Assemblage Theory

How do different parts acquire a capacity to work together?

Suppose students and residents launch a neighbourhood podcast. A library offers a room. Two volunteers bring microphones. A producer edits the recordings, contributors speak in Bengali and English, a hosting service distributes the episodes, and listeners send voice messages.

These connections create a new capacity: the group can record, circulate and discuss local stories over time. Its continuity depends on more than the presence of equipment. Schedules must align. Files must travel. People must recognise the programme and find a reason to return.

The podcast brings together people, buildings, devices, software, money, language, habits and expectations. Some connections strengthen its identity. Others open it towards new participants and possibilities. A funding change or a lost recording space can redirect the whole project.

Think of a musical ensemble

A singer, a percussionist and a sound technician bring different skills. Their arrangement allows a performance that each alone would struggle to produce. The singer can later join another group; the microphone can serve another event. What they can do together depends on how their capacities meet.

Three questions to carry through the chapter

• Composition: which components are brought together, and through which relations?
• Capacity: what becomes possible through this particular arrangement?
• Transformation: which processes stabilise the arrangement, loosen it or redirect it?

In my lecture, I introduce assemblage through heterogeneity, exteriority, material and expressive roles, territorialisation and coding. These concepts help us examine media as arrangements being made and remade.

The concept joins an arrangement with the activity of arranging.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed a philosophical use of the French term agencement, commonly translated into English as “assemblage”. It carries a sense of arranging, fitting together and making connections, as well as the arrangement that results.

Their A Thousand Plateaus appeared in French in 1980 and in Brian Massumi’s English translation in 1987. Assemblages belong to a wider philosophy of multiplicity, becoming, desire, signs and material processes.

Manuel DeLanda later developed a systematic formulation directed towards social complexity. A New Philosophy of Society (2006) examines persons, networks, organisations, governments, cities and nations. Assemblage Theory (2016) extends and revises that formulation.

From collection to composition

A shelf holding microphones, notebooks and recording devices offers an inventory. A production routine connects these items with people, files, permissions and audiences. The analytical interest lies in what the connections produce.

A good account therefore names an effect and investigates how it emerges. The neighbourhood podcast’s ability to publish a weekly episode gives the research a clear focus. Its membership list becomes one piece of evidence within a larger explanation.

A family of approaches

Assemblage thinking has developed through different intellectual projects. DeLanda’s formulation makes particular commitments about realism and emergence. Other writers return more closely to Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of desire, expression and social control.

State which formulation guides a study. This makes the concepts easier to assess and prevents a change of vocabulary from quietly changing the argument. Buchanan’s work is useful for examining these interpretive differences.

Begin with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), DeLanda (2006), DeLanda (2016) and Buchanan (2020).

Relations produce effects that the parts alone leave unexplained.

Heterogeneity refers to differences among the components of an arrangement. People, buildings, electrical supply, contracts, sounds and software enter the podcast through different histories and contribute in different ways.

Emergence describes properties or capacities of a whole that arise through interactions among its components. The podcast’s ability to sustain a public conversation depends on recording, editing, distribution and response working together.

Show the mechanism

A claim of emergence becomes useful when it explains a specific outcome. Compare an episode completed on time with an episode delayed by a missing recording. Trace how the missing file changes editing, scheduling and audience expectations.

Components can also constrain one another. A rigid upload limit may shorten contributions. A sponsor’s condition may redirect the topic. A shared editing session may improve accessibility while adding work. The resulting whole carries these tensions.

Feedback and nonlinear change

Assemblage thinking is attentive to feedback, thresholds and changes whose effects vary with the arrangement. One new volunteer may make little difference during a quiet week but become decisive when several recordings arrive together.

Suppose a dependable release schedule encourages listeners to contribute. More contributions make future episodes easier to prepare. This reinforcing loop can strengthen the programme. A competing loop can also develop: added contributions increase editing time, delays weaken trust, and participation falls.

Identify the process before naming it nonlinear. Evidence might include workload records, release dates and changes in contributions. DeLanda’s work on simulation offers a more technical route into emergence and the organisation of possibilities.

