Stanford Archeology, Theory of Assemblage
Assemblage is one of these “bridging concepts” that connect various disciplines while retaining their specificity. Commonly used in geology, paleontology, archaeology and art, recently it regains popularity in different fields (political sciences - Manuel DeLanda, science studies – Bruno Latour, cultural studies - Brian Massumi). This process of reappearance of the concept is accompanied by serious attempts to theorize assemblage mainly by reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the term (French agencement).
The panel “Theory of Assemblage” will gather scholars from various disciplines in order to discuss a non- or a-disciplinary approach to the concept of assemblage. From the understanding of assemblage as an equivalent term to Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s paradigms, or Callon, Law and Latour’s actor-network-theory, to its popular definition as “a group of objects of different or similar types found in close association with one another”, the purpose is to problematize this concept from the point of view of comparative studies in theories of human and social sciences. Due to the course of discussion, the idea is to falsify and transgress modernist and postmodernist considerations on assemblage understood as a structure-like surrogate, or in terms of the idea of the always-emerging, the state of becoming, emergence, and production of difference and heterogeneity. In this sense, assemblage might serve as a “disturbing concept” that shows the limitations of its present understandings, on the one hand, and its potentialities for transgressing them, on the other.
The idea is to focus on material rather than discursive assemblages (however, they cannot be separated) in order to consider the complexity of human-nonhuman and organic-nonorganic relationships (assemblage vs companion species vs actor-network-theory, etc.); to discuss a performative and agentive aspect of assemblage (what it does and how it functions rather than what it means), associations and symbiotic relations as basic elements of analysis (relational materialism), the problem of territorialization and deterritorialization as factors of assemblage’s “identity” (and space as created by assemblage).
__
9:10-9:40am
Secondary Particles: “Everything is always already ready-made”
Hayden White (Stanford University)
In this presentation I will attempt to address the so-called Argos problem as a way of identifying the ontological presuppositions underlying all constructivist theories of reality. Rejecting for the moment any distinction between material and discursive agencements, I will suggest that the paradox which attracts “assemblers” to the strategies of “assemblage” is that of (one version of) the Argos paradox how to make a new thing by putting together a congeries of old ones.