BOOK DATA Kyle Parry, A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. $120.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. 320 pages.“An assembly,” for Kyle Parry, “is any combination of expressive elements that maintains and seizes upon the appearance of selection and arrangement” (3; emphasis in original). It may be a meme; a map; a list; a series of photographs, artworks, or everyday media objects; an archive or database (and all of its contents); a juxtaposition; a gathering; an intermixture of verbal and visual elements. An assembly, then, is any combination of things in which both a collective expression and the various individual expressions that it comprises come into view and remain in productive interplay.At once “a type of thing and something people do,” assembly is by Parry’s mark a cultural form and, indeed, the prevailing cultural form of the postdigital present (4). After two-plus decades of interactive digital media and the “remix” culture thought so endemic to the commercial, user-powered Internet of the Web 2.0 turn, it would seem that time-honored cultural forms such as narrative or representation have been superseded by a form that promises no transcendent experience of the thing apprehended in its totality but instead stresses and actively sits with the contingency and mutual irreducibility of the thing’s component parts. In many ways, though, assembly is a shifting target. Forever relational, forever subject to (and shaped by) the contextually dependent linkages that unite cultural artifacts—as well as their makers, attendant discourses, and sites of circulation and consumption—and endow them with meaning, assemblies are everywhere and always.Parry’s analysis of the form in A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes runs the gamut, taking inventory of assembly’s various manifestations in recent memory and across the varied history of (primarily Western) culture, from COVID-era Internet memes to Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1503–15). Indeed, for all of the ground Parry covers, and for the critic’s attention to both granular and impossibly broad assemblies (from the single tweet met with a reaction GIF to the totality of collected documentation pertaining to a given environmental disaster), one might be tempted to call the book itself an assembly, calling on the author’s understanding that “assembly is all about relationships, from the simple to the complex, from the small to the sprawling, from the clear to the enigmatic” (16).I’m inclined to think that Parry would welcome the charge, for many of his book’s chapters break with the standard conventions of academic writing, as the critic “assembles” illustrative examples of the assembly by enumerating a succession of outwardly disparate or otherwise discrete assemblies along a bulleted list of entries. For example, in his third chapter, he pairs the discursive evolution of Pepe the Frog (a regular feature in alt-right image memes of the United States, which has since been taken up by youth protest movements in Hong Kong) with “Trump Trains” (attempts by supporters of Donald Trump to build coalition on Twitter) and the paramilitary character of online “troll armies” (167–68).Parry proposes the language of “constituents” to parse the elements that make up an assembly: “like citizens … [constituents] remain apart from each other as separate, discernible elements … they persist in distinct and meaningful positions; and they are also in conversation, collaboration, and sometimes conflict with the constituents that precede, exceed, or surround them” (4). If “constituents” evokes both the terminology of “constituent parts” and the various actors who take part in democratic society, this is by design. Much of Parry’s work in A Theory of Assembly lies in (dis)articulating the political ends toward which assemblies are put. Many of the digital assemblies encountered online today have become “increasingly ambivalent” in orientation, if not outright reactionary or otherwise predicated upon a politics of xenophobia (41). Parry takes pains throughout the text, though, to underscore the emancipatory power of assembly as a cultural form that principally works to bring together constituents who may be tenuously related or even at odds.To illustrate the democratic potential of assembly, Parry directs his reader to a variety of popular, user-driven assemblies, such as those that compile genealogies, those that run counter to the media coverage of hurricane Katrina (e.g., the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank), those that seek to combat the erasure of Black artists from the Western canon (@ablackhistoryofart), and those that aim to disrupt colonial topographies by recentering pre-Columbian, Indigenous ways of relating to the land (The Decolonial Atlas). Evaluating both high-culture assemblies drawn from the worlds of fine art and the academy and vernacular, born-digital assemblies, his book slides between distinct registers as it works to make sense of the various ways by which entities that outwardly possess some shared characteristic are brought together and, in their unification, exceed the expressive capabilities of any single constituent.The text begins with an introduction that outlines the scope and stakes of the cultural form at hand. Its first chapter proceeds to articulate and theoretically elaborate the dynamics of particular modes of assembly, modeling in the process the critical methodology that Parry practices throughout the book, what he calls “plural reading” (17). Patterned on the philosophical concept of “family resemblances” as it appears in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, plural reading aims to identify “what binds a particular set of things together,” while acknowledging that not all items in an assembly will necessarily share a single characteristic (18). The resulting “markedly plural exercise of interpretive watching and listening,” for Parry, productively attunes readers to key commonalities and differences among a set of assembled objects, “generating flexible and sometimes speculative categories and the considerably higher levels of heterogeneity, quantity, and scale invited into the mix” (19–20). Parry likewise extends media assembly as an analytical lens that operates by way of perceptual “switches” that modulate shifts in critical attention and scale: “from artifact to practice … to what those things involve or yield … to how their effects stretch out over time and place” (30).Across its four core chapters, the book puts its titular theory of assembly into practice by engaging the cultural form within an array of contexts and applications. By turns aesthetic and political, A Theory of Assembly puts welcome pressure on a cultural form that pervades the contemporary moment, putting name to the supremely relational means of organizing media, objects, discourses, and people: assembly. Parry’s book, as expansive in scope as the form it identifies, offers key interventions into the study of media but is more broadly an essential (and quite timely) text for anyone working in visual culture, digital studies, art history, material culture, the environmental humanities, media studies, or some assembly therein.