“Assemblage” names a way of understanding how worlds take shape through contingent compositions of heterogeneous elements that co-function without dissolving into a single essence. The term translates the French agencement, which foregrounds arrangement, layout, and the orchestrations that make disparate things work together here-and-now (Nail, 2017). In this sense, assemblage is not only a concept; it is a methodological orientation that asks how particular compositions come to hold, what they enable, and how they change. Deleuze and Guattari approached it as a pragmatics of formation, distinguishing the “machinic assemblage of bodies” from the “collective assemblage of enunciation” to keep in view both material couplings and the semiotic regimes that articulate them (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Post-Deleuzian work elaborates this frame as a way to analyse social, technological, and ecological phenomena across scales while attending to their emergent properties and capacities (DeLanda, 2006; DeLanda, 2016).
Composition and heterogeneity
An assemblage is composed of unlike elements—bodies and devices, norms and scripts, atmospheres and infrastructures—that maintain partial autonomy while acting together. DeLanda emphasized that their relations are “external” to the terms: components can be detached and reassembled elsewhere, acquiring new capacities in different contexts rather than expressing a timeless identity (DeLanda, 2016). This exteriority sustains heterogeneity and renewability. It also invites inquiry into capacities rather than essences: what matters is not what a component is in itself, but what it can do in a given alignment, how it affects and is affected by others, and which thresholds of activation it helps to cross.
Emergence and metastability
Assemblages generate properties that none of their parts possess alone. Emergence here is not an ineffable surplus so much as the patterned result of concrete couplings, feedbacks, and thresholds. Simondon’s account of individuation helps to specify this dynamic by shifting focus from already-formed individuals to metastable fields in which tensions and gradients drive the production of new consistencies. He called the operative logic of this production “transduction,” a process by which a structuring activity propagates through a heterogeneous milieu, resolving tensions locally and, in so doing, altering the field that sustains further resolution (Simondon, 1992). Deleuze drew on this schema to think of assemblages as metastable compositions poised for further becoming, their apparent stability held by a topology of gradients and singularities rather than by a final form (Deleuze, 1994). In short, assemblages exhibit a dynamic coherence: they hold together enough to do work, precisely because they remain open to change.
Multiplicity, scale, and the politics of arrangement
Assemblages are multiplicities that ramify across scales. A classroom, a platform algorithm, a dissertation committee, a university, a national research policy, and a global citation economy can each be analysed as an assemblage, while also functioning as components of others. Deleuze and Guattari gave names to recurrent operations—territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization—to describe how assemblages consolidate a zone of consistency, become displaced or loosened from that zone, and then recompose into new arrangements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In the posthuman humanities, this compositional pragmatics carries an ethical-political charge: it shifts attention from identity and essence to the concrete alignments through which power works, capacities are distributed, and lives are made livable or precarious (Braidotti, 2013). The “More Posthuman Glossary” registers this politics in entries on racializing assemblages, where authors track more-than-human arrangements of bodies, infrastructures, and discourses that pattern exposure and possibility (Braidotti, Jones, & Klumbytė, 2022; see also Puar, 2012).
Methods: what assemblages do
If the properties of assemblages concern how they are structured, their methods concern how they operate. Several processual notions travel with assemblage thinking and offer a vocabulary for analysis.
Transduction names the propagation of structuring activity through a field. As Simondon described it, a transductive operation does not apply a pre-given form to inert matter; it draws form from the potentials and tensions of the milieu itself, step by step, with each local resolution reshaping the conditions for the next (Simondon, 1992). In research terms, transduction is visible when innovations spread through an institution not by decree but by iterative uptake—each adoption altering workflows, expectations, and infrastructures in ways that condition subsequent adoptions.
Individuation refers to the genesis of new unities—a concept Deleuze took from Simondon to contest the habit of presuming ready-made individuals. In an assemblage frame, individuals—bodies, texts, devices, classrooms—are effects of processes that precede and exceed them; they retain a “preindividual” share of potential that can be reactivated, which is why they remain open to transformation (Simondon, 1992; Deleuze, 1994). This perspective invites analysts to ask under what conditions an apparent individual coheres, what maintains that coherence, and through which operations it might become otherwise.
