The Tragic Political Assemblage: Implications of Contemporary Anthropological Debates on Hierarchy, Heterarchy, and Ontology as Political Challenges

A project conceiving of political assemblages as anything larger than just an object of intellectual history will have to face a question—what is the potential scope and entailments of the idea of political assemblages outside of the very specific late twentieth-century milieu that it was conceived in? And given the present moment, there is also is much more specific question that should well be taken up: what place any project organized as a political assemblage could have in an era of global capitalist accelerated economic inequalities and anthropocentric warming? Drawing on debates in contemporary social and cultural anthropology about Dumont, hierarchy, actor-network theory, and ontology, this essay argues that in the current milieu there is still a role for political assemblages as a purposeful engine of heterarchy. However, this essay posits that political assemblages can only operate as a tragic politics, where political action can only take place with the knowledge that hierarchies of some sort will inevitably return. The question that remains, though, is what hierarchies should be resisted, and what are the ethics of a tragic politics of the political assemblage.

To take up this question, we need to have a grasp of what kind of concept the political assemblage is, what its relation to practice is, and what work it was envisaged as doing. Fortunately, we have a text that is well suited for these questions. If we were to look for an example of the concretized relations between the practice and theory as it was imagined by Gilles Deleuze, we do well to turn to his 1972 discussion of the subject with Michel Foucault.¹ It is, of course, the fact that we believe we have an understanding of Foucault’s thoughts that makes Foucault such a valuable fixed point of intellectual reference in situating Deleuze. While the rise of neoliberalism has meant that Foucault’s political credentials are perhaps not in as high esteem as they once were, it is true that Foucault was and continues to be an indispensable social theorist for much of academia; it is certainly true that we can talk about a Foucauldian approach to the political. It would seem that this dialogue would be a good way to position Deleuze’s political imagination, which could be thought of as a first step in further articulating a politics of the assemblage, the concept that he co-crafted with Guattari and which was such an important part of his writings.

This discussion, though, starts out with a small hiccup. Foucault begins the exchange by recounting a complaint by “a Maoist” that though he understands why figures such as Sartre and Foucault were “siding” with him, Deleuze is still “an enigma” (Foucault and Deleuze 205). Foucault then claims that to his own eyes, though, Deleuze’s position had “always seemed particularly clear” (205). A simultaneous claim of obscurity and perfect legibility is fitting for Deleuze, who ran counter to Descartes’ third meditation by prizing not the “clear and distinct,” but rather the clear and indistinct. However, it is the distinct over the indistinct that we are given in the rest of the exchange; at a minimum, the discussion that follows does seem to suggest that there was, at least, a certain commonality of approach at that moment to both Foucault and Deleuze. First, there is a prizing of theory as an instrumental, and therefore serving only as a temporary concretization that exists merely as a relay to another set of practices (and with practice serving, in turn, as another relay). Second, there is the rejection of “the group” serving as some kind of unified political subject, and replacing it with “groupuscules,” multiplicities that are not organized around a single representative voice, but a particular moment of action.

This may not be as clear and distinct as it first appears, however. If we are to take seriously the first claim, that theory has a punctual structure, a beat that is hit before practice, then the frankly theoretical claims put forward by Deleuze and Foucault in this discussion is...