Assemblage (philosophy)

Assemblage (from French: agencement, "a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled") is a philosophical approach for studying the ontological diversity of agency, which means redistributing the capacity to act from an individual to a socio-material network of people, things, and narratives. Also known as assemblage theory or assemblage thinking, this philosophical approach frames social complexity through fluidity, exchangeability, and their connectivity. Its central thesis is that people do not act exclusively by themselves, and instead human action requires complex socio-material interdependencies.

There are multiple philosophical approaches that use an assemblage perspective. One version is associated with Manuel DeLanda in work on assemblage theory. A second version is associated to the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon on Actor-network theory. A third version draws from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The similarities among these versions include a relational view of social reality in which human action results from shifting interdependencies between material, narrative, social, and geographic elements. The theories have in common an account for emergent qualities that result from associations between human and non-humans. In other words, an assemblage approach asserts that, within a body, the relationships of component parts are not stable and fixed; rather, they can be displaced and replaced within and among other bodies, thus approaching systems through relations of exteriority.