Assemblages: (Pre)Political, Ethical and Ontological Perspectives

Our work offers a new answer to a growing theoretical and practical demand within diverse domains of investigation by redefining the concept of political action. It grounds and elucidates some of the manifestations of a distinctive mode of the political. Its regulative idea is that of the assemblage. The overall aim of this volume is to show that the political assemblage should be productively distinguished from both the limiting concepts of proceduralist and identitarian politics. One can broadly define proceduralist politics as being grounded in autonomous individuals pursuing their own self-interests under the standardized rules of the political game. Identitarian politics is a mode of communitarian politics, the expression of a material experience of domination in which self-identified groups engage in different forms resistance and advocacy in order to acquire public recognition and empowerment. In both cases, the field of action is the political arena conventionally defined—at least in Western liberal democracies. We argue that political assemblages articulate beyond the problematization and the critical treatment of self-interested actions and communitarian self-realization.

Our contribution situates assemblages within the dynamic of the New Social Movements (NSMs). It is well known that NSMs have been the object of theoretical interest for at least the past four decades (Buechler). A few scholars doubt that the NSMs are so new, but the majority of analysts agree that they have lineaments that the activist—often revolutionary—movements of the 19th and 20th centuries lacked. Among these features are: 1) the focus on issues of the quality of life rather than issues of class standing, 2) the tendency of their constituencies to come from the middle and upper-middle classes rather than the working classes, 3) the blurring of any straightforward divide between “right” and “left,” and 4) a similar blurring of the divide between a politics of recognition (usually cast as “identity politics”) and a politics of interests (often cast as “resource-allocation” politics). If not in so many words, many analysts have recognized that the NSMs are in fact assemblages—an intersection of heterogeneous attitudes and commitments, and an assemblage that in the first instance is not “political” as the term has been conventionally understood. Hence the label: “social” rather than political movements. Analysts as early as Touraine have further recognized that the signature that has marked what have become one or another NSM is not the competitive pursuit of specific worldly ends but instead the championing of abstract values which “concern the grammar of forms of life” (Habermas 33). The distinctive features of the NSMs are thus clear enough. Feminist movements, environmentalist movements, anti-globalization movements and—worthy of special attention—the recent Occupy Movement are cases in point.

While this journal issue does not theorize NSMs per se, they serve as a powerful exemplar that supplements the analytic tenor of our treatment of assemblages. At this juncture, is it important to note, however, that our philosophical treatment of assemblages as manifestation of specific forms of collective action is normatively distinct from a sociological analysis of collective behavior grounded in the belief of actors (Melucci; Cohen).

If NSMs are one of the best exemplars thought of as assemblages, it seems fair enough to ask what the idea of the assemblage entails. The concept of the assemblage as we deploy it derives chiefly from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. For Deleuze and Guattari, the assemblage stands in contrast to homeostatic systems, autonomous structures, homogenous interests and intentions. It is a distinctive, emergent composite, systemically open, substantively heterogeneous and of uncertain duration.

We should note parenthetically that the assemblage is a concept that is perhaps not always treated with the technical care that it deserves.² This is not necessarily a problem. Part of the life a concept relies on its acknowledged and unacknowledged misuse. Despite the fact that the assemblage is indissociably linked to Deleuze and Guattari, they of course have no ownership over the concept, and the term itself has a long history of lexical ‘prior art’ under both its English and its French names. But this also means...