Powerful assemblages?

John AllenFaculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6BJ

Email: J.R.Allen@open.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 17 February 2011

In thinking through how different registers of power, that are neither centred nor radically dispersed inpattern, come into play with different outcomes in different times and places, the notion of assemblagehas its appeal. Two qualities come to mind. First off, it allows for non-coherence as a way of thinkingabout how institutional arrangements of power more or less hold together, despite being made up of aco-existence of often diverse logics and practices. Second, spatio-temporal assemblages offer a way ofunderstanding the various power plays that shape, say, the politics of regions and nation states, byinvoking a topological sensibility around proximity and distance that appears more productive than thefamiliar topographies of scale and networks. Weighed against such attractions, however, the notion ofassemblage lends itself to a number of pitfalls: endless description is one, weak conceptualisationanother.

Key words: power, non-coherence, co-existence, topology, interplay of forces

IntroductionWhen a novel term enters the geographical lexicon it isoften greeted by many within the discipline, quite reason-ably, with a degree of organised scepticism. ‘Assemblage’is just such a term. If its use is to amount to more than apassing fad or intellectual fashion, then it should perhapsallow us to do certain things and enable us to think incertain ways that were not possible before. As Ben Ander-son and Colin McFarlane suggest in their introduction, thetask is not so much one of pinning down the ‘correct’definition of assemblage or simply declaring a certainfidelity to Deleuze’s vocabulary, as it is one of exploringwhat avenues of enquiry are opened up and what ques-tions are made possible by thinking through social andmaterial formations as assemblages. In what follows, I firstset out what I take to be one of the term’s main attractions:that it offers the possibility of grasping how something asheterogeneous as nation states, for instance, or regionalpolitical formations, hold together without actuallyceasing to be heterogeneous (Deleuze and Guattari 1988;see also Deleuze and Parnet 1987). The implications ofthis somewhat paradoxical stance are then considered forwhat they raise about how spatial and temporal ordersmay be understood and engaged. Finally, and briefly,some of the potential pitfalls of the term, its scope andlimitations, are discussed. Throughout the paper I draw on

examples from the geographies of power and authority toillustrate my line of thought.

Holding it all togetherPerhaps one of the first things to understand aboutassemblages, or if not to understand then at leastacknowledge, is what, for me, is their guiding sentiment.For much of the time, the geography of this or that ismade up of relationships and things that jostle, co-exist,interfere and entangle one another. Some of the tangledrelationships that lie before us may co-exist uneasilywith one another, to the extent that it may seem odd thatthey are part of the same formation. The heterogeneity ofsuch arrangements can throw into question the very ideathat there is such a coherent and consistent formationout there or, indeed, that it is possible even to talk aboutsuch a given entity. In such circumstances, we may findourselves forced to choose between a motley world ofcontingent practices that never amount to anything morethan that or a tight seamless world of well-defined shiftsand formations. Working with the notion of assemblageallows us to avoid such extremes, not by adding themtogether or splicing, say, the local and the global, but byfacing up to the possibility that heterogeneous elementscan hold together without actually forming a coherentwhole.

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The idea that institutional arrangements of power, forexample, can more or less hold together, despite beingmade up of a co-existence of diverse logics and priorities,often pulling in different directions, suggests something ofthe tenuous achievement that institutions can display inachieving consistency across their practices. A UK regionlike the South East of England, for instance, is made up ofbits and pieces of state authority, sections of business andany number of partnerships and agencies engaged in a‘politics of scale’ exercise to fix resources and stabilise ageographical definition of the region to their advantage(see Allen and Cochrane 2007). The sense in which thereis a regional ‘assemblage’, however, rather than a geo-graphically tiered hierarchy of decisionmaking, lies withthe tangle of interactions between part-private, part-public agencies, as well as parts of central, regional andlocal government ‘lodged’ in the region. The interplay offorces between these diverse actors is precisely whatmakes different kinds of regional government possible,but crucially this does not mean to say that the arrange-ment is itself institutionally coherent or without tension.

