622570

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TAP0010.1177/0959354315622570Theory & PsychologyPrice-Robertson and Duff

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Theory & Psychology

Realism, materialism, and

2016, Vol. 26(1) 58­–76
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354315622570
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Manuel DeLanda

Rhys Price-Robertson
Monash University

Cameron Duff
RMIT University

Abstract
The purpose of this article is to introduce Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory” to psychology.
Based on a select review of this theory, we argue that DeLanda’s work may allow for new ways
of approaching unresolved problems in psychological inquiry, such as the realism–constructivism
impasse, and disputes regarding linear and non-linear models of causality. DeLanda’s systematic
treatment of the assemblage, using terms familiar to social scientists and analytic philosophers
alike, offers a host of novel concepts and methods for the analysis of social, biological, and/or
political systems, while also indicating how this analysis may be deployed in innovative social
science inquiry. A number of psychologists have recently begun to explore the concept of
assemblage. We add to these efforts in the present paper by assessing how DeLanda’s assemblage
theory may open up a new “image of the psychological” to guide research and practice.

Keywords
assemblage, constructivism, Manuel DeLanda, materialism, psychology, realism

Recently, many theoretically inclined psychologists have grown disenchanted with the
“linguistic turn” taken in the latter part of the 20th century by continental philosophy and
certain branches of the social sciences (Brown & Stenner, 2009; Bryant, Srnicek, &
Harman, 2012; Held, 2007). While the linguistic turn has not been as enthusiastically

Corresponding author:
Rhys Price-Robertson, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
Email: rhys.price-robertson@monash.edu
Price-Robertson and Duff 59

embraced in psychology as in other of the human and social sciences (Brown & Stenner,
2009), it has provided an important means of translating many of the key insights of
constructivism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism into psychological research and
practice (DeLamater & Ward, 2013). Eager to retain many of these insights, a number of
authors have nonetheless insisted that an emphasis on texts, discourse, culture, and
power, to the relative exclusion of material entities and forces, has reinforced stale
dichotomies between body and mind, object and subject, and nature and culture in psy-
chological research (Duff, 2014, pp. 28–31). Within psychology, attempts to redress the
shortcomings of the linguistic turn have tended to move in two closely related directions.
The first is a renewed interest in ontology, specifically realist ontologies. Theoretical
psychology has long debated the epistemological merits of realism and constructivism,
and their “seemingly inexhaustible disagreement” as to the appropriate status of “reality”
in psychology (Stam, 2002, p. 572). Although these debates have cooled somewhat in
recent years, many psychologists continue to search for a compromise or moderating
alternative between realism and relativism. Examples include various “middle-ground
theorists” (Held, 2007) who tend to be broadly supportive of the linguistic turn in psy-
chology, particularly its defence of human agency and freedom, while maintaining that
the relativism of interpretive psychology goes too far, denying its adherents access to a
concrete world independent of human perception and representational systems. Criticisms
like these have inspired interest among theoretical psychologists in realist ontologies and
their implications for research and practice (see Brown & Stenner, 2009; Duff, 2014).
Similar concerns have motivated the second response to the linguistic turn in psychol-
ogy, which has involved increased theoretical engagement with questions of materiality.
An emphasis on the forces (or “stuff”) of the material world is evident in “actor-network
theory,” “affect theory,” and “new materialism,” among other theoretical currents, which
have all had some influence among contemporary psychologists (see Brown & Stenner,
2009; Duff, 2014; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Rose, 2007). These emerging theoretical
discourses arguably constitute a “second wave” of social constructivism, which moves
beyond an exclusive focus on language and meaning to explore the objects, materials,
and processes by which entities (or “objects”) are constructed and maintained (Alvesson
& Sköldberg, 2010). While some of these discourses have drawn on concepts and theo-
ries from psychology and neuroscience (e.g., affect theorists’ adoption of the work of
Silvan Tomkins and Antonio Damasio), few psychologists have explored what they may
offer their own discipline. Notable exceptions are Brown and Stenner (2009, p. ix), who
have sought to develop a novel “‘image’ of the psychological” premised on the process
ontologies of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and Buruch
Spinoza, among others. Brown and Stenner (2009) argue that processual ontologies offer
a means of transcending the antinomies of subject/object, nature/culture, and mind/body
that continue to frame psychological research. In place of such binaries, Brown and
Stenner (2009, p. ix) propose an “orientation to reality as multiply mediated process or
becoming” and then begin to indicate how this “orientation” may help rejuvenate psy-
chological inquiry.
Building on the work of Brown and Stenner (2009), the purpose of this paper is to
introduce Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) “assemblage theory” to psychology, and then
explore what “image” of the psychological may be derived from it. Born in Mexico City
60 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

in 1952, Manuel DeLanda moved to New York city in 1975 to pursue filmmaking. After
making a number of experimental films inspired by critical theory and philosophy, and
spending time focused on computer programming and digital art, he was introduced to
the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Over the course of numerous articles and
books, Delanda developed a unique and sometimes polarising interpretation of Deleuze’s
oeuvre, bringing the French philosopher’s work into contact with diverse scientific and
technical fields, including nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, and artificial life. Currently
teaching in the USA and Switzerland, he is increasingly seen as an important philosopher
in his own right. Like Deleuze, Whitehead, and Bergson, DeLanda (2006) proposes an
avowedly realist ontology capable of accounting for both the material and the psychic (or
“idealist”) dimensions of “real experience” (see Duff, 2014, pp. 15–18). Unlike Deleuze,
Whitehead, and Bergson, however, DeLanda’s explicit task is to offer an epistemological
framework to guide novel lines of empirical inquiry in the social sciences. In his 2006
book, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, DeLanda
derives a model of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and then outlines how this
model may be adopted in studies of social complexity. Based on a select review of this
model, we argue that DeLanda’s work may allow for new ways of approaching unre-
solved problems in psychological inquiry, such as the realism–constructivism impasse
noted above. DeLanda’s systematic treatment of the assemblage, using terms familiar to
social scientists and analytic philosophers alike, offers a host of novel concepts and
methods for the analysis of social, biological, and/or political systems, while also indi-
cating how this analysis may be deployed in innovative social science inquiry. DeLanda
also addresses how the figure of the assemblage overcomes common objections to real-
ism (e.g., that realism is essentialist), and how it offers novel perspectives on enduring
social-scientific problems (e.g., questions of causality). A number of psychologists have
recently begun to explore these theoretical developments (Brown, 2010; Brown &
Stenner, 2009; Semetsky & Delpech-Ramey, 2012), while the methodological utility of
assemblage theory has been widely debated in human geography (Anderson, Kearnes,
McFarlane, & Swanton, 2012), political science (Buchanan & Thoburn, 2008), sociol-
ogy (Marcus & Saka, 2006), and public health (Duff, 2014). We add to these debates in
the present paper by assessing how DeLanda’s assemblage theory may help to open up a
new “image of the psychological” to guide research and practice.