Research extension: DeLanda (2011) and Anderson and colleagues (2012).

A component can exceed the role it plays in one arrangement.

Relations of exteriority mean that a component’s identity and capacities are only partly defined by its place in a particular whole. Components can enter other arrangements and exercise different capacities there.

The podcast’s producer also teaches audio editing and records music. These activities draw on overlapping skills while connecting them with different people, equipment and purposes. The producer’s current role leaves other possibilities available.

Properties and capacities

A property is a characteristic an entity has, such as a recorder’s weight, supported file formats or storage capacity. A capacity concerns what it can do through encounters with other entities: record a clear interview, connect with an editing system or fail under a particular workload.

Interiority as a contrasting relation

A relational role can depend on another role for its definition: a chairperson is chairperson of a particular body; a subscriber subscribes to a service. The person occupying that role has a wider history and can participate elsewhere.

This distinction helps separate a role from the entity that occupies it. It also makes replacement and recomposition researchable. Ask which capacities travel with a departing contributor and which depend on the connections left behind.

The same component can support action and express an identity.

DeLanda distinguishes the material and expressive roles that components play within an assemblage. Material roles concern practical support, physical interaction, resources and operations. Expressive roles communicate qualities, identities, authority or significance.

A library room offers space and acoustic conditions. Its location and public identity can also express openness and civic recognition. A contributor’s voice carries sound while expressing confidence, local affiliation or professional authority.

Roles depend on context

A studio microphone stored in a cupboard contributes differently from the same microphone placed before an interviewee. A logo on a private draft contributes differently from one displayed on an established community institution’s noticeboard.

Ask which capacity is exercised in the episode under study. Observe where a component enters a practice and what follows. A visible microphone might reassure one participant and intimidate another; the surrounding relations help explain the difference.

Content and expression in Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish a material arrangement of bodies and actions from a collective arrangement of enunciation: statements, acts of speaking and social transformations carried through expression. These dimensions become linked in a concrete assemblage.

Suppose an editor announces that a contributor now speaks on behalf of the programme. The statement changes an authorised position through an arrangement of people, conventions and procedures. Its force depends on the relations that make the announcement effective.

DeLanda’s material–expressive continuum offers a particular way of developing this field of questions. Keep each vocabulary attached to the formulation being used.

Boundaries and routines give an arrangement a recognisable identity.

Territorialisation refers to processes that stabilise an assemblage’s boundaries and increase coherence or internal similarity. A regular meeting place, a release schedule, agreed roles and a recognisable programme format can consolidate the podcast.

Deterritorialisation refers to processes that loosen boundaries, disturb established relations or unsettle an arrangement’s identity. Contributors moving away, a lost room, a change of format or new channels of circulation may trigger such changes.

Reterritorialisation describes the formation of renewed boundaries or stabilising relations. The team may move to distributed recording, establish new coordination routines and develop a different programme identity.

Territory reaches beyond a location

Physical places matter, and territorialisation also concerns social boundaries and patterned conduct. A password, a language convention or a rule about who can publish can make membership more definite even when participants work across several locations.

Specify the boundary. Does it concern the room, the organisation, the category of contributor, the permitted format or the programme’s public identity? Each requires different evidence.

Track maintenance alongside change

A stable programme requires people to book space, renew access, repair devices and remind contributors about deadlines. This labour keeps relations aligned. Examine who performs it, how it is recognised and what happens when it stops.

A useful comparison follows two relations separately: the changing geography of recording and the continuity of editorial review. That comparison can reveal simultaneous movement and stabilisation within one assemblage.

Expressive systems can make an arrangement’s identity more definite.

Coding, in DeLanda’s formulation, concerns the role of certain expressive components in fixing or consolidating an assemblage’s identity. Naming, classification and formalised prescriptions can define what belongs, which roles count and how the whole is recognised.

The podcast may introduce a membership register, an editorial constitution and a classification of authorised contributors. These arrangements can stabilise who speaks for the programme and how participation is recognised.

From an expectation to an identity-defining code

A suggestion to “arrive early” helps coordinate a session. A formal credential defining who qualifies as an accredited producer goes further: it classifies participants and establishes a recognised status. Examine what the prescription fixes and how its authority is maintained.

