Assemblageapparatus using Deleuze and Foucault.pdf

Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault

Stephen LeggSchool of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD

Email: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 17 February 2011

In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’(agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in ‘governmentality studies’ and, secondly, on thelatter’s central concern with the concept of the security ‘apparatus’ (dispositif). I would like to suggestthat the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world.After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India,I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben’s and Giles Deleuze’s reflections on Michel Foucault’s use of theterm dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze’s obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault’s work, buthis explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation ofdis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze andFoucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together.

Key words: assemblage, apparatus, governmentality, Foucault, Deleuze

IntroductionIn this commentary I would like to offer some reflectionson the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’ (agencement)from the perspective of my grounding in ‘governmentalitystudies’ and, secondly, on the latter’s central concern withthe concept of the security ‘apparatus’ (dispositif ). I wouldlike to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically,both as concepts and as actually-existing things in theworld. After outlining my use to date of these concepts,and their deployment in my research on colonial India,I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben’s and GilesDeleuze’s reflections on Michel Foucault’s use of the termdispositif/apparatus. Deleuze’s obvious and acknowl-edged indebtedness to Foucault’s work, but his explicitre-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with theDeleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used toconclude with some methodological suggestions regard-ing how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and disposi-tif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should bethought together.

Foucault’s governmentality work helped me frame andunderstand my research into the ordering of the newcapital of British India (Delhi, 1911–47). In terms of race,power and knowledge, discipline and crime, and thebiopolitics of urban living, the apparatuses of orderingthat Foucault described brought beneficial insights in theobjectives and aspirations of the many-tiered hierarchies

of colonial government (Legg 2007). However, my splic-ing of the governmentality literature with that from post-colonial studies made it more apparent than ever thatattention needed to be paid to subaltern experience,refusal, autonomy and resistance. In part this was doneby insisting that the analytical categories of governmen-tality (episteme, identity, visibility, techne and ethos)be studied through specific examples of ‘regimes ofpractices’ that are persistently problematised andre-problematised (Legg 2007, 12–13; following Dean1998, 185). While Rabinow and Rose (2003) had sug-gested that apparatuses emerged in response to prob-lematisation, one of the main inspirations behind myforegrounding of problematisation was Deleuze’s com-mentary on Foucault’s work, in which he stressed that‘the final word on power is that resistance comes first’(Deleuze 1988, 89; original emphases).

While problematisations, as historical fact and concep-tual research tool, were always present in Foucault’swork, Deleuze brought them to the fore and made themthe start- and end-point of his research. Working toremove subjective notions of agency from our ontologicalworldview, Deleuze introduced the concept of assem-blage to help us disassemble bordered thinking in termsof, at least, desire, territory, philosophy, bodies and move-ment (as with translations of various concepts in post-structural theory from French to English, ‘assemblage’solidifies and simplifies the much broader concept of

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‘agencement’, see Phillips 2006, 1445). Deleuze’s moregeneral work on assemblage was articulated through spe-cific concepts and examples, including those of thenomad, lines of flight, smooth space, de-territorialisation,and bodies without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).In my later work, this helped me consider how the ‘traf-ficking of women and children’ in the interwar years wasan assemblage of actual movements, policies, novels,rumours, myths, desires, and places of disembarkation,slavery, purchase and policing (Legg 2009). But what alsobecame apparent in attempting to think assemblage andgovernmentality studies together was the extent to whichDeleuze also portrayed assemblages as leading to order,striation, re-territorialisation, long-term effects and scalingas much as to dis-order, smoothing, de-territorialisation,short-term effects and de-scaling. Similarly, apparatuses ofsecurity also create the conditions for their own decay,contestation and obsolescence.

I suggest that the interconnections between these con-cepts can be productively thought of as a dialectic. Shep-pard (2008) has summarised the debates over dialecticalthinking: whether it is tied to ontological universalism,and a triumphant unilinear belief in progress, over a morepost-structuralist emphasis on difference and fragmentednarratives; whether dialectical prioritisation of relationsand flows over things and structures is compatible withpost-structural ontologies; and how dialectics comple-ment complexity and assemblage theory. All theseapproaches emphasise relational ontologies, heterogene-ity, relational causality, constant change and space-timerelationships. Assemblage theories are, however, neces-sarily against (even temporary) dialectical resolution ofopposing forces such as, for instance, smooth and striatedspace or re-/de-territorialisation. There is, therefore, nosynthesis emerging from the thesis/antithesis dialectic.While the relationism and blending of process and struc-ture in recent Marxist thinking on dialectics is inspira-tional, the necessity of confirming the capital/labour,bourgeoisie/proletariat dynamic, and the binary ontologydriving historical materialism, re-centres ‘opposing forces’(Harvey 1996, 54). Such theories would work against theradical openness and multiplicity of the bodies at theheart of assemblage (and even apparatus) thinking. Thesestress that each state contains the traces, remnants, seedsand potential for the alternate state, and need not exist inhostile opposition. I suggest that assemblages and appa-ratuses operate in a dialectical sense in practice, but thatthey also emerged dialectically in the thought of Deleuzeand Foucault.

