other words, no sudden advance in
brainpower which made seventeenth century humans more scientific
than fifteenth century humans. Similarly, as philosophy of science
has shown, there is no clear scientific method that we simply started
to follow (Feyerabend 2010). Instead, a significant portion of the
shift was in the production and circulation of various new technolo-
gies which enabled our rather limited cognitive abilities to become
more regimented and to see at a glance a much wider array of facts
and theories. The printing press is the most obvious example here,
but also the production of rationalized geometrical perspectives
and new means of circulating knowledge – all of this contributed
to the processes of standardization, comparison and categorization
that are essential to the scientific project. Similarly, the instruments
of knowledge production themselves come to embody and embed
particular theories, permitting a boot-strapping process of further
technological and scientific development (Humphreys 2004). The
electronic thermometer, for instance,

has been designed to take one quantitative reading (e.g. mercury volume)
and systematically translate it into another quantitative reading (e.g. degrees
Celsius). This is a very simple computation, but it is a kind of reasoning
process. Modern science is built upon a panoply of much more complicated
instruments that automate lengthy series of calculations which we previ-
ously would have had to wind our own inferential path through.1

This condensation of inferences into instruments is one of the pri-

mary means of expanding our limited cognitive capacities. Therefore,
the shift between the prescientific to the scientific world was heavily
indebted to shifts in the materiality of knowledge, not our minds.
And it is assemblage thinking which turns attention to this aspect,
emphasizing that any social formation is always a collection of mate-
rial and immaterial elements. In this sense, questions about the divide
between the material and the ideational can also be recognized as false

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 Cognitive Assemblages and the Production of Knowledge 

problems. The ideational is always material, and the constructivist is

also a materialist.

Economics and climate science

So what does this sharper focus on the materiality of knowledge get
us? Two quick examples – one from economics and one from climate
science – can suggest some points where thinking in terms of cognitive
assemblages can assist in explaining events.
The first case has to do with the transformation in the 1970s of UK
macro-econometric modelling from a Keynesian framework to a mone-
tarist framework. Peter Kenway’s research (1994) shows that in the 1960s
and early 1970s, the UK economic modelling scene was dominated by a
particular Keynesian model which formed a paradigm for both research
and government policy. With the crisis of stagflation in the 1970s
though, the levers of government control over the economy weakened.
The problem here was that the government response was to some degree
hamstrung by the computer models they used to forecast the economy
and test out policy options. It was not until the late 1970s that a properly
monetarist model was developed and capable of being put into use. As
Kenway’s narrative shows (1994: 39), the innovations of this model were
then quickly adopted by the government largely because it included new
variables that were modifiable by policy.
The significant point here is that while individual economists were
generating answers to the question of why stagflation was happening,
and what could be done about it – it was not until these theories were
implemented into computer models – that the UK government could
see and appraise the effects of monetarist policy proposals. Until then,
the UK government remained largely bound to Keynesian mechanisms
of government intervention, despite the failures of Keynesianism at the
time. An explanation of the shift in government policy that only focused
on the epistemic communities promoting monetarism would be incapa-
ble of giving a full explanation of the timing of the policy shift, and the
delays in the shift despite the problems of stagflation.
The second example I want to briefly outline is of climate modelling.
Since the earth’s climate system is far too complex for any mind – or
even a collection of minds – to think about, all of our knowledge about
it comes from computer modelling (Edwards 2010). Consequently,

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 Nick Srnicek

our knowledge of the effects of policy decisions is held in machines

as well.
In the past two decades, one of the dominant trends in climate model-
ling has been a shift from the global to the local – increasingly modelling
finer resolutions, and increasingly integrating elements of the geophysi-
cal system that are relevant to local areas – things like rivers, soil and
biological species (Dahan 2010). The consequence of this technological
development in computing power is that local and long-term adaptation
policies become viable. If one wants to know how to adapt rather than
mitigate climate change, one needs to have an image of how climate
change will affect the relevant local area – and these images all come
from computer models.
So while one can find statements from epistemic communities about
the value of adaptation policies as early as the 1970s, it is only in the past
decade that the UK government has been able to seriously start making
preparations for local and long-term adaptation (Dahan 2010). As with
macro-econometric modelling, a focus on the materiality of knowledge
helps in explaining the timing and shape of various policies.
From these two brief examples, it is possible to draw out at least
some initial conclusions. In the first case, while individuals continue to
develop their fields, the technology employed by these cognitive assem-
blages has a momentum and stability to it that a purely social analysis of
epistemic communities misses. Keynesian computer models continue
on during a crisis of Keynes; and today we arguably see neoliberal
computer models continuing on during a crisis of neoliberalism. The
material aspect of knowledge here invokes a certain path dependency
that limits options.
In the second example, we see technology producing new political
options rather than restricting these options. The rise of seemingly viable
adaptation policies stems not just from the desire for these policies, but
also by technology making these policies possible in the first place.
In both cases, what is significant is not only the representational
aspect of the models – whether they are true or not. Just as important is
the affordances they offer to various political actors (Gibson 1977). New
monetarist models proposed a way for the UK government to intervene
in the economy and stop stagflation. New regional climate models
provide the basis for intervening in the Earth system and adapting to
climate change. The materiality of cognitive assemblages is significant
for what they make possible.

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 Cognitive Assemblages and the Production of Knowledge 

Cognitive assemblages

Stepping back from these brief examples, it can be seen that cognitive
assemblages share many features with epistemic communities: they
highlight the intermingling of knowledge and politics in contemporary
societies; they recognize the often competing demands of both worlds;
and they recognize that the products of these systems are designed to
bridge the two worlds. Where cognitive assemblages go further is in
highlighting the material infrastructure of epistemic communities, and
emphasizing the technological dynamics (Edwards 2010: 388). A few
general points about the differences can therefore be outlined.
First, what is particularly novel about cognitive assemblages is the
delegation of thought to machines. Epistemic community approaches
maintain cognition as a solely human process and one shaped by social
factors such as power and authority. With the cognition of problems
delegated to machines though, the factors affecting the outcome begin
to include material aspects of technology properly as well. Incorporating
technology is significant because technological dynamics become an
important explanatory factor in when, where and how political issues
arise and are tackled. Knowledge becomes collective and distributed
rather than individual or solely social.

These descriptions of the temporally extended and collective work of pro-

ducing objective displays contrasted with the established view of observa-
tion and representation as individual, and largely instantaneous, perceptual
acts. Instead of being a confrontation between a world and a prepared mind,
the research act began to resemble a form of factory production in which
material inputs were transformed into readable data to be disseminated
widely in a community. (Lynch 2006: 29–30)

Secondly, the concept of cognitive assemblages highlights the way in

which epistemic communities can be a derivative effect of technological
infrastructures (Edwards 1996). For epistemic communities, ideas are
situated in and organized by a collective. It is the members of this collec-
tive who then spread the ideas around. By contrast, the idea of cognitive
assemblages highlights that ideas can also be situated in and organized
by technologies. For instance, regardless of a community existing before-
hand or not, option pricing models have become hegemonic tools to
intervene in derivatives markets. To interact with these markets means
to accept the framing of the market provided by these instruments

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 Nick Srnicek

(MacKenzie 2006). Similarly, the climate modelling infrastructure

produces communities that incorporate atmospheric scientists, software
engineers, physicists, data designers, chemists, technicians and others.
These communities are brought together by virtue of the needs of the
technological system itself, and the scientific representations produced
by the models can and do form the basis for shared beliefs in epistemic
communities. Much like newspapers for the constitution of national
imagined communities, scientific visualizations can constitute particular
epistemic communities (Jasanoff 2001; Anderson 2006).
Third, cognitive assemblages focus on the decentring of rational
thought. Government rationality exists neither in a unified mind (the
statist view) nor in competing bureaucracies (the foreign policy analysis
view). Rather, government rationality is an extended material infrastruc-
ture, complete with the unique advantages and hindrances that such a
situation brings. This also means looking at alternative places where the
understanding of a situation may go wrong – namely, in the political or
otherwise biased nature of the models themselves. For instance, one of
the main observational gaps for climate modelling is currently in Africa,
leading to greater uncertainty over short- to mid-term predictions for
this region. The political consequences of this model’s shortcoming
could be significant given that it is among the most vulnerable areas in
the world to climate change.
Lastly, externalized cognition has different properties and capaci-
ties from internal cognition. Certain forms of non-human cognition
become available for use (e.g. thinking non-linearities and second- and
third-order effects), but also bring along new problems of parameter-
setting, tuning, computational friction and data arms races. In addi-
tion, technological cognition, as opposed to internal cognition, has
the properties that it can be more durable, easier to communicate,
have greater capacities and be simpler to consciously manipulate
(Sutton 2010).
In all these ways, therefore, the concept of cognitive assemblages
shifts the focus of attention and changes the potential explanatory
factors involved in understanding world politics. The cognitive assem-
blage becomes a necessary mediating point between the problem and
those charged to solve it. The problem (e.g. the changes in the climate
system) must pass through a technological mediator (e.g. GCMs) in
order for them to become thinkable by a policymaker. The result is
that the technology introduces a particular series of representations of

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 Cognitive Assemblages and the Production of Knowledge 

the problem into the cognitive assemblage and these go onto shape the
behavioural, perceptual and cognitive capacities available to political
actors.

Note
 See: Pete Wolfendale. “No Givenness Please, We’re Sellarsians.”
Deontologistics, 12 January 2012, http://deontologistics.wordpress.
com/2012/01/12/no-givenness-please-were-sellarsians/.

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 6
Global Assemblages and
Structural Models of
International Relations
Olaf Corry

Abstract: This chapter argues that assemblages, although

rooted in a deep skepticism of grand theory, could also be
useful for re-thinking structure and models of structure
in international relations. IR models of structure usually
restrict themselves to how subjects are ordered. The idea
of an ordering principle that concerns objects as well as
subjects has not been much considered. But what if not
only subjects but also assemblages play a critical role in
structuring international relations? I argue that ‘polities’
are basically constituted, not by the emergence of a
hierarchy, but by the emergence of a common governance-
object and that a ‘global polity’ is therefore a situation
where actors orient themselves toward the governing of
specifically global governance-objects.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Global Assemblages and Structural Models 

Introduction
Rather than consigning assemblages to the micro-politics of international
relations, this chapter argues that assemblages, although rooted in a deep
scepticism of grand theory, could also be useful for rethinking structure and
models of structure in international relations. IR models of structure usually
restrict themselves to how subjects are ordered – hierarchically, anarchically,
in core-periphery relations or in terms of networks, for instance. The idea of
an ordering principle that concerns objects as well as subjects has not been
much considered. But what if not only subjects but also assemblages – the
bringing together of previously unconnected elements into novel constella-
tions – play a critical role in structuring international relations? More spe-
cifically, one particular sub-category of assemblages – those constructed as
governable and important to govern, upon which actors’ identities become
dependent, which I refer to as ‘governance-objects’ – is central to the
structure of international relations and has hitherto been ignored. I argue
that ‘polities’ are basically constituted not by the emergence of a hierarchy,
but by the emergence of a common governance-object and that a ‘global
polity’ is therefore a situation where actors orient themselves towards the
governing of specifically global governance-objects. The aim is to integrate
analysis of objects into a new model of structure with relevance to IR.
The chapter begins with standard definitions of what structures are
and the range of models currently used to identify and think about the
effect of structures in IR. It highlights the blindness of most models to
the role of objects. Section two explores whether assemblage-thinking
can be of use in structural model-building and argues that it can cast
new light on the core problem of the international (namely that the
world consists of multiple political entities). Thirdly, the idea that a pol-
ity is constituted precisely by the assemblage of a governance-object –
the construction of something considered governable and worthy of
governance – is advanced. Whereas anarchy is whatever states make of
each other’s intentions and identities, a global polity can be thought of as
something actants render simultaneously governable and global.

Subject-centrism: models of international structure

For Kenneth Waltz, who set much of the terms of debate about the
idea of structure in International Relations, a structure ‘defines the

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 Olaf Corry

arrangement, or the ordering, of the parts of a system’ (Waltz 1979: 80).

It was not internal to his definition of structure, ‘the parts’ of the system
in which he was interested were the actors – or rather a particular group
of actors, namely states. If they were arranged in terms of super- and
sub-ordination then the structure was hierarchical. Otherwise it was
by default anarchic. A third ordering principle would be relevant only
if a third type of system was identified: ‘to say that there are borderline
cases is not to say that at the border a third type of system appears’
(Waltz 1979: 116).
Though many have criticized his version of structural realism, in par-
ticular because Waltz chose to fill the structure with states, none of the
critics have objected to him only taking account of the arrangement of
actors. This is despite the fact that there is nothing in this definition that
stipulates that ‘the parts’ that are structurally ordered must necessarily be
the actors. Formally, Waltz left this totally open: ‘a structural definition
applies to realms of widely different substance so long as the arrange-
ment of parts is similar’ (Waltz 1979: 80). He was keen to distinguish the
structure from the properties of the units: ‘How units stand in relation to
one another, the way they are arranged or positioned, is not a property
of the units’ (1979: 80).
While Waltz only countenanced the models of hierarchy and anarchy,
other models of how ‘units’ stand in relation to one another are of course
used in IR. Empire is thus arguably a distinct model of structure, often
pictured as a rimless hub-and-spokes figure, with a core that divides and
rules peripheral units holding them apart by treating them differentially
to undermine counter-coalitions and to nurture dependency on the
core (Nexon and Wright 2007). Though also based, like hierarchy, on
the super- and sub-ordination of actors, empire can thus be considered
a distinct model of structure stipulating a ‘set of constraining conditions’
(Waltz 1979: 74) stemming from the arrangement of the actors. ‘Network’
is also increasingly considered a model of structure in international rela-
tions (Emilie, Kahler and Hafner-Burton 2009) although the debate as
to whether it stipulates an arrangement of the parts of a system or lacks
a specification of structure (Cavanagh 2007:50) simply amounting to
an account of various structures in terms of nodes and links (see Corry
2010).
All of the above, however, privilege the ‘who’ and how they stand
in relation to each other and ignore or down-play the ‘what’ of world
politics. To be sure, empire with its Marxist roots does not exclude the

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 Global Assemblages and Structural Models 

construction of objects of governance, for example theorizing the rei-

fication and objectification, of the product of human labour. However,
the structure itself is focussed ultimately on social groups in positions of
exploitation and dependence.

Assemblages and structure: constituting polities

The point of identifying a structure is to identify the consequential
ways in which the parts of a system are arranged. In this sense, the
relation between subjects and objects could well matter greatly. For
Ong, ‘one strength of the idea of assemblage is that it focuses on
relationality not just of actors, but actually relationality of things and
people’ (Ong, this volume: 24). Models of structure are systematically
excluding the relationality of things and people, while purporting to
identify key constraints and possibilities in a political system. The
concept of an assemblage may therefore bring something new to the
table with regard to thinking about structural models in IR. Still, let
us first deal with some possible objections to employing the concept
of ‘assemblage’ in this way.
In some ways, the idea of a structure and models of structure such as
Waltz’s are anathema to the basic impulse of assemblage-thinking. For
Ong, thinking in terms of assemblages is not about ‘trying to under-
stand very fluid, indeterminate and heterogeneous social realities in
terms of given frameworks’ but rather reflects ‘a much more careful,
modest admission that we can only grasp a pretty limited part of
unfolding contemporary life’ (this volume: 24). In contrast, for Waltz,
models of structure were exactly attempts to think in terms of given
frameworks – ones he claimed were the most important ones. The
idea of abstracting from detail and huge swathes of reality to focus
on ‘a few important things’ as Waltz aims to, arguably does fit badly
with the style of theorizing that those working with assemblages have
adopted. Secondly, the sheer scale of the international system in a way
may defeat the object of thinking locally and contingently in terms of
assemblages.
On the other hand, the concept of assemblage can also be taken as
‘an invitation to think’ about and to ‘interrogate one’s own assemblage’
(Sassen, this volume: 23). For IR scholars the key assemblage is arguably
the international itself, understood as ‘that dimension of social reality

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 Olaf Corry

which arises specifically from the coexistence within it of more than one
society’1 (Rosenberg 2006: 308). Just as assemblage-thinking challenges
time-honoured concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘economy’, it could be been
used to rethink the usual idea of ‘the international’ including how the
multiple units are arranged.
Secondly, identity has already become a central preoccupation of IR,
but without considering the importance of assemblages for identities.
‘Assemblage’ highlights the connection between subjectivity and objects
pointing out that objects are part of what constitutes actors for who they
are. Most IR theories, if they consider identity at all (e.g. constructivist
or post-structuralist ones), consider them relational in relation to other
identities for example in the relation between self and significant oth-
ers (Wendt 1999, Zehfuss 2002). Yet it is difficult to imagine a political
identity in the US, for example, that does not in some way relate to the
‘object’ the United States of America, including in some sense its materi-
ality. In this sense, the concept of assemblage is useful as it refers not
only to how previously unconnected material elements come together
in new and contingent ways, but also to ‘the apparently often mutually
constitutive relationships between much of the social and the material
world’ (Faulkner and Runde 2010: 1).
Moreover, there is nothing inherent in the idea of an assemblage
that restricts it to small-scale features of the world as the concept of
‘global assemblage’ perhaps indicates (Collier and Ong 2009). Collier
and Ong suggest that ‘global forms’ are composed of elements that can
exist in multiple cultural contexts, are able to ‘assimilate themselves
to new environments, to code heterogeneous contexts and objects in
terms that are amenable to control and valuation’ and are thus ‘lim-
ited or delimited by specific technical infrastructures, administrative
apparatuses, or value regimes, not by the vagaries of a social or cul-
tural field’ (Collier and Ong 2009: 11). Today such global forms may
have huge temporal and spatial reach. What Paul N. Edwards terms
infrastructural globalism or ‘projects for permanent, unified, world-
scale institutional-technological complexes that generate globalist
information not merely by accident, as a by-product of other goals,
but by design’ (2010: 25) have created a ‘vast machine’ of apparatus
that have rendered the global climate governable. This would be an
obvious case in point.
Finally, although it does not reify its models to make trans-historical
substantive claims about the matter and composition of the world, as

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 Global Assemblages and Structural Models 

a form of analysis assemblage-thinking, it inevitably takes part in the

great simplification of the world that analysis performs. In this sense like
structural models, assemblage thinking too seeks to focus strategically
on a few consequential things.

From an international system to a global polity

So how can we think about a model of structure that includes objects?
Elsewhere (Corry 2010, 2013) I have suggested that a ‘polity’ is consti-
tuted, not necessarily by the emergence of a hierarchical structure of
authority but, by the emergence of a common governance-object. This
can be pictured as in Figure 6.1 where X, Y and Z are different actors, all
oriented towards the governance-object ‘O’.
A governance-object can be seen as a kind of assemblage in so far as it
becomes recognized, despite the inherent heterogeneity of the world, as a
meaningful or even ‘natural’ unit through social processes of distinction
and construction. Unlike other assemblages, however, it is also somehow
rendered governable: it can be operated upon. Foucault’s account of
‘governmentality’ is one famous depiction of how ‘society’ emerged as
a distinct entity capable of being governed through statistics, political
economy and other governmental techniques (2007). Thirdly, however,
not all governable assemblages are equally indispensable to identities
(salient), so a governance-object is also one that is intimately bound up
with political subjectivity. Members of a polity, thus understood, share
a common orientation concerning what is to be governed, albeit not nec-
essarily in a consensual way. In contrast, in a hierarchy the sovereign
decides questions of inclusion and exclusion and in an anarchy it is by
way of mutual recognition.

X-o
Y-o

X-o O

Z-o
Z-o

Figure 6.1 A model of polity where governance-objects are constitutive

Source: Corry 2013: 86.

