A constructivism of desire: Conceptualising the politics of assemblage with Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

Assemblage theory has made a significant impact on the theoretical landscape of human geography over the past decade, providing the discipline with a “radically constructivist” account of social and cultural life that is no longer anchored to the process of human meaning‐making. Despite this growing popularity, however, geographers have recently voiced concerns about the critical efficacy of contemporary assemblage approaches, which often rely on the application of scientific terms like emergence and complexity to social and cultural processes. This temptation to overemphasise the physics of assemblage is problematic, I argue, because it tends to obfuscate the concept’s political significance and leads to accusations of a lack of criticality. In this paper I revisit the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with the aim of bringing the political implications of the assemblage concept into sharper focus. While more commonly associated with A thousand plateaus, I trace the conceptual genealogy of Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage concept through to their earlier collaboration Anti‐Oedipus, where the two philosophers develop a novel framework for political theory based on a radically constructivist model of desire. In doing so, I show how Deleuze and Guattari's political commitment to re‐think desire in machinic terms is what makes assemblage theory both a critique of capitalist subjectivity and a provocation to think the conditions of social and cultural life beyond the human.

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“…A researcher using inductive and/or qualitative methods confronts the challenge of bounding each conversation as a ‘rhizomatic assemblage’. Assemblages are a gathering and grouping of things (bodies, discourses, affects and other elements) (Roberts, 2021). As an analytic tool, the concept of assemblages supports researchers who describe the world as a complex and vibrant system of interconnected elements.…”