Decoding and recoding

Decoding concerns the weakening, loosening or disruption of such identity-fixing codes. A contributor category may lose its authority when regular listeners begin producing and editing episodes through informal cooperation.

The change may invite recoding: new categories, procedures or identities emerge. The programme could recognise listener-producers, revise voting rights and define a new review process.

Separate coding from boundary consolidation

Coding and territorialisation can reinforce one another while remaining distinct analytical questions. A stable group may work through informal understandings. A dispersed group may use highly explicit membership classifications and standards.

For research, examine the code and its operation together. A written constitution may remain unused, while a short platform label has immediate consequences for visibility or payment. Trace when the category is invoked, by whom, and what changes through that invocation.

Digital media offer many examples: verified status, contributor tiers, content categories and eligibility labels. Their significance depends on the relationships among classifications, technical permissions, organisational decisions and users’ responses.

Study how an arrangement acquires its form and how that form can change.

Becoming directs attention towards ongoing formation and transformation. The podcast is being maintained, revised and connected elsewhere through every recording session, invitation, repair and editorial decision.

Its present identity has a history. Follow how an occasional recording became a regular programme, how some roles became established and how new connections changed its direction.

Strata and assemblages

Deleuze and Guattari use strata to examine organised layers and processes that consolidate forms, functions and relations. Assemblages work across, within and between such formations, drawing components into particular arrangements.

DeLanda revises the vocabulary by treating coding and territorialisation as parameters whose different settings can describe more tightly consolidated or more open arrangements. His 2016 formulation develops this parameterised concept to encompass assemblages composed of further assemblages.

Rhizomes and lines of flight

The rhizome draws attention to multiple connections, entry points and routes of development. A programme can spread through teaching, community groups, clips and personal exchanges, with several points of initiative.

A line of flight names a movement that escapes or transforms an established arrangement. Suppose contributors begin an independent series that changes the programme’s language policy and editorial format. Trace what the departure makes possible and what new dependencies it brings.

Desire as productive connection

In Deleuze and Guattari’s project, desire participates in producing connections and forms of life. It enters collective practices, aspirations and investments. Ask what draws participants into an arrangement and which ways of acting become attractive or imaginable through it.

For media analysis, a programme’s promise of public recognition can help organise unpaid labour, professional ambition and belonging. Examine those investments alongside equipment, contracts and routines.

For contrasting developments, compare Deleuze and Parnet (2007), DeLanda (2016) and Buchanan (2020).

A component at one scale can be a complex arrangement at another.

A recording team contains people, tools and routines. It can also become a component of a wider community-media organisation. That organisation may enter arrangements with funders, libraries, platforms and educational institutions.

DeLanda’s approach treats entities at these different scales as historically formed assemblages. Their capacities emerge through specific relations, while each can enter larger arrangements and interact with others at its own scale.

Flat ontology

A flat ontology places concrete entities at different scales within a common account of reality. A person, an organisation and a city each require explanation through processes of formation and the relations that sustain them.

A wider scale can still carry greater capacity. An organisation may control funding that determines whether a local programme continues. Investigate how that control is assembled and exercised.

Relative autonomy of the whole

A programme may survive a change of presenter because records, routines and other members carry its operations forward. Its identity has become more durable than any one member’s involvement. That durability can be tested through replacement, departure and repair.

The whole can enable and constrain its components. A recognised programme gives a new contributor access to an audience; its schedule also restricts when the contributor can speak. Trace both directions of influence through specific mechanisms.

Actual arrangements and spaces of possibility

The actual is the arrangement realised in an event. The virtual, in this philosophical vocabulary, concerns real tendencies and structured possibilities of transformation. A team may possess capacities that current conditions leave unexercised.

DeLanda’s work on intensive processes and simulation develops this distinction technically. For an introductory media study, ask which alternative arrangements the components could support and what conditions would enable the transition.

Communication takes shape through connected practices, materials and expectations.

Assemblage Theory connects questions about media content with questions about production, circulation, access and use. A media object acquires its effects within arrangements that include people, devices, classifications, institutions and bodily experience.

