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Assemblages and actor-networks : rethinking socio-
material power, politics and space
Müller, Martin
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10.1111/gec3.12192
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Müller, M 2015, 'Assemblages and actor-networks : rethinking socio-material power, politics and space',
Geography Compass, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 27-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12192
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Geography Compass 9/1 (2015): 27–41, 10.1111/gec3.12192
Assemblages and Actor-networks: Rethinking Socio-material
Power, Politics and Space
Martin Müller
*
Universität Zürich and University of Birmingham
Abstract
Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory (ANT) have been at the forefront of a paradigm shift that
sees space and agency as the result of associating humans and non-humans to form precarious wholes. This
shift offers ways of rethinking the relations between power, politics and space from a more processual,
socio-material perspective. After sketching and comparing the concepts of the assemblage and the
actor-network, this paper reviews the current scholarship in human geography which clusters around
the four themes of deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation; power; materials, objects and technologies;
and topological space. Looking towards the future, it suggests that assemblage thinking and ANT would
benefit from exploring links with other social theories, arguing for a more sustained engagement with is-
sues of language and power, and affect and the body.
Assemblages and Actor-networks: New Paradigms?
If language, representation and discourse were the pet concepts of the 1990s, assemblage, actor-
networks and materiality might well be those of the 2000s. From geography’spreoccupation
with meaning in the wake of the cultural turn in the late 1980s, the pendulum has come full
circle with a return to a concern for materiality – objects, bodies and matter. Calls for
‘rematerializing geography’ have sounded throughout the sub-disciplines, in political geography
(Dittmer 2013a; Meehan et al. 2013; Squire 2014a), feminist geography (Colls 2012; Slocum
2008), urban geography (Lees 2002), social and cultural geography ( Jackson 2000; Whatmore
2006), resource geographies (Bakker and Bridge 2006) or GIScience (Leszczynski 2009). As-
semblage thinking and actor-network theory (ANT) have been at the forefront of this revalor-
isation of the material, or indeed the socio-material: the co-constitution between humans and
non-humans.
Both assemblage thinking and ANT have much to say about the spatial dimensions of power
and politics. That is because both approaches are concerned with why orders emerge in particu-
lar ways, how they hold together, somewhat precariously, how they reach across or mould space
and how they fall apart. These aspects render assemblage thinking and ANT of particular interest
not only to political geographers but indeed to anyone examining the exercise of power and
politics. Within political geography, there have recently been explicit calls for a broader move
towards socio-materiality, mobilising assemblages and actor-networks as concepts (Depledge
2014; Dittmer 2013a; Müller 2015).
Actor-network theory and assemblage thinking are now also finding a somewhat delayed and
cautious reception in fields such as international relations (IR) (e.g. Acuto and Curtis 2013; Barry
2013a; Best and Walters 2013; Büger and Gadinger 2007). It is interesting to note that some of
this is mediated through geography, for example in interventions from human geographers
(Barry 2013a) or scholar explicitly referencing geographical debates (Acuto and Curtis 2013).
© 2014 The Author(s)
Geography Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
In IR, too, politics and power are the bread-and-butter business of the discipline, and
assemblage thinking and ANT have been utilised to decentre reified totalities. They serve to
disassemble the black boxes of international politics – states and international organisations –
question the a priori of scales and interrogate the production of knowledge and expertise and
the enrolment of manifold technological devices in that process.
This article pursues three aims. First, it renders an introduction to assemblage thinking and
ANT, in particular to the aspects that relate to an understanding of power, politics and space.
Second, it reviews the state of the art of research in political geography that utilises these ap-
proaches, divided into four themes: deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation; power; materials, ob-
jects and technologies; and topological space. Given the numerous similarities between them,
the paper has opted to treat studies drawing on assemblage thinking and ANT together here,
duly noting the differences that exist between the two approaches. Third and last, it points to
barriers and paths not taken as avenues for further engagement.
Assemblage
Assemblage is a concept that goes back to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. Foreshadowed in Anti-Oedipus and its focus on desiring machines (Deleuze and
Guattari 1972, 1983), it was refined in subsequent publications, notably in their best known
work, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 1987). Deleuze defines an assemblage
as follows:
It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, rela-
tions between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’sonlyunityis
that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’.Itisneverfiliations which are important but al-
liances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind. (Deleuze
and Parnet 1987, 69 [1977])
1
In other words, assemblage is a mode of ordering heterogeneous entities so that they work
together for a certain time.