As the editors of this special section, and the papersherein make clear, assemblage theory is itself a heteroge-neous and diverse collection of writings and ideas (forinstance, see Bennett and Healy 2009). Robbins andMarks (2009, 182) even suggest four alternative traditions

of ‘assemblage geographies’, as exemplified by BrunoLatour, Donna Haraway and Karl Marx, as well as themore Foucauldian-Deleuzian work of Timothy Mitchell.In terms of the last two perspectives, Tampio (2009) arguesthat Deleuze’s project marks a distinct contribution toleftist thought, which is done a disservice by contempo-rary re-codings (namely, in Hardt and Negri 2001 2005).Left assemblages are defined by him as ‘any loose andprovisional material and expressive body that works forfreedom and equality’ (Tampio 2009, 385). Yet, just asDeleuze had praised Foucault’s rejection of the centraltenets of much leftist dogma, so he reworked the aim ofthe leftist project into striking a balance between the stateand the ‘war machine’, between chaos and order, ‘to takeadvantage of the life-affirming forces of metamorphosiswithout risking one’s individual or collective life’ (Tampio2009, 391). The concept of assemblage forces us to con-sider this balance, strain and tension simultaneously: ofsomething that is consistent but has fuzzy borders; of theurge to de-territorialise, while remembering that toosudden a de-stratification could be suicidal (Deleuze andGuattari 1987, 503).

There is, of course, a need for ordering, security andstratifications, and these powerful processes need not benegative. A trade union movement, a family, a partner-ship, a migration or a waist-line all need some degree ofcontrol, but this can be productive not deductive. Thiswas, of course, one of Foucault’s (1980) most famousassertions. The publication of his lecture courses is pro-viding detailed information regarding how this sort ofpower was exerted over European populations from the18th century onwards, complementing prior extractiveand often violent sovereign power and the intense,focused surveillance and routinisation of disciplinarypower. Here Foucault showed that modern societies andstates were the product, not producers, of ‘apparatusesof security’ that focused on spaces like the town or thefield to govern and normalise the regularity of vitalevents (such as birth, death, harvest, profit, crime orsanity). As with Deleuze and ‘assemblage’, for Foucault‘apparatus’ emerged among a family of concepts,including those of conduct, institution, milieu, regime,pastoralism, diagram and governmentality. He produceda genealogy of these distinctly modern forms back toancient notions of the pastor and conducting conduct,but also to traditions of diplomatic-militarism andpolicing (in the broadest sense). In introducing the latter,a fascinating slippage in the language of apparatus/assemblage also emerged:

In order to implement a political reason now definedessentially on the basis of the dynamic of forces, I thinkthe West, or Western societies, set up two assemblagesthat can only be understood on this basis of the rational-ization of forces. These two great assemblages, which I

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want to talk about today and next week, are, of course, amilitary-diplomatic apparatus, on the one hand, and theapparatus of police, in the sense the word had at the time,on the other. (Foucault 2007a, 296)

The equivocation between assemblage and apparatuscontinued in the following lecture which described‘police’ as ‘the second technological assemblage’ charac-teristic of the new art of government according to statereason, as against the ‘first great technological assem-blage’ or permanent diplomacy and a professional army.Both assemblages were said to rely on statistics:

For it is precisely the whole set of procedures set up toincrease, combine, and develop forces, it is this wholeadministrative assemblage, in short, that will make itpossible to identify what each state’s forces compriseand their possibilities of development. (Foucault 2007a,315)

In contrast, when apparatuses of security were laterdescribed, they were analysed through more specificexplorations of how disease, grain and urban order wereensured, forming the background to Foucault’s (2008)later study of liberalism and political-economics. To myknowledge, Foucault did not use the term assemblage ina systematic manner, but his collaboration with Deleuzefrom the late 1960s through the 1970s on translationsand research symposia would have led to a joining ofvocabularies and concepts. What is clear from the aboveis that Foucault was in no sense using assemblage torefer to a de-territorialising or solely de-stabilising eventor formation. Similarly, explorations of Foucault’s use ofthe term apparatus have added further weight to under-standings of its relation to the concept of assemblages,as demonstrated through the work of Agamben andDeleuze.