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 Olaf Corry

In this model of structure, rather than being incidental to political

structure, the object becomes the ‘anchor’: those not oriented towards
the governance-object are in effect outside the polity. If the governance-
object dissolves or is displaced by another one, this is likely to have
structuring effects on the interaction around it. These processes are
therefore inherently political, but may also be emergent out of seemingly
unrelated activities with unintended consequences, such as when weather
monitoring systems and space travel end up rendering the global climate
governable (Edwards 2010).
To take another example, members of an ‘Afghan polity’ may all
implicitly recognize ‘Afghanistan’ as a (somehow) governable entity and
define themselves in terms of the practice of governing it. Thus NATO,
the Taliban, Pakistan, Uzbek and other ethnic groups may all operate
in a way that reflects the premise that ‘Afghanistan’ is a real, delimited,
malleable entity to some degree and relevant to them. They may be at
loggerheads – or even war – over who is to rule and how it is to be ruled,
but their membership of the polity would depend on their orientation
towards the object. A European polity likewise may exist in terms of a
group of actors and infrastructures that render ‘Europe’ a governable
entity with its own governance-logic. By extension, a ‘global polity’ is ‘a
situation in which subjects are oriented towards the governance of an
object considered not only distinct and governable but also “global” ’
(Corry 2013: 100).
This raises the question, when is a governance-object ‘global’? Many
notions of globality approximate to ‘transnational’ or a stronger ver-
sion of ‘international’ (Scholte 2000) but to leave it thus would tie the
discussion of a global polity to the statist paradigm that identifies state
borders as constitutive of political space (which is precisely the issue that
concerns structure). Instead, global governance-objects may be referred
to in terms of governance-objects constituted in terms of the world
being one place, drawing on a social as well as a physical notion of glo-
bality (Shaw 2000). In these terms, a ‘global’ polity does not refer to the
purported governance of more than one country or the entire planet, but
to those elements of the world rendered governable that simultaneously
reference the world as one place.
A global polity will thus not be territorially neatly limited, but will be
positively identifiable, since those assemblages that are rendered govern-
able that do not reference the world as one place would not be included.
Many actors continue to define themselves in relation to governing

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 Global Assemblages and Structural Models 

non-global objects such as ‘Britain’, or perhaps the Umma, but global

governance-objects such as ‘the climate’ or ‘the global economy’ assem-
bled through complex processes from a multitude of diverse elements
are arguably becoming increasingly central to political subjectivities and
hence to a nascent global polity.

Conclusion
In the spirit of questioning received categories, the idea of ‘governance-
objects’ as a specific form of assemblage that constitutes polities can thus
be used to question the basic constitution of the international sphere
and its structure. The overwhelming presumption that nations (or other
‘domestic’ spheres) are the only significant governance-objects perhaps
rendered the whole question of governance-objects, and how they
emerge and structure politics somewhat invisible in Westphalian inter-
national discourse. Yet the idea of a global polity understood as a set of
actors and objects constituted by the governability of ‘globality’ does not
displace ‘the international’, as Rosenberg defines it as societal multiplic-
ity, but adds a new dimension to it: Multiple societies have to deal with
each other as before, but now also with the dilemmas of governing global
assemblages – as well as older ones such as regional governance-objects
including ‘Europe’. Polities emerge and dissolve and always have.
This does not mean that models of hierarchy and anarchy are obsolete.
Things identified by other concepts (such as societies or markets) will
inevitably contain hierarchical features (or anarchic ones), even if we do
not define them through their hierarchical characteristics. Each is a dif-
ferent model that brings out different aspects of world politics and power:
anarchy draws attention to competition between states and patterns of
polarity; hierarchy makes us ask how far we are from a global state or
empire; network poses questions of connectivity and linkages. ‘Polity’, I
have suggested, draws attention to the governance-objects, their origins
and structuring effects. That ‘the weather’ has been rendered governable
in the form of ‘the climate’ has had profound structuring impacts on
world politics, for example, including contributing to the constitution
of a global polity centred on global governance-objects. Assemblage
theory gives us a stronger idea of how this has happened, and relating
such processes to the overall problematique of ‘the international’ raises
the assemblage-gaze up from the micro-processes of construction and

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 Olaf Corry

bricolage to their aggregated systemic effects. IR debates about models of

structure need to reflect that.

Note
 This should rather read ‘more than one political entity’, since these will not
always coincide with ‘societies’. The coincidence of societies and political
units was perhaps a feature of the Westphalian Age, although even then this
is only partly the case.

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 Part 3
Methods of Assemblage

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 7
Thinking Assemblages
Methodologically: Some
Rules of Thumb
Christian Bueger

Abstract: This chapter argues that the way that assemblage

is employed as a loose metaphor almost deprives it of any
theoretical meaning. In contrast, other intellectual projects
claim that assemblage is more than a metaphor, it is a
promising theoretical source of inspiration for developing
new frameworks of research. In this chapter I argue that
it is important to reflect on the different potentials of
these projects. Contrary to Sassen, I argue for engaging in
more depth with Deleuzian assemblage thinking. Against
De Landa, I argue that formulating a consistent theory
of assemblage and remaining on the philosophical level
is misleading. Partaking with Collier and Ong, I argue
that assemblage thinking implies an empiricist project,
providing a parsimonious and open ontological vocabulary
meaningful for conducting empirical research.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules of Thumb 

Introduction1
The concept of assemblage has travelled widely. While its origins as an
analytical concept can be located in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari (notably 2004 [1987]), the concept is increasingly adopted
in various intellectual contexts, stretching from design, art theory and
anthropology to social science. Also in an international relations (IR)
context the concept is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. Most
visibly the concept was employed by Saskia Sassen (2006, 2008), and
drawing on Sassen, in an article by Rita Abrahamsen and Michael
Williams (2009). While briefly acknowledging the origins of the concept
in the works of Deleuze and others, these authors use the concept largely
as a loose metaphor to speak about hybridity and to investigate proc-
esses of assembling and dis-assembling. Sassen adopts it to go beyond
the state – non-state dualism and to explore hybrid formations of terri-
tory, authority and rights. Abrahamsen and Williams likewise draw on
the concept to discuss the hybridity of state and private violence. In both
cases the concept of assemblage is not further theorized in the sense of an
ontological elaboration. The way that assemblage is employed as a loose
metaphor almost deprives it from any theoretical meaning. In contrast to
such a reception other intellectual projects claim that assemblage is more
than a metaphor, but a promising theoretical source of inspiration for
developing new frameworks of research. These projects include firstly,
Aiwha Ong and Stephen Colliers (2005) project of ‘global assemblages’
that provides an attempt to employ the concept to formulate an ‘anthro-
pology of the present’. Secondly, Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) attempt to
develop a coherent theory of assemblage. Both of these projects engage
intensively with the work of Deleuze and provide important reference
points for thinking assemblages for IR. Sassen, Ong and Collier and
DeLanda provide very different takes on what can be (and should be)
done with the concept of assemblage and what follows from it. In this
chapter I argue that it is important to reflect on the different potentials
of these projects. Contrary to Sassen I argue for engaging in more depth
with Deleuzian assemblage thinking. Yet, against DeLanda, I shall argue
that formulating a consistent theory of assemblage and remaining on
the philosophical level is misleading. Sassen undervalues the potential
of assemblage thinking, DeLanda almost contradicts it by turning it into
a philosophical project. Partaking with Collier and Ong I argue that
assemblage thinking implies an empiricist project. Assemblage thinking

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 Christian Bueger

is not a philosophical project of ontological contemplation. Assemblage

thinking provides a parsimonious and open ontological vocabulary
meaningful for conducting empirical research.
To develop this argument I begin with a brief reconstruction of the
apparatus underlying the concept of assemblage. I suggest that assem-
blage thinking implies the rejection of wholeness and embracement of
multiplicity, the study of the practices of maintaining relations between
elements and attention to different forms of material and symbolic
expressivity as well as territorialization and de-territorialization. Then I
suggest (arguing against DeLanda) that what follows from this apparatus
is an empiricist project of studying the practices of relating. Empiricism
implies attention to methodology. I thus end by outlining a number of
‘rules of thumb’ for an empiricist project which takes assemblage think-
ing as its starting point.

Assemblage thinking

An assemblage is a number of disparate and heterogeneous elements

convoked together into a single discernible formation (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004 [1987]: 327, 503–504). The concept denotes an under-
standing of structure which is not confined to a distinct scale (such
as local-global or a micro-meso-macro-scale) nor does it preclude a
distinct order. It thus resembles the intent of other concepts of struc-
tures increasingly debated in IR theory, such as the notions of fields
(Bourdieu), ‘actor-network’ (Latour) or ‘arrangements’ (Schatzki).
Marcus and Sakka (2006: 102) provide a good summary in arguing that
the term assemblage ‘seems structural, an object with the material-
ity and stability of the classic metaphors of structure, but the intent
in its aesthetic uses is precisely to undermine such ideas of structure’.
Instead of offering anything stable, ‘it generates enduring puzzles about
“process” and “relationship”. ... Whoever employs it does so with a
certain tension, balancing, and tentativeness where the contradictions
between the ephemeral and the structural, and between the structural
and the unstably heterogeneous create almost a nervous condition for
analytic reason’. Assemblage is hence ‘a sort of anti-structural concept
that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity,
the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life’
(Marcus and Sakka 2006: 101).

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 Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules of Thumb 

The concept of assemblage is part of a more complex line of reasoning

inherent in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which cannot be compre-
hensively reviewed here. Yet, there are at least four core characteristics
of assemblage thinking which are immediately useful to carve out space
for thinking international relations differently: multiplicity, relations
and practices, expressivity and territoriality. Each is discussed in the
following.

Multiplicity
The notion of multiplicity is a corrective to singular universalist under-
standings on one side, as well as particularist pluralist positions on the
other. Neither should the world be understood as one coherent whole,
nor as an atomized system of particulars. The notion of assemblage
erodes an understanding of reality as singular, but also rejects an atom-
ized understanding of the world. As programmatically put by Annemarie
Mol (2002: 55), reality is ‘more than one – but less than many’. Yet it is
not fragmented, ‘Even if it is multiple, it also hangs together’ (Mol 2002:
55). Different realities overlap and interfere with each other.
For IR this implies refraining from assuming that something like an
overarching whole such as ‘the international system’ or a ‘global cul-
ture’ can be identified. Or to suggest that a single overarching logic of
behaviour, such as the instrumental rationality, the logic of appropriate-
ness or the logic of practicality can be identified which explains order
and behaviour on its own. Simultaneously the notion of multiplicity
addresses the concerns that the rejection of universality implies the end
of knowledge (or even humankind) and that order is not possible. As
Inayatullah and Blaney (2004: 33) have argued, IR has been suspicious of
multiplicity and precluded that it is a source of instability and disorder.
Rather than treating multiplicity as a threat, they argue it needs to be
understood as a resource of building orders.
Indeed the notion of assemblage does not exclude the possibility
that an object or a system has been turned into a singular object or has
been made well-ordered. Deleuze and Guattari distinguished between
what they called rhizomatic and arboreal assemblages (see Khan 2008;
Hayden 1995). While they considered the rhizomatic form character-
ized by heterogeneity and multiplicity to be the norm, the arboreal
form referred to the situation in which an assemblage is well ordered
and subordinated under one ordering principle. In assemblage thinking,

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 Christian Bueger

arboreal assemblages are the exception, and they are forms that require
explanation and attention to the craftwork that has gone into forming
them and turning them into a well-ordered coherent whole. This brings
me to my second point, the importance of relations and practices of
ordering.

Relations and practice

The notion of assemblage entails a relationalist understanding of reality
(Hayden 1995). Assemblages are primordially organized by relations
between heterogeneous elements. The core ideas of relationalism have
become more and more familiar to IR (Jackson and Nexon 1999; Guillaume
2007). As Guillaume (2007: 742) emphasizes, such a perspective has
‘the advantage of ontologically avoiding considering social entities or
concepts as substances (e.g. power is not something one possesses but a
constellation of relations in which one is enmeshed in), epistemologically
avoiding reifying social entities or phenomena into static units and, on the
contrary, integrating the idea of change throughout one’s conceptualisation
of the social world (e.g. states are not functionally equivalent units inter-
acting in an established system but rather particular social entities whose
trans-actions constitute this system)’.

A core idea of relationalism is that relations are not fixed and stable. They
cannot be characterized once and for all, but are emergent and enacted
in practice. As argued by Hayden (1995), in this sense the notion of
assemblage entails primarily a theory of practice. Relations are made and
remade in practices. What is hence required is a study of the practical
work needed to generate relations between the elements of an assem-
blage. Two dimensions can be distilled from assemblage thinking of how
such practices can be described: expressivity and territoriality.

Expressivity material and symbolic

Similar to other practice theories (Reckwitz 2002), assemblage think-
ing is a symmetrical perspective in that it highlights the importance
of the synchrony and interplay of the material and symbolic. It is
symmetrical in that it does not give ontological superiority to either
things or humans and organizations. Assemblages consist of hetero-
geneous elements. These elements can be in principle things, artefacts,

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 Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules of Thumb 

technologies, humans or other assemblages. Alongside humans, the

worlds described as assemblages are populated by all sorts of material
things, such as documents, machines or architectural artefacts. This
symmetry is achieved in avoiding to essentialize any element as being
either material or symbolic. To conceptualize this symmetry assem-
blage thinking offers the concept of expressivity. The concept suggests
that any ordering practice and hence any element involves a mixture of
material and expressive roles by which it exerts effects. Thus, assemblage
components can play variable roles. As DeLanda (2006:12) suggests the
components of an assemblage can be described along an axis, ‘from
a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive
role at the other extreme. These roles are variable and may occur in
mixtures, that is, a given component may play a mixture of material
and expressive roles by exercising different sets of capacities’. Walters
(2002) for instance provides the example of a bureaucratic form. The
bureaucratic document can through its materiality be circulated to
distant places and as such can organize a political process, but it also
implies certain symbolic codes and practical understandings reaching
from what is important and requires to be documented to how it has
to be filled out appropriately. In considering symbolic expressivity, this
dimension should not be reduced to language and talk. Of course, a
main component of relations between humans is the content of talk,
yet there are many other forms of bodily symbolic expressions, such as
silences, dress codes or facial gestures.

Territorialization and de-territorialization

Assemblages can be grasped by the variable processes in which the
components become involved. These processes ‘either stabilize the
identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homo-
geneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it’
(DeLanda 2006: 12). Material and expressive roles of an entity can hence
be considered as having either a stabilizing or a destabilizing effect. In
using Deleuze’s terms, the former can be understood as territorializa-
tion, the latter as de-territorialization. Yet, as goes for the material and
expressive dimensions, ‘in fact, one and the same component may
participate in both processes by exercising different sets of capacities’
(DeLanda 2006: 12). As DeLanda (2006: 13) expands, territorilization
should be firstly understood literally as referring to particular places.

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 Christian Bueger

Face-to-face conversations, for instance, acquire well-defined spatial

boundaries (a bar, a church, etc.). Moreover, organizations often operate
in particular buildings, and their jurisdiction of their legitimate author-
ity usually coincides with the physical boundaries of that building.
While governmental organizations are an exception in this regard, their
jurisdiction is usually limited in geographical terms as well (e.g. state
territory). Territorialization is hence firstly to be understood as a proc-
ess that defines or sharpens the spatial boundaries of actual territory.
Yet, territorilization also refers to non-spatial processes which refer
to homogeneity in the first place. To provide an example, UNESCO’s
classification of the world cultural heritage is for instance a process
that sorts which monuments and landscapes are to be considered part
of the ‘world cultural heritage’ and which not. In this sorting process
the space and the boundaries of the assemblage ‘world cultural heritage’
become defined, and through the classification work an internal homo-
geneity of the assemblage is reached. Territorialization hence refers
to processes of strengthening and sharpening spatial and non-spatial
boundaries and increasing internal homogeneity. In turn processes of
de-territorialization are any processes which ‘either destabilize spatial
boundaries or increase internal heterogeneity’ (DeLanda 2006: 13).

Towards new empiricism: some rules of thumb

Assemblage thinking offers a range of concepts of immediate utility for
the study of international relations. As a structural metaphor, assem-
blage connects concerns that have been discussed in IR under labels
such as relationalism, process ontology, pragmatism, practice theories,
new materialism or Actor-Network Theory. In carving out the above
four dimensions of assemblage thinking, the embracement of multiplic-
ity, the focus on practices of relating and ordering, the mixture of mate-
rial and symbolic expressivity, and the simultaneity of territorialization
and de-territorialization, I do not want to suggest that this is a coherent
representation of Deleuzian philosophy. Yet this was not my intention.
Assemblage thinking offers a range of concepts which should not be
evaluated in how far they add up to an internally coherent theoretical
apparatus but in the way they create space and open up new ways for
the study of the international. It is one of the paradoxes of Deleuze’s
work that on the one side he engaged in complex and very abstract

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 Thinking Assemblages Methodologically: Some Rules of Thumb 

philosophical argumentation, while on the other he was arguing against

abstraction and for the primacy of empirical work, the empirical study
of practices and their diverse ordering effects. Assemblage thinking is
an invitation for empirical work, not for contemplating ontological con-
cepts and metaphors. Hence, DeLanda (2006: 3) is wrong when he criti-
cizes Deleuze (and Guattari) for not laying out a full-fledged assemblage
theory. Does that imply, as DeLanda suggests, that we would require
such a theory? Following Hayden (1995) and Gane (2009), I suggest
that what follows from Deleuze’s argument is a new empiricist agenda,
which takes as its starting point that the abstract does not explain, but
requires explanation itself. The concepts of assemblage thinking in this
sense require to be taken as a vocabulary that offers us a contingent
system of interpretation which allows us to make empirical statements.
Concepts such as assemblage, multiplicity, relations, practice, ordering,
expressivity and territoriality offer a sensitizing framework for empiri-
cal research. Then the meanings of these concepts have to be defined
in empirical work. It is on this basis that assemblage thinking offers
us a number of rules of thumb for the study of the international. Let
me end in sketching some of them: (1) Responding to the concept of
multiplicity the researcher should be suspicious towards anything that
is presented or taken to be a coherent whole, whether it is an object,
system or logic. These apparent wholes are puzzles for research and
are not to be taken for granted. (2) Thinking multiplicity is an invita-
tion to go beyond binaries and dualisms. Classifications such as state/
non-state, human/non-human, modern/post-modern and material/
symbolic are not explanatory frameworks. They are distinctions that
require explanations themselves and attention to how they are enacted.
(3) The vocabulary of assemblage is voluntarily poor. It does not want
to limit a priori what are the most important elements and what their
properties are. (4) Assemblage thinking implies attention to detail and
the mundane activities of doings and sayings by which realities are
enacted, relations are built and ordering takes place. (5) This implies
an ethnographic gaze, yet there is no singular methodology by which
assemblages can be opened up. Methodologies are, as Law (2004) has
shown, assemblages in their own right, they order the world in a distinct
way. (6) In representing assemblages the scholar is inevitably entailed in
the enactment of an assemblage. Scholars perform the world in distinct
ways and not others. Representing an assemblage in an academic nar-
rative hence always entails a political choice. (7) Since assemblages are

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 Christian Bueger

made of real-time enactment, no representation of an assemblage will

ever be finite or complete.

Note
 For comments and suggestions as well as conversations which have informed
this chapter I am grateful to Frank Gadinger, Elspeth Guild and Corinne
Heaven.