On this view, a regional authority is a relational effect ofpolitical interaction between a range of central, regionaland local actors, not a bloc of pre-formed decisionmakingpowers. It hangs together institutionally, not by the impo-sition of powers ‘from above’ or by the diktats of a rulingclique, but through the tangled and cross-cutting politicalrelationships between actors engaged in a complex set ofpolitical mobilisations to secure, modify or translate theirgoals and interests. Central government actors, in thatsense, are part of ‘regional’ assemblages, not bodies thatsit over or apart from the region. Their manoeuvres andnegotiations are entangled in regional governance struc-tures and it is through such relationships that the con-straints and impositions of the ‘centre’ are revealed. Justbecause the central state is ‘higher up’, institutionally andgeographically, does not pre-judge whose will eventuallyprevails; in a regional assemblage that is an outcome to beunravelled from the tangled practices of power andauthority. (The apparent ‘flatness’ to this arrangement,where outcomes are not pre-determined or assumed to betop-down, is what I take Jones et al. (2007) to imply intheir critique of geographical scale).

Significantly, one can think as much about regionalpolitical formations in this way, as a tangled assemblageof relationships and practices, as one can think about anypowerful arrangement that hangs together as an assortedheterogeneous mix of power and authority: from, say, thechanging organisation of finance and corporate businessin a more demanding economic world to the shiftingtactics of civil society movements in response to globalharm and injustice. The mix assembled may be different,but the arrangements themselves hold together nonethe-less as some form of consistent, if not coherent, entity.

Yet, critically, this does not mean that such assembledparties form a whole that is entirely separate and discretein their relationships and practices. The open-endednature of such formations means that the same actors andinstitutions may find themselves entangled in quite differ-ent ways in more than one economic or political assem-blage. In one particular setting, the relationship between aprivate business, say, and a regional development author-ity may revolve around the negotiation and inducement ofwaste contracts, yet that very same corporate firm mayfind itself the target of a bitter campaign against environ-mental malpractice by a distant NGO in a quite differentsetting. Each assembled heterogeneous mix of power isconstructed through its relationships and interactions, andas those interactions change so, potentially, do the actorsand materials in the arrangement (on powerful humanand non-human assemblages, see, for instance, Bennett2010). What can be assembled to explore a particularavenue of enquiry may be reassembled to pursue anotherquite different set of questions and relationships.

In the absence of any off-the-shelf wholes, whose prop-erties, as Manuel DeLanda (2006) would have it, cannotbe reduced to those of its parts, we are left to traceconnections and relationships, and that, in turn, raises thenature of the timeframes and spatial orders of the actorsassembled in the different power plays.

Assembling parts of elsewhereInsofar as relationships of whatever kind are assembledacross space and over time, the fact that there may be amix of space/times embedded in the practices of thediverse actors that give shape to regional political (Allenand Cochrane 2007) or, for that matter, environmentalassemblages (Li 2007) should alert us to the fact that wehave moved beyond the mappable coordinates and dis-tances of Euclid. A world in which power and authority iseasily locatable and capable of extension over fixed dis-tances with more or less uncomplicated reach over agiven territory sits awkwardly alongside a geography ofco-existence and entanglement where proximity andpresence are themselves not straightforward givens. Whenheterogeneous bits and pieces of power and authorityhold together because, rather than in spite, of a clash ofdiverse logics and practices, the geography itself onlyreally starts to make sense in a world of relational space/time (see Harvey 2006; Massey 2005).

A recent attempt to capture such a mixed spatial andtemporal assemblage can be found in Saskia Sassen’sTerritory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assem-blages (2006), where ‘global’ financial centres like theCity of London are said to reveal a new geography ofpower. The financial formations that she has in mindare configurations of territory, authority and rights that

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combine older elements of legal and bureaucratic gover-nance with new economic capabilities and norms drawnfrom elsewhere. Part private, part public, with bits andpieces of institutional authority, legal rights and territorialinfrastructure, the emergent assemblage, which is neither‘national’ nor ‘global’, represents, for her, an unstablepower formation in the making. The instability, however,is not only a product of co-existing economic, politicaland legal relationships which rub up against one another;it is also because such relationships are deemed tooperate according to quite different temporal rhythms andpaces that have the potential to clash in ways that, in herterms, ‘unbundle’ formerly exclusive financial spaces likethe City of London. When privatised governance regimesare inserted into previously publically regulated domains,the faster tempo of the former can disrupt the sloweraccountability mechanisms of the latter and produce atension that has to be more or less managed, not simplyresolved. Stabilisation, in such a context, is a tenuousachievement, forged on an ongoing basis and alwaysopen to volatility.