The English term ‘assemblage’ is the translation of the French original agencement. It captures
well that an assemblage/agencement consists of multiple, heterogeneous parts linked together
to form a whole – that an assemblage is relational. But the translation risks losing some conno-
tations of agencement, especially that of an arrangement that creates agency. For Deleuze and
Guattari, there are thus no pre-determined hierarchies, and there is no single organising princi-
ple behind assemblages (‘it is never filiations … these are not successions, lines of descent’), be it
capital or military might. All entities – humans, animals, things and matters – have the same on-
tological status to start with. However, as Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 167) remarks, ‘it is not that the
world is without strata, totally f lattened; rather, the hierarchies are not the result of substances
and their nature and value but of modes of organization of disparate substances’.
Although there have been attempts to construct an assemblage theory (DeLanda 2006),
Deleuze and Guattari have a much less grand agenda. For them, the concept of the assemblage
is a provisional analytical tool rather than a system of ideas geared towards an explanation that
would make it a theory. Assemblages have at least five constituent features:
1 Assemblages are relational. They are arrangements of different entities linked together to form
a new whole. The crucial thing to note here is that for Deleuze, assemblages consist of rela-
tions of exteriority. This means two things. First, it implies a certain autonomy of the terms
(people, objects, etc.) from the relations between them. Second, ‘the properties of the com-
ponent parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole’ (DeLanda 2006, 10).
28 Assemblages and Actor-networks
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Geography Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Geography Compass 9/1 (2015): 27–41, 10.1111/gec3.12192
2 Assemblages are productive. They produce new territorial organisations, new behaviours, new
expressions, new actors and new realities. This also means that they are not primarily mimetic;
they are not a representation of the world.
3 Assemblages are heterogeneous. There are no assumptions as to what can be related – humans,
animal, things and ideas – nor what is the dominant entity in an assemblage. As such, one can
also say they are socio-material, eschewing the nature–culture divide (Bennett 2010).
4 Assemblages are caught up in a dynamic of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.
Deterritorialisation/reterritorialisation is a central axis of an assemblage, where ‘reterritorialized
sides, … stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, … carry it away’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 88).
2
Assemblages establish territories as they emerge and hold together but
also constantly mutate, transform and break up.
5 Assemblages are desired. ‘Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that
are by nature fragmentary and fragmented’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 6).
3
Assemblages thus
have a corporeal component.
Deleuze and Guattari use Franz Kafka’s oeuvre to illustrate and refine their notion of the as-
semblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1975, 1986). Indeed, Kafka’s fragmentary novels Der Prozeß
[The Trial]andDas Schloß [The Castle] encapsulate most features of the assemblage and are recom-
mended reading for elucidating the highly abstract concept of the assemblage. In them, everything
seems linked to everything else: there are new, unexpected realities at each turn, entities congeal
just to fall apart in the next instance and desire to reach an elusive goal (the castle and the end of
the trial) recomposes them anew every time. Consider this vignette of the inside of the chimeric
castle as a metaphor for the assemblage, always leading on to new entities, but never revealing an
overarching organising principle or transcendental origin.
Barnabas is admitted into certain rooms, but they’re only a part of the whole, for there are barriers be-
hind which there are more rooms. Not that he’s actually forbidden to pass the barriers. … And you
mustn’t imagine that these barriers are a definite dividing-line. … There are barriers in the rooms that
he enters and they don’t look different from those that he hasn’t passed. So it can’t be assumed from the
outset that beyond those latter barriers are rooms of an essentially different kind from those in which
Barnabas has been. (The Castle – own translation from Kafka 1926)
4
The more the protagonist pushes to pin down the castle – to understand its logic and to meet
its representatives – the more it recedes, forever elusive. As soon as we pass one barrier, the next
one looms. Kafka also embraces topological conceptions of space, such as when two points at
opposite ends of the city turn out to be contiguous and linked through a door, epitomising
the idea of a folded or crumpled space (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 73; see also Serres and
Latour 1995, 60–64, 109–110).