Contextualising assemblage theory

Before we turn to DeLanda’s account of the assemblage, and how it may reframe select
debates in psychological research, it will be useful to describe the intellectual context of
DeLanda’s work, particularly the recent resurgence of interest in realism and materialism
in disciplines such as philosophy, science and technology studies, feminism and gender
studies (see Bryant et al., 2012; Coole & Frost, 2010). Although realism and materialism
are often closely allied, it is advantageous to consider them separately as they are not
necessarily identical (Bhaskar, 2008). At the most basic level, realism asserts that “enti-
ties exist independently of being perceived, or independently of our own theories about
them” (Phillips, 1987, p. 205). However, questions of exactly what constitutes a real
entity, how entities interact, and how perceptions and entities are related have been the
Price-Robertson and Duff 61

subject of enduring debate. A host of new realisms have emerged alongside critical real-
ism (e.g., Bhaskar, 2008) in the course of these debates, including “natural realism”
(Putnam, 1999), “innocent realism” (Haack, 2002), and the recent turn to “speculative
realism” (e.g., Harman, 2010; Meillassoux, 2008).
Despite their not insubstantial differences, some commonalities distinguish these
forms of realism from the “naïve” realism that is often taken to represent all realist ontol-
ogies (Alvesson & Sköldberg, 2010; Maxwell, 2012). First, many deny that humans are
capable of direct, purely objective knowledge of the world (i.e., they combine ontologi-
cal realism with some variety of epistemological subjectivism). Second, most hold that
mental states, as well as institutions or other entities whose existence depends on mental
states (a classic example being money), are real, just as sea anemones, bicycles, and
protons are real. Third, many would readily agree that (social) scientific institutions and
traditions are historically contingent or “constructed,” though they would deny that this
necessarily discredits or relativises all knowledge produced by these traditions. Fourth,
they acknowledge that there are cases where social scientific theories and practices affect
the behaviour of the entities under investigation such that realism remains compatible
with individual, social, and disciplinary reflexivity.
Tracking alongside these realist ontologies are new materialist modes of analysis.
Among continental philosophers and social scientists there has been a resurgence of
interest in the materiality of bodies, the philosophy of biology and nature, biopolitics,
bioethics, and the natural sciences in general (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; Lock &
Farquhar, 2007). Within these disciplines, human bodies are increasingly treated as full-
blooded material entities, rather than sites for the inscription of discourse and power
(Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). Material practices and states of everyday life, such as
eating, sleeping, playing, mobility, exercising, and aging, have come under close scru-
tiny as their intersections with geopolitical and socioeconomic forces and their capacity
to shape contingent bodies and subjectivities have been recognised (Lock & Farquhar,
2007). As a result, aspects of embodied interaction that lie outside of discourse have
become increasingly important in a range of social scientific fields. For example, theo-
rists of “affect” (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2004) argue that the “body has a grammar
of its own that cannot be fully captured in language” (Shouse, 2005, para. 5). Affect theo-
rists draw on Spinoza, Whitehead, James, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari, as well as
developments in psychology and neuroscience, to distinguish between emotions, which
are subjective and signifying, and affects, which are non-cognitive, non-signifying “pre-
subjective intensities” (Thrift, 2004, p. 58). Finally, social and political theory has been
stretched beyond its habitual anthropocentrism by authors such as Jane Bennet (2010a,
2010b), who explore new ways of conceptualising non-human “things” in and of them-
selves. “I’m in search of a materialism,” Bennett (2010b) declares, “in which matter is an
active principle and, although it inhabits us and our inventions, also acts as an outside or
alien power” (p. 47).
Importantly, although many working in these newly emergent realist and materialist
paradigms are keenly aware of the limits of the “linguistic turn,” the turn back to matter
has not typically come at the expense of interest in subjectivity and discursivity. In fact,
some of the most innovative contributions have focused on conceptual mélanges of the
material and the discursive whereby texts, discourses, bodies, affects, technologies,
62 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

