Assemblage Theory

Assemblage is one way to examine complexities in today’s world. In Deleuzian thinking, assemblage refers to both the act of assembling diverse elements and the arrangements of these elements for a specific purpose. Importantly, it is the interaction between elements that allows the assemblage to become more than the sum of its parts. Applying this concept to long-term research on Cold Rush – the transformation of the Arctic commons into commodities – I argue that examining the boom, bust, and buzz around the commons can be fruitfully conceptualised and studied with assemblage. This approach brings with it an ontological shift from binaries into multiplicities and multiple temporalities. Assemblage also sheds light on the role of discourse in these transformations and shows how language gains its productive force only in collaboration with other elements.

This paper takes tools of self-valuation in social media as an empirical focus. By way of a case-study of Klout, an influential measure of influence, we suggest that the forms of reactivity and self-fulfilling prophecy that have been identified as a problem with some forms of measurement are actually an intentional effect of such tools: that is, the measurements that such tools produce are not designed to capture a separate reality, but are deliberately employed to modify the activity that they themselves invite. In other words, they expect and exploit reactivity. We suggest that such media are indicative of the rise in what might be called participative metrics of value. We further suggest that the capacity to evaluate and modify the self that Klout affords is intricately tied up with the agency and (self-)valuation of Klout as a tool itself. An intermediate layer of the argument is that this tying up is achieved through the production of numbers as specific kinds of ‘enumerated entities’. We use this term to draw attention to the ways in which numbers are never simply abstractions, but always have specific material-semiotic properties. In this case, we show that these properties are tied to the use of media-specific operations, and that these properties, including those of inclusion and belonging, inform how Klout participates in particular kinds of ordering and valuation. We thus explore the interlinked movement of numbers, media, and value in social media as a kind of dynamic assemblage.

Following up on current discussions of digital youth culture, this article examines the concept of assemblage and its potential for understanding the ambiguous forces that shape young people's everyday media practices. In the first part of the article, we argue for approaching these forces in their affective materiality. To provide a situated example, in the second part of the article, we explore the distribution of relations between hashtags #selfie and #antiselfie attached to 200 photos that were publicly shared on Instagram between August 1st and 30th of November 2019. By focusing on the network of tagging, liking and sharing selfies, we consider the resulting hybrid assemblage of Instagram youth in its multiplicity -- from the digital affordances of connectivity and relations of identity performance to the attention economy of Instagram and its manifold affective dynamics that are at play.

The article explores the politics of life underground in Bucharest, Romania. It focuses on a tunnel passing under Bucharest's central train station, where a community of drug users and so‐called ‘homeless’ have made a long‐standing home, using a space that many others considered uninhabitable. Relying on extensive ethnographic observations and interviews undertaken within the tunnels, the article traces and illustrates the socio‐material entanglements characterizing life underground. It frames this assemblage of bodies, veins, syringes, substances and various relationships of power and affect, as a ‘propositional politics’ of home and life at the margins. Such a politics speaks of drug addiction and extreme marginalization, but also of a sense of belonging, reciprocal trust and care. In tracing such a politics, the article does not aim to romanticize the status of home in the underground or to treat it as the marginal antithesis of normative homeliness, but to reveal the ways in which an affirmative, self‐grounding politics of home emerges from the immanence of tunnel life within the fabric of the city. As such, the article contributes to debates around homing practices in conditions of uninhabitability and proposes a radical approach to the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban.

To understand what digital democracy is, this article suggests looking at the individual level of democratic subjectivity. Who is the democratic subject and how is it constituted in digital democracy? It revisits the poststructuralist-inspired debate about cyberdemocracy in the 1990s, which conceptualized the democratic subject as disembodied discursive self, reifying through textuality in cyberspace. In contrast, current debates on new materialism offer novel perspectives with attention to the materiality of bodies and things. New materialist thought has been fruitfully incorporated for social interaction online, but they have yet to be applied to political participation. By discussing three examples of political online participation in which users materialize their classed, raced, and gendered bodies, this essay contributes to a novel understanding of embodied democratic subjectivity in the digital age.

