assemblage (agencement) A concept created by Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix to account for the complex combination and interaction of a set of material objects, which may be very diverse and heterogeneous in nature, and a set of discursive qualities or attributes, which may be similarly diverse in nature. Deleuze and Guattari used Foucault, Michel’s work on prisons as their key exhibit of what they mean by assemblage. The prison combines the physical structure of the prison itself with its inmates and guards as well as a host of prison rules, procedures, and practices that give shape to daily life in the prison. But the prison also taps into a discursive system of laws as well as ways of thinking about criminals and criminality that determines not only who should be in prison, but also for how long and for what reason. The prison and the justice system (as it might be called) are integrated, to be sure, but they are separate entities that evolve independently of each other. The key to understanding it, though, is the fact that the assemblage itself is virtual, even though its contents may be actual. The structure of the assemblage, which they elaborate in Mille Plateaux (1980), translated as A Thousand Plateaus (1987), is drawn from the work of the Danish linguist Hjelmslev, Louis, but it also combines elements of Stoic language philosophy (which Deleuze writes about in his book Logique du sens (1969), translated as The Logic of Sense (1990)) and somewhat residually elements of Lacan, Jacques’s concept of the objet (petit) a. The latter points to the fact that the assemblage began life as the concept of the desiring-machine, but evolved considerably between the writing of L’Anti-Œdipe (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977), and its sequel Mille Plateaux (1980). This connection is important because, in their analysis of desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue that it can only manifest by means of the assemblage. And in interviews given after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze said they created the concept as an intervention into the discourse on behaviourism. Although widely used and generally accepted as the standard translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s original word ‘agencement’, assemblage is nonetheless a contested choice because the meanings of the French and English words do not line up exactly. The added problem is that assemblage in English is a loan word from French. It has been suggested that ‘arrangement’ would be a better translation. Given how well-established assemblage is now, it is probably a moot point to question the translation, but it is important to remember that it is a translation because the secondary literature on what is now known as ‘assemblage theory’ (following the work of Manuel DeLanda) tends to derive its applications of the term from its meaning in English. Thus, there is an emphasis on assembling in Anglophone uses of the concept which is inconsistent with its original meaning in French. The concept of the assemblage has also been taken up by actor network theory (ANT) and new materialism. In each case its meaning deviates from Deleuze and Guattari’s original conception. In the case of ANT, as John Law explains in After Method: Mess in Social Science Research (2004), there is a strong emphasis placed on the idea of complex, and the assemblage is used as a way of thinking about causality in situations where clear lines of causality are difficult to discern. Law gives the case of a train crash in which it is unclear whether it was driver error or a signal fault that caused the disaster. For ANT the concept of the assemblage is a way of incorporating non-human and other-than-human agency. New materialism has a similar concern, but as Jane Bennett illustrates in Vibrant Matter (2010), there is a strong emphasis on the agency of matter itself. The assemblage is defined as a confederation of energetic matter.