non-human “things,” and physical and social contexts combine to create hybrid entities
and novel conceptions of subjectivity, identity, and agency (see Duff, 2014, pp. 27–35).
For example, Haraway’s (1991) figure of the “cyborg,” of “theorized and fabricated
hybrids of machine and organism,” has been called upon to disrupt traditional naturalis-
tic feminist identities, and their basis in “leaky distinction[s] between human and animal,
organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical” (pp. 150–151). Similarly,
Bruno Latour (1993, 2005), among other actor-network theorists, has reconsidered the
nature of entities and the locations of agency by exploring the material linkages between
both human and non-human actors (or “actants”), which interact and negotiate with one
another in complex social and material networks. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
notion of the assemblage, and their analysis of the processes that drive the creation (i.e.,
“territorialisation”) and transformation or dissolution (i.e., “deterritorialisation”) of
assemblages, has inspired a number of new approaches to social science that emphasise
heterogeneity, fluidity, and processes of becoming (see Coleman & Ringrose, 2013;
Duff, 2014 for reviews).
The emergence of a host of new realist ontologies, and the concomitant turn to affect
and materiality that these ontologies have partially inspired across the social sciences,
provides a useful intellectual and epistemological context in which to approach
DeLanda’s assemblage theory and the model of social complexity this theory evinces.
Mindful of recent developments in philosophy, social theory, and the natural and social
sciences, DeLanda’s assemblage theory provides a syncretic model of the ways biologi-
cal, material, and/or physical processes intersect with social, discursive, and/or political
processes in the formation of complex human (and nonhuman) systems. DeLanda (2006,
pp. 3–7) is keenly aware of contemporary developments in science and technology stud-
ies, in physics and mathematics, just as he is interested in the recent turn to materialist
modes of analysis across the human and social sciences. DeLanda draws from each of
these theoretical and empirical developments in the course of describing a novel theory
of the assemblage to guide innovative empirical studies of social complexity. It is on the
basis of this theoretical and empirical bricolage that we would argue for the value of
DeLanda’s assemblage theory for theoretical psychologists interested in drawing on
recent developments in, for example, affect theory, science and technology studies,
actor-network theory, feminism, and new materialisms in order to generate new modes
of psychological inquiry. Without ignoring the important differences of theoretical and
empirical orientation that distinguish these varied fields of inquiry (Brown, 2010),
DeLanda’s model of the assemblage provides a useful point of entry into these fields,
along with novel methods and concepts for empirical research. We will now briefly
review DeLanda’s assemblage theory before assessing the particular “image of the psy-
chological” that may be derived from it.

An outline of DeLanda’s assemblage theory

DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage theory is explicitly premised on a realist ontology in
which entities at every level of complex, multi-scaled human worlds are treated as
“wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts” (p. 5). As a result,
individuals may be regarded as assemblages of sub-personal components, such as sense
Price-Robertson and Duff 63

impressions, ideas, habits, and skills; social groups, networks, and organisations are
assemblages of individuals, norms, habits, and customs; governments are assemblages of
multiple forms of organisation; towns and cities are assemblages of individuals, social
networks, organisations, and various forms of infrastructure; and nations are assem-
blages of towns, cities, and geo-political regions (DeLanda, 2006, pp. 4–5). No individ-
ual level or instance of the assemblage, whether individual, group, network, region,
space, or organisational entity, can be reduced to the sum of its parts, just as each level
incorporates the emergent properties of the level immediately producing it (e.g., social
groups are a function of the assembling of individual bodies).
More directly, DeLanda (2008) characterises all assemblages according to two
“dimensions”: one identifying the “role which the different components of an assem-
blage may play, a role which can be either material or expressive” (p. 253); and a second
axis comprising varied processes which determine either “the emergent identity of the
assemblage” or its destabilisation “opening the assemblage to change” (p. 253). In each
respect, assemblages have material dimensions or components (e.g., spaces, objects,
technologies, bodies), and expressive ones (e.g., identities, signs, affects, desires). While
all assemblages have material and expressive functions, providing, incidentally, a means
of distinguishing social, biological, political, and economic assemblages from one
another, DeLanda argues that these dimensions are rarely differentiated clearly enough
that their effects may be readily determined. DeLanda (2006) adds that material and
expressive effects “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 capac-
ities” (p. 12). Hence, for example, an organisational assemblage will likely comprise
entities performing material roles (e.g., human bodies, physical labour, tools) and com-
ponents playing expressive roles (e.g., conversations, rules, organisational mores),
although the precise roles these entities perform will be dependent on interactions
between all entities immanent to that assemblage. This simply means that the analysis of
any given assemblage ought to prioritise the study of capacities and functions (DeLanda,
2006, pp. 10–12) as a way of determining the range of entities that may be said to com-
prise that assemblage. It also means that one must remain sensitive to the ways material
and expressive functions may merge, evolve, or be exchanged between entities and
forces as they encounter one another in an assemblage. As a result, the expressive com-
ponents of an organisational assemblage, to return to the current example, cannot be
reduced simply to language and symbols as there are many forms of bodily expression
and behaviour that are not linguistic, but express meaning nonetheless (e.g., posture,
dress, acts of subordination or insubordination). These expressive and material aspects,
and the means of their circulation and commingling, express the first axis or dimension
of the assemblage.
The second dimension emphasises the generative processes through which entities
emerge and maintain their identities within assemblages, as well as the processes that
transform these entities. These generative processes “either stabilise the identity of an
assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness
of its boundaries, or destabilise it” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 12). Borrowing terms from
Deleuze and Guattari (1987), DeLanda (2006, p. 12) adds that processes of territorialisa-
tion work to stabilise the assemblage’s identity, while processes of deterritorialisation
64 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

transform the assemblage in the expression of new functions, capacities, forms, and/or
boundaries. Ian Buchanan (2000) offers a range of additional insights into the ways pro-
cesses of territorialisation and deterritorialisation combine in the formation of assem-
blages. Buchanan (2000) argues that assemblages are created in two distinct operations
“that logically succeed one another but in actual fact take place simultaneously” (p. 120).
The first operation entails an “autonomous process of selection,” a “grouping together”
of heterogeneous elements. The second involves the “consolidation” of this selection and
the “actualisation of the potential” effected in the connections and flows created between
these consolidated elements (Buchanan, 2000, pp. 120–121). The actualisation of poten-
tial—understood as the release of affect or force in the grouping together of entities—
explains the active and autonomous character of assemblages. It also explains why
assemblages should not be understood as a composite of forces that may somehow be
disassembled to reveal each constituent element. On the contrary, assemblages are
“intensive multiplicities” whereby each assembled element is transformed in its relations
with other elements such that it no longer makes sense to speak of constituent parts
(Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 132). Caroline Williams (2010) provides a useful summary
of the relationality that characterises all assemblages when she notes that the “relation is
literally a ‘taking in hand’, a production of something that did not exist before and which,
through the process of relation, becomes an aspect of that thing’s existence” (p. 249). In
other words, bodies, signs, and objects are not folded into a pre-existent entity, but rather
contribute their affective and relational force to the ongoing modification of that
assemblage.
Having briefly reviewed how assemblages may be characterised, and some of the
ways they emerge in social life, we should now like to explore DeLanda’s analysis of
how the notion of the assemblage may be used to study social complexity. Following
DeLanda’s lead we will focus on how assemblage theory furnishes a novel realist ontol-
ogy to guide empirical inquiry, along with the advantages and limitations of this ontol-
ogy. To this end, we will first examine the main features of DeLanda’s “social realist”
ontology, including his analysis of the exteriority of relations, anti-essentialism, and the
modes of causal explanation that follow from social realism. We will then consider how
these ontological investments evince a new “image of the psychological” and the ways
this image may be put to work in novel studies of social psychology.