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 8
Energizing the International
Debbie Lisle

Abstract: This intervention addresses the rather mundane

question of method – of how we go about identifying,
exploring, analysing, tracing and politicizing assemblages.
Certainly the ‘materialist turn’ has energized the scholarly
landscape by allowing us to recognize the political in
a radically expanded landscape of sites, scales and
temporalities. It has displaced humans as the dominant
agents of political change and placed us in intense and
deeply embedded relations with the non-human things in
our proximity, but also at a distance. But what research
methods are adequate to such a radical expansion of our
research landscape? With such a critical understanding of
how knowledge itself is produced, is it even possible to speak
in terms of ‘research methods’ anymore? Are we supposed
to reimagine more traditional research methods such as
ethnography, or develop new approaches that embrace
wonder, surprise, intuition and experimentation? While
many of these questions prompt grand ontological statements,
I want to push the more mundane outworkings of materialist
thought through a constant refrain of: ‘yes, but how?’

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 Debbie Lisle

A positive affirmation
Since the critical turn in International Relations (IR) in the early 1990s,
the discipline has been late to every intellectual party that has ever been
thrown. For example, we scrambled after our resident Feminist and
post-colonial scholars who had long been pursuing issues of identity
and power; we worked out the global spread of policing, governance
and force only after the criminologists and sociologists had done so; and
we trailed behind those in cultural studies and visual culture who had
been busy for years demonstrating the political and global significance
of popular culture. As a consequence of our intellectual sluggishness, we
are constantly lagging behind other disciplines that seem better placed
to embrace the zeitgeist in advance. These practices of belatedness have
produced a curious inferiority complex – an inability to assert that we
are the ones most capable of foregrounding what is political and what is
global about a particular problem. It is precisely this anxiety that results
in a well-intentioned but rather perverse opening question: What can
‘assemblage’ thinking contribute to the study of international relations? In
an effort to rid IR of its belated self-understanding, I want to start by
reordering the question: rather than ask what assemblage thinking can
do for us, we should ask what we – as students, scholars and thinkers of
the international – can do for assemblage thinking.
Decades of assiduous and committed critical work has resulted in what
many have called a new social ontology. Our efforts to problematize the
gap between reality and representation, demonstrate the constitutive
role of knowledge claims, and call attention to the exclusions inherent
in all knowledge productions have resulted in acute dissatisfaction with
research agendas that accept a settled ontological realm. It is precisely
these feelings of discontent that have led to the flourishing of work
that takes as its starting place a more expansive, open, heterogeneous
and fragile set of connected life-worlds in which agency circulates
between humans and non-humans. IR is a crucial site in this reimagin-
ing because, for once, we have not come late to the party. Indeed, the
discipline has a long history of engaging with non-human objects that
cause violence (e.g. guns and bombs) and with the political spaces
within which those objects circulate (e.g. the international, the state, the
border). Moreover, having travelled through the cultural, aesthetic and
visual turns, the discipline now has multiple and well-established criti-
cal traditions that frame our forceful and populous participation in the

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 Energizing the International 

material turn. While there are many different intersections that emerge
when constitutive relationships between human and non-human agents
are interrogated, IR is the best place from which to analyse the political
and the global character of those intersections. Indeed, it is IR scholars
that pose two of the most important questions to assemblage thinking:
first, what are the inclusions, exclusions and boundary practices opera-
tive in any assemblage; and second, how does that matrix of inclusion
and exclusion operate on a global terrain? The importance of IR’s con-
tribution to assemblage thinking is clearest in the topics that we have
chosen to address so far; for example, critical infrastructures in cities
(e.g. transport systems), security technologies at border sites (e.g. bio-
metric screening), invisible objects of governance (e.g. data, algorithms)
and objects that evade sovereign borders (e.g. drugs, weapons).1 We can
justify our central position in this emerging field by a simple question:
what contemporary emergent assemblages are not global? Even work
that extrapolates out from the detailed minutiae of a single human/non-
human encounter ends up sutured into the global realm. And who better
to critically interrogate that realm than students and scholars of IR?

Some tentative suggestions

Some of the most important work within IR that draws out the political
and global aspects of assemblage thinking explores what the encoun-
ter with materiality does to traditional research methods, especially
within Critical Security Studies.2 Indeed, by accepting that agency has
been radically redistributed across human and non-human actors, we
are forced to engage with extremely difficult questions about how we
might go about interrogating assemblages that are constantly emerging,
dispersing and recombining. Does an assemblage itself constitute an
‘object of knowledge’ in the traditional sense? Do we study one or many
assemblages? How do we connect the different scales through which an
assemblage operates, from the microbial to the planetary? Using this
work on methods and materiality in IR as a starting point, I want to
offer some preliminary suggestions to those of us currently engaged in
assemblage thinking:
() Think, don’t apply : Over and above any other insight offered by
assemblage thinking, this is the most important: that politicizing
how things and people are entangled cannot be done through

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 Debbie Lisle

pregiven concepts or theoretical frameworks that are simply

applied to already settled ‘objects of analysis’. Centrally, this
is because assemblage thinking does not accept the subject/
object distinction that orders so much of contemporary life and
allows us – as researchers – to isolate the targets of our research
and subordinate them through our methods of inquiry. By
redistributing agency so that ‘objects’ have vitality and capacity,
assemblage thinking forces researchers to think in conjunction with
our research topics rather than seek to ‘explain’ or ‘understand’
them. As Shapiro (2013: xv) argues: ‘To think (rather than to seek
to explain) ... is to compose the discourse of investigation with
critical juxtapositions that unbind what are ordinarily presumed
to belong together and thereby to challenge institutionalized
ways of reproducing and understanding phenomena.’ Assemblage
thinking in IR does precisely this: it ‘unbinds’ common-sense
assumptions about anthropocentrism and the inertness of
objects, and explores how the entanglements between human
and non-human actors coalesce into fragile hegemonies that
span the global terrain, before dispersing and recombining
again differently. Conventional methods of explaining and
understanding cannot capture the rampant mobility, flexibility
and contingency of assemblages. To do this requires a different
‘ethos of engagement with the world’ (Anderson and McFarlane
2011: 126) that enhances, rather than seeks to order, its
multiplicity, heterogeneity and contingency. Very simply, it is
impossible to ‘apply’ assemblage thinking to the world because
it doesn’t come with a preformed ‘toolbox’ of methods that
can be chosen and utilized. Warning us of the dangers of what
he calls ‘applicationism’ in studies of governmentality, Walters
(2012: 5) argues that ‘The toolbox needs to be reimagined as a
dynamic and transactional space – more akin to the fluid world of
software design than the settled scene of the tool shed.’ As such,
we can say that assemblage thinking may involve established
research methods such as ethnography, interviews, participant
observation or discourse analysis, but only to the extent that
these have been recalibrated through a critical ethos that both
refutes the hierarchies normally implied in them (e.g. between the
interviewer and interviewee, or the researcher and the text) and
foregrounds the materialities that constitute such interactions.

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 Energizing the International 

() Be stubborn: Assemblage thinking has emerged despite many

institutional forces arrayed against it – most notably the wide-
spread consensus across all fields of knowledge production that
intellectual inquiry is an established process that follows pregiven
pathways. This consensus is at its most acute and pervasive (and
therefore most difficult to resist) when institutions seek to impart
to young scholars the established research methods they must learn
and choose from. Assemblage thinking – if it is even considered – is
cast as deviant because it exceeds, disrupts and reworks established
methodological rules and conventions.3 Arming oneself to break
apart this consensus and insist on a place within the schema of
research methods and design is a careful process – especially
when confronted with so-called Pluralists who welcome ‘new’ and
‘innovative’ methods ... as long as they operate within the dominant
discourse of knowledge production (e.g. What is your hypothesis?
What method will you use to gather and /or analyse your data?
What recommendations will you make to policy-makers?) Here,
John Law’s work on non-coherent methods is indispensable when
confronting methodological gatekeepers. In After Method, Law
(2004: 4–7; Law 2007) makes three simple points: (1) the world is
highly complex, generative, indistinct and sometimes unknowable;
(2) conventional methods cannot capture ‘the ephemeral, the
indefinite and the irregular’ because they assume that the world
is made up of ‘a set of fairly specific, determinate, and more or less
identifiable processes’; and (3) we need new ways of knowing the
world that foreground heterogeneity and address its unformed,
indefinite and fluctuating character. For Law (2004: 14), what is
required are ‘method assemblages’ that ‘do not produce or demand
neat, definite, and well-tailored accounts. And they don’t do this
precisely because the realities they stand for are excessive and
influx, not themselves neat, definite and simply organized’. The
point here is to rejuvenate and keep open the debates on method,
methodology and epistemology – both in IR and across the social
sciences – by demanding a place for the disruptive, troublesome
and unruly character of assemblage thinking.
() Pay attention: What is it that we do, exactly, when we engage in
assemblage thinking? The first thing is to slow down, listen and
look closely to whatever encounter or interaction is under scrutiny.
Latour (2005: 144), for example, argues that the goal is not to

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 Debbie Lisle

explain or understand, but instead to provide the richest, fullest

and most complex description of a phenomenon. My point is that
it is only by slowing down that you will be able to identify the
multiple human and non-human actors involved in an assemblage
and let them articulate themselves in whatever way they can. And
it is only by listening carefully to what is articulated that you will
be able to properly describe the inclusions and exclusions that
inevitably arise, and show how the constant reproduction and
dispersal of those binaries spans the globe. Pursuing assemblage
thinking means (1) affording agency to all actors that constitute
your inquiry, especially the non-human actors; and (2) paying
attention to the relationships between these multiple actors and
the forces that impel them to act in the way they do. This kind of
analysis is challenging in the smallest register, but even more so
when one’s primary scale is the globe. In IR, we have done excellent
work showing the inclusions and exclusions that operate at the
level of representation (e.g. in linguistic, discursive, rhetorical
and visual registers), and we have even begun to excavate the
important affective and emotional registers of global politics. In
part, this is because the registers we are comfortable analysing – the
representational, affective and emotional – remain wedded to a
familiar anthropocentrism. What we need to do is take all that
rich work centring on humans, human relations and the global
span of human contact and pluralize it so that we foreground
the interactions between humans and their material worlds. To
follow Connolly’s trajectory: it is not enough to focus on identity/
difference, one must also follow how that logic is constituted by
(and therefore enfolds) multiple materialities and forces. Causality,
here, is never singular or unidirectional, it is always heterogeneous
and emergent. What needs further exploration, then, is how well
our insights from the cultural, aesthetic and visual turns translate
into what Thrift (2008: 9) has called the ‘non-representational
realm’ of practice in which humans and non-humans are always
entangled.
() Practice creative ethnography: Part of the problem with IR is its
undervalued and totally reductive account of ethnography – the
central method that allows us to slow down and pay attention. As
a matter of urgency, we need to have many more conversations
with anthropologists – not those who reproduce traditional

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 Energizing the International 

ethnographies in which the life-world of the researcher remains

intact, but those critical scholars who redistribute agency so their
descriptions afford equal value to the plural forces of human
bodies, material objects, affective registers, infrastructures and
atmospheres. That understanding of ethnography requires an
altogether different disposition, orientation and ethos to the world
which, in effect, becomes a giant, open laboratory made available
for exploration. This is hugely energizing because it dramatically
expands the sites through which we can trace the global reach of
assemblages (e.g. bacteria, dirt, data, drugs, hardware, software,
cells, polymers, networks). But it is also potentially paralyzing in
terms of strategy, for what is not ethnography within such a wide-
open disposition? When we slow down and pay attention to how
heterogeneity is put together, where/when do we start and where/
when do we stop? How can we live our research in our everyday
lives, and vice-versa, without succumbing to narcissism, solipsism
and irrelevance?
() Embrace vulnerability: To make assemblage thinking relevant, we
need to start with an acknowledgement of vulnerability, fragility
and contingency – of the material world we exist in, of ourselves
as researchers within that world, and of the multiple self/world
interactions that arise. This requires an extremely difficult balance.
On the one hand, we have to remain undecided as to where the
research will take us, and therefore constantly negotiating powerful
feelings of doubt, anxiety and uncertainty when asked to justify
our work.4 Where some might confidently assert ‘I will answer
my hypothesis by doing X, Y and Z’, we can only respond with
hesitation, partial insight, intuition and hope. On the other hand,
that vulnerability must be pursued with confidence that our critical
ethos will create the space necessary to allow the assembled actors
to articulate themselves in all their plurality, contradiction and
particularity. To achieve that balance between vulnerability and
confidence, we need to carefully recalibrate our critical skills which
have so long been honed against hegemonies that entrench the
asymmetries of the global order. Assemblage thinking is important
because it allows us to infuse that intellectual fire-power with more
productive energies. Primarily, it allows us to be creative in terms of
the rather unexpected objects and phenomena we choose to study
and, more importantly, the ways in which we choose to study them.

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 Debbie Lisle

But what is particularly energizing about assemblage thinking is

that it enables us to work collaboratively with like-minded scholars
across all disciplines – including the sciences – who accept that
vulnerability is central to any research endeavour. Rather than
exploiting such vulnerabilities by the various methods academia
encourages (e.g. vicious anonymous reviews; disciplinary
gatekeeping; professional hierarchies), this community of scholars
sees solidarity in our shared vulnerability, and as such, seeks to
promote intellectual curiosity, practice collegial generosity, and
encourage experimental, innovative and unruly acts of critical
questioning.

Notes
 As for example Aradau (2010), Coward (2012), Muller (2012) or Amoore
(2009) and Bourne (2012).
 See ‘The Material Turn’ in Salter and Mutlu (2013: 173–206).
 A good account of the disruptive nature of assemblage thinking is Bruno
Latour’s (2005: 141–156) encounter with an anxious student.
 For Bruno Latour (1988: 258), this undecided condition is central to ANT
as he states in his famous ‘Rules of Method’ (Rule 5): ‘We have to be as
undecided as the various actors we follow as to what technoscience is made
of; every time an inside/outside divide is built, we should study the two sides
simultaneously and make the list, no matter how long and heterogeneous, of
those who do the work.’

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 9
Visual Assemblages: From
Causality to Conditions
of Possibility
Roland Bleiker

Abstract: To explore how we can take assemblage thinking

seriously, this chapter engages the study of images in
world politics. Images need to be understood in their own
multiplicities, with each requiring fundamentally different
methodological tools. Yet numerous obstacles hamper the
establishing of this type of heterogeneous methodological
framework. Key among them is the antagonistic dualism
between qualitative and quantitative methods. They are
divided not only by different methodological trainings, but
also by a range of linguistic and epistemological assumptions
that seem to make genuine cross-method collaboration
all but impossible. Assemblage thinking can provide a
conceptual path beyond this impasse. Drawing on the notion
of ‘rhizome’, I explore potential and limits of understanding
the political dimension of images through a heterogeneous
combination of seemingly incompatible methods.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 Roland Bleiker

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the methodological implica-

tions of assemblage thinking. I do so through my own struggle to
understand the role of images in world politics. Scholars largely agree
that images are increasingly crucial, with examples ranging from the
visual impact of 9/11 to the role that new media sources played in
democratic movements across the Arab world. But major and largely
unaddressed methodological challenges obstruct an adequate under-
standing of the issues at stake. Images seem to objectively depict the
world and subjectively interpret it at the same time. They perform the
political as much as they reflect it. And they work at numerous overlap-
ping levels: across national boundaries and between the physical and the
mental world. Images – still and moving – also need to be understood
in their own multiplicities, ranging from their construction to their
content and impact, with each realm requiring fundamentally different
methodological tools.
Numerous obstacles hamper the establishment of methodological
frameworks that are required to understand the complex and multifac-
eted political role of images. Key among them is an often antagonistic
dualism that separates scholars advocating qualitative and quantitative
methods. They are divided not only by different methodological train-
ings, but also by a range of epistemological assumptions that seem to
make genuine cross-method inquiries all but impossible.
Assemblage thinking can provide a conceptual path beyond this
impasse. It does so by breaking with epistemological systems that require
each methodological component to behave according to the same coher-
ent overall logic (see DeLanda 2006: 10–11). Drawing on Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of a rhizome, I explore the politics of images through
a heterogynous combination of seemingly incompatible methods,
including ethnography, semiotics, discourse analysis, content analysis
and experimental surveys. Rather than seeking to establish direct causal
linkages, such an assemblage-inspired approach appreciates how images
perform the political in more indirect ways, by establishing what William
Connolly (1991) called ‘the conditions of possibility’. They frame what
can be seen, thought and said.
My use of assemblage theory is neither very theoretical nor aimed
at the prevailing ontological task of understanding historical shifts
or complex transnational political constellations (as, for instance, in
Abrahamsen and Williams 2009, McFarlane 2011). I use the concept
in more pragmatic ways and as advocated by Saskia Sassen and Aihwa

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 Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of Possibility 

Ong: more as a tool, as a way of thinking analytically (Sassen 2006:

5, Sassen and Ong this volume). Doing so is also consistent with the
double meaning that Stephen Collier (2006: 400) attributes to global
assemblages. He refers to them as both actual political figurations
and tools for the production of a critical knowledge that go beyond
prevailing social scientific methods. By illustrating this path through
the challenges of visual politics I also hope to render more concrete
some of the abstract concepts that populate discussions on assemblage
theory.

Methodological challenges in visual politics

Visual politics is often seen as operating at three sites. Each requires a
different set of methods to understand the dynamics involved (see Rose
2007: 13). Take the example of media photographs. First is the production
of images, the process that determines, for instance, how photographs are
taken and which ones end up on newspaper front-pages. Understanding
this process requires, amongst others, interviews with photojournalists
and editors. Second is the challenge of understanding the content of
images. The tools that are employed here range from semiotics (which
explores the symbolism of images) to discourse analyses (which exam-
ines the power relations involved) and content analysis (which empiri-
cally measures patterns of how images depict the world). Third is the
reception of images – their actual impact. The methods required here
include quantitative surveys, lab experiments, audience observations
and ethnographies.
A comprehensive understanding of visual politics can only be reached
across these three sites. Most method scholars recognize this need and
acknowledge that their own approach is a ‘necessary but not sufficient
methodology’ (Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2004: 5). A content analysis,
for instance, can identify important patterns but say nothing about the
impact of images, just as a survey experiment can gauge impact but
offer no knowledge of the origin or content of images. And yet, few if
any scholars try to combine the types of methods required to assess
the comprehensive dimensions of visual politics. There is, for one, the
practical challenge of acquiring a highly diverse set of methodological
skills. Scholars who employ, say, discourse analysis rarely have the skills
to conduct large-scale surveys. Likewise, researchers who, say, do lab

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 Roland Bleiker

experiments are not usually equipped to conduct a semiology. But there

is more at stake than the challenge of acquiring methodological skills.
Prevailing thinking in the social sciences prevents a truly heteroge-
neous methodological approach. One of the most influential method
textbooks reduces social science to the task of learning ‘facts about the
real world’. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are meant to oper-
ate according to the same logic: they have to be based on hypotheses that
‘need to be evaluated empirically before they can make a contribution to
knowledge’ (King, Keohane and Verba 1994: 6, 16).
Such methodological approaches have meanwhile been widely
critiqued for their problematic positivism. But their impact remains
remarkably strong. In much of the social sciences there is still a deeply
held dualism between positivist and post-positivist approaches; a dual-
ism that mistakenly either validates or discredits methods according to
certain epistemological positions. Consider two brief examples. Content
analysis often remains wedded to a scientific ethos that stresses the
method’s ‘objective, systematic and quantitative’ qualities, even though
the actual set-up of the experiments inevitably require numerous highly
subjective decisions (Neuendorf 2002: 10–12). Such an ethos makes it
difficult to embrace more interpretative methods at the same time. But
resistance comes from other sides too. Although my research is associ-
ated with post-structuralism and related methods, I recently employed
survey experiments and content analysis for my work on images (Bleiker,
Campbell, Hutchison and Nicholson, 2013: 398–416). The reaction
of like-mined post-structural colleagues was all too often one of deep
concern that by embracing quantitative methods I would lose my ability
to critically analyse political phenomena. I was seen as ‘selling out to the
enemy’.