Agamben’s (2009) essay ‘What is an apparatus?’ wasoriginally published in 2006 as ‘Che cos’è un disposi-tivo?’ He began by returning to Foucault’s descriptionfrom 1977 of an apparatus as a thoroughly heteroge-neous set of discourses, institutions, forms, regulations,laws, statements or moral propositions; the said as muchas the unsaid (see Foucault 1980, 194–6). These forma-tions function in response to a specific urgency in a stra-tegic manner, inscribed in a play of power but alsolinked to certain limits of knowledge. Rather than situat-ing this term among Foucault’s work at the time of theinterview (on governmentality and conduct), Agambentraced it back to Foucault’s (1972) Archaeology of knowl-edge, where ‘apparatuses’ was referred to as ‘positivities’,and through this source back to Hegel through the teach-ings of Jean Hyppolite. The ‘positive’ here refers to thatwhich is enforced and obligatory, as opposed to that

which is natural or free. Unlike Hegel, Foucault did notseek to close this dialectic between individuals andhistory:

For Foucault, what is at stake is rather the investigation ofconcrete modes in which the positivities (or the appara-tuses) act within the relations, mechanisms, and ‘plays’ ofpower. (Agamben 2009, 6)

The term is then traced back even further via theologicalgenealogies of the economy in second to sixth centuryChristianity. Here Agamben explores uses of the Greekterm oikonomia (‘management’), which becomes theLatin disposition (also see Foucault 2007a, 192, on theGreek term for pastoral procedure, oikonomia psuchon[economy of souls], which goes beyond oikos [habitat] tothe ‘management’ of all Christians). What is central to allthese terms is the government and control of the behav-iours, gestures and thoughts of human beings. Agambenthus arrived at his own definition:

I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in someway the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept,model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opin-ions, or discourses of living beings. (2009, 14)

Apparatuses, living beings, and subjects are here articu-lated. Reading Agamben through his previous work(1998), apparatuses appear here as the mechanismsthrough which zoe (living beings, or the ‘ontology ofcreatures’) becomes bios (subjects). We face here, again,Agamben’s nihilism regarding the subsumption of biologi-cal and social life within the nomos of the camp (seeLaclau 2007). He does ask how we might confront themassive contemporary accumulation and proliferation ofapparatuses, and suggests liberating the captured through‘profanation’ (restoring objects to common use). But hisconclusion is that this is phenomenally difficult withmodern apparatuses.

In this reading, apparatuses appear to be similar toassemblages in their heterogeneity, but quickly becomemechanisms of entrapment. This reading can be directlycompared to Deleuze’s (1992) ‘What is a dispositif’,which the promotional material for the Stanford Univer-sity Press’s version of Agamben’s essay claimed hadmystified the concept of apparatus, whereas Agambenhad illuminated it.1 Just as his collected musings Foucault(Deleuze 1988) had presented us with a very Deleu-zian man, Deleuze’s apparatus is almost comicallyassemblage-like. From the outset, a dispositif is defined asa ‘tangle, a multilinear ensemble’ (Deleuze 1992, 159).Each has lines of different natures, which break andchange direction:

Untangling these lines within a social apparatus is, in eachcase, like drawing up a map, doing cartography, surveying

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unknown landscapes, and this is what [Foucault] calls‘working on the ground’. One has to position oneself onthese lines themselves, these lines which do not just makeup the social apparatus but run through it and pull at it,from North to South, from East to West, or diagonally.(Deleuze 1992, 159)

Deleuze’s apparatuses have dimensions of visibility,enunciation, force and subjectification, although not allneed have them, and their operations could not be cir-cumscribed. Rather than ordering and capturing withomniscient foresight, apparatuses get muddled and mixthings up, producing subjectivities which escape andneed to be reinserted into a different ‘multiplicity’, forcinga constant reconsideration of the ‘new’ (Deleuze 1992,162–3). If apparatuses are so dynamic and messy thenwhy, Deleuze asks, has Foucault been read as scribing thevictory of power (see Said et al. 1993 [2004]), not ofresistance? Deleuze suggested that the lines of appara-tuses divided into two groups: lines of stratification orsedimentation, and lines leading to the present day orcreativity. The reason Foucault is associated with theformer is that they were the subject of his books, whichdid not formulate the latter; these were the subject of hisinterviews and activism.