The neighbourhood podcast’s “audience” can be investigated through listening occasions, devices, language competence, available time and channels for response. These relations help explain who can participate and which capacities the programme actually exercises.

Platform power

A platform brings together users, interfaces, infrastructure, business arrangements, moderation practices and categories of acceptable content. Its capacity to organise visibility depends on these connections.

Bucher’s work on algorithmic power and Gillespie’s study of moderation offer useful media-specific extensions. Examine a particular change: a new eligibility category, an altered recommendation practice or a revised moderation procedure. Ask which relations carry the change into creators’ work.

AI as a sociotechnical assemblage

An AI-assisted subtitle workflow connects recordings, language resources, a model, computing infrastructure, prompts, reviewers, deadlines and publishing practices. The quality and authority of its output emerge through that arrangement.

A model’s capacity to produce text becomes useful for a programme when the text fits languages, formats, review procedures and audience needs. Changing one connection can alter the result: a clearer recording, a glossary of local names or a more careful review may redirect the workflow.

Analyse material and expressive roles together. Computing equipment and energy support processing; interfaces display confidence or authority; organisational labels such as “approved” shape how the output is treated. Each role can be examined through evidence.

Affect and embodied participation

A room’s layout, an interviewee’s nervousness, a familiar accent and the visibility of equipment can change what participants feel able to say. Assemblage thinking keeps these encounters within the account of communication.

Use observation and participants’ accounts to investigate these changes. An open microphone can invite a confident speaker while silencing someone who fears public exposure. The arrangement’s capacity to include therefore needs to be assessed across differently placed participants.

Agency and accountability

Agency is distributed through the contributions of an arrangement’s components. Ethical responsibility can be traced through human and institutional decisions: who designed the workflow, authorised publication, allocated review time and could change the process.

People deliberate, interpret and make commitments. Devices and formats contribute through their material and operational capacities. Following these different contributions keeps intention, causal participation and responsibility visible within the same explanation.

A useful analysis locates leverage. It identifies a relation that could be changed and explains why that change may improve access, accuracy or participation. Evaluate the intervention through actual use.

Make the explanatory contribution clear, then test its reach.

Assemblage thinking explains how particular combinations acquire capacities, how their identity is stabilised and how alternative relations can transform them. It becomes especially useful when a communication problem crosses familiar boundaries between people, tools, organisations and environments.

Assemblages and actor-networks

Both approaches examine heterogeneous participation and challenge ready-made divisions between the social and the technical. Their formulations differ internally as well as from each other.

DeLanda places particular emphasis on exteriority, emergent properties and capacities at multiple scales. ANT often begins by following mediations and translations. Müller’s comparison provides a useful route through their shared concerns and differences.

Strengths

• It connects different kinds of evidence. A contract, a bodily experience and a file format can enter the same explanation through their consequences.
• It makes change specific. Departures, replacements and new relations reveal how capacities are gained or lost.
• It joins stability with process. Routines and institutions become achievements that require continued work.
• It opens an intervention question. Research can identify connections through which access, participation or accountability could change.

Power, history and political judgement

A detailed account becomes stronger when it explains how some participants acquire greater room to act. Include ownership, contracts, resource allocation and histories of exclusion where these shape the arrangement.

The debate between McFarlane and Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth makes this question explicit. McFarlane develops assemblage’s potential for critical urban inquiry. Brenner and colleagues question formulations that weaken the analysis of wider capitalist relations and structural context.

For media research, the practical implication is clear: connect a local workflow to the institutions that organise its resources. A volunteer’s effort and a company’s ownership right may both matter while carrying sharply different consequences.

Explanation, boundaries and evidence

An assemblage map becomes explanatory when it shows a mechanism linking relations with an outcome. “Many things are involved” leaves the central question open. Demonstrate how a particular connection enables, blocks or redirects an action.

Every study selects a boundary. Explain the period, sites and relations examined, and follow consequential links beyond the initial setting where needed. Compare successful episodes with failures or contested cases.