The study of enslaved people's consumption practices often relies on 'fast science,' reducing these acts to a reflection of socioeconomic structures or a medium for agency and self-expression. What often gets lost is the effects these actions had. My paper builds on Édouard Glissant's discussions of the ontological and ethical aspects of 'slow science' to argue that attending to what Glissant would call the poetics of consumption-how consumers and commodities came together and the effects that radiate outward from acts of consumption-allows us to see enslaved consumers as people whose actions affected the world around them. To demonstrate this, I draw on merchants' ledgers and archaeological data from ongoing excavations at Belle Grove Plantation to discuss how enslaved people came to acquire both tea and teawares, and how this consumption affected how local economies and the institution of slavery operated in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

This paper investigates the affective and performative aspects of the right to the city with a focus on the materialisation of this right, its corporeal coming into being. In elaborating the idea of an affective right to the city, I will refer to Judith Butler's performative theory of assembly, along with findings drawn from ethnographic research conducted among individuals experiencing homelessness in Melbourne, Australia. My research suggests that the materialisation of the right to the city is embodied in the social, material and affective occupation of urban spaces. This work reveals how the body's inhabitation of place, and the affordances of the material environment, mediate the performative expression of the right to the city. It also calls for a shift from a juridical conception of the right to the city to an affective one, more accommodating of the social and material contexts in which this right is enacted. I conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of this affective conception of rights for performative studies of homelessness in urban space.

In this chapter I propose a time and place of birth for maritime security. Utilising Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory, I locate the original context from which maritime security arose in a foundational violent event that bore witness to the presence of different visions of order at sea. I document how the sudden irruption of activist non-state actors into the maritime assemblage challenged the traditional statist construction of the sea. I locate that event in the bombing of the Greenpeace flagship, "Rainbow Warrior", by French secret service agents on 10 July 1985, in Auckland harbour, at 23h45. At that moment maritime security was born as a complex, evolving field of relationships housing inter alia, state and non-state actors, forces of stasis and change, and practices of military technocracy and radical democracy.

To date, most discussion of security privatization in international
politics has been focused on the role of private military companies and mercenaries. This article seeks to shift the focus away from the battlefields and toward the less spectacular privatization and globalization of commercial private security. Drawing on Saskia Sassen’s notion of state ‘‘disassembly,’’ we situate the growth of private security within broader shifts in global governance. Pointing to the weakness of seeing the rise of private security as an erosion of state power and authority, we show instead a re-articulation of the public ⁄ private and global ⁄ local distinctions
and relationships into what we term ‘‘global security assemblages.’’ Analyzing the role of private security in two such assemblages in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, we show how a range of different security agents and normativities interact, cooperate and compete, to produce new institutions, practices and forms of security governance. Global security assemblages thus mark important developments in the relationship between security and the sovereign state, structures of political power and authority, and the operations of global capital.

Studying fanfiction in a field called “fan studies” conveys the assumption that we study it primarily to learn about fans. But what of fanfiction from a textual perspective—its distinctive recombinatory, iterative, and unstable textual effects and pleasures? How can it be defined and understood from literary historical and theoretical perspectives, or as a distinctive literary mode in its own right? Though it does seem refer to a recognizable kind of text, “fanfiction” resists a single definition but rather indicates an often playful relation nonetheless ordered by power dynamics—between source and text, writer and text, law, profit, platform or code and text, etc. Arguing through cephalopods and theorists influential in assemblage and network theory (Deleuze, Kittler), this chapter claims that “fanfiction” challenges models of unitary authorship and artistic hierarchies derived from Kant even as it relies on these models both conceptually and historically for the conditions of its existence

This article is an attempt to move beyond the conventional binary heuristic of identity to its progressive representation based on multiplicity, difference, and dispersion popularized by the 'rhizomatic' theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story, "The Yellow Wall Paper". It is a cliché belief that multiplicity comprises of numerous units, and these units can be eventually united under one category such as the ages of population. Deleuze and Guattari interrogated such logocentric assumptions, and 'arborescent root-tree' model of objectified structures, language, identity and self. This article seeks to trace the voyage of Jane's identity whose dairy constitutes the story "The Yellow Wall Paper". Her identity has evoked ramified and conflicting networks of references. Feminists broach that she is caged to be a conventional caring mother; for a Freudian she is a 'hysteric' struggling with temporary nervous depression, Lacanian posit that she is a 'psychotic' who persistently tries to satisfy the 'gaze' of her physician husband John, and for a Deleuzian the moment she fails to bear the burden of capitalism driven 'bio-power' and 'nuclear family' she becomes a 'schizo'. The object of study of this article is not Jane's mind which romanticizes asylums rather the interrelation between 'bio-power' and her 'desire'. The article will portray that Jane's 'self' is evacuated from its fixed position to cherish free form of human interaction, and her identity is not handcuffed by any law, rather it is in a state of constant 'flux', in a ceaseless motion of 'becoming', it is a 'rhizome', facilitating a non-hierarchical network.

in: T. Schade – B. Schweizer – S. Teuber et al. (Hrsg.), Exploring Resources. On Cultural, Spatial and Temporal dimensions of ResourceCultures, RessourcenKulturen 13 (Tübingen 2020) 307–328.