Social realism
In the first paragraph of A New Philosophy of Society, DeLanda announces his commit-
ment to a realist social ontology and his interest in overturning the ontological differen-
tiation of subjects and objects, natures and cultures that mark the faultlines between
realism and constructivism throughout the social sciences (Brown & Stenner, 2009).
According to a realist “social ontology,” social entities are not simply treated as manifes-
tations of mind or consciousness, but are regarded as every bit as real as physical entities.
As DeLanda (2006) explains,

a realist approach to social ontology must assert the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions
we have of them. To say that social entities have a reality that is conception-independent is simply
Price-Robertson and Duff 65

to assert that the theories, models and classifications we use to study them may be objectively
wrong, that is, that they may fail to capture the real history and internal dynamics of those entities.
(p. 1)

Of course, an immediate objection comes to mind when one asserts that social entities
are autonomous from the conceptions people have of them: human beings are reflexive
creatures. Thus, the labels, taxonomies, and theories humans develop to account for
social life can affect, or sometimes even create, their own referents. For example, while
the behaviour of a tropical cyclone is in no way influenced by its being labelled as either
“Category 3” or “Category 4,” the teenager labelled as “antisocial” or “delinquent” may
internalise these appellations, perhaps fatalistically accepting them or even wearing them
as a badge of honour. In either case, these labels may lead to an intensification of the
original “problem behaviours.” That the meaning of words can, in certain instances, be
shown to moderate the behaviour of their referents is a central insight of social construc-
tivism. Indeed, this insight has now been confirmed in such a variety of circumstances,
and in relation to so many different social problems that the basic premises of construc-
tivism are today denied by only the most incorrigible of realists. How, then, does DeLanda
incorporate reflexivity into his realist philosophy?
In addressing this problem, DeLanda gives the example of a woman fleeing terrible
conditions in her home country who modifies her behaviour to ensure that she fits the
criteria for the designation of “female refugee” at her intended destination. Though this
is clearly an example of an individual reflexively responding to a socio-political catego-
risation, DeLanda (2006) reasons that:

accepting that the referents of some terms may in fact be moving targets does not undermine
social realism: to explain the case of the female refugee one has to invoke, in addition to her
awareness of the meaning of the term “female refugee,” the objective existence of a whole set
of institutional organizations (courts, immigration agencies, airports and seaports, detention
centres) institutional norms and objects (laws, binding court decisions, passports), and
institutional practices (confining, monitoring, interrogating), forming the context in which the
interactions between categories and their referents take place. In other words, the problem for
a realist social ontology arises here not because the meanings of terms shape the very perception
that social scientists have of their referents, creating a vicious circle, but only in some special
cases and in the context of institutions and practices that are not reducible to meanings. (p. 2)

In fact, DeLanda uses the example of the female refugee to explain why modes of social
analysis that privilege discourse and power are inadequate, on their own, for explaining
social complexity. For such forms of analysis invariably fail to accommodate the mate-
rial and affective practices that shape the experience of becoming, for example, a
“female refugee.” Having demonstrated how realism may be rendered consistent with
constructivism (in the form of social realism), DeLanda goes on to examine a range of
problems that follow from this settlement. If one accepts that heterogeneous assem-
blages are real entities, one must inevitably ask: what makes an assemblage? Can any
conceivable group of things be an assemblage? What marks the shift from group-of-
things, or aggregate, to real individual entity, or assemblage? Thinking through this
question, Graham Harman (2008) offers an absurd collection of entities that it would be
66 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

difficult to ever imagine comprising an assemblage: “the Pacific Ocean, Angela Merkel,
and the set of all coins and beans that ever have existed or will exist” (p. 371). Although
“bizarre scenarios might be concocted in which this offbeat assemblage might stake its
claim in the world” (Harman, 2008, p. 371), why shouldn’t these items be regarded as
comprising an assemblage?
DeLanda responds to objections like Harman’s by positing three criteria for determin-
ing what counts as an assemblage. The first is the fact that assemblages are “causal
agents capable of acting back on the materials out of which they are formed” (2006, p.
34). In other words, the components of the assemblage can be affected by the whole.
Take the example of a psychiatric clinic as an institutional assemblage. If this clinic is
well respected, it accrues a capacity to confer prestige on the professionals who work or
are trained within it. Hence, the very affective, social, and material attributes that com-
prise individuals within the “clinic assemblage” may be transformed by their participa-
tion within this assemblage. The second criterion for identifying or characterising
assemblages is the presence of emergent properties, insofar as assemblages can causally
affect other assemblages at their own scale of social reality. Hence, the clinic exists as
part of a population of other clinics and psychiatric establishments, and at this social
level the clinic has emergent capacities (such as prestige) that cannot be attributed to any
of the material or expressive elements from which it is comprised. As a result, the pres-
ence of the clinic in a specific neighbourhood may inhibit the formation of other clinics
in the same neighbourhood, evincing an emergent property that may not be traced to any
individual entity within the clinic assemblage. The final criterion describes what DeLanda
(2006) calls “redundant causality” (p. 37), meaning that components of the assemblage
are “redundant” in that they could be replaced by other actors, entities, or forces without
compromising the assemblage’s overall identity. Redundant causality indicates that any
effort to explain the clinic’s capacity to generate social effects (e.g., the ability to confer
prestige, or the ability to inhibit the formation of rival clinics) should not resort to a
higher, or more structural, scale of social reality. For example, while it may be tempting
to attribute the clinic’s prestige to a particularly influential psychiatrist, the fact that the
clinic may still maintain its prestige even if that psychiatrist is replaced demonstrates that
at some point prestige has become associated with the clinic itself, rather than any of its
constitutive components. It is difficult to imagine how Harman’s hypothetical Ocean-
Merkel-coins-beans assemblage could meet any of these three criteria, which merely
restates DeLanda’s point that assemblages ought to be treated as real entities with real
effects, such that they may be distinguished from groups, structures, or aggregates.