Towards a methodological rhizome

How can assemblage thinking provide a way out of this impasse? First
is the need to recognize the consequences that flow from juxtaposing
what Manuel DeLanda (2006: 10–11) calls assemblages and totalities. The
latter, he stresses, are systems of thought based on relations of interiority.
In such a system each component has to behave according to an overall
logic that structures the movement of parts. The above positivist meth-
ods textbook is a key example of such coherent and clearly delineated

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 Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of Possibility 

system: it is structured according to an overall logic, that of social science

as a science. To make sense and fit in, each methodological component
of this system has to operate according to the same principles: those of
testable hypotheses. Methods that do not fit these criteria are seen as
scientifically illegitimate.
Assemblages are an alternative to totalities. They are, according
to DeLanda (2006: 10–11), structured by relations of exteriority: the
properties and behaviour of its components neither have to explain
the whole nor fit into its overall logic. Heterogeneity is a key feature
here, for each component is both linked and autonomous. A certain
embrace of a post-positivist or at least anti-essentialist epistemology is
perhaps an inevitable side-product of assemblages: an attempt to refuse
totalities and embrace life and the political as a decentred, heteroge-
neous alignment of emerging and constantly moving parts (DeLanda
2006: 4, Marcus and Saka 2006: 101, Harman 2008: 372–374). But far
more important is that epistemological positions are no longer linked
to particular methods, but to the value claims that are attached to them.
A discourse analysis can be part of a positivist totality just as a quantita-
tive survey can become integrated into a post-positivist approach – as
long as its claims are seen as contingent on the position of the author
and not advanced in reference to an allegedly value-free and overall
frame of reference.
Once the logic of totality is forgone it becomes possible to combine
seemingly incompatible methods, from ethnographies to semiologies
and experiential surveys. The logic according to which they operate do
not necessarily have to be the same, nor do they have to add up to one
coherent whole. Method here is more like how Deleuze and Guattari
(1996: 3–25, 377) describe assemblages: as a rhizome, a type of loose
methodological network that has not central regulatory core but, instead,
operates at various interconnected levels, each moving and expanding
simultaneously in different directions. Deleuze and Guattari juxtapose
rhizomes to roots or trees: hierarchical systems in which one becomes
two, in which everything can be traced back to the same origin. Roots
and radicles may shatter the linear unity of knowledge, but they hold
on to a contrived system of thought, to an image of the world in which
the multiple always goes back to a centred and higher unity. A rhizome
works as an assemblage: it is not rooted and does not strive for a central
point. It grows sideways, has multiple entryways and exits. It has no
beginning or end, only a middle, from where it expands and overspills.

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 Roland Bleiker

From causality to condition of possibility

There are numerous practical implications of combining seemingly

incompatible methods in the spirit of a rhizomatic assemblage. One
example has to suffice: the challenge of how to assess the political impact
of images. Prevailing social science approaches revolve around ‘a logic of
stability and linear causality’ (Van Wezemael 2008: 169). The above meth-
ods textbook, for instance, stipulates that a ‘proposed topic that cannot
be refined into a specific research project permitting valid descriptive or
causal inference should be modified along the way or abandoned’ (King,
Keohane and Verba 1994: 18). Some research on visual politics could
undoubtedly be framed this way. Quantitative surveys or lab experi-
ments, for instance, can yield a great deal of insight into how people
react to visual stimuli. But these direct causal reactions exist primarily
at the individual level. The issue of causality becomes far more complex
when one assesses the collective dimensions of visual politics.
Images do not directly cause political events, attitudes or discourses,
certainly not in a linear, etiological sense. They do not even constitute
political events in the way constructivists understand the social con-
struction of politics. No method can, for instance, retrace the causal
or constitutive links between the visual representations of 9/11, the
emergence of a discourse of evil and the ensuing war on terror. And yet,
hardly anybody would question that images were a key part of the nature
and impact of 9/11 or, for that matter, almost any political event. But
images work in complex ways, crisscrossing a range of geographical and
temporal boundaries – all the more since new technologies, from global
media networks to new media sources, now allow for an even faster and
easier circulation of images. To understand the political dimensions of
this process methods other than those based on social scientific models
of causality are needed: strategies that acknowledge the multidirectional
and multifaceted dimension of political events (see Sassen 2006: 405,
Latour 2005).
Images work more indirectly, by performing the political, by setting
the ‘conditions of possibility’ for politics (see Connolly 1991). They shape
what can and cannot be seen, and thus also what can and cannot be
thought, said and done in politics.
Allow me to illustrate this process through a recent collaborative
project in which we employed content and discourse analyses to under-
stand how media images have framed Australia’s approach to refugees

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 Visual Assemblages: From Causality to Conditions of Possibility 

(Bleiker, Campbell, Hutchison and Nicholson, 2013: 398–416). Over a

decade, asylum seekers have primarily been represented as medium/
large groups and through a focus on boats. We show that this visual
framing, and in particular the relative absence of images that depict
individual asylum seekers with recognizable facial features, associates
refugees not with a humanitarian challenge, but with threats to sover-
eignty and security. But asserting a direct causal link to specific policy
outcomes would be impossible. And yet, these dehumanizing visual pat-
terns played a key political role by framing the parameters of debates. In
doing so, they reinforced a politics of fear that explains why refugees are
publicly perceived as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does
not generate a compassionate political response. We are now aiming
to gain further insight though experimental surveys that measure how
people respond to particular images of humanitarian crises. But even
such impact studies, insightful as they will hopefully be, will not be able
to identify a clear causal link between images and political events.
In sum: assemblage theory can offer important stimuli for establish-
ing the type of heterogeneous methodological framework required to
understand how images work across three overlapping realms: their
production, their content and their impact. This entire complex realm
of visual politics cannot be appropriately understood through a single
method or even a methodological framework that revolves around
an internally coherent and closed logic. Different methods need to be
given the chance to work based on their own logic, even if they are not
compatible with an overall set of rules. While the concept of assemblages
can provide the framework for such a heterogeneous approach to visual
politics, the study of images might also be able to give something back
to assemblage thinking. The latter is often theorized in highly abstract
terms. A more practical illustration of how assemblages work in the con-
crete context of complex interactions between images and politics might
not only force theorists to re-evaluate their claims, but also make their
insights accessible to a wider audience.

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Part 4
Materialities of Assemblage

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 10
Security in Action: How
John Dewey Can Help Us
Follow the Production of
Security Assemblages
Peer Schouten

Abstract: While the term ‘security assemblages’

lends substantial analytical purchase to mappings of
contemporary security governance arrangements, this
contribution suggests its purchase could be radically
expanded by building on insights by John Dewey and
elaborated upon by actor-network theory (ANT). Where
most studies use the term ‘security assemblage’ negatively –
to show how contemporary security governance doesn’t
fit the state-centric institutional and territorial mold
of traditional IR theorizing – I argue that the work of
pragmatists such as John Dewey can enrich the analytical
purchase of the term ‘security assemblage’. By being
agnostic as to the ontological nature of governance
arrangements, I want to suggest that Dewey and ANT
widen the scope of what security assemblages are.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 Peer Schouten

Introduction
International security is not what it used to be, at least in the treatment
it receives from scholars at the forefront in innovative theorizing of what
has come to be referred to as ‘global security governance’. Whereas tradi-
tionally, international security refers to interactions between the security
apparatuses of monolithic states (Walt 1991), post–Cold War international
security seems to entail a move away from such state-centric arrange-
ments and towards a more diffuse aggregate picture. This move is lodged
within a larger sociology-inspired rethinking of what has been hailed as
departure from the Westphalian state system towards a more heteroge-
neous international landscape in the immediate post–Cold War period
(Ong and Collier 2005, Sassen 2006). This is reflected in the vocabulary
deployed to conceptualize post–Cold War security governance: ‘ideas
concerning new assemblages, nodes, networks, chains, rhizomes, all
the way to speculations about the immanent logic of global Empire are
some of the most prominent within a large and expanding universe of
attempts to capture the dynamics that fall under that popular and use-
fully polymorphic term, security governance’ (Williams 2012: 1). The red
thread tying together the literature has been to argue how the prolifera-
tion of novel security concerns and arrangements entails a slippage away
from rigid territorial security apparatus towards more ephemeral and
shifting ‘security assemblages’ (for instance, Abrahamsen and Williams
2009, Voelkner 2011), a term deployed to analytically underscore that
contemporary security governance arrangements do not follow the
institutional and spatial boundaries that structure traditional analysis of
international security. Studies deploying the term emphasize that, much
rather, individual security assemblages can be composed of a networked
heterogeneity of actors cross-cutting both institutional and territorial
boundaries. Airport security assemblages, for instance, typically involves
an array of private security companies, different state security forces, and
national and transnational regulatory networks (Berndtsson and Stern
2011, Lippert and O’Connor 2003).
While the term ‘security assemblages’ lends substantial analytical pur-
chase to mappings of contemporary security governance arrangements,
this contribution suggests its purchase could be radically expanded by
building on insights by John Dewey and elaborated upon by Actor-
Network Theory (ANT). Where most studies in a sense use the term
‘security assemblage’ negatively – to show how contemporary security

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 Security in Action 

governance doesn’t fit the state-centric institutional and territorial mould

of traditional IR theorizing – I argue that the work of pragmatists such
as John Dewey can enrich the analytical purchase of the term ‘security
assemblage’ in two interrelated ways. First, extant uses of the term do
justice to a sense of ontological uncertainty as to what contemporary
security governance is made up of. Dewey’s pragmatism radicalizes
this ontological indeterminism by further insisting on process rather
than structure. This entails a shift in focus from the stable notion of
order, underpinning mappings of the networked topographies of global
security assemblages towards security governance as a relational proc-
ess of stabilization. Second, while contemporary studies recognize the
role of material infrastructures in security assemblages, they do so in
what Marres and Lezaun (2011) call a ‘subdiscursive way’: significant
representations of security are human or discursive, and the material
underpinnings of security assemblages are passive vehicles for, rather
than the locus of, agency. By being agnostic as to the ontological nature
of governance arrangements, I want to suggest that Dewey and ANT
widen the scope of what security assemblages are.

Dewey: representation in action

The problem around which American pragmatist thinker John Dewey’s
The Public and its Problems (1927 [1991]) revolves was that he considered
democratic political representation outpaced by the transformations in
society engendered by technological advances. The proliferation of new
socio-technical apparatuses that reconfigured society around him entailed
a varied range of complex problems; in an afterword he wrote in 1946 to
the book, he for instance observes that World War II itself was ‘due to the
infinitely multiplied and more intricate points of contact between peoples
which in turn are the direct result of technological developments’ (1991:
226). Yet beyond the case of democratic representation, Dewey’s work
contains some more profound insights regarding the ‘fabric’ of society;
insights that have critically influenced Actor-Network Theory.
A first distinctive analytical premise for Dewey is simply that ‘nothing
stays long put’: instead of a select number of actors or stable structural
features, the world he aims to study is composed of ‘shifting and unstable
relationships’ (1991: 140). Dewey aligns with Whitehead’s process phi-
losophy in stating that ‘(e)very actual entity in the universe is in process;

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 Peer Schouten

in some sense is process’ (1937: 171, emphasis in original). ANT translates

this into its methodological dictum: follow the actors, or rather, fol-
low the eternal transformation of entities and understandings as they
undergo new associations (see, most notably, Latour 2005). If nothing
is a priori stable, then order, continuity, macro-actors and centralized
power become the problem to be explained.
This leads to a second key premise in the work of Dewey – also cen-
tral to ANT – which is his relational ontology, that is, foregrounding
how phenomena are constituted by their associations to other entities.
Dewey considers both the individual and society fictions abstracted
from the associations that constitute them (1991: 191). Because shift-
ing associations are central to the composition of actors, entities and
understandings, they undergo radical ‘ontological shifts’ when a change
occurs to their connections (Neyland 2009). This means that contrary
to mainstream social sciences, which are premised on analysis of the
interaction of a select number of variables or actors (be they rational
economic individuals, institutions such as states, or social forces),
Dewey and ANT have an agnostic understanding of who or what
occupies subject positions in narratives of action. What ANT calls an
‘actant’, Dewey most aptly defines when he states that ‘in its approxi-
mate sense, anything is individual which moves and acts as a unitary
thing’ (1991: 186) – which it does, again, in function of its ‘connections
and ties’ (ibid.: 187). In this way, process ontology echoes Greek tragedy,
where forms became manifest only ‘insofar as they underwent meta-
morphosis’ (Calasso 1993: 11). Following Dewey, ANT shifts the focus
from structure to action and from the substantive ‘assemblage’ to the
verb assembling, inspiring, for instance, the research agenda of ‘econo-
mization’ which looks at the processes of assembling economic agents
and things (Çalișkan and Callon 2009).
However, a process ontology doesn’t mean that powerful structures
don’t exist or cannot impress themselves upon us as external ‘cold
monsters’. The point for Dewey and inspired scholars – and this is the
third premise – is rather that if everything is in principle unstable, then
assembling structures or stable objects of governance consists of render-
ing ‘desirable associations solider and more durable’ (Dewey 1991: 71).
Here, the importance of materials come in: if order requires resisting
inherent transformation, then ordering – stabilizing relations – is most
effectively done exactly when the ‘actors’ are not human (Callon and
Latour 1981). For Dewey, discourses and social constructions do matter

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 Security in Action 

but can only be shown to do so to the extent that they are inscribed in
more durable entities that can circulate and resist contrary action (1991:
152–153, 218); as such, he points towards the ‘object-mediated constitu-
tion’ of stable subjectivities, understandings and objects of governance
(Marres 2007: 765). This means that one can thus distinguish between
hypothetical unmediated connections or human interaction and those
kinds of associations that are mediated by apparatuses (Feldman 2011);
the latter are both more stable and – more radically – mediating con-
nections through stabilizing artefacts actually entails ontological shifts
in the subjectivities or objects of government concerned (Schouten
2013). Yet conversely, Dewey’s insistence on technology doesn’t slip into
technological determinism (see next chapter for discussion) or a reifica-
tion of material entities: he refuses to distinguish between ‘material’ and
‘discursive’ technologies, and, as a corollary to his relational ontology,
either kind of technology can only be said to matter ‘in use’ in concrete
situations (Hickman 1990: 16).
These considerations helped Dewey grapple with the problem of the
public, that is, how changes in technological apparatus entailed, con-
fused, distorted and reassembled representations of public concerns and
hence the public itself as an entity. The next section turns these Deweyan
sensibilities to security.

Security in action
While for Dewey modern society stood out because ‘the radio, the
railway, telephone, telegraph, the flying machine, and mass production’
(Dewey 1929) engendered complex novel concerns such as ‘foreign
entanglements’ (Dewey 1990: 338), it can be argued that a hundred years
later, the technologies that coconstitute modern governance arrange-
ments are infinitely more complex. Arguably, the proliferation of new
socio-technological apparatuses has spurned not only many of the
post–Cold War economic and social transformations, but has also led to
a concomitant proliferation of boundary-crossing security concerns, not
in the least the very fragility of the critical infrastructure of globalization
(Collier and Lakoff 2009). As the current ‘moment’ can in some ways be
said to mirror the ‘immense transitions’ (1923: 94) Dewey observed in
his time, this section sketches how the key premises in his work can shed
novel light on contemporary transformations in security governance.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Peer Schouten

The first premise outlined above is Dewey’s process ontology. If we

apply this to security, we would shift the focus from mapping security
assemblages towards on-going assembling processes. One way of doing so
is by radicalizing the insight in security studies that security is ‘essentially
contested’ to study the on-going attempts to stabilize security. Critical
approaches to security studies emphasize that security is not something
fixed or natural out there, but rather discursively constructed in the
assemblages that describe and organize (in)security. This assertion can
be taken much further, if we look at the role security governance plays
in coconstituting objects of governance external to itself. Paraphrasing
Çalișkan and Callon (2009: 370), the study of security should involve
investigating the processes through which collective behaviours, materi-
als and spheres of activities are established as (in)secure (whether or not
there is consensus about the content of such qualifications).
Dewey’s second premise – his relational ontology – would require
us to describe such processes of assembling (in)security in terms of
associations severed and new associations established. This is already
salient in many detailed readings of how security discourses establish
semantic connections between, for instance, terrorism and immigration.
Yet beyond the insight that threats and referent objects are socially or
discursively constructed, Dewey and ANT force us to recognize that (in)
security is ontologically unstable on a much profounder level: during
security controversies, struggles over the representation of security con-
cerns can entail shifts in the very assignment of (in)security across the
great Cartesian divide – the vital importance of aluminium tubes in the
assembling by senior Bush administration officials of Iraq as a nuclear
threat is one example; the shift in airport security from securitizing
liquids and technological upgrading rather than securitizing terrorists
and training guards in security awareness is another. The point of these
examples is that if security practitioners ‘out there’ struggle with the very
ontology of (in)security, how could ‘we’ as analysts a priori decide that
security is a matter of discourse, practice or materiality? The approach
out here should have the humbling effect of a more empiricist under-
standing of the ontology of security not as a philosophical apriori, but
as itself at stake in, and thus the practical outcome of, security govern-
ance. Following Dewey in this regard would entail studying how people,
associations, understandings and other phenomena are stabilized as (in)
secure, something that can just as much involve political speech acts as
the construction of fences and the circulation of personal data through

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 Security in Action 

surveillance assemblages – we simply don’t know beforehand what mat-

ters in assembling security in any given case.
Dewey’s third premise is his refusal to distinguish between, or privi-
lege, discourse, practice or materiality. Because of his emphasis on the
specific technologies of stabilization and representation, Dewey aligns
with post–Cold War IR scholarship in considering the state a ‘pure myth’
(1991 : 224). Following Latour, the Leviathan is erected not out of a ‘social’
contract, but rather out of a socio-material organization of collective
action (Schouten 2013); and it is towards those situated yet distributed
arrangements – that Dewey sometimes calls ‘apparatus’ – that inquiry
should be directed.1 Stable understandings, security arrangements or
even international alliances are not ‘the cause of arrangements that serve
the common interest of several units, but the outcome of the arrange-
ments’ that organize associations (Dewey 1991: 225). These arrangements
are performative: just as there are no economies without apparatuses
composed of metrics, quantifications, economic theories and regulatory
institutions; so, too, for Dewey, without government apparatuses there
is no state (ibid.: 67); and by extension, I want to argue that without
security apparatuses there is no security assemblage. We can then define
a security apparatus – note the semantic resonance with ‘machinery’ –
as a set of ‘socio-technical’ arrangements that mediate associations
within a specific sphere of activities, black-boxing some concerns and
threats while foregrounding others. A security assemblage is then the
totality of associations stabilized by security apparatus, or the shifting
‘milieu’ upon which a security apparatus acts in order to render it secure
(Foucault 2007: 19–21, 37). While security apparatuses are performative
arrangements that cut across ontological divides, relaying articulations
of threat and protection to durable materials through territorial inscrip-
tion – fences, gates and checkpoints – is the most effective strategy of
stabilizing and communicating security. To clarify with a classical
example, the panopticon – that combination of guard and watchtower
weaved into the architecture of the corrective facility – is the apparatus
structuring or making possible the prison-assemblage and the eye of
power. By distinguishing between the constituent apparatus and asso-
ciated assemblage of security arrangements, we do justice to Dewey’s
requirement to always articulate the specific role of entities – assembling
actant or constituted element – that are part of processes of assembling
security. This approach would allow us to analyse a variety of security
arrangements, from airport security apparatuses enabling globalized

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 Peer Schouten

aviation to the ‘war machines’ that constitute criminalized African

enclave economies (Mbembe 2003: 33).

