A dynamic constellation of heterogeneous elements — human, nonhuman, material, discursive, technological — coming together temporarily to produce particular effects, always in motion and continually reconfiguring as relations shift.
An assemblage describes a relational ontology wherein entities do not pre-exist their relations but emerge through them. It is a transient composition where agency is distributed across a heterogeneous mix of forces, materials, affects, practices, concepts, and infrastructures. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who coined the term agencement, the focus is on arrangement, orientation, and capacity—that is, what bodies and things can do together when linked, enabling new functions, intensities, and becomings without presuming a stable essence. Assemblages are not stable systems but contingent, multiply-scaled compositions that are “always in flight.” They hold together through dynamic processes like territorialization (stabilization, organization, and the creation of identity) and deterritorialization (destabilization, escape, and the dissolution of identity) or capture and release, producing emergent properties irreducible to their individual components. These parts maintain a relative autonomy even as they co-function. New materialist thinkers like Bennett and Braidotti extend the concept to emphasize affective intensities and transversal connections across organic and inorganic life, highlighting how vitality and power circulate through these more-than-human constellations.
New materialist and posthumanist scholarship extends assemblage thinking into social inquiry, emphasizing lively matter and performativity. Jane Bennett foregrounds vibrant materiality and the distributive force of things; Manuel DeLanda articulates assemblages as historical and stratified formations with variable degrees of stability; Rosi Braidotti situates assemblage within affirmative, posthuman ethics and nomadic subjectivity; Brian Massumi and Sara Ahmed attend to affective circulations that modulate what assemblages can do. In postqualitative inquiry, assemblage directs attention to how research apparatuses themselves compose phenomena through specific agential cuts, rendering the unit of analysis a situated, material-discursive ecology in process.
Assemblage reframes method from representing stable entities to composing with emergent relations. It orients research toward tracing how phenomena are enacted through material-discursive practices, how agency is distributed and relational, and how affects and technologies modulate capacities. Analytically, it shifts questions from “what is it?” to “what can it do here, with these connections?” Methodologically, it privileges mapping, attunement, and intervention in apparatus design, following how territorializations (stabilizations) and deterritorializations (shifts, leaks, ruptures) pattern inquiry and its ethical accountabilities.
Assemblage clarifies the classroom as a fluctuating ecology in which instructors, students, LLMs, prompts, rubrics, interfaces, policies, datasets, and institutional narratives compose capacities for writing and learning. It supports analyses of lived and affective experience by tracing how anxieties, excitations, and frictions circulate across interfaces, deadlines, assessment regimes, and media discourse, shaping what can be felt and tried. It reorients authorship and creativity as emergent effects of relations among drafting practices, model outputs, feedback exchanges, citation infrastructures, and material conditions (e.g., access, latency, interface design). It also illuminates how tangible artifacts—assignment prompts, prompt-engineering guides, version histories, annotation tools—stabilize certain practices while leaving room for deterritorialization, revealing where pedagogical redesign can modulate capacities in AI-entangled composing.