Relations of exteriority
For DeLanda, assemblage theory offers a way of thinking about complex social relations
that avoids some deeply entrenched and inadequate modes of thought that have come to
characterise much contemporary analysis in the social sciences. One of the most perva-
sive of these modes is the tendency to view the social world through what DeLanda
(2006) calls the “organismic metaphor” (p. 9). In its least sophisticated forms, the meta-
phor of the organism is applied literally to human societies. In the works of Herbert
Spencer or Talcott Parsons, for instance, social actors and institutions are compared to
Price-Robertson and Duff 67

individual cells or bodily organs, contributing to the harmonious, integrated, homeostatic

functioning of the whole social body. Although functionalism has long been out of vogue,
DeLanda (2006) argues that the organismic metaphor still exerts considerable influence
across the social sciences, albeit in a subtler form:

This version involves not an analogy but a general theory about the relations between parts and
wholes, wholes that constitute a seamless totality or that display an organic unity. The basic
concept in this theory is what we may call relations of interiority: the component parts are
constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole. A part detached from
such a whole ceases to be what it is, since being this particular part is one of its constitutive
properties. (p. 9)

According to DeLanda (2006, p. 10), the problem with focusing solely on relations of
interiority is the presupposition that components of the social world are “fused together
in a seamless web” whereby they have no possibility of existing outside of the relations
of which they are a part. Such logic necessarily forecloses the possibility of analysing
complex interactions and changes between component parts—something that is essential
for an adequate explanation of emergence, change, and contingency in social life—
because the logic of interiority asserts that relations merely reflect the innate (or “given”)
properties of the entities so associated. In response to this situation, DeLanda (2006)
distinguishes between (a) the properties of an entity, which are given and (b) an entity’s
capacity to interact, which is not given, and may go unexercised as there is “no way to
tell in advance what way a given entity may affect or be affected by numerous other enti-
ties” (p. 10). On the basis of this distinction, DeLanda (2006) concludes that “being a
part of a whole involves the exercise of a part’s capacities but is not a constitutive prop-
erty of it” (p. 10). Conversely, the properties of a whole cannot be reduced to those of its
component parts, as they are the result not of the components’ properties, but rather the
exercise of the components’ capacities expressed in relations.
The alternative to organic totalities is, of course, the assemblage, which may be char-
acterised by relations of exteriority. The principle of exteriority maintains that an entity’s
capacities emerge as a function of its relations with other entities, where these relations
have their own ontological integrity. Relations are not a function of the properties of an
entity, in other words, but are “external” to (or ontologically independent of) these prop-
erties. It follows that relations must be regarded as ontologically distinct from their
terms, or the entities, ideas, or objects that are party to these relations. To argue that rela-
tions are determined by their relata, the basic premise of interiority, is to argue that “real
entities” contain within themselves the universe of potential associations to which they
may be party. This places relations and their terms within an “organic unity” (Hayden,
1995, p. 285), effectively foreclosing difference and the creation of novel relations
between entities. Indeed, if relations are determined by their terms, “there is nothing to
distinguish the term from the relation” (Hayden, 1995, p. 285) and the ontological sig-
nificance of relations is lost. DeLanda seeks to revive this ontological significance by
insisting on the exteriority of relations, which has an immediate epistemological and
empirical corollary. Subject to the exteriority of relations “a component part of an assem-
blage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its
68 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

interactions are different” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 10). According to the principle of interior-
ity, while a component’s interactions may differ as it forms new relations, these interac-
tions are determined by that component’s innate properties, whereas the principle of
exteriority maintains that such interactions are a function of a component’s encounters or
associations. Interactions and capacities are emergent properties of relations and associa-
tions between component parts, rather than mere expressions of their properties. In this
way, assemblage theory is able to explain emergence without sacrificing the autonomy,
or uniqueness, of discrete objects.

Anti-essentialism
Essentialism is another entrenched mode of thought that DeLanda seeks to challenge. He
sees this as one of the most important tasks of assemblage theory given that ontological
realism is often rejected for its apparent endorsement of essentialism, with critics assert-
ing that the mind-independent entities proposed by realists require the existence of defin-
ing essences. DeLanda (2006) concedes that many realists (and non-realists alike) do
indeed subscribe to a subtle form of essentialism, what he calls “taxonomic essentialism”
in which authors “reify the general categories produced by their classifications” (p. 26).
This form of essentialism relies on a post-hoc logic, which starts with a finished product
(a chemical compound, like oxygen, or a biological species, like “rabbit”) and proceeds
to identify the properties that characterise this product before declaring these properties
to be its essence. The problem with such logic is that it ignores the historical processes
(cosmological, evolutionary, and/or cultural) that produce individual entities. All enti-
ties, from molecules to rabbits to supernovas, are subject to forces of territorialisation
and deterritorialisation, and so all must be considered contingent and precarious. Thus,
in assemblage theory, analysis based on logical differentiation is replaced by analysis of
the historical differentiation of entities.
This historical view leads DeLanda (2006) to propose that “the ontological status of
assemblages, large or small, is always that of unique, singular individuals” (p. 28). Thus,
for example,

a biological species is an individual entity, as unique and singular as the organisms that compose
it, but larger in spatio-temporal scale … individual organisms are component parts of a larger
individual whole, not the particular members of a general category or natural kind. (DeLanda,
2006, p. 27)