This paper focusses on bodily practices with things and substances in sacred spaces. These are seen as crucial for turning wine into a key resource in fifth-century BC Greek culture. As a starting point serves a well-known passage of Euripides’ Bacchae, in which – next to bread – wine is adressed as a key resource for the Greek world. Pictorial representations of the gods mentioned by Euripides as well as the tragical way of describing resources are then correlated to a conceptualization of resources as parts of complex bundles of interdependent tangible and intangible elements in different social and material spaces. Resources defined as means of constructing and negotiating identities are consequently seen as subjected to processes of sacralisation in sacred spaces.
In relation to an archaeological perspective on resources, dimensions of materiality and multimodality of cultural practices as well as the concept of sensorial assemblages are adressed. Concerning wine as a resource beyond the usual view on utility and scarcity of natural products, aspects of passages of Euripides’ Bacchae and pictures of Late Archaic drinking vessels were finally taken into consideration. The aim is to approach multimodal or synesthetic practices of bodily and emotionally involved actors with things and substances in sacred spaces and, thus, the emergence of a key resource in connection to conceptions of cultural knoweldge. Furthermore the paper tries to conflate aspects of assemblage theories and questions of gendered identities or representations, which strictly speaking are often seen in opposition.


Zusammenfassung

Der Beitrag zielt auf Körperpraktiken mit Dingen und Substanzen in sakralen Räumen. Diese werden als entscheidend dafür angesehen, Wein zu einer zentralen Ressource im Griechenland des fünften Jahrhunderts v. Chr. zu machen. Den Ausgangspunkt bildet eine bekannte Passage der Bakchen des Euripides, in der – neben Brot – Wein als zentrale Ressource der griechischen Welt angesprochen wird. Bildliche Darstellungen der von Euripides erwähnten Götter sowie die ‚tragische Weise‘ der Beschreibung von Ressourcen werden dann einer Konzeptualisierung von Ressourcen gegenüber gestellt, die diese im Rahmen komplexer Bündel voneinander abhängiger materieller und immaterieller Elemente in verschiedenen sozialen und materiellen Räumen betrachtet. Die als Mittel zur Konstruktion und Verhandlung von Identitäten definierten Ressourcen unterliegen Prozessen der Sakralisierung in sakralen Räumen.
Für eine archäologische Perspektive auf Ressourcen werden die Dimensionen der Materialität und Multimodalität kultureller Praktiken sowie das Konzept der sensorischen Assemblagen angesprochen. In Bezug auf Wein als Ressource jenseits der üblichen Sichtweise auf Nützlichkeit und Knappheit von Naturprodukten werden schließlich Aspekte von Passagen der Bakchen des Euripides sowie Bilder von spätarchaischen Trinkgefäßen betrachtet. Ziel ist die Annäherung an multimodale oder synästhetische Praktiken von körperlich und emotional involvierten Akteuren mit Dingen und Substanzen in sakralen Räumen und damit die Entstehung einer zentralen Ressource im Zusammenhang mit Vorstellungen von kulturellem Wissen. Darüber hinaus wird in dem Beitrag versucht, Aspekte von Assemblage-Theorien und Fragen geschlechtsspezifischer Identitäten oder Repräsentationen zusammenzuführen, die streng genommen oft in Opposition zueinander gesehen werden.

This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife.

This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116
It is Open Access.

This article is a critique of the neologism “Daoist medicine” (daojiao yixue 道教醫學) that has recently entered scholarly discourse in China. It provides evidence that this expression is an anachronism which found its way into scholarly discourse in 1995 and has now become so widely used that it is seen as representing an undisputed “historical fact.” It demonstrates that the term has no precursor in the pre-modern record, and critiques two substantive attempts to set up “Daoist medicine” as an analytical term. It reviews earlier scholarship on Daoism and medicine, or healing, within the larger context of religion and medicine, and shows how attention has shifted, particularly in relation to the notion of overlap or intersection of these historical fields of study. It proposes that earlier frameworks grounded in epistemology or simple social identity do not effectively represent the complexity of these therapies. Practice theory, on the other hand, provides a useful analytic for unpacking the organisation and transmission of curing knowledge. Such an approach foregrounds the processes and dynamics of assemblage, rather than theoretical abstractions. The article concludes by proposing a focus on the Daoing of medicine, that is, the variety of processes by which therapies come to be known as Daoist, rather than imposing an anachronistic concept like Daoist medicine.