Differentiation and differenciation provide Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual structure of a problem and its actual solutions. Differentiation refers to the virtual repository of differences—intensive relations, gradients, and constraints—while differenciation marks the staged actualization of that virtual in concrete formations and behaviours (Deleuze, 1994). In assemblage analysis, this distinction guards against treating the actual state of an arrangement as exhaustive; it keeps open the question of what else the arrangement could yet become given its virtual differentials.
Modulation describes continuous recalibration rather than discrete molding. Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” famously contrasts the mold of disciplinary enclosures with the open-ended, real‑time modulations of control, in which parameters are continuously tuned across networks (Deleuze, 1992). Simondon also used modulation to name processes in which form is internally variable rather than externally imposed. In assemblage terms, modulation is the ceaseless fine-tuning of intensities, thresholds, and couplings that keeps an arrangement coherent while letting it adapt. One sees modulation in algorithmic platforms that nudge behaviour by adjusting recommendation weights, or in classrooms that maintain momentum by continually recalibrating tempo, task complexity, and forms of participation.
Alignment—or attunement—names the practical work by which unlike elements are brought into workable relation. Deleuze and Guattari’s contrast between machinic assemblages (of bodies, tools, materials) and collective assemblages (of statements, codes, norms) suggests that alignment is always both material and semiotic, both affective and discursive (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Manning’s accounts of “concrete assemblages” in arts-based research foreground alignment as an affective choreography that enhances a situation’s capacity to make something happen (Manning, 2016). Analysis attends to how alignments are achieved—through standards, interfaces, rituals, atmospheres—and what they enable or preclude.
Deterritorialization and reterritorialization index change. Assemblages consolidate territories by stabilizing habits, pathways, and codes; they open lines of flight when forces escape codification; and they recompose when new codings and routings take hold (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Rather than a simple sequence, these operations occur simultaneously at different scales, making transformation uneven and contested.
Properties: capacities, exteriority of relations, and emergent order
DeLanda’s distinction between properties and capacities is especially useful for articulating assemblage properties. Properties (for example, the mass of a book) can be considered independently of a relational context. Capacities (for example, a book’s ability to prop a laptop, become kindling, or provoke a debate) are irreducibly relational, realized only when the book enters into specific arrangements with other things (DeLanda, 2016). Assemblage analysis privileges capacities because it is precisely through them that new functions, meanings, and forms of agency are distributed. This also clarifies why emergent order in assemblages is not the subtraction of difference in favour of unity; it is the patterned coordination of differences in ways that generate new capacities.
The exteriority of relations underscores a further property: since components are not swallowed by the wholes they enter, the same element can interface with many assemblages at once, transporting effects and tensions across scales. A chatbot prompt template circulates between a writing class, an institutional academic integrity policy, and a platform’s moderation pipeline; a change in any one of those assemblages can cascade through the others by reconfiguring capacities and alignments, not by rewriting an essence.
Ethical-political stakes
Assemblage thinking travels with an affirmative ethics that inquires into compositions that expand capacities to act, think, and live, especially for those whose possibilities have been systematically constrained. Braidotti locates this affirmative posture in a posthuman frame that refuses human exceptionalism while insisting on accountability for how more-than-human arrangements distribute harms and benefits (Braidotti, 2013). Work on racializing assemblages clarifies how infrastructures, classificatory regimes, data schemas, and built environments articulate with bodies to pattern exposure to violence or access to flourishing (Braidotti, Jones, & Klumbytė, 2022; Puar, 2012). Bennett’s account of “thing-power” likewise recalibrates responsibility by acknowledging the lively participation of nonhuman forces in social events, without thereby erasing political asymmetries (Bennett, 2010).