Like any individual rabbit, the species “rabbit” was born at a particular historical moment
(i.e., upon achieving reproductive isolation) and will eventually die (i.e., become extinct).
Furthermore, the defining properties of rabbits are always contingent and evolving. This
suggests that there is no “real” rabbit in the metaphysical abstract, but only the objective
reality of large populations of individuals forming an assemblage, collectively interacting,
reproducing, and evolving over time. DeLanda (2006) maintains that viewing all assem-
blages as unique, singular individuals “allows us to assert that all these individual entities
have an objective existence independently of our minds (or of our conceptions of them)
without any commitment to essences or reified generalities” (p. 40). Once historical
Price-Robertson and Duff 69

processes are used to explain the synthesis of assemblages, there is no reason to appeal to
the enduring “essences” of essentialism. As such, assemblage theory rejects essentialism
in favour of the empirical study of social, biological, cultural, historical, political, and/or
economic processes by which actual assemblages emerge.

Causal mechanisms
Assemblages are complex entities involving myriad causal relations between the entities
that comprise them, along with the yet-larger assemblages of which they function as
component parts. DeLanda devotes considerable energy to differentiating and describing
causal mechanisms and their place within assemblage theory. This effort is part of
DeLanda’s broader interest in elucidating the mechanisms underpinning the synthesis of
emergent properties characteristic of the production of assemblages. DeLanda (2006)
regards this task as crucial given that “the shortcomings of linear causality have often
been used to justify the belief in inextricable organic unities” (p. 19). Models of linear
causality, where the same cause always leads to the same effect, are good at describing
atomistic events, such as a collision between two billiard balls. However, things become
substantially more complex as soon as one begins to think in terms of entities composed
of populations of interacting, heterogeneous parts. Hence,

(the) internal organization [of assemblages] may, for example, determine that an external cause
of large intensity will produce a low-intensity effect (or no effect at all) and vice versa, that
small causes may have large effects. These are cases of nonlinear causality, defined by
thresholds below or above which external causes fail to produce an effect, that is, thresholds
determining the capacities of an entity to be causally affected. In some cases, the capacity to be
affected may gain the upper hand to the point that external causes become mere triggers or
catalysts for an effect. (DeLanda, 2006, p. 20)

Thus, in addition to linear causality, DeLanda offers two main forms of nonlinear causal-
ity: “catalysis” and “statistical causality.” Catalysis (or “catalytic causality”) violates the
notion of “same cause, same effect” by proposing that different causes can lead to the
same effects, and that the same cause can lead to different effects, all depending on the
relational organisation of the entities involved. Statistical causality violates the notion
that certain causes “always” lead to certain effects, and is necessary when considering
populations of entities, which, outside of the controlled conditions of laboratories or
simulations, are constantly subject to multiple and contingent interacting forces. For
example, a statement such as “smoking causes cancer” must be qualified by considera-
tion of the genetic predispositions of the population of smokers, along with factors, such
as exercise, diet, education, and access to health care, that may moderate the effects of
smoking. Thus, “the most one can say about external causes in a population is that they
increase the probability of the occurrence of a given effect” (DeLanda, 2006, p. 21).
Indeed, assemblage theory favours a non-linear, probabilistic model that traces interac-
tions between diverse variables in complex populations in order to more accurately iden-
tify which particular mix of biological, genetic, social, and/or environmental factors are
most commonly involved in the emergence of a given effect.
70 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

Towards an “image of the psychological” after the

assemblage
Having outlined some of the main components of DeLanda’s assemblage theory, we are
now in a position to consider what this theory may offer to the discipline of psychology.
The first point to note is that assemblage theory provides a method of conceptualising
social reality that avoids privileging either the individual as a discrete unit of analysis, as
in “methodological individualism” and micro-level analysis, or social structures and
“society,” as in holism and macro-level analyses (Brown & Stenner, 2009; Duff, 2014).
Beyond “decentering the subject,” assemblage theory also avoids the reification of
macro-level concepts such as “structure,” “context,” and “society” that continue to
organise and inform research in the psychological sciences (Brown, 2010, pp. 105–107).
Without presupposing particular social “structures” or modes of organisation, assem-
blage theory avails a range of ontological and methodological tools necessary for a full
social, historical, and political account of how social forms emerge over time, how they
are made stable, and how they are transformed, including the circumstances of their
abolition (see Duff, 2014, pp. 197–199). As Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005)
argue, “most empirical work is lashed to a relatively small number of levels—body,
neighbourhood, urban, regional, national, and global—once these layers are presup-
posed, it is difficult not to think in terms of social relations and institutional arrangements
that somehow fit their contours” (p. 422). While DeLanda’s treatment of the assemblage
acknowledges the realities of scale in social experience, he stresses that the properly
empirical task is to demonstrate how assemblages of differing scales are actually pro-
duced (or made) in a given set of circumstances, rather than to treat scalar units such as
“family,” “community,” “city,” or “region” as necessary methodological presuppositions
for empirical inquiry. The task is to account for the ways assemblages of differing scalar
properties and effects are made in social praxis.
Perhaps more radically however, assemblage theory takes the social sciences beyond
the “social” into the vexed terrain of the “natural,” the “genetic,” and the “biological”
(Shaviro, 2009). By asserting that assemblages exist at all levels of reality, not simply
those that social scientists have traditionally deemed important, DeLanda notes that the
biological, genetic, and/or neurological processes that interest psychologists, for exam-
ple, have their own contingent histories that betray the activity of complex social, politi-
cal, and cultural processes. Various psychological schools that purport to account for
entities at different sociospatial scales (e.g., the biopsychosocial model), still tend to
remain bound to ontologies that privilege individual, largely static entities, and simple,
linear models of causation to explain relations between these entities (Brown & Stenner,
2009, pp. 203–206). DeLanda’s brand of realism avoids the reductionism of privileging
a single layer of reality to which all others are necessarily secondary or derivative. As we
have outlined, the basic unit of reality is the assemblage, and real assemblages occupy all
levels of this reality (see also Duff, 2014). An example should help to clarify the implica-
tions of this logic for psychologists.
Imagine a consultation between a clinical psychologist and a client presenting with
symptoms of trauma. The norepinephrine in the client’s brain, their memory of a trau-
matic event, the family and social dynamics that form contexts for the recollection of this
Price-Robertson and Duff 71

