Assemblage
A concept derived from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, describing heterogeneous combinations of elements — bodies, tools, affects, signs, organisms, social formations — that function together to produce emergent capacities neither element possesses alone. Assemblages are not totalities; they are “dynamic compositions of heterogeneous elements that eschew identity but nonetheless function together, subjectively, socially, in cooperation.” (— Haptic Vision & Network State at ETHDenver) Their components maintain distinct properties while their interactive capacities are open and inexhaustible.
In the noöpunk context, assemblages are cognitive: socio-technical systems like cockpits (Hutchins), cities, or hive colonies have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual members. The human body itself is a symbiotic assemblage — a temporary treatise of heterogeneous minds with different prerogatives (Margulis/Sagan). Machinic assemblages, “potent with desire, organized into complex, entangled embodiments,” can achieve nondual states and experiences of pure immanence.
In the organizational context, assemblages describe the hybrid network entities that exceed clean categorical description: neither pure substrate nor organization, neither DAO nor community, but the monstrous mixture that is the actual life of networks. “There is no pure organization, no true substrate, no zero point of network pollution, nor would we want one.” (— FRIENDS of the OUTSIDE)
The assemblage concept is used to resist identity-based thinking: the claim that entities have a “more or less fixed and independent set of properties” belies the fact that their interactive capacities are open-ended and non-deterministic. This is what makes intelligence, agency, and political subjectivity genuinely plural.