Area (2011) 43.

2, 128133

doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01010.x

Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault

Stephen Legg
School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD Email: stephen.legg@nottingham.ac.uk Revised manuscript received 17 February 2011 In this commentary I would like to offer some reections on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in governmentality studies and, secondly, on the latters central concern with the concept of the security apparatus (dispositif). I would like to suggest that 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 Agambens and Giles Deleuzes reections on Michel Foucaults use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuzes obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucaults work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together. Key words: assemblage, apparatus, governmentality, Foucault, Deleuze

Introduction
In this commentary I would like to offer some reections on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in governmentality studies and, secondly, on the latters central concern with the concept of the security apparatus (dispositif ). I would like to suggest that 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 on colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agambens and Giles Deleuzes reections on Michel Foucaults use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuzes obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucaults work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together. Foucaults governmentality work helped me frame and understand my research into the ordering of the new capital of British India (Delhi, 191147). In terms of race, power and knowledge, discipline and crime, and the biopolitics of urban living, the apparatuses of ordering that Foucault described brought benecial insights in the objectives and aspirations of the many-tiered hierarchies

of colonial government (Legg 2007). However, my splicing of the governmentality literature with that from postcolonial studies made it more apparent than ever that attention needed to be paid to subaltern experience, refusal, autonomy and resistance. In part this was done by insisting that the analytical categories of governmentality (episteme, identity, visibility, techne and ethos) be studied through specic examples of regimes of practices that are persistently problematised and re-problematised (Legg 2007, 1213; following Dean 1998, 185). While Rabinow and Rose (2003) had suggested that apparatuses emerged in response to problematisation, one of the main inspirations behind my foregrounding of problematisation was Deleuzes commentary on Foucaults work, in which he stressed that the nal word on power is that resistance comes rst (Deleuze 1988, 89; original emphases). While problematisations, as historical fact and conceptual research tool, were always present in Foucaults work, Deleuze brought them to the fore and made them the start- and end-point of his research. Working to remove subjective notions of agency from our ontological worldview, Deleuze introduced the concept of assemblage to help us disassemble bordered thinking in terms of, at least, desire, territory, philosophy, bodies and movement (as with translations of various concepts in poststructural theory from French to English, assemblage solidies and simplies the much broader concept of

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 128133, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Author. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Assemblage/apparatus agencement, see Phillips 2006, 1445). Deleuzes more general work on assemblage was articulated through specic concepts and examples, including those of the nomad, lines of ight, smooth space, de-territorialisation, and bodies without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In my later work, this helped me consider how the trafcking of women and children in the interwar years was an assemblage of actual movements, policies, novels, rumours, myths, desires, and places of disembarkation, slavery, purchase and policing (Legg 2009). But what also became apparent in attempting to think assemblage and governmentality studies together was the extent to which Deleuze also portrayed assemblages as leading to order, striation, re-territorialisation, long-term effects and scaling as much as to dis-order, smoothing, de-territorialisation, short-term effects and de-scaling. Similarly, apparatuses of security also create the conditions for their own decay, contestation and obsolescence. I suggest that the interconnections between these concepts can be productively thought of as a dialectic. Sheppard (2008) has summarised the debates over dialectical thinking: whether it is tied to ontological universalism, and a triumphant unilinear belief in progress, over a more post-structuralist emphasis on difference and fragmented narratives; whether dialectical prioritisation of relations and ows over things and structures is compatible with post-structural ontologies; and how dialectics complement complexity and assemblage theory. All these approaches emphasise relational ontologies, heterogeneity, relational causality, constant change and space-time relationships. Assemblage theories are, however, necessarily against (even temporary) dialectical resolution of opposing forces such as, for instance, smooth and striated space or re-/de-territorialisation. There is, therefore, no synthesis emerging from the thesis/antithesis dialectic. While the relationism and blending of process and structure in recent Marxist thinking on dialectics is inspirational, the necessity of conrming the capital/labour, bourgeoisie/proletariat dynamic, and the binary ontology driving historical materialism, re-centres opposing forces (Harvey 1996, 54). Such theories would work against the radical openness and multiplicity of the bodies at the heart of assemblage (and even apparatus) thinking. These stress that each state contains the traces, remnants, seeds and potential for the alternate state, and need not exist in hostile opposition. I suggest that assemblages and apparatuses operate in a dialectical sense in practice, but that they also emerged dialectically in the thought of Deleuze and Foucault. As the editors of this special section, and the papers herein make clear, assemblage theory is itself a heterogeneous and diverse collection of writings and ideas (for instance, see Bennett and Healy 2009). Robbins and Marks (2009, 182) even suggest four alternative traditions