Interpretive differences matter

Read DeLanda’s realist reconstruction alongside accounts that place greater weight on desire, expression and political transformation. Choose concepts that fit the research question and state their intellectual source. This gives the study a coherent argument that others can evaluate.

Reconstruct the arrangement before proposing a change.

For each case, identify components, relations and an emergent capacity. Then locate a process that consolidates or redirects the arrangement. Open the analysis after forming your own explanation.

Case 1 · The podcast loses its recording room

Suppose the library changes its opening hours. The podcast team loses its weekly recording slot. Contributors begin recording at home, but devices and sound quality vary. The producer creates a recording guide, sets up remote checks and introduces shorter episodes. Some older contributors need help sending files.

Your task: distinguish deterritorialisation from reterritorialisation and explain how a capacity changes. Identify who performs the work of rebuilding the programme.

Case 2 · A volunteer series becomes an accredited unit

Suppose a university offers funding to the podcast if it adopts named roles, a training requirement and an approval procedure. The team gains reliable equipment and a paid coordinator. Regular contributors receive certificates. Occasional residents find the new registration process difficult and begin sending material through personal contacts.

Your task: identify coding, territorialisation and the coexistence of enabling and excluding effects. Show how an individual component can enter another arrangement.

Case 3 · AI subtitles change the production arrangement

Suppose the team introduces automated English subtitles for Bengali interviews. The tool produces a quick draft, but local names require correction. The producer creates a shared glossary and asks contributors to review their passages. Subtitled clips reach new listeners. Review work grows, and the team debates who should receive credit and payment.

Your task: separate the tool’s properties from capacities exercised in the workflow. Analyse material and expressive roles, emergence and accountability.

Listen for the movement from separate parts to working relations.

Watch my lecture on Assemblage Theory, then return to the neighbourhood podcast. Connect each concept with a relation, a capacity or a change that can be investigated.

Watch my Assemblage Theory lecture on YouTube ↗

A three-pass viewing exercise

1. First pass: explain how an arrangement differs from an inventory of components.
2. Second pass: connect exteriority, material–expressive roles and territorialisation with one media practice.
3. Third pass: identify a change in coding or membership and describe the evidence needed to analyse it.

Finish with a sentence that contains a mechanism: “The shared editing routine enables the team to combine recordings from several locations.” Then explain the conditions under which that capacity could fail.

Ten questions to test the concepts through their use.

Select one answer before opening its explanation. Then supply a different media example that would illustrate the same concept.

Turn a familiar practice into an evidence-based explanation.

Begin with a bounded event: a programme’s change of venue, an altered publishing routine, a new accreditation requirement or the introduction of an AI tool. A specific transformation makes relations and consequences easier to compare.

Activity 1 · Map a communication assemblage

1. Choose a practice you can observe, such as a student publication, online class, podcast or community announcement.
2. Identify eight to twelve relevant components, including people, material arrangements and expressive practices.
3. Connect them with verbs: funds, records, authorises, classifies, coordinates, edits or distributes.
4. Name one emergent capacity and show which relations make it possible.
5. Select one component and examine another arrangement it could enter. State which capacities might change.
6. Write 400–500 words supported by observation, a document or participants’ accounts.

Activity 2 · Follow a before-and-after change

Compare a workflow before and after a new rule, device or participant enters it. Record which boundaries become clearer, which connections loosen, which categories gain force and which new work becomes necessary.

Produce a two-column comparison, a short timeline and a 300-word explanation. Include one participant who benefits and one whose participation becomes more difficult. Identify the evidence supporting both accounts.

A practical research workflow

Choose evidence that follows the relation

Observation reveals coordination and workarounds. Interviews identify experiences, interpretations and further connections. Contracts and procedures show formal arrangements. Drafts and file histories show transformation. Audience research examines how a capacity is realised in use.

Baker and McGuirk emphasise an ethnographic sensibility, tracing sites and situations, and revealing the labour of assembling. These practices help move the research beyond naming components towards explaining how an arrangement is accomplished.

Operationalise carefully

Define how you will recognise a change. A more stable membership pattern, a newly enforced classification, a longer review process and a higher rate of successful publication are different observations. Combine them only where the argument explains their relationship.