Beyond literary fiction, however, the assemblage has also distinct utility for analysing the in-
terrelation between power, politics and space. While Deleuze and Guattari’swork‘is not politi-
cal philosophy in the sense that it provides tools for the justification or critique of political
institutions and processes, … it is a political ontology that provides tools to describe transforma-
tive, creative or deterritorializing forces and movements’ (Patton 2000, 9). As such, it has
sparked interest with political philosophers (Bennett 2010; Connolly 2011; DeLanda 2006;
Grosz 2008; Protevi 2009), but also lately with political geographers, who have appreciated it
for its concern with materiality and new ways of conceptualising power and space.
Assemblages and Actor-networks 29
© 2014 The Author(s)
Geography Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Geography Compass 9/1 (2015): 27–41, 10.1111/gec3.12192
Actor-network Theory
Actor-network theory shares many cognate concerns with Deleuze and Guattari’sassemblage.
One way to think of ANT is as an empirical sister-in-arms of the more philosophical assemblage
thinking. Like assemblage thinking, it is interested in the provisional, socio-material ordering of
entities beyond one universal principle. Pioneered by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John
Law, ANT has sprung from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Its intellectual roots are di-
verse, but among the most important forebears are sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who Latour once
called his ‘grandfather’ (Latour 2002, 118) and to whom he credits the first attempts to raze dis-
tinctions between macro and micro, and nature and society; philosopher Michel Serres, and his
focus on heterogeneous associations, tracing encounters and relations, and the emergence of or-
der in disorder (Bingham and Thrift 2000; Law 2009; Serres and Latour 1995); and semiotician
Algirdas Greimas, whose notion of semiotics - in which signifiers only acquire meaning through
relations with other signifiers - Latour extends to encompass all forms of order - building
involving objects and language towards a material semiotics (Akrich and Latour 1992; but see
Lenoir 1994, for a critique).
The parallels between the concepts of the actor-network and the assemblage are significant.
ANT also conceives of relations of human and non-human entities as producing new actors and
new ways of acting. For ANT, all entities – whether it is atoms or governments – stand on equal
ontological footing to begin with. The associations established between them make the differ-
ence of whether one becomes more powerful than the other. Hence, Latour (2005a, 9) also
dubbed ANT a ‘sociology of associations’. Similar to assemblage thinking, ANT insists on the
processual nature of the socio-material: ‘There is no social order. Rather, there are endless at-
tempts at ordering’ (Law 1994, 101). Several good introductions to ANT are now available,
both by its major proponents (Law 2009; Mol 2010) and within geography (Murdoch 2006).
Latour and his colleagues have refined ANT through the analysis of concrete cases – the pro-
duction of knowledge in Louis Pasteur’s laboratory and the attempt to construct a new aircraft
or the failed design of Aramis, a new personal rapid transport system. Since the 1990s, however,
ANT has been taken up beyond the realm of STS and has gathered a particularly large following
in geography. This is because ANT speaks to many concerns at the heart of geographical re-
search, including the relationship between the natural and social world, the question of distance
and scale and the role of technologies.
With its increasing adoption in the social sciences, ANT has provoked a series of critical as-
sessments, some of which also apply to assemblage thinking (e.g. Bloor 1999; Latour 1999;
Castree 2002; Collins and Yearley 1992; Fine 2005; Haraway 1991; Kirsch and Mitchell
2004; Star 1991; Whittle and Spicer 2008). Critics have taken the approach to task for
eschewing to think about how power differentials, for example race, gender or class, impact
on who or what is able or unable to form associations in the first place and thus for failing to
acknowledge unequal power relationships. ANT also does not distinguish aprioribetween
humans and materials, ignoring that humans are capable of intentions and pursue interests
whereas things are not. With its task of following the associations that form networks, critics claim
that ANT risks describing endless chains of associations without ever arriving at an explanation for
the reasons and differences in network formation processes. In a similar vein, ANT discards social
context, for example cultural or historical factors, for explanation, unless it can be traced in the
formation of concrete networks. In so doing, it also neglects to problematise the researcher and
how his or her position is implicated in fashioning ANT accounts of certain phenomena.
While there are clear parallels between ANT and assemblage thinking, there are also notable
differences. It is worth noting at least three major ones. First, ANT insists that agency is exclu-
sively a mediated achievement, brought about through forging associations. There is nothing
30 Assemblages and Actor-networks
© 2014 The Author(s)
Geography Compass © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Geography Compass 9/1 (2015): 27–41, 10.1111/gec3.12192