Assembling Agency: Expression, Action, and Ethics in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

Abstract

In response to several problems identified in the primary and secondary literature, this article advances an "expressive" conception of action and agency that (i) is consistent with the metaphysics of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, (ii) can underpin the ethical dimensions of this text, and (iii) meets some of the general requirements of a philosophy of action. This conception will be distinguished from standard theories in the philosophy of action, to the extent that these latter conceptualize and explain action with reference to intentions taken as psychological causes that are specifiable in advance and independently of the resultant activity. But it will also be distinguished from commentaries that, after rightly identifying the standard conception of intentional action as incompatible with Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysics, fail to substitute a viable conception of action and agency in its stead. In short, drawing on a notion of expression, this article will advance a conception of intentions that does not treat them as prior and independently specifiable causes of action, but rather as "immanent" causes whose intelligible content is inseparable from-that is, dynamically assembled and specified within-the ecologically and socially situated, temporally extended and realitytransforming actions they animate.

Theorizing Institutional Entrepreneuring: Arborescent and rhizomatic assembling

“…Finally, we see compatibilities between assemblage theory and institutional theory, particularly the latter's more phenomenological and constructivist variants (Jepperson, 1991;Meyer & Vaara, 2020). Deleuze and Guattari's ontology is one of immanence (Bowden, 2020;Nail, 2017) in which experience is seen not "as a relation between a subject who senses and an object that is sensed," but rather "as being prior to subjects and objects . .…”

“…Thus, contrary to what is connoted by the English term, Deleuze and Guattari's original terminology denotes a "process of arranging, organizing, fitting together," not the static arrangement resulting from such a process (Wise, 2011, p. 91). In other words, assemblage theory might be more aptly called assembling theory, in which attention is squarely on the processes of "assembling agency" (Bowden, 2020).…”

“…29-30). In other words, tracings always follow pregiven structures and predefined pathways (Bowden, 2020).…”

“…In place of heredity or mimesis, rhizomes propagate by epidemic and contagion. Such rhizomatic population depends on experimentation (Watson, 2013); the ever-changing outcome is emergent, and cannot be known a priori (Bowden, 2020). This also means that a rhizome "has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25).…”