The term "cable," as used in the context of diplomacy, is ambiguous. It denotes both a message and its technological messenger. Telegraph wires were used around the middle of the nineteenth century to connect the capitals of Europe. The network soon expanded, and by 1870, with the laying of submarine cables, fast-traveling telegraphic messages could be sent between Britain, Continental Europe, North America, the Middle East, and India. Through these cables, diplomatic posts communicated with their ministries back home. But the term "cable" also came to denote the message that was sent by telegraph. In this chapter I use this ambiguity as an entry point for an exploration of what the new materialist turn can bring to Diplomatic Studies. I will demonstrate how at three particular points in history the cable, as both diplomatic message and technological messenger, made a difference to how things played out. To make sense of this, one needs to be perceptive of the myriad ways in which meaning and materiality intertwine in the making of what we call diplomacy. What is called for is, in other words, a material-semiotic analysis of diplomacy...

Вплив Мішеля Фуко на сучасного соціолога та фі-лософа Бруно Латура навряд чи можна піддати сум-ніву. Останнього можна називати бозна-як: наївним позитивістом, релятивістом, постмодерністом, кон-ст рукціоністом (в поганій конотації) тощо. Але ні-коли не варто забувати, що він був також спінозис-том (навіть таким собі спінозистом-дельо зіан цем [La tour, 2014]) і фукольдіанцем. Фактично знамени-тій áкторно-мережевій теорії Б. Латура (АМТ) пе-ре дувала саме концепція влади, створена М. Фуко. Всі фукольдіанські концепти — біовлада, мікро-влада, мікрофізика влади — іманентно присутні й у латурівській АМТ, хоча і мають у ній інші назви. Більш глибоко зрозуміти фукольдіанську концеп-цію влади можна, на наш погляд, через АМТ і нав-паки — історичну генезу АМТ слід відстежувати не починаючи від семінарів у Вищій гірничій школі, а з праць бунтівного французького інтелектуала. Обидві теорії, як концепція влади Фуко, так і АМТ Латура, розмиті концептуально. Для них не існує жорстких фреймів, у які зазвичай можна укласти будь-яку соціальну теорію — недарма Латур нази-ває свою соціологію «соціологією асоціацій» — асо ціація тут має не лише значення «збірки» пев-них елементів (наприклад, «люди та об'єкти»), але й своє пряме значення — навіяний чимось образ. Саме такою, спонтанною, мінливою й без демар-каційних меж, бачить свою теорію Латур. Фуко ж бажає за краще називати власні соціальні та полі-тологічні концепції «нарисами»: це не будівля і на-віть не фасад будівлі, а радше штрихи до портрета,

This book interrogates why feminist memories matter. Feminist Afterlives explores how the images, ideas and feelings of past liberation struggles become freshly available and transmissible. In doing so, Red Chidgey examines how popular feminist memories travel as digital and material resources across protest, heritage, media, commercial and governmental sites, and in connection with the concerns and conditions of the present.

Key benefits:

- Provides a new set of analytical tools to explore the social and cultural afterlives of social movements and protest
- Moves beyond a text-based focus on narratives and identities to analyse how circulations of protest pasts travel through discursive, material, embodied and affective states
- Offers an insight into the methodologies needed to track activist and social movement memories across time and space, to understand their complex entanglements and meanings
- Brings together insights from memory studies, social movement studies, gender, heritage, media and cultural studies scholarship to outline a vibrant new research agenda for activist memory studies

