Area (2011) 43.2, 124–127 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01004.

Assemblage and geography

Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane
Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham DH1 3LE
Email: ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 17 February 2011

In this introduction to the special section on ‘Assemblage and geography’, we reflect on the different
routes and uses through which ‘assemblage’ is being put to work in contemporary geographical
scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to
prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which
assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of
tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve
around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared
orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.

Key words: assemblage, relations, heterogeneity, difference

any one theoretical tradition or style hold an exclusive

Assemblage and geography
Assemblage is being increasingly used in a wide range of
geographical scholarship. Alongside partially connected
terms such as network, milieu or apparatus, the term has
become a familiar part of the lexicon of contemporary
social-spatial theory. Recent work has described quite
different substantive phenomena in terms of assemblage:
‘adaptation assemblages’ (Head 2010), buildings as
‘assemblages’ (Rose et al. 2010), ‘regional assemblages’
(Allen and Cochrane 2007), or the ‘assemblage of the
geopolitical social’ (Cowen and Smith 2009), to name but
a few examples. Of course, the deployment of the term is
not unique to geography; far from it. Not only has the term
had a longstanding specialist use in archaeology, ecology
and art history, it is also now part of the conceptual
vocabularies of other social sciences and humanities (see
Marcus and Saka 2006; Phillips 2006). In this special
section we pause amid this proliferation to consider the
different uses of the term in contemporary human geog-
raphy. In doing so we aim to debate the theoretical,
empirical and critical purchase assemblage might bring
to geographical work, asking what the term enables us to
think and do. Our starting point in this collection is not to
define, fix or legislate for what assemblage should mean,
but to reflect on the remarkable diversity with which the
term has come into use. Indeed, by inviting contributors
who use the term in quite different ways, we have set up
the issue to keep hold of this diversity. Put bluntly, there
is no single ‘correct’ way to deploy the term, nor does
right to it.
That said, there are some commonalities in how assem-
blage is being deployed that hint at what the term might
enable us to do. The term is often used to emphasise
emergence, multiplicity and indeterminacy, and connects
to a wider redefinition of the socio-spatial in terms of
the composition of diverse elements into some form of
provisional socio-spatial formation. To be more precise,
assemblages are composed of heterogeneous elements
that may be human and non-human, organic and inor-
ganic, technical and natural. In broad terms, assemblage
is, then, part of a more general reconstitution of the social
that seeks to blur divisions of social–material, near–far
and structure–agency (DeLanda 2006). In this use,
deploying the term assemblage enables us to remain
deliberately open as to the form of the unity, its durability,
the types of relations and the human and non-human
elements involved. Indeed, we could understand the
contemporary enthusiasm for assemblage theory as a
response to ambivalence toward the a priori reduction of
social-spatial relations and processes to any fixed form or
set of fixed forms. Hence the deployment of the term by
geographers to understand the formation of a range of
spatial forms – such as regions (Allen and Cochrane
2007), scales (Legg 2009) or territories (Painter 2010).
More specifically, assemblage appears to be increas-
ingly used to emphasise four inter-related sets of processes
(McFarlane 2009). First, assemblage emphasises gather-
ing, coherence and dispersion. In particular, this draws

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Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

