Assemblage theory is a framework for understanding how diverse, heterogeneous elements come together to form wholes that are more than the sum of their parts, without those wholes being permanent or fixed. Originating in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the idea has traveled far from its roots in French poststructuralism, landing in urban studies, environmental governance, security research, and even psychology. What makes it distinctive is its insistence that the world is built from temporary, shifting arrangements of things, people, rules, and forces rather than from stable, self-contained structures.
From Agencement to Assemblage
The concept begins with a translation problem. Deleuze and Guattari used the French word agencement, which carries connotations of arrangement, fitting together, and active composition. When their work was translated into English, agencement became “assemblage,” a word that loses some of the original’s dynamic flavor and instead suggests a more static collection of parts.1Atlantis. Theory in Perpetual Motion and Translation: Assemblage and Intersectionality in Feminist Studies This isn’t just an academic footnote. The gap between the two words has shaped how English-speaking scholars interpret and use the theory. Some treat assemblages as relatively stable groupings that can be mapped out, while others stay closer to the French sense of an ongoing process of arranging and rearranging.
Deleuze and Guattari were interested in how things as different as bodies, institutions, technologies, affects, and signs can come together into functioning wholes without any single element being in charge. A city, for instance, is not just buildings, roads, and people: it’s also laws, habits, desires, weather patterns, and economic flows all interacting in ways that produce something recognizable yet constantly changing. The theory says these wholes are real and have genuine effects, but they are never permanent. Pull one element out or add something new, and the entire arrangement shifts.
What Makes an Assemblage Tick
At its core, assemblage theory rests on a few key commitments. The first is heterogeneity. An assemblage is made up of radically different kinds of things. It isn’t a group of similar items; it’s a mix of material objects, living beings, rules, technologies, policies, and even emotions, all co-constituting each other because they happen to share a particular time and place.2Edward Elgar Publishing. Assemblage theory A hospital ward, for example, is an assemblage not just of doctors and patients but also of beeping monitors, pharmaceutical supply chains, insurance regulations, architectural layouts, and the anxiety in the waiting room.
The second commitment is what philosophers call “exteriority of relations.” In the standard Deleuzian reading, the parts of an assemblage relate to each other externally. That means any given part could be detached and plugged into a different assemblage without fundamentally changing what it is. A traffic light works the same way whether it’s installed in Paris or Lagos; its identity isn’t wholly consumed by the intersection it happens to sit in. Not everyone agrees with this framing, though. Some scholars argue for a more dialectical view, proposing that the elements of an assemblage also shape each other internally, so that belonging to a particular arrangement does change what a component is.3Anthropological Theory. Rendering assemblage dialectical This debate about internal versus external relations remains one of the live fault lines in the theory.
A third idea involves what Deleuze and Guattari called “coding” and “decoding.” Certain expressive elements in an assemblage work to fix its identity, to make it recognizable and stable over time. Languages and genetic codes are classic examples of these identity-fixing mechanisms.4ResearchGate. Assemblage Theory When those expressive elements weaken or shift, the assemblage decodes, becoming more fluid and open to transformation. Think of how a neighborhood’s identity can dissolve over a decade of demographic change, or how a political party can lose its coherence when its ideological language no longer holds its members together.
DeLanda, Bennett, and the Theory’s Second Life
Deleuze and Guattari wrote in a dense, literary style that many social scientists found hard to operationalize. The philosopher Manuel DeLanda is largely responsible for reformulating their ideas into something more systematic and accessible to researchers outside continental philosophy. DeLanda’s version of assemblage theory uses language familiar to social scientists and analytic philosophers, offering tools for analyzing social, biological, and political systems that avoid both crude reductionism and fuzzy holism.5Theory & Psychology. Realism, materialism, and the assemblage: Thinking psychologically with Manuel DeLanda His work has been especially appealing to researchers frustrated by the old standoff between realism and constructivism, because assemblage theory sidesteps it: the world is real and materially consequential, but the patterns we observe in it are historically contingent and could always have been otherwise.
Jane Bennett took the framework in a different direction with her concept of “vital materialism,” which foregrounds the agency of nonhuman things. In her account, matter itself has a kind of liveliness. Electrical grids, food systems, and trash heaps all exert force and shape outcomes in ways that can’t be reduced to human intentions.6Theory, Culture & Society. An Alternative Model of Politics? Prospects and Problems of Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism Bennett’s work has been influential in environmental humanities and political theory, though critics have questioned whether attributing agency to nonhuman objects dilutes the concept of agency to the point of meaninglessness.
How Assemblage Thinking Compares to Actor-Network Theory
Readers encountering assemblage theory for the first time often wonder how it differs from actor-network theory (ANT), the approach associated with Bruno Latour and others. Both frameworks insist that the social world is built from heterogeneous networks of human and nonhuman actors. Both reject the idea that society is a thing sitting behind or above the interactions of individuals. The overlap is real, and some scholars draw freely from both traditions.
