Deleuze, Guattari, and the concept of social assemblage

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze initially developed the concept of assemblage through a highly original reading of David Hume's philosophy. The concept's name would come later, first appearing in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, a book written with Félix Guattari. Thinking with the concept of assemblage is characterized as a form of empiricism. I give an account of this assemblage empiricism, accenting how Deleuze gradually developed one of its central tenets—the exteriority of relations. Working with Guattari, Deleuze would eventually define social assemblages as tetravalent or four-sided: there is a collective assemblage of enunciation and a machinic assemblage of desire; there are territorializing processes as well as deterritorializing processes. In short, an individual assemblage is a mixture of speech acts and bodies, one displaying a certain stability, but not to the exclusion of de-stabilizing elements. A display of true philosophical creativity, the concept of assemblage is intended as a positive alternative to a multiplicity of intellectual tendencies: thinking with first principles, the problem of Being, organic conceptions of the social, thinking in terms of species-essences, the “postulates of linguistics,” the Platonic way of relating the immaterial and the material, and the concept of ideology.