The open-ended nature of such formations also impliesthat, over time, relationships folded in from elsewheremay work to disassemble and reassemble ‘nationalregional’ or ‘global regional’ spaces like the City. The mixof space/times embedded in the practices of differentactors – from global banks and supernational institutionsto state agencies and regulatory authorities – take theirshape from the variety of relations that stretch across andbeyond the Square Mile and the Docklands, yet are simul-taneously ‘lodged’ within those urban spaces (see Allenand Cochrane 2011). The ‘lifting out’ of forms of privateauthority from one context to another made possible bynew networked arrangements provides a kind of arm’s-length reach into financial centres, while the ability toestablish near instantaneous reach through a variety oftelecommunication and media technologies enablesactors to connect in real time (see Callon and Law 2004;Allen 2010).

Bruno Latour (1999 2005) perhaps, rather than Sassen,is better at grasping the topological nature of such inten-sive relationships, where forms of rule-setting establishedelsewhere are folded into the here and now and the gapbetween ‘near’ and ‘far’ dissolved, rather than traversed.When relationships are understood topologically, pres-ence and absence are reconfigured so that the distancebetween ‘here and there’ or between ‘the local and theglobal’ is not anything that can be measured in miles andkilometres. The way that things hold together in assem-blages is down to their relatedness, so to speak, ratherthan simply their topographical setting and location. Inthat sense, geometric scale and the idea that actors moveup and down them, or ‘jump’ them even, is somewhatmisplaced, as is the conventional assumption that power

and authority is something that can merely be extendedoutwards through networks across a flat surface (see Allen2009 2011).

Flat-pack geographies?It is perhaps a banal observation, but no less important forthat, to note that carving out assemblages from theplethora of stuff around us is a fallible business. There isno blueprint to follow, only suggestive guidelines as tohow one might possibly approach such a task (on methodassemblages, see, for instance, Law 2004). Nor does itfollow that thinking through assemblages is always themost helpful way to approach geographical questions andpuzzles; philosophical eclecticism may sometimes be themore appropriate stance. That said, two possible pitfalls orshortcomings associated with the use of assemblagescome to mind, both of which have the potential to tripus up.

One concerns the ease with which the notion ofassemblage lends itself to a simple joining-up exercise. Ifwe succumb too readily to the ontological certainty thatthe world is heterogeneous, multiple and contingent, itcan be all too easy to follow our senses and piecetogether what, following Clifford Geertz [1993, andbefore him Gilbert Ryle 1971], can best be described as‘thin description’. The significance of what lies before uscannot simply be taken for granted, nor should everydaycertainties be accepted as such. Experience, and ourattempts to assemble the bits and pieces of the world‘out there’, is best not thought about as an exercise akinto a flat-pack construction where the most obvious rela-tionships are laid out before us to piece together. Thereare, to say the least, tensions and contradictions, clashesand displacements, which may defy any self-evidentarrangement, yet such things could well account for howdivergent spatial and temporal orders hang together inpractice.

Second, and relatedly, the important attention paid toempirical detail in the construction of heterogeneousassemblages does not remove the need for thoughtfulconceptualisation. A tangled bundle of co-existing logics,each beating to its own rhythm, has first to be appre-hended before it can be comprehended. The interactionsbetween different logics, the different modes throughwhich things work themselves out in practice, and thecontent of the relationships that hold assemblages inplace have first to be specified in some way for us to grasptheir looming shape and wider potential significance.With luck, assemblages, sharply conceived, should openup new questions, as well as new forms of engagement,not merely tell us what we have known more or less allalong. If it turns out to be the latter, then they are indeedlikely to end up a passing intellectual fashion.

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