But there are genuine differences. ANT tends to be strong at describing how networks stabilize and extend across space, how a laboratory finding in one city gets connected to a policy decision in another through chains of documents, instruments, and spokespersons. Assemblage thinking, by contrast, is more attuned to rupture, to the moments when arrangements break apart and something genuinely new emerges. It also gives more weight to affect and desire as forces that hold assemblages together or tear them apart.7Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross‐fertilisations Where ANT describes change as fluid and incremental, assemblage theory is more comfortable with discontinuity and surprise. In practice, the two often complement each other, with ANT providing a granular toolkit for tracing connections and assemblage thinking supplying a vocabulary for when those connections come undone.
Assemblage Theory and the City
Urban studies is one of the fields where assemblage theory has gained the most traction. The appeal is intuitive: cities are the ultimate heterogeneous mix of people, infrastructure, capital, regulations, weather, history, and improvisation. Traditional approaches to urban analysis often start from a fixed spatial form (the neighborhood, the downtown, the suburb) and ask how social processes unfold within it. Assemblage thinking flips this, treating the spatial form itself as something that has to be produced and maintained through ongoing interactions.
One line of research uses the framework to rethink the city as a “dwelling process,” emphasizing that urban space is relational, mobile, and unequal rather than a container that people simply live inside.8Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space The city assembles itself differently depending on where you stand in it. The assemblage experienced by a homeowner in a gated community is made of different materials, rules, and affects than the one experienced by an informal street vendor a few blocks away, even though both are “in” the same city.
More recent work has applied the concept to specific urban forms like corridors, the transit-oriented strips and development axes that connect city centers to peripheries. Rather than treating corridors as fixed infrastructure, assemblage urbanism sees them as contingent formations shaped by unique histories, competing political projects, and material constraints that vary from one place to another.9Urban Studies. Neither infrastructural nor planetary: Urban corridor as an assemblage This matters practically because it pushes back against one-size-fits-all planning templates. If every corridor is a distinct assemblage, then copying a bus rapid transit model from Bogotá to Lagos without understanding local material and political conditions is likely to produce unexpected outcomes.
Environmental Governance and Global Politics
Environmental governance is another area where the framework has proved useful, especially for understanding how policies and economic logics spread across borders without any single authority directing them. Research grounded in assemblage thinking has examined how the language and practices of market-based conservation gradually reshape power dynamics and institutional structures, not through top-down design but through the accumulation of loosely coordinated actions across diffuse networks.10World Development. Environmental governance in motion: Practices of assemblage and the political performativity of economistic conservation The assemblage lens highlights that governance is often less deliberate and more emergent than institutional analysis assumes.
A striking application comes from research on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Fieldwork in Bolivia analyzed how the SDGs function as an assemblage that, whatever its stated intentions, works to depoliticize conflicts over resource extraction. By packaging development targets in a neutral, technical language, the SDGs obscure the fact that pursuing certain goals (like economic growth) can directly undermine others (like environmental protection for indigenous communities). The assemblage frame helped make this tension visible by drawing attention to the heterogeneous elements, including measurement tools, NGO networks, government reports, and mining contracts, that hold the arrangement together.11Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. The anti‐politics of sustainable development: Environmental critique from assemblage thinking in Bolivia
In international relations and security studies, scholars have used assemblage thinking to examine how security regimes persist and expand. One analysis theorizes that assemblages of security thrive on a double denial: denial of complicity in producing insecurity, and denial that total security is impossible. These denials allow security assemblages to grow, drawing in technologies, private contractors, surveillance systems, and public narratives that reinforce each other across civilian and military domains.12Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Denials ‘From Seabed to Space’: Assemblages of (In)Security and Denial in the Politics of Security Legal scholarship has similarly used the concept to analyze how territory, authority, and rights get reconfigured in the era of climate change, drawing on Saskia Sassen’s influential use of an assemblage framework to trace transformations from medieval to global political forms.13The Modern Law Review. From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re‐Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic Regime
Turning Theory Into Research Method
One of the persistent challenges with assemblage theory is that it can feel more like a way of seeing the world than a method for studying it. Researchers who want to use it empirically have had to improvise. Several methodological experiments have emerged in recent years, and they look quite different from each other.