event, the discussion about this memory between client and psychologist, the online
copy of DSM V that the psychologist consults to confirm a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD), the health clinic in which the consultation takes place, the men-
tal health system of which the clinic is a component: these are all real entities. The
memory cannot be explained away as a by-product of brain chemicals, even if norepi-
nephrine and other neurotransmitters play a necessary role in its emergence. Likewise,
the conversation between client and psychologist cannot be reduced to a local manifesta-
tion of a broader discourse or structure, even if the institutions of the mental health sys-
tem are causal agents capable of acting back on the materials out of which they are
formed. The point is that no individual actor, force, or condition evoked in this example
ought to be regarded as primary, as the necessary and sufficient cause of the emergence
of PTSD for which all other conditions play only a moderating role. Moreover, the task
should not be to articulate which of these “moderating variables” plays a greater or lesser
role in the onset of PTSD, as if the activity of each such entity might be neatly calibrated
such that their activity may be more effectively curtailed.
According to DeLanda, we should treat the PTSD described in this example as a social,
material, and affective expression of an assemblage of forces acting within a complex
network of actors and institutional arrangements to produce particular events, memories,
feeling-states, an impulse to seek treatment, the technical skills adequate for the accurate
diagnosis of a treatable condition, and the means of managing this condition. The logic of
DeLanda’s assemblage theory would treat PTSD less as a discrete effect of isolatable
events and neurological processes, and more as an emergent property of diverse entities
acting together. Such logic does not disregard the impact of traumatic events or the activ-
ity of neurological processes in the experience of PTSD, it simply argues that a much
wider cast of entities, forces, and agencies must be acknowledged in order to account for
this experience and its successful management. Crucially, assemblage theory proposes a
series of novel units of analysis for the investigation of problems like PTSD, which move
beyond the “individual,” “discourse,” or “institutions” to enable far more comprehensive
studies of the ways psychological problems are experienced, diagnosed, treated, and made
sense of in “real experience.” It is for this reason that assemblage theory is often described
as an “expanded empiricism” (Massumi, 2002), for its interest in including a wider field
of bodies, forces, and processes in the study of complex social problems.
We would argue that this attempt to reinvent (or “radicalise”) empiricism lies at the
heart of DeLanda’s social realist ontology. To persist with the example of PTSD,
DeLanda’s realist ontology gives us the capacity to assert that some theories, models, or
classifications are better than others at capturing the dynamics of the various entities at
play in this scenario. A theory that reduces our client’s problem to the activity of various
brain chemicals fails to capture enough of these dynamics to account for the variety of
entities that are actually involved in the production (or expression) of PTSD within a
given assemblage. It is critical to add, of course, that an account that seeks to explain
disorders such as PTSD as “mere effects” of social structure or discourse offers equally
limited insights into the array of entities involved in the expression of this condition.
DeLanda would argue that all of these entities act in the world, influencing one another
in ways that are often independent of any theories or conceptions we may have of them.
We might propose a theory that is oblivious to the real influence of norepinephrine on the
72 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

manifestation of traumatic memories. It is possible that we could misrepresent the ways

in which the DSM V taxonomy mediates conversations between psychologists and cli-
ents, or shapes the client’s memory of a traumatic event. Our theoretical perspective may
lead us to privilege the significance of family and social dynamics in ways that fail to
account for the physiological and psychological effects of traumatic events. A more com-
prehensive and useful account of PTSD ought to commence with the assemblage itself as
the basic unit of analysis in order to trace the diversity of objects, actors, interactions,
institutions, and processes involved in the expression of trauma and its conversion into a
treatable condition within a given mental health care system.
To speak of dynamics and relations between assemblages is to speak of causation.
Like critical realism, assemblage theory encourages not simply the examination of a
network of interacting agents, but also the explication of causal mechanisms associated
with the relational capacities of these agents. While interpretivists see causal relations as
reducible to conceptual or linguistic categories, and positivists see them as an “observed
constant conjunction” between events, realists see causality as “an objective relation of
production between events” (DeLanda, 2011, p. 385). This position arguably provides a
way out of interminable debates within psychology regarding the causes of psychologi-
cal disorders, and the extent to which such disorders result from natural, genetic, social,
or environmental conditions. The problem with much contemporary analysis of causality
in psychology is the temptation to quantify and ascribe causal responsibility to individual
actors, objects, or factors, such that one might identify the degree of variance attributable
to these factors (see also Hacking, 2001). This logic is premised on the assumption that
individual actors, objects, or “factors” may be statistically abstracted from their contexts
in order to probabilistically determine their contribution to the particular state of affairs
under investigation. Ever more sophisticated statistical techniques have emerged within
psychology to express this logic (see Latour, 2005), leading psychologists to apportion
causal significance to identifiable variables involved in the temporal and spatial produc-
tion of phenomena like PTSD. Without ignoring the significance of these kinds of stud-
ies, they haven’t fared especially well in the treatment of counterfactuals, such as the vast
majority of instances in which traumatic experiences do not produce PTSD.
Assemblage theory, in contrast, asserts that all action, all phenomena, are an effect of
assemblages rather than individuals, actors, or entities. The assemblage generates the cause
just as it expresses the effect. It makes little sense, in other words, to attempt to determine
the degree of causality attributable to any one body, actor, or object within a social field,
because assemblages produce activity as an emergent effect of all associations immanent
to them. Activities like PTSD (understood precisely as activities because of the array of
actors at work in their production) are the function of interactions between diverse human
and nonhuman forces, some of which are present “in the effect” just as others reach back
in temporal and spatial folds to reveal a host of antecedent activities (see Bennett, 2010a,
pp. 1–6). According to this logic, PTSD ought to be regarded as a relational effect of par-
ticular interactions, rather than a simple conjunction of neuro-transmitters and traumatic
events. What all this means is that ascribing causal responsibility to individual entities,
rather than assemblages, is bound to produce errors. More charitably, one might say that it
simply fails to explain enough of observable experience. What needs to be explained is
how problems like PTSD emerge in particular kinds of relations. Another key question is
Price-Robertson and Duff 73