Methodological implications: how to study assemblages
Assemblage is as much a method as a doctrine. Deleuze and Guattari called their approach a pragmatics and recommended cartography rather than tracing from a model (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Cartography in this sense is an analytic practice of mapping relations, thresholds, codes, and lines of flight as they operate in specific situations. It tracks how an arrangement territorializes and deterritorializes, which elements act as obligatory passage points, where bottlenecks and leverage points materialize, and how capacities distribute.
Postqualitative research has developed complementary practices that sit comfortably with assemblage thinking. Diffractive analysis, in Barad’s sense, reads data and concepts through one another to trace patterns of difference that make a difference, rather than reflecting a fixed representation back onto a world presumed separate (Barad, 2007). Fullagar and Taylor, in their “Assemblage” entry for A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines, exemplify a cartographic sensibility by following how emotional distress travels across biopolitical territories—pharmaceutical regimes, workplace policies, healthcare systems, and family relations—and how creative practices open lines of flight (Fullagar & Taylor, 2022). Manning’s accounts of concrete assemblages show how arts-based inquiry composes situations so that new forms of knowing can emerge in the doing (Manning, 2016). Across these approaches, the operative questions are practical: what are the components, how are they aligned, what thresholds and gradients organize the field, where are the points of modulation, and what transductive processes are propagating?
A brief illustration for writing pedagogy with large language models
Consider a writing-intensive higher education course in which instructors engage LLMs as tools for learning and inquiry. Under an assemblage lens, the pedagogy that emerges is the effect of alignments among instructors’ beliefs about writing and authorship, students’ dispositions and histories, institutional assessment regimes, platform affordances, data governance policies, prompt conventions, feedback interfaces, and the time-pressure economies of academic life. Properties that matter include the exteriority of relations (a single prompt practice migrates between courses, teaching centres, and online communities), capacities (LLMs’ ability to scaffold invention or short-circuit it; students’ ability to articulate revision rationales with machine traces in view), and metastability (assignments hold together while accommodating improvisation). Methods are visible as operations: transduction appears in the iterative spread of “explain-your-revision” protocols, each adoption restructuring local workflows; modulation is present in the continuous tuning of prompts, rubrics, and interface settings to calibrate what “counts” as acceptable help; individuation is at stake as writers form new habits and identities with machine partners; differentiation/differenciation is observable as latent possibilities in the course’s design are selectively actualized across sections; territorialization consolidates norms (“cite your model interactions,” “annotate your prompting rationales”), while lines of flight open when students invent unforeseen uses—e.g., choreographing multi-turn dialogues to surface counter-arguments that would not otherwise have appeared.
This view also helps articulate the affective and embodied dimensions that instructors report: relief and curiosity when feedback cycles accelerate; anxiety in the face of shifting authorship norms; attunement to the tempo and texture of classroom interactions as human and machine suggestions interleave. A posthuman ethics of composition asks which alignments increase students’ and instructors’ capacities to think and write, how racializing or disabling assemblages might be reconfigured when automated “style” detectors reproduce inequities, and what forms of cyborg writing become possible or desirable. Haraway’s figure of the cyborg becomes concrete here: writer and text are already hybrid, materially composed across keyboards, screens, datasets, and policies, and the question becomes how to cultivate accountable kinships in these couplings (Haraway, 1985; Haraway, 2016).
Synthesis
To explain assemblages in terms of their methods and properties is to hold together two complementary insights. On the side of properties, assemblages are heterogeneous, maintain the exteriority of relations, distribute capacities, and generate emergent order through metastable coherence. On the side of methods, assemblages operate by transduction, individuation, differentiation/differenciation, modulation, and the coupled movements of territorialization and deterritorialization that rearrange alignments. As a methodology, assemblage thinking proceeds cartographically and diffractively: it maps compositions in their specificity and reads patterns of difference to surface how capacities are organized and how they can be reoriented. In research and pedagogy alike, the point is not to define once and for all what an assemblage “is,” but to tune our analyses to what an arrangement does, what it makes possible, and how it might be composed otherwise.
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