Assemblage as ethos: Conceptual genealogies and political problems

Abstract

Assemblage thinking has increasingly made its way in geographic research and scholarship. Assemblage has been approached as a means of describing socio‐spatial formations, as a set of concepts used to understand their (re)production, and as an ethos animating geographic thought. In this paper, I critically reflect on the third usage, assemblage‐as‐ethos, which remains underdeveloped in assemblage geographies. Assemblage has been heralded as contributing a new or renewed ethos to geographic scholarship in so far as it calls into question the stability and historical necessity of socio‐spatial formations. By forwarding an ontology that privileges potential, transformation, and flux over ideas of identity, structure, and system, geographers claim that assemblage opens up new avenues for thinking about politics and social change. However, I argue here that overly simplistic investments in this ethos can function to obscure the relations of power that indelibly shape socio‐spatial formations, thus rearticulating and naturalising dominant social and symbolic regimes of value. To develop these concerns, I synthesise a set of critiques levelled at assemblage geographies, ones that revolve around the place of agency, history, and structure in its formulation. Adding to these concerns, I argue that assemblage geographies' emphasis on flux, potential, and transformation can rearticulate racialised discourses of neoliberalism, thus undermining claims to being a radical or even critical geographic paradigm. In closing, I provide some avenues for developing assemblage into a more critical ethos for geography.