Conclusion
This brief contribution has attempted to break open the notion of ‘secu-
rity assemblage’ as it is used in International Relations by sketching how
insights from the work of John Dewey and ANT could expand its mean-
ing and purchase. There are I believe two key points that can be drawn
from this discussion. First, a process ontology shifts attention from
security assemblages such as mappings of arrangements across institu-
tional boundaries to the processes by which (in)security gets assembled.
Second, a refusal to distinguish between the social and material, discur-
sive and technical, entails redefining the locus of agency in assembling
(in)security towards socio-material security apparatuses where efforts to
stabilize (in)security are concentrated. Together, they could constitute
starting points in efforts to rethink the way we understand and represent
international security in security studies.

Note
 Note how Dewey’s symmetrical ontology – refusing to distinguish between
subject and object – has been completely muted in discussions of his possible
contribution in IR, where he has been assembled as social constructivist (see
Isacoff 2002, Widmaier 2004).

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 11
Welcome to the Machine:
Rethinking Technology
and Society through
Assemblage Theory
Antoine Bousquet

Abstract: Although it is widely acknowledged that

technology plays an increasing role in our lives, attempts to
produce analyses of global politics commensurate with that
role frequently fall short, suffering from the twin pitfalls
of technological determinism and social constructivism.
Assemblage theory offers a way through this aporia by
grounding its analysis in an ontology that suspends these
categories in favour of an understanding of the dynamic
evolutionary systems that cut across them. Drawing upon
the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Manuel
DeLanda, and Bruno Latour, this contribution will seek
to outline the theoretical coordinates and methodological
principles of an assemblage theory of technology
and underline the ways in which it can enrich our
understanding of global politics in the twenty-first century.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 Antoine Bousquet

Few would contest the proposition that key technologies such as the
printing press, the gun, the railroad, the atomic bomb or the Internet
have been at the heart of large-scale social and political change of great
relevance to the character and conduct of international relations. Indeed,
IR literature is peppered with casual claims of the significance of this
or that technology to any given wider phenomena of global import.
And yet systematic attempts to grapple with the role of technology in
international politics have been to date few and far between. With a
few notable exceptions (Deibert 1987, Herrera 2006), technology is,
to different degrees of explicitness, generally treated within IR theory
either as an exogenous causal variable or as the mere materialization
or instrumental extension of state intentionality, economic rationality
and normative regimes. Accounts thus typically oscillate between latent
statements of technological determinism that ascribe to technical objects
singular causal powers to shape the social world and assertions of social
constructivism that reduce these same objects to mere surfaces for the
projection of social forces, each approach trading the autonomy of one
domain for that of the other. Such ambivalence can notably be found
in Kenneth Waltz’s treatment of nuclear weapons that went from being
initially presented as simply another component of military power that
is itself a manifestation of the relative distribution of underlying state
capabilities (1979: 180–181) to being attributed a unique ability to over-
ride this very same distribution in allowing weaker states to decisively
deter more powerful ones (1981).
It is essential here to submit both types of arguments to critical
scrutiny, above all to draw out that which is presupposed by their very
duality. Rarely the object of explicit theoretical endorsement and sys-
tematic defence as such, technological determinism1 has long borne the
brunt of sustained attacks of sociologists and philosophers of technol-
ogy (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, Bijker, Hughes and Pinch 1987).
But while it has been salutary in many instances in interrogating the
origins of technological development and examining the various socio-
economic and cultural forces that shape the uses of technical objects,
the social constructivism that underpins most of these critiques has
also produced its own common wisdom that is rarely queried. Indeed,
in many academic quarters, technological determinism is simply syn-
onymous with bad scholarship, any trace of which is to be eradicated
in one’s own work, and frequently invoked as a handy rhetorical charge
to levy against any account suspect of straying too far from the primacy

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 Welcome to the Machine 

of the social as explanans. Furthermore, since technology is taken to be

self-evidently ‘socially constructed’, the study of technical objects per se
is something to be left to scientists and engineers, as long as they refrain
from any encroachment into the sphere of the social. I want to suggest
here not only that closing off enquiry into the specific materiality of
technique is a major loss to our understanding but that technological
determinism and social constructivism are effectively two sides of the
same coin, the mirror effects of a single originary conceptual partition
between the social and the technical that increasingly obscures more
that it illuminates.
Bruno Latour (1993) has argued that this dualism can be traced back
to a ‘modernist settlement’ according to which a rigid demarcation was
traced between subject and object, human and non-human, and social
and technical. Yet paradoxically it is within modernity that hybrid enti-
ties that evade such categorizations have most proliferated, so much
so that attempts to uphold them are becoming ever more futile and
counter-productive to our intelligence of these entities. Indeed, to speak
of the social as a domain to be counter-posed to that of the technical is
to invoke a hollow concept of society purged of all the material objects
that permit its existence in the first place. As Latour points out elsewhere
(1999: 214), ‘we are sociotechnical animals and each human interaction
is sociotechnical’.
This socio-technical condition has important analytical implications.
For one, the deployment of any technology within the social field must
necessarily be grasped in terms of the wider ensemble within which
it is inserted, since the multiple relations that compose this ensemble
determine to a large extent the usages and meanings given to the said
technology. Yet at the same time, the technical object is not however
thereby to be seen as an entirely hollow or malleable vessel merely
transmitting the will or action of other forces. Every technical object
has its own specificity and exerts its own resistance such that it con-
tributes to shaping the social field and reorganizing the various entities
that are connected to it. It is therefore crucial that neither technology
nor society be reduced to a cipher for the projection of the other’s
influence but that our accounts allow for their dynamic coevolution.
The contention of the present chapter is that the conceptual apparatus
of the assemblage and its attendant ontological commitments are ide-
ally suited to the task of this reconfigured understanding of technology
and society.

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 Antoine Bousquet

The conception of assemblage proposed here is primarily derived

from the meaning given to it by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987),
as any collection of heterogeneous elements that can be said to display
some form of consistency and regularity yet remain open to transforma-
tive change through the addition or subtraction of elements or the reor-
ganization of the relations between them.2 The set of relations connecting
an assemblage are therefore to be thought of as a network (or rhizome in
Deleuzoguattarian terminology) rather than a structure, in the sense that
the parts retain some independent existence outside of these relations.
In contrast, a structure forms a closed totality in which all the elements
within it exist only through the differential relations between them.3 For
Manuel DeLanda, assemblages are hence not totalities since the relation
between parts is ‘not logically necessary but only contingently obliga-
tory: a historical result of their close coevolution’ (2006: 12).
This concept of assemblage is deployed throughout Deleuze and
Guattari’s work to account for ensembles across a broad range of fields:
biology, literature and the arts, psychology, society and politics. The par-
ticular application of assemblages to the field of technology is examined
in sections of A Thousand Plateaus with the authors stating that:
the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical ele-
ment remains abstract, entirely undetermined, as long as one does not relate
it to an assemblage it presupposes. It is the machine that is primary in rela-
tion to the technical element: not the technical machine, itself a collection
of elements, but the social or collective machine, the machinic assemblage
that determines what is a technical assemblage at a given moment, what is
its usage, extension, comprehension, etc. (1987: 397)

A similar formulation of this idea can also be found in Deleuze’s book on

Michel Foucault:
Machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there is a human
technology before there is a material technology. No doubt the latter devel-
ops its effects throughout the entire social field; but, for it to be possible, the
tools, the material machines, must have first been selected by a diagram,
taken on by an assemblage. (1986: 47)

What is immediately striking is that the language of technology and the

machine is being applied to social ensembles over and above technical
objects which are only a smaller part of these broader assemblages.
Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari develop a ‘machinic’ theory of society
in which the analytical focus is placed upon the diagrams or ‘abstract

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 Welcome to the Machine 

machines’ that account for the mobilization, organization and operation

of various assemblages composed of bodies, machines, raw matter, ideas,
discourses, affects, etc. The ontology developed here is a radically flat-
tened one in the sense that there is no hierarchy to the different aspects
of reality and no possible reduction of all domains to a single one (as
is frequently the case in a variety of approaches that alternatively view
economics, the human mind, or language as the structure underlying all
others). Even the ‘abstract machine’ is not itself a prime mover, piloting
the assemblage as much as it is constituted by it: ‘an abstract machine
in itself is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is
diagrammatic ... [it] is neither an infrastructure that is determining in
the last instance nor a transcendental idea that is determining in the
supreme instance’ (2003: 141–142).
Returning to the specific question of technology, we can recapitulate
the above with the proposition that any given technical object is always
inserted into broader assemblages that determine its mode of produc-
tion, the value attributed to it, and its distribution and employment in
the social field, none of which are intrinsic features of the object.4 At first
sight, this might appear merely a restatement of the social constructivist
view of technology, but this is not so for two important reasons. For one,
the technical object must also be itself thought of as an assemblage as an
ensemble of heterogeneous parts that possesses its own specific diagram
of operation beyond the immediate uses they are put to and exerts its
own influence on the wider assemblages that adopt it. But most impor-
tantly, there is within a theory of assemblages no possibility of invoking a
given entity that would be the ‘social’ and would shape at will technology
or any other ‘non-social’ realm. There is no totality of the social, only
social assemblages that already combine bodies, material, machines,
discourse and so on. In his own Actor-Network Theory, Latour (2005)
has likewise argued that it is the assembling of entities which constitutes
the social and never the reverse – one should always resist making the
social the starting point of any explanation.5 If anything, social construc-
tivist approaches fall short in not being constructivist enough by their
presumption of a social entity that somehow predates all its material
anchors and mediations.
When it comes to its application to IR, the purpose of assemblage
theory is not to propose grand generalizations on international politics
of the nature offered by realism or liberalism but rather to methodologi-
cally orient researchers towards different ways of approaching specific

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 Antoine Bousquet

empirical problems. To take only one example that has been already
briefly mentioned at the outset, the question of the effect of nuclear
weapons on international relations can give rise to different kinds of
accounts when framed in terms of assemblages. Rather than posit a
deterrent effect inherent to these weapons that diffuses itself automati-
cally throughout international society, one could thus seek to scrutinize
the machinery of nuclear deterrence beyond the self-evident destructive
power of nuclear devices and abstracted models of strategic rationality.
The account thereby produced would include a range of interacting
socio-technical entities among which would be found nuclear warheads,
guidance and delivery systems, civilian and military bureaucracies,
defence think-tanks, R&D labs, computer models and simulations,
early warning systems, aerial and satellite photographs, and telephone
hotlines. Such an account would seek to show how the emergence of the
practice of nuclear deterrence (or perhaps more properly of a deterrent
assemblage) during the Cold War was the outcome of a multiplicity of
push-pull effects between coevolving entities that cut across civilian and
military spheres as well as national boundaries. This analysis would,
among other things, have the merit of highlighting the material contin-
gency of the deterrent assemblage, its innate frailties and dependencies,
and the laborious work required for its reproduction and stabilization
within different national and geopolitical contexts. Pace Waltz, the ques-
tion of whether or not the spread of nuclear weapons is a factor of inter-
national stability is therefore not one that can be summarily answered
on the basis of a few general postulates about the natures of the weapon,
states or the international system. Beyond nuclear weapons, a whole
range of other issues central to IR could be insightfully reframed with a
renewed, if certainly not exclusive, attentiveness to the role of technical
and material objects via assemblage theory, from diplomacy and trade
agreements to international development and various other practices of
global governance.
By way of conclusion, it could be said that technology is simultane-
ously both less and more than what it is typically taken to be: less because
it’s not an external material agency that unilaterally transforms a passive
social body, and more because it actually permeates every aspect of the
social. The question of technology thus directs us towards the ubiquitous
materiality of social relations, the very glue that holds human collectives
together. The twin approaches of technological determinism and social
constructivism fails to get to the heart of what both technology and

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 Welcome to the Machine 

society are, paradoxically because they all too hastily presume to deduce
one from the other. By eschewing the conventional dichotomy between
the technical and social, assemblage theory sets both these domains in
flux so as to bring out the relational dynamics constituting the ensem-
bles that traverse them, opening up new intellectual vistas that we have
barely begun to explore.

Notes
 Jacques Ellul’s uncompromizing stance on the autonomy of modern
technique constitutes one noteworthy exception (Hanks 2010: 67–75).
 The term of assemblage is imperfectly translated from the French agencement
which could be alternatively translated as distribution, arrangement or
layout.
 Structure is understood here in its usage within structuralism, initiated by
the linguistic work of Ferdinand de Saussure and further developed in a
variety of ways within Claude Levi-Strauss’s anthropology, Jacques Lacan’s
psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes’s literary theory, and Louis Althusser’s
Marxism. Under the structuralist approach, it is the totality of the structure
organizing any chosen field of enquiry that gives meaning to it and to the
otherwise undifferentiated elements that compose it.
 It is this fundamental indeterminacy that permits the same airliner that
was employed to carry peoples and goods from one point to another when
inserted into a transport assemblage to serve as a missile directed against a
skyscraper when it enters into a war assemblage.
 ‘If the social remains stable and is used to explain a state of affairs, it’s not
ANT [Actor-Network Theory]’ (Latour 2005: 10). The methodological
proximity of Actor-Network Theory to assemblage theory is further
illustrated by John Law’s definition of the former as the study of ‘the
enactment of materially and discursively heterogeneous relations that
produce and reshuffle all kinds of actors including objects, subjects, human
beings, machines, animals, “nature”, ideas, organisations, inequalities, scale
and sizes, and geographical arrangements’ (Law 2008: 142).

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Part 5
Politics of Assemblage

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 12
The Onto-Politics of
Assemblages
David Chandler

Abstract: This chapter explores the problematic politics of

assemblage thinking, firstly articulating how assemblage
politics challenges constituted power and liberal
frameworks of representation and secondly, analysing how
this form of onto-political understanding is increasingly
dominant in our academic understandings and political
practices.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 
 David Chandler

Introduction
In my contribution to the discussion I would like to explore the prob-
lematic politics of assemblage-thinking, firstly articulating how assem-
blage politics challenges constituted power and liberal frameworks of
representation, and, secondly, analysing how this form of onto-political
understanding is increasingly dominant in our academic understandings
and political practices.
Assemblage theory articulates the critical politics of life’s vitality and
creative emergent powers of possibility: the ontology of immanence.
I think that this is particularly appealing today when radical politics
seems restricted to the imagination of alternative possible futures rather
than to strategic engagement in the politics of the present.1 This also
explains why assemblage theorizing takes a particularly disengaged
form; the concern is not with ‘anthropomorphic’ or instrumentalist
understandings of fixed essences or properties but the virtual multiplic-
ity of relations and processes which are creatively productive of dif-
ference.2 The politics of assemblages is not concerned with power and
structures, organizational strategy or with theoretical clarification, but
with asserting an alternative virtual ontology of creativity and resistance
based on the fragility of objects and meaning rather than their fixity.3
Like John Holloway’s ‘scream’ (2005) or Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’
(2005), assemblage theory says our everyday practices and experiences
promise us the immanent possibility of alternatives: in the here and now.
We need to recognize this alternative ontological reality of the possible
to free ourselves from the constrictive power of the actual.
Instead of the liberal binaries – of subject/object, inside/outside, poli-
tics/economics – assemblage theory posits a new set of binaries of the
onto-politics of resistance to liberal forms of representation and power.
This alternative power – the anti-power – forms a permanent ontologi-
cal challenge to hegemonic power’s attempts to control or constrain the
creative vitality of life.4 Assemblages always represent constituent power
(power to/potentia/puissance), a collective multiplicity, potentially at
one with the world – as against constituted power (power over/potestas/
pouvoir), the power wielded over/against the world. The ‘life politics’
of assemblages serves as a permanent and indestructible onto-critique.
Assemblage onto-politics are a challenge to power per se and therefore
to all attempts to constitute power over the ontological realm of life. For
assemblage theory, it is human hubris to assert frameworks of collective

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 The Onto-Politics of Assemblages 

representation in terms of meaning or organization: these human con-

structs (the politics of the actual) are doomed to be constraining and
exclusionary, a pale imitation of the virtual and the immanent.
The political binaries of assemblages:

potentia (power to) potestas (power over)

constituent power constituted power
creative parasitical
non-linear linear
relational essentialist
open closed
bottom-up top-down
life death
infinite finite
mobile fixed
concrete abstract
autonomy control
time space
becoming being
real artificial
critique consensus
plurality singularity
autopoiesis direction
contingency certainty
possible actual
labour capital
excess limit
emergent causal
agency structure

Life without representation – life as constituent power – is a rich assem-

blage of complex, concrete, multiple interactions – never fixed or final.
Life – qua existence – is full of particularity, complexity and creative
variation. Life is infinite and human constructions are bounded. Laws,
constitutions, cultures, all have their limit; all theory (as abstraction from
the concrete) has its limit; power has its limit: this limit is life itself in its
complexity and rich diversity. Life always trumps socially constructed
meanings and structures.

Love life: love assemblages

Onto-politics forms a radical critique of representative politics and
liberal constructions of the political. The ‘people’, the ‘nation’ and the

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 David Chandler

‘public’ become figures of oppression, tools of constituted power – ‘life’

captured, homogenized, and then produced in the liberal political and
legal realm as subjects and citizens. This is a dead reification of people
in their relational multiplicity as creative constituent power – their life,
practices and agency continually making and creating the world beyond
the formal constituted constructions of homogeneity. In the onto-politics
of life – the biopolitics of Hardt and Negri or the pragmatism of John
Dewey (1954) – people rule through their constituent multiplicity rather
than being ruled over through constituted structures, ideologies, states
or cultures. For assemblage theory, the constituent power of life exceeds
anything constituted as a structure – which is mere constituted power.5
Life is always in excess of what was life and is now reified and mystified
as having some power of its own – like culture, ideology or markets.
Life appears to be a radical source of onto-political critique. But only
once the modernist political project is rejected. Assemblage politics is a
critique of Enlightenment aspirations dressed up in the radical clothing
of critical post-modernity. I think that one reason this current makeover
of anti-humanist thought appeals is that the critique of liberal universal-
ist aspirations takes an ontological rather than epistemological form.
This love of life makes assemblage politics clearly hostile to the critical
sociology of modernist radical thought. Marxists do not love life enough,
constraining the power of critique with their hierarchical understand-
ings filled with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ of life (Ricoeur 1970:
27). Althusser, Foucault and Bourdieu, we are told, failed to appreciate
the power of life, understanding it as problematic: as shot through by
power, alienation, ideology and false consciousness. In the onto-politics
of assemblages, critical sociology is displaced by the pragmatic and
empirical work of the ‘sociology of critique’, ‘actor-networks’ and ‘new
materialisms’.6
Until recently, it was difficult for power to follow the shift to the love
of life carved out by the post-Marxist left. For the romantic, reactionary
and neoliberal apologias of power, life was problematic. Neoliberalism
is a defensive doctrine of life: life is the inscrutable barrier to liberal
universalism and the promise of progress. Neoliberalism does not love
life – particularly the life of ‘non-liberal’ subjects, failing to partake in
democracy, markets and liberal progress – and disdains it for its lim-
its, incapacities and bounded rationalities. Life needed to be cured, to
adapt to the market, to make democracy safe and globalization inclusive
(Chandler 2013). Foucault (2008) describes this well in the Birth of

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 The Onto-Politics of Assemblages 

Biopolitics – neoliberalism tried to bring in the rationality of the market

as the guide to governance, to incentivize, to frame, to rule of law, to
account for externalities, to manage the environment or milieu of choice-
making, to build civil society, to democratize – for neoliberalism life was
an object to be transformed or altered, guided or shaped. Capitalism
wasn’t the problem but life. Neoliberalism put the problem of life at the
centre of the political agenda, via new institutionalism and constructiv-
ism, but governments and markets stood above life and attempted to
tame and direct it on the path of liberal ends. Luc Boltanski and Ève
Chiapello (2007) capture this shift to a certain extent in their New Spirit
of Capitalism.

