The opposite of assemblage, what we are calling here dis-assemblage, is the act of decomposing an established order. In the design process this may be thought of as an approach to creation through dispersion through tactics of removal, tactics about the creation of absence, and tactics that celebrate and explore the potentials of disappearance. This is often an exploratory process of teasing things apart to see what happens, or of uncovering the parts that constitute the whole. But it is also about placing the emphasis as much on what holds things together as on the things themselves.

“Things, quasi-objects, and attachments are the real center of the social world, not the agent, person, member or participant – nor the society or its avatars ... its not the social that accounts for associations but rather associations that explain the social.” [7]

It is perhaps here that actor network theory becomes its most unwieldy and possibly its most powerful, for Latour is very interested in what constitutes the social and he is very careful to point out a need to avoid the objectification of the social. He states, “social is not a place, a thing, a domain, or a kind of stuff, but a provisional movement of new associations” [8]

Design may thus be thought of as a practice of understanding and reconfiguring the social.  Dis-assemblage (dispersion of the social) may be thought of as tactics for understanding not only the composition of the world (in a very broad sense) but also about understanding what holds a place together, and of proposing new (provisional) associations.

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 F e b r u a r y 5  - 7   2 0 1 5

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