Lucas Harle

Assembling Subjectivity

The modern world is a technological one; and our modern subjectivity, becomes more technological by the day. The pervasive becoming-technology of the human subject—in the Deleuzian sense—cannot be without repercussion. Philosopher Jeff Malpas describes the technological—from contemporary capitalism to the personal computer—as a limitless linear spatiality, fit with forces of convergent connectivity, and global homogenisation1. As our experience is further filtered through this spatiality, we risk losing our sense of self, of other, and even an ethical way-of-being. 

Intent on subverting this technological filter, I engage Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Assemblage, and Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory. This thesis reaches out for often overlooked elements of experience that are fundamental components of the larger complex systems from which place and our human subjectivity emerge. This thesis posits that, when working upon this increasingly technological plane, described by Malpas1, the human (the designer), overly emphasizes extensive parameters, smoothing out numerous intensities that may otherwise serve as a robust ground for place and being. Thus, by introducing a greater sensitivity for life’s intensive forces, we may subvert the extensive hegemony within the frames of design, promoting new assemblages, and exploiting their emergent potentials in assembling a new more robust subjectivity. 

“What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important, but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.”

                           - Deleuze and Parnet Dialogues II (as cited in DeLanda 2016)

Delanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 
Malpas, Jeff. 2016. Place Space and Modernity Lecture @ University of New Mexico