The onto-politics of power

However, the politics of assemblages is not merely attractive to a left
forced to rely on virtual possibilities rather than present ones. Even
constituted power has turned to assemblage politics to revive its forms
of regulatory legitimacy. Assemblage theory, or the onto-politics of life,
in its critique of power per se, can also been seen to play an apologetic
role in reifying the status quo.7 In the early 1990s, with the end of the
legitimizing dynamic of Left–Right political representation, life imme-
diately came to the fore in the problematic of ‘globalization’: where
once there was order, fixed meanings and state direction, now life ruled
through complexity and interdependence, minimizing the importance
and accountability of power. In the mid-1990s the power of life, as
the limit of liberal power, was articulated in terms of the birth of ‘risk
society’ (Beck 1992) and ‘manufactured uncertainty’ (Giddens 1994),
where side-effects and unintended outcomes took precedence over the
strategic instrumentalism of constituted power, and it became clear to
all that a globalized world was not amenable to liberal forms of progress,
knowledge, representation and intervention.
We don’t have to read assemblage theory to understand that the onto-
politics of life is hardly a critique from the margins. Today, it is not even
a provocation to suggest that liberal modernity itself was a myth, a lie, an
imposition (Latour 1993). One does not need to be remotely radical to
suggest that the limits of power are everywhere in ‘life’ itself. No student
PhD is short of reference to either Latour’s recalcitrance of things, the
biopolitics of post-Operaismo Marxism, the pragmatic sociology of

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 David Chandler

critique, the ‘hidden transcripts’ of resistance, new materialism, post-

humanism, complexity, emergent causality, complex adaptive systems,
autopoietic processes, non-linearity or post-Cartesian pragmatism. In
this context it seems a little disingenuous to think that the politics of
assemblages is somehow a challenge to power: as if ideas could somehow
operate independently in the world and make up for the lack of real
political possibilities in the present. Rather than seeing assemblage poli-
tics as a critical alternative it might be better to investigate how the onto-
politics of life actually works as an alternative; not in terms of immanent
futures but in terms of the governing of the present. How does politics
work when constituted power is rearticulated as constituent power? Is it
not possible that, today, the onto-politics of life itself is not a challenge to
constituted power but its very modus operandi?
Today, government does not say that it ‘represents’ ‘the people’ but
rather that it is a constituent power among others. As a constituent
power, government can no longer govern but merely partake in govern-
ance: in the understanding and facilitation of life itself. Onto-politics
enables power to rule as the governance of life: enabling, empowering,
facilitating and capacity-building. Governments cannot rule over life
but only through life. Ruling through rather than ruling over implies a
flat ontology. Governments no longer have or need programmatic goals;
governance is merely the management of contingency, continually inter-
active, aware of the dangers of unintended outcomes and the side-effects
of any attempt to assert the hubris of rule. Policy goals – if they are not
to be undermined – need to come from life itself. Life is the means and
ends of governance with practice-based policymaking, self-reflexivity,
feedback-loops, reflexive law-making and the inculcation of community
capacities and resilience.

Conclusion
Everywhere the human constructs of constituted power lie in ruins –
sovereignty, law, science, truth, ideology, culture, capitalism and critical
theory. The ontological unknowability of the constituent power of life
for Hannah Arendt (2005: 201) was the desert (the withering away of the
humanly constructed world), but for our ‘critical’ age it appears as a lush
and welcoming oasis. Assemblage politics reify the defeat of modernist
aspirations as an ontological necessity rather than understanding this

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 The Onto-Politics of Assemblages 

as a contingent and reversible historico-political event. When collective

projects of transformation seem unimaginable, radical academics and
the apologists of power are more than happy to sign up to the onto-
political understanding that we are suborned to the onto-politics of life
in a never-ending complex adaptive system with no goals or telos. This
short intervention has argued that this sublime image is a mirage: virtual
life as immanent possibility rather than actuality is a life without human
aspirations. The love of life then becomes no more than a critique of
human aspirations to understand and to transform the world around us.

Notes
 By this, I mean that for political radicalism today, it is always ‘Spring’-time
(from the Middle East to ‘Occupy’) the awakening of possibilities in radical
protests which often do not take a clear political form and quickly rise and
dissipate, giving little opportunity for discussion of the political implications
to take a clear conceptual or organizational form.
 See, for a good overview, Nick Srnicek. Assemblage Theory, Complexity and
Contentious Politics: The Political Ontology of Gilles Deleuze, 25–52. Available
at: http://www.academia.edu/178031/Assemblage_Theory_Complexity_and_
Contentious_Politics_The_Political_Ontology_of_Gilles_Deleuze.
 See, for example Connolly (2013).
 The assertion that constituent power can never be constrained by the
‘artificial’ power of hegemony can be traced back to the flight into the
virtual of the post-1968 ‘new left’. See for example Deleuze (1988) or Negri
(1999, 2004).
 To locate the heritage of the radical politics of assemblage theory in critical
constructivist understandings, see further, Burger and Luckmann (1979) and
Giddens (1984).
 See, for example Boltanski (2011), Connolly (2011), Bennett (2010), Cudworth
and Hobden (2011), Coole and Frost (2010) or Latour (2005).
 See further Chandler (2013).

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 13
Agencement and Traces:
A Politics of Ephemeral
Theorizing1
Xavier Guillaume

Abstract: International Relations theory has largely

remained an effort at producing forms of theorization
concentrating on the transcendence of a spatio-temporal
particular and on a double autonomization: as a specific
locus of interactions, and as specific mode of knowledge
production. International theory can be said to pertain to
an ephemeral attempt at theorizing an immanently fluid
and ever changing set of processes, in which continuous
instantiations and relationalities are actualizing a fleeting
and ever elusive assemblage we term ‘international’. This
chapter mobilizes the concepts of traces (Ginzburg) and
assemblage (fr. agencement, Deleuze) in order to highlight
what an ephemeral international theory would look
like from an ontological, epistemological and normative
perspective.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969

 Agencement and Traces: A Politics of Ephemeral Theorizing 

Introduction
From a theoretical perspective, the international is usually conveyed as
international relations. That is to say that our convention about what
is the international, or by what it should be constituted, is delimited
conceptually as a specific space of interacting sovereign states, in com-
bination with more or less influential non-state collective entities. This
specific spatial conceptualization also reflects a specific temporality that
is structuring what the international is. The international is composed
of a multiplicity of historiographic rationalities (see Guillaume 2013).
The international is composed of histories that were written ‘in their
own terms and according to their own canonical veridicity’, and then
are juxtaposed, entangled, merged, destroyed, emerging, transformed,
meeting or ignoring each other (see Bertrand 2011: esp. 16–20). The
organizational principle of this historiographic operation is the univer-
salizing temporality of a dominant Western modernity (Chakrabarty
2000), which structures around a normative liberal teleology what the
international should be and will look like.
As a result, international (relations) theory has largely remained
an effort at producing forms of knowledge concentrating on the
theoretical transcendence of a spatio-temporal particular, the modern
European west (see Walker 1993), and on a double autonomization:
a conceptual one and a knowledge one. On the conceptual side,
it is the autonomization of a specific site of inter-actions between
compounded units rather than embracing the ever on-going proc-
esses that constitute these ‘units’ as the primary ‘level’ of analysis of
international theory (see Guillaume 2011a). On the knowledge side,
it is the autonomization of a specific mode of knowledge production
as a discipline, the implication being a disciplinary ordering of how
international theory should perform and should be performed in
order to be an intellectual endeavour worthy of consideration: to offer
a grand theory of world history (see Buzan and Little 2001), rather
than pinpointed interventions to confront an immanently fluid and
ever changing set of processes which continuous instantiations and
relationalities are actualizing a fleeting and ever-elusive assemblage
we term ‘international’ (Guillaume 2007).
This chapter is an exploration of the conceptual politics behind this
elusive and ephemeral assemblage that should also be constitutive of
international (relations) theory. To do so, it mobilizes Gilles Deleuze

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 Xavier Guillaume

and Félix Guattari’s concept of agencement (the French original term

for the inadequate but commonly accepted English rendition of
assemblage) and Carlo Ginzburg’s concept of traces. To do so is to
highlight the necessity to also provide forms of theorizing that privi-
lege the ‘non-linear and non-Euclidean’ (Adkins and Lury 2009: 16)
and offers a ‘method of interpretation based on the gaps, on marginal
facts, understood as indicative’ (Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]: 230) of
a reality that may remain opaque if one remains solely attached to
a linear and Euclidean form of theorizing. Here lies one central ele-
ment in the politics of assemblage: to put to the fore of a reflexion
about the international that is seemingly unimportant, contingent and
quotidian.

Assemblage, agencement and traces

There is always a cost in translating philosophical concepts into work-

able sociological and political concepts: imprecision and fragmenta-
tion. Translation is a process by which something belonging to one
system of intelligibility has to be transformed into something else in
order to become significant in another system of intelligibility. In other
words, the coherence and rigor philosophical concepts are designed
to attain when articulated in their own system of intelligibility usually
cannot be retained per se in different systems of intelligibility such
as the social or human sciences. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
concept of assemblage is no different (see Phillips 2006). Deleuze and
Guattari’s Mille Plateaux has been one of the most important sources
behind the success of the concept of assemblage in social sciences and
humanities (see, for instance, DeLanda 2006, Fuglsang and Meier
Sørensen 2006). Yet, Deleuze and Guattari’s original term in French
is that of agencement which bears but limited semiotic similitude with
assemblage. More importantly maybe, such translation ‘can give rise
to connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate ele-
ments of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it’
(Phillips 2006: 108). Translations can be conceptually alienating but
also liberating.
To translate the concept of agencement into social and human sciences,
one can focus on the centrality given to the project to move not only
beyond a (modernist) dichotomizing understanding of (social, political

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 Agencement and Traces: A Politics of Ephemeral Theorizing 

and economic) realities, by which the either/or logics (religion or secu-

larism, state or society, masculine or feminine, security or freedom, and
so on) and the oppositional forms of politics that go with it are taken
for granted, but also to move beyond binary logics as an universaliz-
able scheme of intelligibility (see, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari
1980: 11–12, 15, 23, 31–32). In other words, to mobilize the concept of
agencement requires the adoption of schemes of intelligibility that do not
reduce an analytics of an event to either a specific state of affairs – for
example, that multiple overlapping sites of production of sovereign
power (public, para-public and private actors) constitute in actu the
security apparatus – or to the statements we can make about this state of
affairs – for example, that to provide an understanding of security from
a sociological perspective one has to study the circulation of knowledge
among these different sites (see Phillips 2006: 108). An agencement is
precisely the connection between the state of affairs and this statement
into something ‘that exceeds them and of which transformed, they now
form parts’ (Phillips 2006: 108).
Agencement-as-connection is reflective of a form of theorization that
runs counter to the predominant understanding of theory in interna-
tional (relations) theory: a linear and Euclidean endeavour to hierarchise
evidences into events according to a specific system of intelligibility – for
instance causality or hermeneutics – in order to offer a systematic, even
if contextually sensitive, ordering of such events within a space and time
understood as the onto-epistemic realm of International Relations (IR).
This realm is a realm that only recognize ‘big’ events of states or of state-
wide implications, such as wars, economic crisis, human rights norms
and so on. Theorizing thus privileges a reading of the international that
excludes its everydayness (see Guillaume 2011b), it excludes ‘marginal
facts’ (Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]: 230) because they cannot participate
to the type of systematicity that is deemed required to theorize about the
international. This is not to say that this form of theorizing is inadequate
or unsound, but rather that it a priori delimits what can be seen as con-
stitutive of the international to a specific (macro-) serialization of (big)
events of the same genus. The implication being that the international,
and by extension the type of systematicity international (relations) the-
ory should display, is a rather stable and continuous, even if contextually
sensitive, category. What if it wasn’t only this? What if the international,
and thus international theory, was also something more ephemeral and
contingent?

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 Xavier Guillaume

This is where the concept of agencement comes in handy, when linked

to what an historian such as Carlo Ginzburg calls ‘traces’ (see Ginzburg
2010[1989/1979]), because it is reflexive of a form of theorizing that does
not a priori reject the demand of ordering, or even systematicity, but
rather engages with what constitutes an evidence, with what constitutes
the building blocks of theorizing about the international. For Ginzburg,
an evidence is not solely a proof of something – a building block that a
theorist ‘assembles’ with other evidences within a system of intelligibil-
ity to order them according to a causal or hermeneutic, for instance,
scheme. An evidence can also be, and maybe more crucially, a clue
(Ginzburg 1991: 79). Ginzburg speaks of clues with a specific system
of intelligibility – the paradigme indiciaire (Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]:
233; that is to say a paradigm based on clues (indices)) – which aims
at putting to the fore ‘traces, even the most infinitesimal, enabl[ing] to
seize a deeper reality, one we are unable to reach otherwise’ (Ginzburg
2010[1989/1979]: 232). It is clear for Ginzburg that approaches belong-
ing to this paradigm ‘do not answer to the criteria of scientificity’ that
are at the heart of more linear and Euclidean forms of theorizing (see
Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]: 250).
Clues do not necessarily belong to the same order of things to become
evidences. They do not need to become so. Clues are a series of facts
that ‘may seem insignificant’ but that may open up, once put together in
a meaningful way, ‘a complex reality that is not directly experiential’ or
that may remain opaque without them (Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]: 242,
290). As Ginzburg puts it, while a type of rigor inspired by a ‘Galilean’
(i.e. linear and Euclidean) system of intelligibility ‘might be not only
impossible to reach’, it might also be ‘undesirable for forms of knowledge
that are more linked to the everyday’ (Ginzburg 2010[1989/1979]: 292).
In the end, the agencement of traces aims to put forth ‘forms of knowl-
edge that are tendentiously mute – in the sense that ... the [rules of their
formulation] cannot be formalized, not even made explicit’ (Ginzburg
2010[1989/1979]: 292–293). This is for instance the process of knowledge
production that Walter Benjamin identified as a mosaic. In his account
of Paris as the archetypical city of the nineteenth century as an epoch,
Benjamin uses a specific locus, the passages, as a way to put together a
mosaic: an agencement of traces (see Arendt (2011[1971]: 20–21, 28,
98–101). The mosaic for Benjamin is a methodology to produce knowl-
edge via the establishment of correspondances (affinities) between a variety

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 Agencement and Traces: A Politics of Ephemeral Theorizing 

of pre-existing textual (snip-bits, quotations, etc.) and visual materials

(paintings, pictures, drawings, etc.) that do not seem, a priori, to be inter-
woven together or even to be potentially linked together because they do
not belong either to the same categories of fact or possess the same value
as an evidence (see Benjamin 1989[1982]). Benjamin weaves in together
clues about why Paris is the archetypical city of the nineteenth century
as an epoch, by serializing what would have normally been muted from
an architectural reading of the passages in the time he wrote.

A politics of agencement for international theory

The international is a specific problematization of a complex set of
events that are artificially linked together (on the concept of artifice,
see Guillaume, manuscript) in a set of relations, the boundaries of
which depends on the system of intelligibility mobilized, thus giving
shape to different ‘international’. To use the concept of agencement/
assemblage is to put forth a politics of theorizing about the interna-
tional that does not limit its understanding of what the international is
to a macro-serialization of events into evidences but rather recognizes
that the international is a multiple reality (on multiplicity, see Deleuze
and Guattari 1980: 14–15) of immanently fluid and ever-changing set of
processes that can be meaningful with different forms of serialization,
such as a micro-serialization of everyday clues. The international can be
read from serializing the multitude of events or non-events (what could
or was expected to happen but did not) that are taking place when a
branded shirt is bought in a shop in Europe, or when someone travels
from one’s country to another. Yet, from the perspective of a politics
of agencement/assemblage, the international is neither that specific shirt
or that specific traveller, neither is it the political economic statement
that can be made about that shirt (how it is produced, in which site
of production, by whom, for whom, and so on) nor the kinetic state-
ment that can be made about that traveller (what modes of transport,
for what reasons, and so on). Rather, the international is the connec-
tion, the ordering, that is the agencement, between these events and
these statements, and this agencement can be made not only of states
or non-governmental organizations but also of branded shirts, ‘illegal’
immigrants or quotidian events that partake of the multiplicity of the

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 Xavier Guillaume

international, the clues of which we can only unveil and connect in an

ephemeral and contingent moment.

Note
 I would like to thank Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis for inviting me to
participate to this volume. All translations are my own as well as all errors
that probably remain.

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 14
The Assemblage and the
Intellectual-as-Hero
Mark B. Salter

Abstract: What is the role of the engaged intellectual in

assemblage theory? In addition to being a partisan for
assemblage theory, against other forms of organizing
and presenting knowledge, in the trench warfare of
post-positivist methods, what responsibilities does a
particular attentiveness to a flattened ontology imply for
writers, scholars and activists? Assemblage theory poses a
fundamental challenge to our current model of intellectual-
as-hero precisely because of its more distributed sense of
agency.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969 

 Mark B. Salter

Fool: ‘Truth’s a dog must to kennel, he must be whipped out’.

(Lear, Act 1, Sc IV)

Intellectual-as-Hero
Public intellectuals often perform as heroes or wise fools, ‘speaking truth
to power’, and academics often adopt this role. I do not want to engage
with all thinking on the task or ethics of being a public or engaged intel-
lectual (Cummings 2005, Posner 2003), particularly since most intel-
lectuals articulate their own self-understanding of those ethics at some
point or another. My point is simply that the public intellectual often
describe their work as causative, thinking, writing, speaking and pro-
voking as doing. I argue that the traditional, enlightenment view of the
intellectual-as-hero persists in Actor-Network Theory and assemblage
theory, but that role is difficult to reconcile with a more diffuse model
of agency.
In Plato’s Apology, we get the archetype for a public intellectual. In
his trial, Socrates describes himself as an irritant to the ‘great and noble
steed’ of the state, and says: ‘I am that gadfly which God has given the
state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you,
arousing and persuading and reproaching you’. Socrates thus sets the
role as a martyr to the higher pursuits of truth, as opposed to earthy con-
cerns or political office. But, the socratic hubris is a crucial part of this
archetype. During his trial, he says ‘if you kill me you will not easily find
another like me ... ’. The public intellectual is crucial to political change,
to rousing the complacency of the state and its citizens by questioning
their actions and their justifications. The philosopher is a hero, standing
up against power.
Many contemporary critical theorists subscribe to this archetype,
though perhaps with more humility. Said reflects on this model: theory,
he says, is always grounded in a particularly, territorial conflict – with
added critical distance or contrapuntal position – and that theory is
always developed as a way to engage in a specific conflict (Said 2000:
436). The further the theory travels away from that very political strug-
gle, the less explanatory power it has. But, the intellectual’s own position
in this is privileged: because s/he is invested in the political conflict, she
is knowledgeable and interested, crucially however, because she is not

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 The Assemblage and the Intellectual-as-Hero 

engaged in the actual daily struggle, then her theory is not for some
political or tactical purpose (Said 1994). For Said, it is the position of
exile that makes this critical position possible. The intellectual stands
outside of the tactical struggle because they are nationally or physically
dispossessed, but still invested in the strategies of resistance, and whose
theory crucially acts.
Foucault’s role as a public philosopher is complex, but equally heroic.
The role of the specific intellectual, says Foucault, is the ‘resurrection of
subjugated knowledges’: scripting the philosopher as either an archaeolo-
gist or a kind of Dr. Frankenstein. On one hand, Foucault makes a similar
point to Said about the role of personal experience in his intellectual
trajectory (2000a: 244). He states that part of the impulse to write on psy-
chiatry was his liminal position at the Hopital Ste Anne, where he was nei-
ther patient nor doctor: he had access and could see clearly the circuits of
power without being implicated in the daily tactical struggles (1997a: 123).
Foucault also conducts an interview as a ‘masked’ philosopher, in which
he promotes ‘philosophy in activity ... the interaction between analysis,
research, “learned” or “theoretical” criticism and changes in behavior’
(1997b: 327). However, in both cases, whether Foucault is not taking credit
for the ideas or grounding it in his experience, the public intellectual’s
role is to provoke the public, it is to cause political change. The role of the
philosopher is to generalize that condition of estrangement.
Thought is something that is often hidden but always drives everyday
behaviours. There is always a little thought occurring even in the most
stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism
consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change it: showing that
things are not as obvious as people believe, making it so that what is
taken for granted is no longer taken for granted. To do criticism is to
make harder those acts which are now too easy (2000b: 456).
Zizek performs a similar role as the wise fool or jester, engaging with
the public in forms such as public lectures, documentaries, and even
the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. He presents his public persona
as intentionally difficult: ‘I don’t give clear answers to even the simplest,
most direct questions. I like to complicate issues. I hate simple narratives.
I suspect them. This is my automatic reaction’ (O’Hagan 2013). However
much he insults his students and denigrates himself, he advocates
(sometimes violent) change. He articulates his role as a change-agent,
a provocateur – but again a provocateur that is outside the system (of
politics, of academe, even of mainstream society).