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of assemblage geographies, as exemplied by Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Karl Marx, as well as the more Foucauldian-Deleuzian work of Timothy Mitchell. In terms of the last two perspectives, Tampio (2009) argues that Deleuzes project marks a distinct contribution to leftist thought, which is done a disservice by contemporary re-codings (namely, in Hardt and Negri 2001 2005). Left assemblages are dened by him as any loose and provisional material and expressive body that works for freedom and equality (Tampio 2009, 385). Yet, just as Deleuze had praised Foucaults rejection of the central tenets of much leftist dogma, so he reworked the aim of the leftist project into striking a balance between the state and the war machine, between chaos and order, to take advantage of the life-afrming forces of metamorphosis without risking ones individual or collective life (Tampio 2009, 391). The concept of assemblage forces us to consider this balance, strain and tension simultaneously: of something that is consistent but has fuzzy borders; of the urge to de-territorialise, while remembering that too sudden a de-stratication could be suicidal (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 503). There is, of course, a need for ordering, security and stratications, and these powerful processes need not be negative. A trade union movement, a family, a partnership, a migration or a waist-line all need some degree of control, but this can be productive not deductive. This was, of course, one of Foucaults (1980) most famous assertions. The publication of his lecture courses is providing detailed information regarding how this sort of power was exerted over European populations from the 18th century onwards, complementing prior extractive and often violent sovereign power and the intense, focused surveillance and routinisation of disciplinary power. Here Foucault showed that modern societies and states were the product, not producers, of apparatuses of security that focused on spaces like the town or the eld to govern and normalise the regularity of vital events (such as birth, death, harvest, prot, crime or sanity). 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 produced a genealogy of these distinctly modern forms back to ancient notions of the pastor and conducting conduct, but also to traditions of diplomatic-militarism and policing (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 dened essentially on the basis of the dynamic of forces, I think the West, or Western societies, set up two assemblages that can only be understood on this basis of the rationalization of forces. These two great assemblages, which I

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 128133, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Author. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

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Legg which is natural or free. Unlike Hegel, Foucault did not seek to close this dialectic between individuals and history:
For Foucault, what is at stake is rather the investigation of concrete modes in which the positivities (or the apparatuses) act within the relations, mechanisms, and plays of power. (Agamben 2009, 6)

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

The equivocation between assemblage and apparatus continued in the following lecture which described police as the second technological assemblage characteristic of the new art of government according to state reason, as against the rst great technological assemblage 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 to increase, combine, and develop forces, it is this whole administrative assemblage, in short, that will make it possible to identify what each states forces comprise and their possibilities of development. (Foucault 2007a, 315)

The term is then traced back even further via theological genealogies of the economy in second to sixth century Christianity. Here Agamben explores uses of the Greek term oikonomia (management), which becomes the Latin disposition (also see Foucault 2007a, 192, on the Greek term for pastoral procedure, oikonomia psuchon [economy of souls], which goes beyond oikos [habitat] to the management of all Christians). What is central to all these terms is the government and control of the behaviours, gestures and thoughts of human beings. Agamben thus arrived at his own denition:
I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. (2009, 14)