What we have in these two discussions is, then, anacknowledgement that apparatuses are etymologicallyand genealogically indissociable from regulation andgovernment, but that their very multiplicity necessarilyopens spaces of misunderstanding, resistance and flight.What we can also see, through the increasing explora-tion of the utility of assemblage theory, is that stability isassembled as much as destabilisation. Stuart Elden(2009, xxvii) stressed that, despite the common trend toassociate globalisation with de-territorialisation, Deleuzeand Guattari always stressed the ongoing and complexconfiguration of de- and re-territorialisation. Yet, theconcepts can also be thought too closely together. TaniaLi (2007), for instance, created a typology of assem-blages featuring six generic attributes: forging align-ments; rendering technical; authorising knowledge;managing failures; anti-politics; and reassembling. In sodoing, Li explicitly blurs any distinction between assem-blage and apparatus, and closes the dialectic by turningthe former into an act of labour and governance. It is mysuggestion that apparatuses be considered a type ofassemblage, but one more prone to (in the sense ofanticipating, provoking, achieving and consolidating)re-territorialisation, striation, scaling and governing (alsosee Patton 2000, 73; Erikson 2005, 604). Apparatus andassemblage thus emerge as one and part of each other,but in a continual dialectic (for comments on a similardialectic between sovereign order and ontological dis-order in the writings of Carl Schmitt, see Rowan 2011).This is evident in both the philosophical content and the

written style of Foucault and Deleuze’s texts. While Fou-cault’s books (if not interviews or activities) concernedthe regulation of sexuality, Deleuze wrote about powerand desire (Grace 2009). While Foucault outragedFreudians by challenging the repressive hypothesis,Deleuze stands out more as a queer theorist through hisvery different style of provocation:

What got me by during that period was conceiving ofthe history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, whatamounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception.I imagined myself approaching an author from behindand giving him a child that would indeed be his butwould nonetheless be monstrous. (Deleuze 1977, cited inMassumi 1987, x)

How to operationalise, then, this dialectic as a method-ology? Returning to my empirical work, my originalresearch explored the apparatuses of the colonial city.Securing the urban form was a chief interest in Foucault’swork, as explored by John Pløger (2008; also see Foucault2007b; Legg forthcoming). He shows that most readingsof dispositif have emphasised the orderly over the genera-tive, and suggests translating dispositif itself as assem-blage. Urban apparatuses make it as obvious as anydispositif that they cannot be assumed to achieve theorder they may desire:

A spatial dispositif is thus more than a regulatory appa-ratus, a material installation or (spatial) ontology . . .Space does not determine; it signifies, it disposes,‘allows’ more than ‘forbids’ specific practices. (Pløger2008, 60)

But there are also ongoing attempts to consider theurban from the perspective of assemblage theory. Onerecurring feature of this nascent field of study is its atten-tion to the trans-scalar potential that assemblage theory’sinterest in smooth space and de-territorialisation brings(see McFarlane 2009, on housing and transnational socialmovements, or Legg 2009, on brothels and internationaltrafficking). A recent volume on Urban assemblages drewvery specifically on actor network theory more thanDeleuze directly, but arrived at the compatible conclusionthat

The notion of urban assemblages in the plural form offersa powerful foundation to grasp the city anew, as an objectwhich is relentlessly being assembled at concrete sites ofurban practice or, to put it differently, as a multiplicity ofprocesses of becoming, affixing sociotechnical networks,hybrid collectivities and alternative toplogies. (Farías andBender 2010, 2)

I believe our challenge is to look for manifestations of theapparatus–assemblage dialectic in the worlds weresearch. These are not meant to be abstractions or ideal



types, but actually-existing heterogeneous multiplicitiesthat govern, incite and move us, through mechanismsunsaid and said, at various scales:

A political assemblage – a city, state, party, or interna-tional order – has some coherence in what it says andwhat it does, but it continually dissolves and morphs intosomething new. (Tampio 2009, 394; also see Isin 1998)

In conclusion, I leave you with some questions that haveemerged from intersections of the pleasantly irresolvableapparatus–assemblage dialectic that have emerged in mywork (and some questions that might be of wider interest):At what point does the sprawling and imaginary conceptof the urban temporarily solidify into the experience of acity? (Or, how do broader trends in apparatus and assem-blage formation and dialectics find material or concep-tual, if temporary, stability?) How do assumptions aboutthe political or the nation coalesce into the endlesslyprovocative and agonal apparatus of the state? Howshould we go about exploring the ways in which theapparatus of the Government of India intersected with theaesthetic, moral and racial assemblage of the Raj? (Or,how does the cultural imperium of America coincide withthe form of the USA? Or how do economic and culturalassemblages of ‘tradition’ and ‘development’ get taken upand reworked in explicitly ‘developing’ states?) Andthrough what channels can we examine the global assem-blage of interwar internationalism as it became instanti-ated in bodies as diverse as the League of Nations, theRockefeller Foundation, and the Communist Interna-tional? (Or, how does the question of international sover-eignty get reconfigured through the apparatuses of, forinstance, the UN, World Bank, WHO, the Ford Founda-tion, Amnesty International or media, mining, banking orfashional multi-national corporations?)

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Colin McFarlane and Ben Anderson for invitingme to be part of this special section. Special thanks also to AlexVasudevan for discussions on this topic and for reading throughthe paper.

Note

1 See http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17450, accessed 5 August2010.

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Assemblageapparatus using Deleuze and Foucault.pdf