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 Mark B. Salter

My argument is that this notion of the intellectual-as-hero is wide-

spread: the intellectual is engaged but above or beside the political
conflict. The point of the public intellectual is change, to affect change,
to create new possibilities for change. What happens when that model of
change is problematic?

Assemblage theory and change

Within the field of assemblage scholars, there is a wide variety of distanc-
ing from this archetype of intellectual-as-hero. Law and Latour have both
resisted the lure to systematize Actor-Network Theory (Law 1999), but
also suggest that their intellectual work is done, assemblages are traced, in
order to provoke. Latour: ‘ ... action is possible only in a territory that has
been opened up, flattened down, and cut down to size ... if this is not possi-
ble, then there is no politics. ... To break the package open and allow public
scrutiny, I proposed the distinguishing question[s] – how many are we –
can we live together?’ (2005: 52, 254). Law wants to avoid the separation of
researcher and research object: rather than ‘stand outside and describe the
world, and that when we do so we do not get our hands dirty. We are not
in the world’, he urges us to ‘imagine, reflexively, that telling stories about
the world also helps to perform that world. This means that in a (writing)
performance reality is staged ... what is being performed is thereby ren-
dered more obdurate, more solid, more real than it might otherwise have
been’ (2002: 6). He continues, ‘partly inside, partly outside, we are at least
partially connected with our objects of study. And if we seek to criticize
then it also becomes import to reflect on the character of that involvement’
(2002:7). For Law, then, as for others like Said, Foucault, Zizek above, the
manner of intervention is also a deeply political question.
However, for assemblage theory, the potential for change is radically
different. In efficient models of causality, as defined by Connolly, social
scientists attempt to find the sufficient and necessary conditions for a
particular chain of conditions and events (Connolly 2004). However,
assemblage theory is not interested in this kind of reductionism and
seeks instead to understand how different objects, ideas, individuals,
groups and institutions come to be enrolled in a field (Callon 1986). With
a flattened ontology, in which multiple actors and heterogeneous kinds
of actors, the notion of agency is both stronger (objects can exercise
agency) and weaker (more diffuse). Within this flattened social world,

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 The Assemblage and the Intellectual-as-Hero 

the role of the public intellectual is similarly stronger (we are not simply
outside observers from the ivory tower with clean hands) and weaker
(because the opportunities for our engagement do not have a special
place). If only we were a gadfly that could move the noble steed of state!
Instead, we are simply part of a complex, messy set of associations.
Law’s proposal of writing fractionally or imaginatively attempts to
write on the multiple aspects of an object without creating a centred or
coherent object – either for the research or the researcher. He then writes
about how Law includes himself in his analytic narrative, and argues that
the question of writing one’s self is precisely the ‘problem of trying to
find practices of knowledge-relevant embodiment that don’t perform
themselves as “self-revelations” ’ (2002: 44). Moving beyond the acute
and necessary dictates to ‘know thyself ’ and that the ‘personal is politi-
cal’, I would argue that this form of writing that includes the self, but not
as a coherent subject is precisely the intellectual as traveller, rather than
as a carrier of theory. There is no presupposition of a privileged position,
either high up in the ivory tower or down low below the salt. It is a care-
ful humility that acknowledges: (1) it is our experience that impels us to
engage with particular research objects, and (2) we play one role among
many at both assembling and questioning those assemblages.

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 15
Conclusions: Assemblage
Theory and Its Future
Graham Harman

Abstract: In the concluding chapter of the book the

philosopher Graham Harman looks back at the arguments
made by the various contributors, and assesses the
strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches.
He argues that there are considerable tensions and
contradictions within assemblage thinking, which may
eventually lead to its transformation into another type of
theory altogether, although not, perhaps, until it has had a
transformative impact itself on existing theories. Harman
lauds the contribution of assemblage thinking in the battle
against abstraction and stasis – but he also argues that the
next step is to recover the non-relational autonomy that
assemblages employ to stabilize themselves.

Acuto, Michele, and Simon Curtis, eds. Reassembling

International Theory: Assemblage Thinking and
International Relations. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014. doi: 10.1057/9781137383969.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969

 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

The articles collected in this volume show the potential fertility of

assemblage theory for international relations as for so many other
fields. In what follows I will touch again on the virtues of an assemblage
approach, already summarized so compactly in the editors’ Introduction.
Yet I will also consider some possible shortcomings of this theory.
Every method has a finite lifespan, since every method inevitably fails
to do justice to the complexity of the world. The best any method can
hope for is to change the intellectual terrain for its eventual successors,
sweeping aside tired inherited problems and formulating new ones.
The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos (1980) describes methods as
research programs, by which he means that no one failure or limitation
is enough to sink a theory. A certain tenacity is called for in adhering
to any method, as long as it remains basically ‘progressive’ (able to
expand its insights daringly into fresh topics) rather than ‘degenerat-
ing’ (belatedly claiming that it too can account for what its opponents
have already discovered). New theories always begin as more raggedy
and limited than institutionalized elder methods, which have generally
had decades in power to iron out their difficulties. Yet the best new
theories offer paradoxical central conceptions able to revitalize stagnant
disciplines and replace their leaking paradigms. Assemblage theory has
already shown great promise in philosophy and the social sciences. That
said, it is not as young as it used to be, and perhaps no longer in need
of the protective shield that Lakatos recommends for fragile embryonic
research programs. Hence it is not too early to speculate on the possible
weaknesses that will eventually lead assemblage theory to be trans-
formed into something else altogether.
The term ‘assemblage’ is of Deleuzo-Guattarian origin, and has been
developed above all by an important heir of this tradition, Manuel
DeLanda (2002, 2006). Though Bruno Latour speaks of actor-networks
rather than assemblages, there are obvious points of comparison, though
I will suggest some key differences below. While this book catalogues
numerous important features often ascribed to assemblages, there are
two closely related points that strike me as the sine qua non, with the
others being optional:
 Assemblage theory is an anti-atomistic theory of reality. To speak
of assemblages entails a reference to ‘assembly’, and this means a
heterogeneous world devoid of privileged uncuttable units. Any
black box can be opened to reveal a swarm of interior components,
though each component itself is already an assemblage. Any entity

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 Graham Harman

is already a society, as noted by DeLanda as well as the French

sociologist Gabriel Tarde, recently revived through the praise of
Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour (Tarde 2012).
 Since all components of an assemblage are assemblages in their
own right, assemblage theory requires a democracy of scale. No level
of the world is more real than any other, whether it be particles in
science or nation-states in international relations. Any assemblage
is vulnerable to incursions from both its internal constituents and
its environmental relations. Consider how different this is from
the classical metaphysics of Leibniz (1989), who drew an absolute
distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘aggregate’. Using nature as
his criterion, Leibniz granted to certain things (humans, animals,
plants) the status of real individuals, while viewing the others
(machines, circles of men holding hands, two diamonds glued
together, the Dutch East India Company) as mere aggregates
lacking genuine reality. Against the great Leibnizian tradition,
assemblage theory allows us in principle to talk about all entities:
large and small, natural and artificial, human and non-human. This
is because it allows us to speak of emergence, which gives each level
of the world a reality not found in aggregate in its components.
The United States is not reducible to the sum of its citizens,
but has a certain durability despite the constant birth, death
and immigration/emigration of those citizens. In other words,
assemblage theory is a form of ‘flat ontology’.
In what follows I will proceed in three steps. First, I will describe some of
the features ascribed to assemblages by the authors in this volume. The
reason for this is my suspicion that some of these features are in con-
siderable tension with each other. Second, I will reflect on some of the
possible shortcomings of assemblage theory already addressed by others
in this volume. But third and finally, I will also note a major shortcoming
not explicitly addressed in the pages above. This defect, I believe, will be
the seed of the future transformation of assemblage theory.

Assemblages
In their Introduction to the volume, editors Michele Acuto and Simon
Curtis give us such a thorough overview of assemblage thinking that
one can hardly add to their list. Let’s recall some of the key features of

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 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

assemblages that they list, with the aim of addressing a tension between
some of these features. The notion of assemblage, the editors hold, entails
both materialism and relationism. Human-centred privilege is replaced by
the creative capacities of matter and energy. We must avoid totalization,
and also not reify entities such as state, city, society and capitalism, shift-
ing our focus instead to the processes of assembly that build these large-
scale entities from tangible local actors.1 There are no closed systems,
since the multiplicity of any system’s components and relations ensures
the constant possibility of sub-version from above or below; stability is
high-maintenance. Since the world contains nothing but assemblages, we
have a ‘flat ontology’ in which neither humans, nor capital, nor society
is a dominant entity devouring all others. We can no longer segregate
such disparate domains as corporations, institutions, nation-states and
terrorist networks, since assemblage theory must account for all of them
in precisely the same terms. The editors speak favourably of ‘emergence,
non-linearity, openness, adaptation, feedback and path-dependency’,
while also suggesting that the difference between Deleuzean and
Latourian approaches is primarily one of emphasis. Following DeLanda,
they note that assemblages not only allow for a grass-roots ontology in
which everything is built from the bottom, but also enable us to think the
retroactive effects of larger assemblages on their interior components: as
when a nation-state exerts pressure on the assemblages within it. While
they generally seem to favour a relational approach, the editors also
refer in passing to human geographers who view assemblage theory as a
response to problems with the relational perspective. Borrowing Derrida’s
key term (though citing Foucault and Deleuze), they note that ‘assemblage
thinking tends to push for the problematization of the ordinary and the
deconstruction of wholes and totalities such as the “global” into contin-
gent realities where society is, even if temporarily, stabilized in networks,
institutions and routines’. They also invoke Jane Bennett’s defence of a
‘throbbing confederation’ of ‘vibrant materials’, and promote the view that
assemblages lead to a theory of immanence and change. For this reason,
greater attention must be paid to fluidity in society. Though I agree with
most of the principles contained in this summary, disagreement is usu-
ally more interesting, and thus I will speak briefly of three of the listed
features that, in my view, work at cross-purposes with the general spirit
of assemblage theory. This difficulty is due not to the editors’ wonderfully
compact account of assemblage theory, but to problems inherent in the
theory itself, and widely overlooked by its advocates.

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 Graham Harman

My first point of concern is with the usual assumption that assemblage

theory must be a relational theory. At first glance this might seem obvi-
ous: assemblages are meant to replace ossified abstractions with the
lively multitude of component actors found on the inside of any formerly
black-boxed unit. Does this not entail that we shift our focus to the rela-
tions between these components? The problem with this assumption is as
follows: Relationality is also characteristic of those ‘closed systems’ that
assemblage theory aspires to replace. Relations must be external to their
terms rather than constituting them, a favourite Deleuzean principle
taken up with great flair by DeLanda. Roland Bleiker’s chapter above
draws our attention to this partly non-relational character of assem-
blages: ‘Assemblages are an alternative to totalities. They are, according
to DeLanda, structured by relations of exteriority: the properties and
behaviour of its components neither have to explain the whole nor fit
into its overall logic. Heterogeneity is a key feature here, for each com-
ponent is both linked and autonomous.’ If assemblage theory wants to be
a flat ontology, it cannot also be a relational holism, since it must grant
autonomy to the various pieces of the cosmos rather than placing them
amidst a harmonious whole. Nation-states, security guards, passports
and citizens must not be defined by their relations, since they need to be
able to enter and exit various relations at different times. Please note the
counter-intuitive result that this gives assemblages a point in common
with the much-maligned classical concept of substance, which is defined
as a surplus over any of its qualities, accidents or relations. Though the
atomicity, naturalness and (sometimes) eternity ascribed to classical sub-
stance are features well worth avoiding, the relative freedom of substance
from context needs to be preserved. Otherwise we will find ourselves
back in a theory of totalities, which are a textbook example of relational
systems, given that nothing is allowed to exist except in relation to a
wider whole. The spirit of assemblage theory is quite different from this.
Assemblages are supposed to be locked in constant duel or dialogue,
partly withholding their riches from any given situation. Though today
we find a widespread view that relational thinking is fresh, while non-
relational thinking is supposedly oppressive and dull, assemblages teach
us the opposite lesson.
There is an equally widespread view that links assemblages with mat-
ter and materialism. The opposite term for matter is almost always ‘form’.
Given that form is usually associated with cognitive or linguistic access
the world, or even mathematical access to it (as for Alain Badiou [2005]

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 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

and Quentin Meillassoux [2008]), to formalize something is taken to

mean that we reify it, leading to nothing but a petrified forest of abstrac-
tions. Against this apparently desolate picture, ‘matter’ is often proclaimed
as a source of energy, upsurge, and abundant possibility, as in Bennett’s
metaphor of throbbing confederations of vibrant matter (Bennett 2010).
It is certainly true that assemblage theory dethrones such reified abstrac-
tions as city, nation-state, society and capital, showing their contingent
emergence from concrete local actors. But when we open the black box
of a term like ‘society’, revealing the diverse assemblages that compose
it, in what sense do we find ‘matter’? To use Peer Schouten’s examples,
do fences, gates and checkpoints have more of a material character than
society itself? I hold that there is nothing inherently material about any
of these assemblages, whatever scale we consider. Even a highly ambi-
tious social theory (such as Tarde’s) that follows the development of
assemblages from particles on up to nation-states would have to consider
these tiny particles as forms, not as unformed matter – though as real
forms never fully commensurate with our abstract knowledge of them. If
‘materialism’ is code for treating micro-actors such as fences as more real
than macro-actors such as the Department of Homeland Security, then
flat ontology is lost, along with DeLanda’s insight that systems can have
retroactive effects on their parts.
If we oppose reification, this should be because reification improp-
erly posits certain mere abstractions as entities, not because individual
entities are ipso facto abstractions from a unified matter-energy. We
must certainly insist that assemblages are always more concrete than
any attempt to conceptualize them, and in this sense they always elude
the particular ways in which they are formalized by knowledge or even
perception. But in no way does it follow that they are ‘material’, since
every assemblage has a structure of its own, and structure entails form.
To bring another classical concept back from the dead, we can see how
the medieval term ‘substantial form’ might prove to be useful, despite
its general disrepute in the modern era. Assemblage theory does allow
us to place new emphasis on the transition, the coupling, the fusion
and the destruction of assemblages, and in this respect we remain far
from all classical models. Yet we cannot preserve the virtues of flat
ontology if we start from the notion that roads are material and laws
are not, or that laws are material only in so far as they receive paper or
electronic inscription. At best, this can be a useful short-term tactic for
drawing attention away from the cottony abstractions of past theory

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 Graham Harman

towards an apparently humbler layer of concrete actors: schizophren-

ics for Deleuze and Guattari, wastepaper baskets for Latour, aircraft for
John Law, arteriosclerosis for Annemarie Mol. Otherwise, assemblage
theory can be done perfectly well without ever speaking of matter at
all. And this ought to be done, since all materialism faces one of two
dangers that have plagued it since pre-Socratic Greece, and which have
nothing in common with the spirit of assemblage theory. Either one
particular entity is defined as ultimate matter at the expense of others
(water, air, atoms, chemical elements), which stops flat ontology dead
in its tracks. Or else all particular entities are held to emerge from
and descend into a single bubbling blob, like Anaximader’s shapeless
apeiron, and there is no explanation for how we pass from the blob to
specific assemblages: not even if we join Bennett in calling it throbbing
or vibrant.
This brings me to my only point of disagreement with Acuto and
Curtis specifically: their view that the difference between Deleuzean
and Latourian approaches is primarily one of emphasis. They are not
the only ones to hold this view, and it is even more common to link
Deleuze with Alfred North Whitehead, one of Latour’s closest forerun-
ners. Initially, Deleuze and Latour might seem like an obvious partner-
ship. Both authors seem to endorse something like assemblages, and
both seem to emphasize change over stability, becoming over stasis,
relation over substances. All this is true, yet there is a crucial difference
in how these two authors treat the becoming of assemblages. Deleuze,
like his distant model Henri Bergson, is primarily a thinker of continu-
ity. Different assemblages may close themselves off from others, but
this is never an absolute cut: there are folds, striations, lines of flight
and intensities, not autonomous individuals cut off from the energies
and flows that ultimately show them to be an uninterrupted cloth.
This is perhaps even clearer in Bergson, for whom (as for Aristotle in
the Physics) time cannot be decomposed into instants, or becomings
into a series of individual states. How different it is for Whitehead and
Latour! Admittedly, Schouten is right to say that ‘[John] Dewey aligns
with Whitehead’s process philosophy in stating that “(e)very actual
entity in the universe is in process; in some sense is process” ’. The
question is whether process means the same thing here as it would for
Bergson and Deleuze. What is always ignored at moments like this is
Whitehead’s insistence that actual entities do not become, but merely
perish. However much ‘process’ one wants to find in Whitehead or

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 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

Latour, we cannot escape the fact that their entities and actors perish
instant-by-instant in a way that would be non-sense for Bergson and
Deleuze. If we wish to lend the term ‘assemblage’ to Whitehead and
Latour, we cannot forget that their assemblages last for only an instant,
perishing in favour of a close successor that is not, strictly speaking,
the same assemblage. This comes as a side effect of the extreme rela-
tionism of these two thinkers, for both of whom (unlike for Deleuze)
relations are always internal to their terms. Latour, in particular, does
speak of ‘trajectories’ that link all these isolated perishing actors across
time. Yet the trajectories are not pre-given in the things, but must be
established by an outside observer through a painstaking series of
translations. There is no inherent ‘line of flight’ for Latour, only a series
of strobe-lit punctiform actors, each perishing as quickly as the next.
This difference is no mere academic dispute, since the very meaning
of assemblage theory changes depending on which model one takes
to be pre-eminent. Are the different zones of the world composed by
folds and striations in a basically seamless continuum, or do we work
in reverse and define assemblages so thoroughly by their relations
that they become internally defined by those very relations, and perish
instantly once those relations have changed? Or alternatively (my own
preference) do we decide to reject both models and add a new one?