In contrast, when apparatuses of security were later described, they were analysed through more specic explorations of how disease, grain and urban order were ensured, forming the background to Foucaults (2008) later study of liberalism and political-economics. To my knowledge, Foucault did not use the term assemblage in a systematic manner, but his collaboration with Deleuze from the late 1960s through the 1970s on translations and research symposia would have led to a joining of vocabularies and concepts. What is clear from the above is that Foucault was in no sense using assemblage to refer to a de-territorialising or solely de-stabilising event or formation. Similarly, explorations of Foucaults use of the term apparatus have added further weight to understandings of its relation to the concept of assemblages, as demonstrated through the work of Agamben and Deleuze. Agambens (2009) essay What is an apparatus? was originally published in 2006 as Che cos un dispositivo? He began by returning to Foucaults description from 1977 of an apparatus as a thoroughly heterogeneous set of discourses, institutions, forms, regulations, laws, statements or moral propositions; the said as much as the unsaid (see Foucault 1980, 1946). These formations function in response to a specic urgency in a strategic manner, inscribed in a play of power but also linked to certain limits of knowledge. Rather than situating this term among Foucaults work at the time of the interview (on governmentality and conduct), Agamben traced it back to Foucaults (1972) Archaeology of knowledge, where apparatuses was referred to as positivities, and through this source back to Hegel through the teachings of Jean Hyppolite. The positive here refers to that which is enforced and obligatory, as opposed to that

Apparatuses, living beings, and subjects are here articulated. Reading Agamben through his previous work (1998), apparatuses appear here as the mechanisms through which zoe (living beings, or the ontology of creatures) becomes bios (subjects). We face here, again, Agambens nihilism regarding the subsumption of biological and social life within the nomos of the camp (see Laclau 2007). He does ask how we might confront the massive contemporary accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses, and suggests liberating the captured through profanation (restoring objects to common use). But his conclusion is that this is phenomenally difcult with modern apparatuses. In this reading, apparatuses appear to be similar to assemblages in their heterogeneity, but quickly become mechanisms of entrapment. This reading can be directly compared to Deleuzes (1992) What is a dispositif, which the promotional material for the Stanford University Presss version of Agambens essay claimed had mystied the concept of apparatus, whereas Agamben had illuminated it.1 Just as his collected musings Foucault (Deleuze 1988) had presented us with a very Deleuzian man, Deleuzes apparatus is almost comically assemblage-like. From the outset, a dispositif is dened as a tangle, a multilinear ensemble (Deleuze 1992, 159). Each has lines of different natures, which break and change direction:
Untangling these lines within a social apparatus is, in each case, like drawing up a map, doing cartography, surveying

Area Vol. 43 No. 2, pp. 128133, 2011 ISSN 0004-0894 2011 The Author. Area 2011 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

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

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Deleuzes apparatuses have dimensions of visibility, enunciation, force and subjectication, although not all need have them, and their operations could not be circumscribed. Rather than ordering and capturing with omniscient foresight, apparatuses get muddled and mix things up, producing subjectivities which escape and need to be reinserted into a different multiplicity, forcing a constant reconsideration of the new (Deleuze 1992, 1623). If apparatuses are so dynamic and messy then why, Deleuze asks, has Foucault been read as scribing the victory of power (see Said et al. 1993 [2004]), not of resistance? Deleuze suggested that the lines of apparatuses divided into two groups: lines of stratication or sedimentation, and lines leading to the present day or creativity. The reason Foucault is associated with the former is that they were the subject of his books, which did not formulate the latter; these were the subject of his interviews and activism. What we have in these two discussions is, then, an acknowledgement that apparatuses are etymologically and genealogically indissociable from regulation and government, but that their very multiplicity necessarily opens spaces of misunderstanding, resistance and ight. What we can also see, through the increasing exploration of the utility of assemblage theory, is that stability is assembled as much as destabilisation. Stuart Elden (2009, xxvii) stressed that, despite the common trend to associate globalisation with de-territorialisation, Deleuze and Guattari always stressed the ongoing and complex conguration of de- and re-territorialisation. Yet, the concepts can also be thought too closely together. Tania Li (2007), for instance, created a typology of assemblages featuring six generic attributes: forging alignments; rendering technical; authorising knowledge; managing failures; anti-politics; and reassembling. In so doing, Li explicitly blurs any distinction between assemblage and apparatus, and closes the dialectic by turning the former into an act of labour and governance. It is my suggestion that apparatuses be considered a type of assemblage, but one more prone to (in the sense of anticipating, provoking, achieving and consolidating) re-territorialisation, striation, scaling and governing (also see Patton 2000, 73; Erikson 2005, 604). Apparatus and assemblage thus emerge as one and part of each other, but in a continual dialectic (for comments on a similar dialectic between sovereign order and ontological disorder in the writings of Carl Schmitt, see Rowan 2011). This is evident in both the philosophical content and the