attention to the labour of assembling and re-assembling
sociomaterial practices that are diffuse, tangled and
contingent. In this respect, assemblage emphasises spati-
ality and temporality: elements are drawn together at
a particular conjuncture only to disperse or realign, and
the shape shifts – as anthropologist Tania Murray Li (2007,
265) has put it – according to place and the ‘angle of
vision’. Assemblage therefore involves an orientation to
assembling and disassembling, as relations form, take
hold and endure, but they also may change or be dis-
rupted. Second, assemblage connotes groups, collectives
and, by extension, distributed agencies. Assemblages are
not organic wholes, where the differences of the parts are
subsumed into a higher unity. As Jane Bennett (2005) has
persuasively argued, assemblage names an uneven topog-
raphy of trajectories that cross or engage each other to
different extents over time, and that themselves exceed
the assemblage. This raises questions about where agency,
causality and responsibility lie in assemblage, and about
how they should be conceived. Third, following Li (2007),
in contrast to Foucauldian notions like apparatus, regime
or governmental technology, assemblage connotes emer-
gence rather than resultant formation. Part of the appeal of
assemblage, it would seem, lies in its reading of power as
multiple co-existences – assemblage connotes not a
central governing power, nor a power distributed equally,
but power as plurality in transformation. Fourth, and in
common with some but not all renditions of the term
network, an emphasis is placed on fragility and provision-
ality; the gaps, fissures and fractures that accompany pro-
cesses of gathering and dispersing.
The proliferation of the term assemblage is, then, only
understandable in the context of what can be broadly
termed a constructionist account of social-spatial rela-
tions. While there are many roots to the term assem-
blage, it is possible to identify a series of inspirations for
its deployment. The most obvious reference points for
assemblage as a concept include an ‘after’ actor-network
theory literature (Latour 2005; Hinchliffe 2007; Hether-
ington and Law 2000) and the emphasis in Deleuze and
Guattari on the event of agencement (e.g. Thrift 2007;
Anderson and Harrison 2010). Leaving aside the differ-
ences between these styles of thought, and the many
debates surrounding each, both share an initial orienta-
tion to how ‘[t]hings have to be put together (Latin com-
pnere) while retaining their heterogeneity’, that is how
common worlds have ‘[t]o be built from utterly hetero-
geneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best
a fragile, revisable and diverse composite material’
(Latour 2010, 3, 4). Beyond these currents there has
been a wide variety of uses of the term that share this
emphasis on composition, but deploy assemblage
slightly differently as a descriptor, ethos and concept.
If we consider each of these uses in turn, then
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Assemblage and geography 125
we can begin to get a sense of differences in how the
term is being deployed.
First, assemblage is used as a descriptor for some form
of provisional unity across differences. For the most part
this use relies on taken-for-granted dictionary definitions
of the term (e.g. Sassen 2006). In particular, the link
between assemblage and, on the one hand, the state of
being gathered or collected and, on the other, a number of
things gathered together. Once deployed in this way,
assemblage may then be connected up to a potentially
limitless array of concepts and used in relation to any
provisionally structured formation. The risk is that literally
anything comes to be described as ‘an’ assemblage. We
do not think such a use is exactly wrong, more that it
carries the risk that an emphasis on form replaces forma-
tion, assemblage as noun replaces assemblage as verb. In
other words, it loses sight of what we take to be the key
task of an assemblage-based analysis of social-spatial
relations: to understand assembling as a process of
‘co-functioning’ whereby heterogeneous elements come
together in a non-homogeneous grouping. Recognising
this risk, the more careful uses of the term as a descriptor
have employed it to understand the formation of specific
geographies. In urban geography, for instance, it has been
used both as a descriptor of sociomaterial transformation
(e.g. Gandy 2005; Farías and Bender 2009; Swyngedouw
2006), and to describe the relations between travelling
policies and their localised substantiations (e.g. Allen and
Cochrane 2007; McGuirk and Dowling 2009; McCann
and Ward 2011).
Second, assemblage is used as a concept that takes on
its meaning and function in relation to other concepts and
conceptual problems. The use here is usually derived from
an encounter with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986 1987)
elaboration of the concept. This conceptual use has many
links with assemblage as descriptor; in particular the
emphasis on the process of arranging or fitting together a
set of heterogeneous elements that the French agence-
ment has and the sense that assemblages are provisional
contingent wholes (Braun 2008). There are also some
differences though. Rather than being used synonymously
with network or some other relational term, assemblage
has a specific meaning and set of functions. In Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1987, 406) terms an assemblage is a ‘con-
stellation’ of elements that have been selected from a
milieu, organised and stratified. Assemblages can be
divided on two axes. The first is between a machinic
assemblage of desire and a collective assemblage of
enunciation (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 81). The former
refers to a collection of qualities, things and relations; the
latter to a collection of languages, words and meanings. A
provisional unity is produced through the ‘co-functioning’
(Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 52) of words, passions, things