Charges made against assemblage theory

So far we have been talking philosophy, or even pure ontology.
Christian Bueger worries about this very tendency in some assemblage
theorists, such as DeLanda. For Bueger the whole point of assemblages
is to give us new traction for empirical research: ‘Assemblage thinking
is an invitation for empirical work, not for contemplating ontological
concepts and metaphors’. Indeed, Bueger goes so far as to say that
DeLanda ‘almost contradicts [assemblage thinking] by turning it into
a philosophical project’. It is ironic that Bueger lays this charge against
DeLanda, who is arguably more concrete in his writings than Deleuze
and Guattari, if not Latour. It is DeLanda, after all, who studies intel-
ligent weaponry, the formation of stones in rivers, the workings of
non-linear dynamics, and more recently the genesis of thunderstorms.
If this is not empirical work, then what is? But beyond this point, I am
inclined to side with Debbie Lisle, who takes exception to the very idea

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 Graham Harman

that empirical work merits a higher rank than theoretical speculation.

Lisle’s argument is an oldie but a goodie: premature concreteness often
just adopts pre-existent theories loaded with stale assumptions. For
this reason, patient contemplation is advised. While I share Bueger’s
view that philosophical innovation must eventually cash out in the
form of local detail, flat ontology cuts both ways: just as water and gas
networks are no less real than a palace, speculative ontology is no less
‘fieldwork’ than that of geographers and anthropologists, even if they
work in rather different fields. To claim otherwise is to redraw the dis-
tinction between a priori abstraction and empirical concreteness that
assemblage theory was born to deny.
A more pressing concern for assemblage theory is whether it allows us
to make judgements about good and bad assemblages. The editors raise
this problem directly, asking if assemblage theory ‘levels the playing field
for more egalitarian political stances? Does it help us deconstruct and
advocate against established socio-political hierarchies and economic
injustice as well as it might do with macro-categories and established
notions?’ Rita Abrahamsen strikes a similar note in her interview with
Michael Williams, calling for ‘the addition of a Bourdieuisan analysis
of capital and power within and between assemblages. Its possible to
conceive of this as a weakness of some analyses that draw on assemblage
theory: that this mode of thought can lack a conceptual framework to
show how these struggles take place. So, to do that we put in Bourdieu
and that helped us think about power, struggle and politics’. After read-
ing this book, I find that I am still of two minds about this important
question. In one sense, assemblage theory has a purely descriptive
dimension that seems to wall it off from political judgments. I discussed
this question last year with Schouten during a visit to Sweden, and took
seriously his point that one could do a perfectly brilliant actor-network
analysis of the Gulag and other horrors, simply ‘following the actors’ and
describing the mechanics of show trials, barbed wire, guard dogs, and
forced labour. One seeks in vain for a ‘normative’ principle in Latour’s
writings, and this has led to charges concerning a vaguely Machiavellian
element in his work. Yet I wonder if it makes sense to ask for this kind
of normativity from any theory. Is it really expected that one be able
to deduce ethical and political principles from any given method? This
borders on an untenable kind of rationalism. The classic effort of this
sort is found in the ethics of Immanuel Kant, who claims to use rational
means to deduce his categorical imperative, with the apparent result

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 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

that others must always be treated as ends rather than as means. But
even Kant’s ethics are more studied than believed, and have met with
unyielding objections from even the most ethically well-meaning schol-
ars. Michel Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus
(1983) makes the interesting claim that it is a book of ethics. Be that as
it may, a right-wing Deleuzianism seems more than conceivable (see
Eyal Weizmann’s remarks on the use of assemblage theory by the Israeli
Defense Forces2). More recently, Badiou claims to deduce egalitarian
politics by purely rational means, but here too there seems to be some-
thing a bit forced, ad hoc, or axiomatic about this claim. Most important
thinkers can be taken up for opposite political purposes: thus we have
Left and Right Hegelians, Left and Right Nietzscheans, even Left and
Right Heideggerians. The use of Deleuze on the Right may alarm some
partisan Deleuzians, yet it is an excellent sign of his future viability as a
thinker: a sign so far without equivalent among Badiou’s almost exclu-
sively Leftist admirers. In this sense, the perennial gap between ‘is’ and
‘ought’ still seems to be unbridged. The normative views of a theorist
seem to come from somewhere outside the theory itself, and perhaps
always must.
At the same time, there are also clear political implications of
assemblage theory, even if they do not lead to immediate alignment
with any discernible political camp. To focus on levels of assemblage
other than the nation-state does entail a certain empowerment of
micro-actors that was impossible under the old theories. By providing
the tools to examine sub-national agents, it automatically allows us to
treat the emergence of sub-national assemblages as something much
more than ‘anarchy’. In doing so, it reinforces the questions already
raised (by historical events themselves) about the continued viability
of the nation-state as the central political actor. The emergence of non-
state actors is no longer framed as an anarchic upsurge to be tamed or
crushed, but as a positive phenomenon which may contain the seeds of
political renewal. Viewed from this angle, there does seem to be a link
between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ nonetheless, even if it has more to do
shifting the field of recognized actors rather than generating a platform
for activism.
David Chandler puts a negative spin on this reframing of actants. His
chapter is rhetorically unusual, in that it initially reads like a full-blown
defence of assemblagist political claims. Yet he closes by pulling the
political rug from under the feet of assemblage theory. For instance:

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 Graham Harman

‘it seems a little disingenuous to think that the politics of assemblages

is somehow a challenge to power: as if ideas could some how operate
independently in the world and make up for the lack of real politi-
cal possibilities in the present’. And further: ‘How does politics work
when constituted power is rearticulated as constituent power? Is it not
possible that, today, the onto-politics of life itself is not a challenge to
constituted power but its very modus operandi?’ Chandler’s argument
concludes as follows: ‘Assemblage politics reify the defeat of modernist
aspirations as an ontological necessity rather than understanding this
as a contingent and reversible historico-political event. When collective
projects of transformation seem unimaginable, radical academics and
the apologists of power are more than happy to sign up to the onto-
political understanding that we are suborned to the onto-politics of life
in a never-ending complex adaptive system with no goals or telos’. Seeing
this as a defeat for human aspiration, Chandler endorses the now-faded
virtues of modernism. Yet it is unclear whether big aspirations can take
the same form as they did in the age of idealist philosophy, when the
relations of humans and non-humans were given the binary form of
‘alienation’ and ‘emancipation’. The Leftist DeLanda’s turn from Marx to
Braudel, along with the ‘rhizomatic’ rethinking of protest movements,
are signals that aspiration may need to be rewritten in the language of
assemblages.

A more serious shortcoming of assemblage theory

Most assemblage theory is at pains to emphasize transience and con-
tingency over the apparent stasis of big political abstractions. This has
been useful in the face of totalizing concepts such as society, state, city
and ‘neo-liberalism’ (Saskia Sassen is right to distrust this fuzzy term,
which lacks even the candour of the Marxist ‘capitalism’). It is good
to open the black box of nuclear weapons in light of Kenneth Waltz’s
evident failure to conceptualize these weapons at levels other than that
of the nation-state. But as argued above, assemblages are no more rela-
tional than non-relational, no more transient than stable. This seems to
be the most recurrent bias of assemblage theory, one that may now be
reversing from virtue into vice. Yet I also take note of a new theoriza-
tion of stability found in several chapters of the present book. I refer to
Schouten’s remarks on how physical arrangements stabilize the security

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 Assemblage Theory and Its Future 

system, Nick Srnicek’s insights into how new modelling tools open and
consolidate new spaces of research activity, and Olaf Corry’s account
of how shared governance-objects lend a taste of political durability
to otherwise fickle human actors. Let us grant that no assemblage is
eternal. It does not follow that every assemblage constantly shifts at
every moment. Between the eternal and the instantaneous, a vast field
of intermediate durability lies before us. The United States Constitution
has been in force since 1787, and will not be in force forever. But to
view the Constitution as nothing more than a reifying nickname for
a continuously shifting and mutating trajectory is to forego the more
difficult work of finding the specific moments when the United States
and its Constitution were generally transformed. There are borderline
cases where it remains unclear if these turned into something different,
but surely we can agree that no change occurs when President Obama
happens to lose hairs from his head or clip his fingernails. Once we
concede that assemblages have a robust internal character, that they
can gain and lose pieces or enter and exit relations while remaining
somehow the same, we are obliged to modify assemblage theory into
a theory of non-relational stability, however temporary this stability
might be. An assemblage passes through many surrounding events,
some of which leave no trace while others may destroy it. A black
box can always be opened, but does not exist only to be opened. To
assemble also means to close off, to admit some partnerships but not
all, to negotiate but not always to surrender. An assemblage does not
only arise from its components and enter into wider assemblages, but
also closes its gates to many insignificant changes both below and
above. When assemblage theory becomes too focused on the environ-
mental sensitivity of trembling actants, it neglects that assemblages
also withstand blows and resist reduction in two directions. To view
them simply as folds in a pre-connected matter-energy is to silence the
genuine question of why they only respond selectively to neighbouring
influence. It will not do to say (with Deleuze or Dewey) that assem-
blages are individualized through functions or practices, since both
function and practice encounter assemblages already formed. Now
that the battle against stasis and abstraction is won, perhaps the next
battle is to recover the non-relational autonomy of assemblages, with
a renewed focus on stability and its merely intermittent crises. But this
would mean the transformation of assemblage theory into something
else altogether.

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 Graham Harman

Notes
 Fernand Braudel’s (1992) history of the emergence of capitalism from
regional markets, so beloved by DeLanda, is an excellent forerunner here.
 See: Eyal Weizmann. “The Art of War.” Frieze 99, May 2006. Available online
at http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the_art_of_war/.

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 Index
Abrahamsen, Rita, 3, 12, 25–31,
59, 126
abstractions, 2, 7
actants, 5, 127–28
actor-network-theory (ANT),
3, 5, 10, 11, 37, 60, 76n4,
83–90, 95, 97n5, 114, 116,
119, 126
Acuto, Michele, 1, 120, 124
adjacency, 38
Adler, Emanuel, 41
African state, 27–28
agencement, 106–12
agency, 8–9, 13
airport security, 84
analytical tactic, 9–11, 23
anarchy, 50, 53, 55
Anderson, Ben, 3, 10, 13, 14,
46, 70
ANT, see actor-network-theory
(ANT)
anthropocentrism, 2, 5
anthropology, 18, 20
applicationism, 70
arboreal assemblages, 61–2
Archer, Margaret, 8
Arendt, Hannah, 104
arrangements, 60
assemblages
Abrahamsen on, 25–31
arboreal, 61–2
boundaries of, 22–1, 30–1
cognitive, 40–7
Collier on, 32–38

concept of, 5–6, 20, 24, 59,
60–1, 94, 119–0
definition of, 3
deployment of, 26–27
deterrent, 96
global, 3, 6, 18–19, 30–31,
48–6, 59
global security and, 25–31
heterogenous elements in,
62–3, 94, 122
love, 101–3
as metaphor, 59
method of, 9, 67–74
onto-politics of, 99–5
processes of, 7–8
representations of, 65–6
rhizomatic, 61, 76,
78–1, 94
security, 83–90
structure and, 51–3
theory of, 5
visual, 75–82
Williams on, 25–31
assemblage theory, 6–11, 12, 30,
36, 55–6, 91–7, 100, 103,
116–17, 119–0
assemblage thinking
as analytical tactic, 8–19
Bueger on, 58–6
concept of, 60–1
drawbacks of, 36–7
international relations and,
35–5, 64–74, 95–6
introduction to, 1–4
DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969

assemblage thinking – continued
methodological frameworks for,
75–82
methodological view on, 58–6
Ong on, 17–24
ontology, 6–9
overview of, 4–6, 120–1
politics of, 99–105
as reflexive method, 24, 37–38
Sassen on, 17–24
styles of, 3
tensions within, 118–30
assembly, politics of, 11–15
asylum seekers, 80–1
authority, 59
autonomization, 107
autonomy, 14
Benjamin, Walter, 110–11
Bennett, Jane, 10, 13, 14, 121, 122
Bergson, Henri, 124–5
binaries, 100, 101
biopolitics, 34, 102–3
Bleiker, Roland, 38, 75, 122
Boland, Tom, 38
boundaries, 22–1, 30–1, 64, 69
Bourdieu, Pierre, 126
Bourdieusian field theory, 27, 60
Bousquet, Antoine, 15n3, 38, 91
Bueger, Christian, 9–11, 58, 125
Callon, M., 10
Canada, 31
Cape Town, 29–30
capital, 27
capitalism, 7, 34, 103
Castells, M., 14
categorical imperative, 126–7
causality, 80–1
CCTV, 29
Chandler, David, 11, 99, 127–28
change, 116–17
cities, 2, 7, 15
climate science, 45–7
clues, 110
cognitive assemblages, 40–7
DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
Index 
Cold War, 96
collective action, 89
Collier, Stephen, 3, 5, 6, 12, 18, 32–38,
52, 59
complex systems, 7
computer technology, 5
conditions of possibility, 80–1
Connolly, William, 76, 116
constructivism, 41
Corry, Olaf, 37, 48
critical security studies, 69
critique, 38
Curtis, Simon, 1, 120, 124
Dahan, A., 44
deconstruction, 10, 11, 35, 121
DeLanda, Manuel, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 59,
63–5, 78, 94, 119–122, 125
Deleuze, Gilles, 3–5, 12–13, 19–20, 59, 61,
64–5, 79, 94, 107–9, 120, 124–5, 127
democracy of scale, 120
Derrida, Jacques, 121
deterrent assemblage, 96
deterritorialization, 60, 63–4
Dewey, John, 83–90, 102, 124
discourse, 89
distributed agency, 8–9, 13
economics, 43–5
economy, 52
Edwards, Paul N., 45, 52
electronic thermometer, 42
emergence, 120
empire, 50–1
empiricism, 64–6
epistemic communities, 41–7
ethics, 127
ethnography, 72–3
exclusion, 69
expressivity, 62–3
Feyerabend, P., 42
field theory, 27, 60
flat ontology, 7, 121
Foucault, Michel, 37–8, 53, 94,
102–3, 115
 Index

Gane, N., 65 international relations theory, 2, 7,

geography, 10, 14 9–11, 14, 34–5, 59
geopolitics, 30
Giddens, Anthony, 8 Kant, Immanuel, 126–7
Ginzburg, Carlo, 108, 110 Kenway, P., 43
global assemblages, 3, 6, 18–22, 30–40, Keynesianism, 19, 35, 43
48–56, 59 knowledge
global governance, 28, 54, 84 collective, 45–6
globalization, 33, 34, 87, 102, 103 materiality of, 43–3, 44
global politics, 72, 91 production, 42–7, 68, 107
see also international relations
global polity, 49, 53–5 Lakatos, Imre, 119
global security, 25–31 Lakoff, Andrew, 35
governance-objects, 49, 53–5 Latour, Bruno, 5, 10, 13, 37, 42, 60, 71–2,
governmentality, 53, 70 76n4, 93, 95, 116, 119, 120, 124, 125
governments, 104 Law, John, 71, 116, 117, 124
Group4Securicor, 29 Legg, Stephen, 34
Guattari, Felix, 4, 13, 19, 59, 61, 79, 94, Leibniz, G. W., 120
108–9, 127 liberalism, 38
Guillaume, Xavier, 12, 33, 38, 62, 106 life, 101–3, 105
life politics, 100–1
Harman, Graham, 118 Lisle, Debbie, 58, 67, 125–6
Hayden, P., 62, 65 love assemblages, 101–3
heterogeneity, 62–3, 94, 122 Lynch, M., 45
hierarchy, 50, 53, 55
historical turning points, 19 machines, 94–5
historiographies, 21–2 see also technology
Holloway, John, 100 Marcus, G., 60
Humphreys, P., 42 Marxism, 13, 14
hybridity, 59, 93 materialism, 2, 13, 15n1, 121, 122–3
materiality, 41–3, 44, 52, 62–3, 69, 89
identity, 52 McFarlane, Colin, 10, 70, 76
immigration, 18 metatheories, 23
inclusion, 69 modernity, 21, 93, 103, 107
infrastructural globalism, 52 Mol, Annemarie, 61, 124
institutions, 23 monetarism, 35
intellectual-as-hero, 113–17 morphogenesis, 8
international, 51–2 mosaic, 110–11
international relations multiplicity, 61–2, 102
assemblage thinking and, 64–74,
95–6 nation-state, 22, 35, 122, 127
critical turn in, 68 neoliberalism, 2, 34, 38, 102–3
multiplicity and, 61 networks, 14, 49, 50
structural models of, 48–6 network theory, 26–7
technology and, 91–7 new empiricism, 64–6
theorizing and, 106–12 new materialism, 15n1

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Index 

Niger Delta, 28 science, technology and society

nongovernmental organizations (STS), 3, 5
(NGOs), 31–2 security apparatuses, 89
non-human agents, 69 security assemblages, 83–90
nuclear weapons, 92, 96 Security Beyond the State, 25
self-revelations, 117
Ong, Aihwa, 3, 5, 6, 12, 17–24, 32, 51, 52, Shapiro, M. J., 70
59, 76–7 social constructivism, 91–3, 95–7
ontological shifts, 86 social interaction, 2
ontology, 6–9, 13, 68, 86, 88, 121 social movements, 14
onto-politics, 99–5 social ontology, 68
social realities, 19, 23
panopticon, 89 social sciences, 20
Plato, 117 social theory, 6–7, 14, 122
politics, 49, 50, 72, 75–82, 99–5 society, 7, 8, 10
of agencement, 111–12 technology and, 15n3, 93, 96–7
of assembly, 11–15 socio-technical networks, 10
polities, 49, 51–5 sovereignty, 22–3
post-anthropocentrism, 8–9 spatial boundaries, 64
post-Cold War security, 84–90 Srnicek, Nick, 8, 35, 40
post-structuralism, 78 stagflation, 35, 43, 44
power, 20, 27, 100, 103–4 state, 18, 28–9, 52
practice, 62, 89 state-centrism, 7
printing press, 42, 92 Strathern, Marilyn, 36
private security firms, 28, 29–30 structuralism, 8, 97n3
process ontology, 88 structural models, 48–56
production of knowledge, 40–7, 68, 107 structuration, 8
subject-centrism, 49–51
Rabinow, Paul, 38 subjectivity, 52
rational thought, 46 substance, 122
reflexivity, 24, 37–38 surveillance, 29
relationalism, 2, 24, 62, 121 symbolic, 62–3
relationality, 51, 122
relational ontology, 86, 88 Tarde, Gabriel, 120
relations, 62 technological cognition, 46
rhizomatic assemblages, 61, 76, technological determinism, 5,
78–81, 94 91–3, 96–7
rights, 59 technology, 15n3, 45, 45, 86–7, 91–7
risk society, 103 territorialization, 60, 63–4
Russell, B., 14 territoritality, 22–3
territory, 22–3, 59
Sakka, E., 60 theorizing, 106–12
Salter, Mark, 11, 113 totalities, 78, 122
Sassen, Saskia, 3, 5–6, 9, 12, 17–24, 26, traces, 106–12
59, 76–7, 128 trajectories, 21
Schouten, Peer, 83, 122, 128–9 transformation, 19

DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969
 Index
U.S. Constitution, 141
utility, 23
vibrating plateau, 19
violence, 29, 59
visual assemblages, 75–82
visual politics, 77–78
vital systems security, 34–5
vulnerability, 73–4
Walters, W., 70
Waltz, Kenneth, 37, 49–50, 51,
92, 128
Weizmann, Eyal, 127
Whitehead, Alfred North, 124–5
Wight, Colin, 6
Williams, Michael, 3, 12, 25–31,
59, 126
world cultural heritage, 64
world politics, 46, 50, 75–82
Zizek, Slavoj, 116
DOI: 10.1057/9781137383969