written style of Foucault and Deleuzes texts. While Foucaults books (if not interviews or activities) concerned the regulation of sexuality, Deleuze wrote about power and desire (Grace 2009). While Foucault outraged Freudians by challenging the repressive hypothesis, Deleuze stands out more as a queer theorist through his very different style of provocation:
What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous. (Deleuze 1977, cited in Massumi 1987, x)

How to operationalise, then, this dialectic as a methodology? Returning to my empirical work, my original research explored the apparatuses of the colonial city. Securing the urban form was a chief interest in Foucaults work, as explored by John Plger (2008; also see Foucault 2007b; Legg forthcoming). He shows that most readings of dispositif have emphasised the orderly over the generative, and suggests translating dispositif itself as assemblage. Urban apparatuses make it as obvious as any dispositif that they cannot be assumed to achieve the order they may desire:
A spatial dispositif is thus more than a regulatory apparatus, a material installation or (spatial) ontology . . . Space does not determine; it signies, it disposes, allows more than forbids specic practices. (Plger 2008, 60)

But there are also ongoing attempts to consider the urban from the perspective of assemblage theory. One recurring feature of this nascent eld of study is its attention to the trans-scalar potential that assemblage theorys interest in smooth space and de-territorialisation brings (see McFarlane 2009, on housing and transnational social movements, or Legg 2009, on brothels and international trafcking). A recent volume on Urban assemblages drew very specically on actor network theory more than Deleuze directly, but arrived at the compatible conclusion that
The notion of urban assemblages in the plural form offers a powerful foundation to grasp the city anew, as an object which is relentlessly being assembled at concrete sites of urban practice or, to put it differently, as a multiplicity of processes of becoming, afxing sociotechnical networks, hybrid collectivities and alternative toplogies. (Faras and Bender 2010, 2)

I believe our challenge is to look for manifestations of the apparatusassemblage dialectic in the worlds we research. These are not meant to be abstractions or ideal

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Legg
Bennett T and Healy C 2009 Introduction: assembling culture Journal of Cultural Economy 2 310 Dean M 1998 Questions of method in Velody I and Williams R eds The politics of constructionism SAGE, London 18299 Deleuze G 1988 Foucault Athlone, London Deleuze G 1992 What is a dispositif in Armstrong T J ed Foucault: philosopher Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York 15968 Deleuze G and Guattari F 1987 A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN Elden S 2009 Terror and territory: the spatial extent of sovereignty University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN Erikson K 2005 Foucault, Deleuze, and the ontology of networks The European Legacy 10 595610 Faras I and Bender T eds 2010 Urban assemblages: how actornetwork theory changes urban studies Routledge, London Foucault M 1972 The archaeology of knowledge Tavistock, London Foucault M 1980 Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 19721977 Harvester Press, Brighton Foucault M 2007a Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collge de France 197778 Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Foucault M 2007b Spaces of security: the example of the town. Lecture of 11th January 1978 Political Geography 27 4856 Foucault M 2008 The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collge de France, 197879 Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Grace W 2009 Faux Amis: Foucault and Deleuze on sexuality and desire Critical Inquiry 36 5275 Hardt M and Negri A 2001 Empire Harvard University Press, Harvard MA Hardt M and Negri A 2005 Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire Penguin Books, London Harvey D 1996 Justice, nature and the geography of difference Blackwell, Oxford Isin E F 1998 Governing cities, governing ourselves in Isin E F, Osborne T and Rose N eds Governing cities: liberalism, neoliberalism, advanced liberalism York University, Toronto 33118 Laclau E 2007 Bare life or social indeterminacy in Calarco M and DeCaroli S eds Giogio Agamben: sovereignty and life Stanford University Press, Stanford CA 1122 Legg S 2007 Spaces of colonialism: Delhis urban governmentalities Blackwell, Oxford Legg S 2009 Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 34 23453 Legg S forthcoming Security, territory and colonial populations: town and empire in Foucaults 1978 lecture course in Upstone S and Teverson A eds Postcolonial spaces: the politics of place in contemporary culture Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Li T M 2007 Practices of assemblage and community forest management Economy and Society 36 26393 Massumi B ed 1987 Translators foreword: pleasures of philosophy University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN McFarlane C 2009 Translocal assemblages: space, power and social movements Geoforum 40 5617 Patton P 2000 Deleuze and the political Routledge, London Phillips J 2006 Agencement/Assemblage Theory, Culture & Society 23 108109

