Assemblage Geography

Assemblage draws from the work of Gilles Deleuze who coined the term 'agencement' (translated to "assemblage" in English) which in the original French refer both to "coming together' as well as to 'agency'. The philosophy draws attention to the contingency of material things as well as their agentic power: emphasizing that things retain both virtual capacities, which remain latent, as well as ones that are actualized when entering into relation with other forces or actors. 

Example:

Consider the power of a mongol warrior.  Here three separate entities, the individual warrior, the horse that he rides, and the stirrup that enables him to stand with his weapon while in motion. Each of these separate aspects cannot conquer a territory on their own, but together the three entities can enter into an assemblage that has additional agentic power to have a major effect. Such an assemblage can 'stabilize' into this configuration , while each component still maintains its own identity. Assemblage provides a way to speak about such entities, but also about how certain capacities can be latent within entities until they are forged together in contingent, temporary assemblages. 

Relation to Complexity

Assemblage theorists adopt the concept of Emergence, but engage with it in a much more philosophical manner. Following the works of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, they describe concrete urban entities as emergent, indeterminant and historically contingent Stabilized Assemblages.  Assemblages are configurations of inter-meshed forces and distributed agencies - human/non-human, local/non-local, material, technical, social, etc., that are stabilized at particular moments. Once in place assemblages - like emergent features - may have unique properties or capacities not associated with their constituent elements, and thereupon yield agency in structuring further events.  'Assemblage' ideas therefore echo those of Emergence: something is produced from constituent agents that is able to act in novel ways. This conceptual overlap has led geographer Kim Dovey to suggest that the phrase 'Complex Adaptive Assemblage' be used in place of 'Complex Adaptive System' in the spatial disciplines. 

Agents in a particular assemblage have particular capacities which one might see as analogous to Degrees of Freedom, but how these capacities manifest is subject to Contingency: predicated on the nature of flows, forces, or the Patterns of Interactions at play in a given situation. Assemblage geographers thus import the language of Non-Linearity and Bifurcations: trying to understand the chance events that determine the trajectory of urban systems which are sensitive to historical unfolding.

This sense that History Matters, runs counter to the historical determinism that previously dominated geographical investigations, where a coherent logical chain of cause and effect was seen as the primary driver of outer geographical difference. For assemblage thinkers, history does indeed matter, but only insofar as one particular trajectory is realized vs another.  Manuel de Landa, for example, argues that in order to properly conceptualize the importance of any given actualized geographical space, it is necessary to see this space as but a single manifestation - situated within the broader Phase Space of The Virtual - with all its unrealized potentials. This emphasis on the role of history situates urban systems as subject to Contingency, with actual unfolding representing only one possible trajectory of broader system potential.

Assemblage Geography thus engages with many concepts present in Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, but primarily focuses on the nature of contingent, causal flows (including both human and non-human flows) and how these come to be realized in particular physical manifestations.

Accordingly, the field is less attuned to aspects of complexity surrounding, for example, rule-based systems, mathematical regularities, or the adaptive capacities of bottom-up agents.

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