to enquire into what kinds of associations, between what kinds of actors, objects, entities,
bodies, and forces, are involved in the production of these problems, and which of these
agents may be mobilised in the design of interventions (or treatments) for their resolution.
The first step in addressing these questions ought to involve careful empirical study of
particular assemblages in particular contexts, in order to generate robust empirical accounts
of the specific associations at work in the production of conditions or events like PTSD. We
would add that such analysis has important implications for the ongoing development of
systems and modalities for treating conditions like PTSD. DeLanda’s work would suggest
that the entire assemblage must be understood such that effective interventions may be
described for transforming social systems in ways that limit the expression of trauma.
Rather than identifying the relative responsibility of individual objects, actors, or forces,
the goal ought to be to understand the range of associations active in the production of
traumatic events and their subsequent instantiation in the diagnosable condition “PTSD.”
Assemblage theory would suggest that these associations must be transformed in any effort
to reduce the prevalence of PTSD, rather than individual entities alone. The goal must be
to transform the ways different actors, entities, and/or forces affect one another in the event
of their association, such that the production of PTSD may be reduced within a given social
field (Duff, 2014). Understanding how myriad human and non-human entities affect one
another in associations which produce trauma should reveal more about the causes of prob-
lems like PTSD than attempts to understand the role of individual actors alone.

Conclusions
DeLanda’s assemblage theory evokes an “image of the psychological” concerned with
tracing associations between “heterogenous parts”—bodies, ideas, processes, entities,
signs, and events—rather than the functions, capacities, or peculiarities of individual
“psyches” or personalities (see Brown, 2012, pp. 143–145). In so doing, assemblage the-
ory encompasses the lessons of the linguistic turn and its sensitivity to the ways categories
of experiences, and the knowledges derived from them, are structured in discourse and
language, along with an explicit acknowledgement of the variety of social, affective, and
material forces that are equally involved in the emergence of these knowledges (see
Anderson et al., 2012). Assemblage theory may, indeed, be said to offer a bridge between
the discursive and non-discursive aspects of psychological experience, presenting new
avenues for engagement between theoretical psychology and more mainstream schools
such as social, clinical, and applied psychology (Tissaw & Osbeck, 2007). As an example,
by advancing novel accounts of causality and the role of affective, material, and semiotic
forces in the emergence of complex social systems, DeLanda’s assemblage theory offers
new directions for psychological discussions of non-linear dynamics and complexity
(e.g., in contemporary family systems analysis). More broadly, many of the constructs
used in psychology, particularly in the field of mental health (e.g., various diagnostic cat-
egories, notions of recovery and resilience), can usefully be seen as effects of assemblages
of both material (e.g., bodily states, physical contexts, institutional structures) and discur-
sive (e.g., cognitions, norms, professional discourses) elements (Duff, 2014).
Understood in these ways, DeLanda’s work may be said to offer a process-relational
foundation for psychology, to return to the theme of Brown and Stenner’s (2009) recent
74 Theory & Psychology 26(1)

work. It is surprising that the analysis of heterogeneous entities or associations, such as

hybrids, cyborgs, actor-networks, or assemblages, has not been more readily adopted by
philosophically inclined psychologists, especially at a time when “psychologists and
social scientists concerned with the psychological dimensions are once again coming to
recognise the need to reflect deeply on their epistemological and ontological commit-
ments [in their search for] modes of thought that do not bifurcate nature into irreconcil-
able subjective and objective components” (Brown & Stenner, 2009, p. 12). While an
interest in avoiding the bifurcation of the subjective and objective aspects of psychologi-
cal inquiry may presently manifest only at the margins of the discipline, the search for a
means of transcending the antinomies of nature and culture, body and mind, subject and
object, lies at the heart of complexity studies and non-linear dynamics, the affective turn,
new materialisms, science and technologies studies, and most contemporary feminisms
(see Bryant et al., 2012; Coole & Frost, 2010 for reviews). We would conclude that
DeLanda’s assemblage theory provides a means of synthesising many of the key devel-
opments in these diverse fields for psychologists interested in exploring how issues of
ontology, emergence, and contingency may reframe the study of psychological prob-
lems. By presenting philosophically nuanced ideas in ways that ought to be accessible to
theoretically inclined psychologists, DeLanda’s assemblage theory makes questions of
ontology, method, and epistemology more relevant to the mainstream, finding common
ground and enhancing dialogue between theoretical, social, and clinical psychologists
(Tissaw & Osbeck, 2007). It may not be too fanciful to argue that assemblage theory may
one day inspire a novel set of mainstream psychological frameworks and taxonomies—a
form of “assemblage therapy” perhaps—just as White and Epston (1990) have demon-
strated with their Foucauldian inspired “narrative therapy.” More modestly however, we
would conclude that DeLanda’s assemblage theory charts a method by which psycholo-
gists may resume the task, recently neglected, of documenting the ways in which subjec-
tive and objective elements cohere in the articulations of psychological experience.

Acknowledgement
The authors acknowledge the valuable input of Professor Lenore Manderson.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

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Author biographies
Rhys Price-Robertson is a graduate student in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University,
Melbourne, Australia. His recent work utilizes assemblage theory and actor-network theory to
understand mental ill-health and recovery within the context of family life.
Cameron Duff is Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable
Organisation and Work at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His research explores the role
of social innovation and social entrepreneurship in responding to complex health and social prob-
lems in urban settings. His first book, Assemblages of Health: Deleuze’s Empiricism and the
Ethology of Life, was published in 2014 by Springer.