Use counterfactual questions to guide comparison: what would change if a component were removed, a rule relaxed or access widened? Where possible, examine a real replacement or contrasting case. Present untested possibilities as proposals for investigation.

Locate power and protect participants

Ask who controls money, permissions, categories and access to equipment. Follow maintenance and care work as well as visible creative work. Include people who left, were excluded or used alternative routes when their experiences bear on the question.

Obtain appropriate consent for observation, protect private recordings and remove credentials from research outputs. Explain how your selection of sites and participants shapes the account.

Examination prompts

• Short answer: explain exteriority, capacity, emergence and territorialisation through one media example.
• Conceptual answer: distinguish material–expressive roles and coding–territorialisation in DeLanda’s formulation.
• Applied essay: analyse a platform, newsroom or AI-assisted workflow as an assemblage.
• Critical essay: assess the approach’s contribution to understanding power, history, change and responsibility in media.

A developed answer identifies the formulation being used, explains a few concepts precisely, follows a concrete mechanism and evaluates the resulting account. Let the relations carry the explanation from the example to the wider claim.

Keep the concepts connected to what they help explain.

Use the glossary to reconnect each term with a relation, process or capacity. Begin further reading with the philosophical sources and DeLanda, then follow the methodological, critical and media-specific routes that fit your question.

Glossary

Assemblage

A heterogeneous arrangement whose relations produce emergent properties or capacities and a historically formed identity.

Agencement

A French term emphasising both the activity of arranging components and the arrangement produced.

Assemblage Theory

A family of approaches to composition, relations, emergence, stabilisation and transformation.

Heterogeneity

Differences in the types, origins, histories and capacities of components.

Component

An entity participating in an arrangement, which may itself be an assemblage.

Relation

A connection through which components interact, enable, constrain or transform one another.

Relations of exteriority

Relations in which a component is only partly defined by its place in a particular whole.

Relations of interiority

Relations that constitute the identity of the terms or roles they connect.

Relative autonomy

A component’s capacity to exceed its current role while remaining dependent on other relations.

Property

A characteristic of an entity, including material features and acquired characteristics.

Capacity

What an entity can do or undergo through encounters with other entities.

Emergence

The production of properties or capacities through interactions among components.

Emergent whole

An arrangement with properties or capacities arising through the organisation of its components.

Co-functioning

The working together of heterogeneous components through a particular arrangement.

Material role

A component’s contribution to operations, resources, physical interaction or practical support.

Expressive role

A contribution through which identity, quality, authority or significance is expressed.

Content

In Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, a dimension involving bodies, actions and material arrangements.

Collective enunciation

An arrangement through which statements and acts of expression acquire a collective social force.

Territorialisation

Processes that consolidate boundaries, coherence or internal similarity within an assemblage.

Deterritorialisation

Processes that loosen boundaries or unsettle established relations and identity.

Reterritorialisation

The formation of renewed boundaries, anchors or stabilising relations.

Coding

In DeLanda’s formulation, the consolidation of identity through certain expressive components and codes.

Decoding

The loosening or weakening of identity-fixing codes.

Recoding

The establishment or revision of codes that organise identity and recognised participation.

Stratum

An organised layer or formation associated with processes that consolidate forms, functions and relations.

Stratification

Processes through which organised layers and relatively fixed arrangements take shape.

Becoming

Ongoing formation and transformation through encounters and changing relations.

Multiplicity

A heterogeneous organisation of dimensions and relations with capacities for variation and transformation.

Rhizome

A concept emphasising multiple connections, entry points and routes of development.

Line of flight

A movement that escapes or transforms an established arrangement and opens a different trajectory.

Distributed agency

The production of action through contributions made across an arrangement.

Realist ontology

An account that recognises entities and causal processes as real beyond an analyst’s description of them.

Flat ontology

An approach placing concrete entities at different scales within a common account of reality and formation.

Assemblages of assemblages

The composition of arrangements from components that are themselves heterogeneous arrangements.

Actual

The concrete arrangement or event realised under particular conditions.

Virtual

Real tendencies and structured possibilities of transformation within this philosophical vocabulary.

