Assemblage Theory and Its Discontents

Abstract

At least since the publication of Taylor Webb’s landmark work Teacher Assemblage there has been a high level of interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in Education Studies. Undoubtedly the major reason for this interest is the perceived close connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and Foucault’s concepts of power and governmentality. Webb explicitly situates his work at this intersection of these three concepts, with the aim of using the combination to map the effects of surveillance on teachers (Webb 2009: 30). Webb’s work offers a salient reminder too that assemblage theory, at its origin in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, was always concerned about questions of power. This aspect of assemblage theory is all too often forgotten, making the assemblage seem as though it is merely another way of saying something is complicated. This reminder is urgently needed because assemblage theory is rapidly gathering a significant following in the human and social sciences. My university library catalogue lists over 8000 journal articles across all disciplines with the word ‘assemblage’ in the title. There can be no question that it has generated interesting and important new ways of thinking about the complex nature of social reality but it has also drifted a long way from its origins and in doing so a number of both small and large misprisions of Deleuze and Guattari’s work have slipped under the radar and embedded themselves as ‘truths’.1 I have never been one to think that there is no such thing as a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ reading, so I am going to simply go ahead and say assemblage theory makes two kinds of error in their appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari: (1) it focuses on the complex and undecidable (Actor Network Theory); and/or (2) it focuses on the problem of emergence (DeLanda). It may be that these are providential errors because they