An assemblage is “a collection of things which have been gathered together or assembled”. Things and assemblage have agency. They have kinship with the concept of Intertextuality. Their parts can exist on their own and become parts of other or multiple assemblages.
“Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are, rather, emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane, a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone. Each member and proto-member of the assemblage has a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage. And precisely because each member-actant maintains an energetic pulse slightly “off” from that of the assemblage, an assemblage is never a stolid block but an open-ended collective, a “non-totalizable sum.”12 An assemblage thus not only has a distinctive history of formation but a finite life span.13” (Bennett, 2010)
“Contemporary things can often be characterized by their digital, networked, computational, “smart” character. They are more like fluid assemblages (Redström and Wiltse 2015; Wiltse, Stolterman, and Redström 2015; Redström and Wiltse 2019) than ordinary physical things. They are fluid in that their forms and functions change over time and across contexts and users, and assemblages in that they are emergent entities composed of a variety of interconnected and heterogeneous components that can still retain their identity when combined.1 These include various web services and APIs, platforms, infrastructures, and of course both computational and physical components. Yet in use they tend to present themselves as stable, coherent things. It is as (at least provisionally) stable things that they enter into experience, as well as more philosophical analysis.” (“Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial”, 2020, p. 239)
“DeLanda defines assemblages as ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts’.” [@AssemblingAuraGuayB2022, p. 668]
Bibliography
“Assemblage (Philosophy).” 2024. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Assemblage_(philosophy)&oldid=1210467338.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham London: Duke University Press.
Guay-Bélanger, Dany. 2022. “Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts.” Games and Culture 17 (5): 659–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211020381.
Nail, Thomas. 2017. “What Is an Assemblage?” SubStance 46 (1): 21–37.
Wiltse, Heather, ed. 2020. Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial. Bloomsbury Visual Arts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350124288.