Deleuze and Guattari
April 10, 2006
Unity (Binary) Multiplicity
Strata Lines of Flight
Tree of Porphyry
Assemblages of Desire and
Assemblages of Enunciation
Chain: Event, Sense, Common Notion, Assemblage
Body without Organs (BwO)
Kafka: A Minor Literature
Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
2. A Thousand Plateaus
What is Philosophy
On the translation of Agencement by Assemblage
One of the key problems of global knowledge concerns the circulation, adoption and adaptation of concepts in translation. The English word assemblage is gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences as a concept of knowledge, but its uses remain disparate and sometimes imprecise. Two factors contribute to the situation. First, the concept is normally understood to be derived from the French word agencement, as used in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (who, furthermore, do not use the French word assemblage in this way). Tracing the concept in its philosophical sense back to their texts, one discovers that it cannot easily be understood except in connection with the development of a complex of such concepts. Agencement implies specific connections with the other concepts. It is, in fact, the arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense. For Deleuze and Guattari, a philosophical concept never operates in isolation but comes to its sense in connection with other senses in specific yet creative and often unpredictable ways. This in connection with already provides something of the sense of agencement, if one accepts that a concept arises in philosophy as the connection between a state of affairs and the statements we can make about it. Agencement designates the priority of neither the state of affairs nor the statement but of their connection, which implies the production of a sense that exceeds them and of which, transformed, they now form parts.
Secondly, the translation of agencement by assemblage can give rise to connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate elements of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it. One of the earliest attempts to translate Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term agencement appears in the first published translation, by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, of the article “Rhizome.” The English term they use, assemblage, is retained in Brian Massumi’s later English version, when “Rhizome” appears as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. Since then many (though by no means all) translators and commentators have agreed, in a loose consensus, to keep to this early translation of agencement by assemblage, while acknowledging that the translation is not really a good approximation. Agencement is a common French word with the senses of either “arrangement,” “fitting” or “fixing” and is used in French in as many contexts as those words are used in English: one would speak of the arrangement of parts of a body or machine; one might talk of fixing (fitting or affixing) two or more parts together; and one might use the term for both the act of fixing and the arrangement itself, as in the fixtures and fittings of a building or shop, or the parts of a machine.
In contrast, the word assemblage in English means more or less the same as its actual French counterpart, assemblage, a word that Deleuze and Guattari use less often and certainly never in a philosophical sense. It has a more restrictive range of uses in English. The French will talk about an assemblage of different grape varieties or ingredients in a recipe and its senses cover blending, collating, gathering and joining. Although it designates a collection of things in English too (as one of the noun forms of assemble), it is conventionally restricted to more technical terminology: as the collection of remains found on an archeological site (in a French pronunciation: a-sā-bläzh); and in art theory (in both French and English) it is a term associated with collage and other avant-garde or pop art styles, designating works assembled out of diverse objects (like Jean Arp’s Trousse d’un Da, an assemblage of driftwood nailed onto wood with some remains of old painting).
imaginative resource for framing objects and operations of the social sciences,
assemblage remains suggestive. Its use as a translation of agencement, though not entirely without
justification, is nonetheless in
danger of missing what is really forceful with regard to knowledge in Deleuze and
Guattari’s usage. The most direct
connection that agencement has for
Deleuze would be to his work from the late 1960s on the philosophy of Spinoza
and the Common Notion. It also has a very precise correspondence to
the notions of event, becoming and sense, which Deleuze discusses at length in other works of the same
period. A common notion represents the situation when two or more bodies have
something in common. All bodies have in
common the states of extension, motion and rest; but when two or more bodies
come into contact or otherwise enter into a relationship they form a
composition. A common notion is the representation of this composition as an
independent unity. The unity, for
instance, of a poison and the body poisoned can be regarded as a state of
becoming and an event which is reducible to neither the body nor the
poison. The body and the poison, rather,
participate in the event (which is what they have in common). Deleuze brings together readings of several
sources, including Lewis Carroll’s
The implications for knowledge (although these states have powerful implications for ontological questions too) are profound. The traditional arrangement implies a subject of knowledge separated out from his objects, which he transforms by making them his project. But this is a kind of agencement too—an event, a becoming, a compositional unity—with sense and a common notion, to which adequate ideas might be affixed. The sense of such a knowing cannot any longer be attributed to the knower, who participates in a further stage of becoming not reducible to his knowledge. Deleuze and Guattari, first in their 1975 book on Franz Kafka, and then in A Thousand Plateaus, mobilize this sense of agencement and the term itself begins to shift, to break up and to participate in further connections. The “collective agencement of enunciation,” designates the language system to which all speakers of a language belong; the “social agencement of desire” designates the individual’s relation to his objects; and the “machinic agencement” exceeds both the planes of enunciation and desire, recombining them in further enunciative events.
The translation of agencement by assemblage might have been justified as a further event of agencement (assemblage) were it not for the tendency of discourses of knowledge to operate as statements about states of affairs. The statement, as Deleuze and Guattari tirelessly insist, tends to undo assemblages, to take things apart, to divide things from each other, to divide, fundamentally, the subject of the statement (the sense and reference of a statement) from its enunciation (the conditions on which one can make a statement at all). If the sense of the term assemblage gathers to itself the unity and homogeneity of a theoretical concept at the level of the statement (which is what agencement allows) then it is also possible to problematize the term, to hook it back up with the fittings, fixtures, and diverse arrangements that help constitute it and help to keep it current.
Contents Under Pressure - A Hypertext in Progress by Christian Hubert