types, but actually-existing heterogeneous multiplicities that govern, incite and move us, through mechanisms unsaid and said, at various scales:
A political assemblage a city, state, party, or international order has some coherence in what it says and what it does, but it continually dissolves and morphs into something new. (Tampio 2009, 394; also see Isin 1998)

In conclusion, I leave you with some questions that have emerged from intersections of the pleasantly irresolvable apparatusassemblage dialectic that have emerged in my work (and some questions that might be of wider interest): At what point does the sprawling and imaginary concept of the urban temporarily solidify into the experience of a city? (Or, how do broader trends in apparatus and assemblage formation and dialectics nd material or conceptual, if temporary, stability?) How do assumptions about the political or the nation coalesce into the endlessly provocative and agonal apparatus of the state? How should we go about exploring the ways in which the apparatus of the Government of India intersected with the aesthetic, moral and racial assemblage of the Raj? (Or, how does the cultural imperium of America coincide with the form of the USA? Or how do economic and cultural assemblages of tradition and development get taken up and reworked in explicitly developing states?) And through what channels can we examine the global assemblage of interwar internationalism as it became instantiated in bodies as diverse as the League of Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Communist International? (Or, how does the question of international sovereignty get recongured through the apparatuses of, for instance, the UN, World Bank, WHO, the Ford Foundation, Amnesty International or media, mining, banking or fashional multi-national corporations?) Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Colin McFarlane and Ben Anderson for inviting me to be part of this special section. Special thanks also to Alex Vasudevan for discussions on this topic and for reading through the paper.

Note
1 See http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17450, accessed 5 August 2010.

References
Agamben G 1998 Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life Stanford University Press, Stanford CA Agamben G 2009 What is an apparatus? And other essays Stanford University Press, Stanford CA

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Plger J 2008 Foucaults dispositif and the city Planning Theory 7 5170 Rabinow P and Rose N 2003 Foucault today in Rabinow P and Rose N eds The essential Foucault: selections from the essential works of Foucault, 19541984 New Press, New York viixxxv Robbins P and Marks B 2009 Assemblage geographies in Smith S J, Pain R, Marston S A and Jones III J P eds The SAGE handbook of social geographies SAGE 17694 Rowan R 2011 A new nomos of post-nomos? Multipolarity, space, and constituent power in Legg S ed Spatiality,

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sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: geographies of the nomos Routledge, London 14362 Said E, Beezer A and Osbourne P 1993 [2004] Orientalism and after in Viswanathan G ed Power, politics and culture: interviews with Edward W. Said Bloomsbury, London 20832 Sheppard E 2008 Geographic dialectics? Environment and Planning A 40 260312 Tampio N 2009 Assemblages and the multitude: Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, and the postmodern left European Journal of Political Theory 8 383400

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