and so on. Unlike in some other forms of relational
126 Anderson and McFarlane
thought, the heterogeneous parts are not fully determined
by their position within a relational configuration. The
second axis involves a distinction between (re)territorial-
ising and deterritorialising movements as heterogeneous
parts come together and come apart. Assemblages always
‘claim’ a territory as heterogeneous parts are gathered
together and hold together. But this can only ever be a
provisional process: relations may change, new elements
may enter, alliances may be broken, new conjunctions
may be fostered. Assemblages are constantly opening up
to new lines of flight, new becomings. Deleuze takes care
to stress that these two movements are caught up in one
other: ‘everything happens between the two’ (Deleuze
and Parnet 2006, 54). Perhaps the most exciting work that
has attempted to think (re)territorialisations and deterrito-
rialisations together has been on social differences such as
sexuality and race (Lim 2010; Puar 2007; Saldanha 2010).
Moving away from a framing of difference in terms of
intersectionality, this embryonic work finds in the concept
of assemblage an analytic for understanding the organi-
sation of bodies and the force of difference.
Third, and cutting across its use as a descriptor and
concept, assemblage also suggests a certain ethos of
engagement with the world, one that experiments with
methodological and presentational practices in order to
attend to a lively world of differences (Swanton 2010;
Lorimer 2010). Montage, performative methods, thick
description, stories – all have been used by geographers
and others in an attempt to be alert to processes of
agencement (Phillips 2006; Stewart 2007; Swanton
2010). Rather than the testing of a pre-existing hypothesis,
work that deploys assemblage experiments in the sense
that it opens the researcher up to risk, embraces uncer-
tainty, expresses something of the fragility of composition,
and strives to listen to what Deleuze and Guattari term
‘the sound of a contagious future, the murmur (rumeur) of
new assemblages of desire, of machines, and of state-
ments, that insert themselves into the old assemblages and
break with them’ (1986, 83).
In short, part of the reason assemblage is being increas-
ingly used across a wide range of contexts is its very
manipulability: it can be used as a broad descriptor of
disparate actors coming together, as an alternative to
notions of network emerging from actor-network theory, as
a way of thinking about phenomena as productivist or
practice-based, as an ethos that attends to the social in
formation, and as a means of problematising origins,
agency, politics and ethics. As one would expect given this
diversity, there are some emerging differences and tensions
as the term is drawn into connection with different theo-
rists, issues, sites, concerns and problems. These revolve
around a set of questions that will repeat – sometimes
foregrounded, sometimes in the background – across the
seven commentaries that make up the special section:
Area © 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
1 What difference does assemblage thinking make to
relational thought? What claims about relation and
their terms are specific to ‘assemblage theory’ in com-
parison with other forms of relational thought that also
place emphasis on composition?
2 How to understand the specific ways in which hetero-
geneous elements are gathered into some form of pro-
visional whole (through concepts such as articulation,
translation/transduction or in terms of alliances or
co-functionings)?
3 How to conceptualise the unity of an assemblage if
assemblages are not organic wholes? How does the
term assemblage relate to other ways of naming social-
spatial formations (such as network or apparatus)?
4 How do relatively durable orders repeat and endure?
Likewise, how to conceptualise and attend to the pro-
cesses whereby either the elements that compose an
assemblage change or assemblages themselves change?
5 What implications for politics and ethics does an
emphasis on ontological diversity and processes of
composition have? How does assemblage thinking and
theory allow or invite us to encounter the world? And
what are the limits of that style or ethos of engagement?
We have brought together a wide group of contributors
to address these and a range of other issues through a
series of short commentaries. Our aim is to stage a con-
versation between different uses of assemblage by includ-
ing people who are using the term in often very different
ways, ranging from urban and postcolonial geography to
non-representational theory and actor-network theory. As
such, the collection will reflect on the different invest-
ments, promises and dangers that assemblage presents to
social-spatial theory. By gathering together a range of
uses of assemblage, we also aim to demonstrate how
terms emerge, develop and change in encounter with
different empirical contexts and in relation to different
theories. As such, the issue will open up various answers
to the questions of what the term assemblage can do,
how it provides an orientation for research and action,
and what it promises geography and social-spatial theory
more broadly. While we do not seek to offer a straight-
forward resolution to the many threads, tensions and con-
tradictions that will emerge in this debate, we seek in the
concluding remarks to consider where the collection
leaves us for thinking with and through a notion of assem-
blage within geography.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to two anonymous referees for comments on the
introduction, Madeleine Hatfield for her help in putting the issue
together, Kevin Ward for his advice and enthusiasm, and the
contributors for making editing the special section a very smooth,
enjoyable process.
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ISSN 0004-0894 © 2011 The Authors.

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