Nonlinearity

Relations in which changes in conditions can produce disproportionate, threshold-dependent or otherwise non-proportional effects.

Feedback

A process in which an outcome returns to influence the conditions producing subsequent outcomes.

Stabilisation

The work and processes through which an arrangement becomes sufficiently coherent and repeatable.

Maintenance

Activities that sustain the functioning, access and continuity of an arrangement.

Contingency

Dependence on a particular history and conditions that could have developed differently.

Space of possibilities

A structured range of ways an arrangement could vary or transform under different conditions.

References and further reading

1. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. Read / view source ↗A foundational source on assemblages, strata, territories, expression and becoming. French original published in 1980.
2. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II (revised ed.). Columbia University Press. Read / view source ↗Read the selected English edition for connections among assemblage, becoming, politics and the actual–virtual distinction.
3. DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum. Read / view source ↗Develops exteriority, emergence and social entities across several scales.
4. DeLanda, M. (2016). Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press. Read / view source ↗Systematises and revises the approach through parameters, historical cases and realist ontology.
5. DeLanda, M. (1997). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Zone Books. Read / view source ↗A historical exploration of material processes, cities, populations and languages.
6. DeLanda, M. (2002). Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Continuum. Read / view source ↗A technical extension on intensive processes, multiplicity and the virtual. The link opens a publisher preview.
7. DeLanda, M. (2011). Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. Continuum. Read / view source ↗Explores emergence through simulation. The linked publisher record presents the later reissue.
8. Phillips, J. (2006). Agencement/assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 108–109. Read / view source ↗A concise discussion of the conceptual and translation issues surrounding agencement.
9. Buchanan, I. (2020). Assemblage Theory and Method. Bloomsbury Academic. Read / view source ↗Returns to Deleuze and Guattari through strata, desire, territory and expressive materialism.
10. Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2005). Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Blackwell. Read / view source ↗Connects assemblage inquiry with global processes, situated practices, technology and governance.
11. Anderson, B., & McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127. Read / view source ↗Introduces different uses and routes of assemblage thinking in geographical research.
12. Anderson, B., Kearnes, M., McFarlane, C., & Swanton, D. (2012). On assemblages and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 171–189. Read / view source ↗Develops questions about composition, relations, agency, causality, expression and politics.
13. McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and critical urbanism. City, 15(2), 204–224. Read / view source ↗Explores the potential of assemblage for critical inquiry, urban transformation and possible alternatives.
14. Brenner, N., Madden, D. J., & Wachsmuth, D. (2011). Assemblage urbanism and the challenges of critical urban theory. City, 15(2), 225–240. Read / view source ↗A critical argument for retaining structural context and political economy within urban explanation.
15. Baker, T., & McGuirk, P. (2017). Assemblage thinking as methodology: Commitments and practices for critical policy research. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5(4), 425–442. Read / view source ↗Translates assemblage commitments into ethnographic attention, tracing and analysis of assembling labour.
16. Müller, M. (2015). Assemblages and actor-networks: Rethinking socio-material power, politics and space. Geography Compass, 9(1), 27–41. Read / view source ↗A focused comparison of assemblage thinking and Actor–Network Theory.
17. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. Read / view source ↗A companion approach to tracing heterogeneous associations, mediation and collective action.
18. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. Read / view source ↗An adjacent materialist account of things, agency and political ecology.
19. Bucher, T. (2018). If...Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford University Press. Read / view source ↗A media-specific extension for studying algorithmic arrangements and the exercise of power.
20. Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press. Read / view source ↗Connects platform practices, moderation, categorisation and public consequences.

Six ideas to retain

1. Begin with composition. Explain how different components form a working arrangement.
2. Specify emergence. Identify a capacity and the relations that produce it.
3. Preserve exteriority. Examine what components bring to, gain from and can do beyond one arrangement.
4. Follow roles and processes. Study material–expressive contributions, boundaries and codes.
5. Connect scales and histories. Trace how wider arrangements shape the possibilities available locally.
6. Evaluate consequences. Include labour, unequal capacity, responsibility and opportunities for change.