One approach borrows from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, using video recordings of people interacting with screens and technologies to unpack how socio-material assemblages form in real time. Rather than starting with a theoretical map and fitting observations into it, this method works inductively, letting the patterns of interaction reveal how human bodies, digital interfaces, and physical spaces assemble together moment by moment.14Human Communication Research. Situated socio-material assemblages: assemmethodology in the making
Another approach takes the assemblage concept and applies it across every stage of a qualitative research project, from framing the question to analyzing data. One study used it throughout an investigation of how people experience antidepressant use, demonstrating seven distinct ways that assemblage thinking can reshape concrete research practices.15International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Orientating to Assembling: Qualitative Inquiry for More-Than-Human Worlds A third experiment developed what it calls “assemblage analysis,” a method for working with narrative data that combines poststructuralist discourse analysis with attention to material, affective, and nonhuman forces shaping the stories people tell. This method was developed during research on how sexuality is treated within a disability service, and it tries to capture dimensions of experience that standard interview analysis tends to miss.16Qualitative Research. Assemblage analysis: an experimental new-materialist method for analysing narrative data
What these diverse methods share is a refusal to treat the “social” and the “material” as separate domains. They all try, in different ways, to trace how meaning, matter, and affect co-produce each other in specific situations. But there is no standardized assemblage method, and this openness is both the theory’s greatest strength and one of its persistent vulnerabilities.
Where the Framework Struggles
Assemblage theory has attracted sharp criticism from several directions. One recurring concern is the boundary problem: if an assemblage is defined by the relations among its heterogeneous parts, where does one assemblage end and another begin? In health geography, for instance, researchers have wrestled with how to identify the borders of a “health assemblage” and, more pressingly, how to distinguish arrangements that are therapeutic from those that are oppressive.17PubMed. The ends of an assemblage of health If everything is an assemblage and every assemblage is connected to others, the concept risks becoming so expansive that it explains everything and therefore nothing.
A related criticism is the difficulty of accounting for change over time. Assemblage theory is good at describing the heterogeneity of a given arrangement at a given moment, but critics argue it is weaker at explaining why assemblages change in the directions they do. Why does one arrangement collapse while another persists for decades? The theory’s emphasis on contingency and emergence can make it hard to offer causal explanations that feel satisfying, especially to scholars trained in more structuralist traditions who want to talk about capitalism, patriarchy, or colonialism as durable forces rather than as contingent assemblages that could always be otherwise.
There is also an empirical gap. The theory is far more developed as a philosophical and conceptual resource than as a set of research tools. Many published “assemblage analyses” amount to redescribing a phenomenon using assemblage vocabulary without demonstrating that the vocabulary reveals something a more conventional analysis would miss. The methodological experiments described above are promising, but they remain scattered and sometimes idiosyncratic. A researcher coming to the field fresh will find plenty of theoretical sophistication and relatively little guidance on how to actually do assemblage-informed empirical work in a replicable way.
Assemblage Theory in Health and Embodiment
One of the less obvious but growing areas of application is health research. The framework appeals to health scholars because illness, treatment, and recovery are obviously assemblages in everything but name. A person managing a chronic condition is enmeshed in a web of pharmaceutical regimens, clinical protocols, insurance systems, bodily sensations, family dynamics, and workplace pressures. Traditional health research tends to isolate one or two of these factors and study them as variables. Assemblage thinking insists on keeping the web intact and asking how all its elements interact to produce the experience of health or illness.
The antidepressant study mentioned earlier illustrates this well. Rather than asking the standard research question of whether antidepressants “work” in an isolated pharmacological sense, the researchers used assemblage thinking to explore how the drug, the person’s body, their social relationships, medical appointments, side effects, cultural narratives about mental illness, and the physical materiality of the pill itself all come together to create the experience of “being on antidepressants.”18International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Orientating to Assembling: Qualitative Inquiry for More-Than-Human Worlds The finding isn’t a neat effect size. It’s a richer, messier picture of what treatment actually involves for the people living through it.
The trade-off, as critics in health geography have pointed out, is that this richness can come at the expense of actionable conclusions. If a health assemblage is shaped by dozens of interacting forces, which lever do you pull to improve outcomes? The theory is better at revealing complexity than at simplifying it, and in fields like public health where simplification is often the whole point, that tension is real and unresolved.19PubMed. The ends of an assemblage of health
Why the Translation Problem Still Matters
The gap between agencement and “assemblage” isn’t just a historical curiosity. It continues to shape how researchers use the theory across disciplines and across languages. In feminist theory, for instance, scholars have traced how the English “assemblage” has taken on a life of its own, accumulating meanings and applications that Deleuze and Guattari might not have recognized.20Atlantis. Theory in Perpetual Motion and Translation: Assemblage and Intersectionality in Feminist Studies The concept has been brought into conversation with intersectionality, postcolonial theory, and queer theory in ways that stretch it well beyond its original philosophical context.
Whether this stretching is productive or corrosive depends on your perspective. Defenders argue that a concept powerful enough to travel across disciplines and languages proves its worth precisely by being adaptable. Critics counter that when a single word is asked to do work in philosophy, geography, sociology, political science, health research, and law simultaneously, it risks becoming a vague gesture toward complexity rather than a precise analytical tool. The same tension exists in many traveling theories, but it’s especially acute for assemblage theory because the original concept was already so open-ended. When your starting point is “heterogeneous things come together in contingent ways,” nearly anything can be described as an assemblage, and the challenge becomes explaining why that description adds more than it costs.