Beyond enabling participatory forms of memory-making, digital media reconfigure power relations in memory construction. In the Philippines, we witness this through the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnakakaw (‘Day of Thieves’) to counter the heroic commemoration of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned by the state and supported by online networks that distort and deny his crimes during his 20-year regime. This case illustrates not only how digital media facilitates the negotiation of memory by non-institutional actors, but also how it sets the conditions to resist elite narratives through non-conventional ways of remembering. This study examines the performance of counter-memory (Foucault, 1977) in the intersection of networked publics, counter-narratives, and technologies of memories. We investigate the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnanakaw by mapping its social network and analyzing its discourses as digital practices (Jones, Chik & Hafner, 2015). We argue that the network derives its power from neither elite nor collective actions, but through connective action of structures, discourses and practices of remembrance. Firstly, the locus of analysis shifts from a single actor (‘who remembers’) to the assemblage (‘what enacts the remembering’) as an agent of counter-memory, with technology shaping its possibilities and boundaries. Secondly, the assemblage’s resistance to elite commemoration surfaces silenced and neglected historical narratives (‘what is remembered’) through affective articulations of protest and subversive commemorative practices (‘how is it remembered’). We theorize the ‘assemblage of counter-memory’ as the connective, discursive, and material assemblage that enact political agency to privilege marginalized narratives and play an active role in the (re)construction of memory.

A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start screen of a huge swath of games, the two paths diverge. In the first, a single-player campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second, gameplay hinges on the actions of other players, whether oppositional combat in a fighting game, or cooperatively as in some sports titles. This perceived split manifests in a variety of historical and contextual forms: it emerges from the single-player games of the frenetic, quarter-driven arcades against the social play style dominant in early generations of home consoles; or, likewise, from the solitary, single-player journeys of role-playing games (RPGs) played in suburban dens to sprawling virtual communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). It often pops up in the interstices between the two, as in the local area network (LAN) party, alternating or asynchronous play, or local cooperative play. Without a doubt, understandings of single-player/multi-player entangle both the context of play and type of game. Approaches in game studies are not immune to the fracturing divide of single/multi, often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leaving design, nar-ratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm. Several questions arise from the slash of single/multi: what are, both material and cultural, the historic conditions that facilitate the rift? How do different schools in the loosely-affiliated field of game studies cultivate, approach, and defy the fracture? How do bounds of platforms, player action, methodology, economic, and marketing interests all shape the senses of single-player and multiplayer experiences? Moreover, if a great deal of what separates the two collapses, then what binds the two and how should we account for the multi-faceted material, discursive, and cultural assemblage of single/multi?

Informal urban street trade is a prevalent feature across the Global South where much of the production and/or buying and selling of goods and services is unregulated. For this reason, local authorities have historically seen it as backward, inefficient and detrimental to the development of urban areas and have thus developed formalisation programmes aimed to control and ultimately make it disappear. Critics argue that the design and implementation of these programmes can marginalise and disempower informal traders as it acts against the traders’ livelihoods and long-established practices they have developed for decades. This research speaks to these concerns and aims to investigate how informal urban street trade manages to continuously reproduce itself despite formalising efforts to make it vanish. The study follows a post-structuralist approach informed by post-development sensibilities (Escobar, 2011). The purpose is two-fold. First, to critically investigate the implications of imposed power-knowledge essentialism inherent to formalisation processes (Foucault, 1980). Second, to analyse the ways in which cultural and socioeconomic development is enacted through the daily assembling of informal urban street trade (Farías and Bender, 2012; McFarlane, 2011).

The research offers a thick ethnographic inquiry, conducted over a one year-long period (2014-2015) in the urban centre of Recife, Northeast capital of Pernambuco state, Brazil. Recife is a particularly rich site to investigate these issues as informal urban street trade has historically been pervasive of its squares and streets and the municipally has in place a formalisation programme aimed to gather information about traders, license them and relocate them into purposefully-built facilities. The ethnographic inquiry focused on the practices, knowledges, materials and technologies associated with the daily work of both informal traders, selling on the streets, and governing officials implementing the formalisation programme, both on the streets and on the City Council office. Primary data collection was gathered through ethnographic observations and fieldnote diaries enriched with pictures and audio recordings of the day-to-day sensorial experience of informal urban street trade. This was enhanced with informal conversations as well as semi-structured and unstructured interviews with governing bodies’ officials, licenced and unlicensed street traders, formal shop owners, and a diversified set of urban citizens.

The thesis highlights that formalisation, through the introduction of regulations, classification schemes and practices of classifying traders through an information system, seeks to establish and expand an individualistic developmentality among all actors. Through this, formalisation aims to shape and normalise their everyday practices to focus on the City Council’s agenda of rendering informal street trade as problematic and turning the solution of formalised trade not only unquestionable, but desirable by all. More problematically, the formalisation programme’s overdetermination of what a socioeconomic order is to be and its imposition of individualising subjectivities to assist in its implementation acts against the traders’ collective and community-based understanding of work and livelihoods which, contrary to the formalisation discourse, greatly benefit the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities. This is achieved through the traders’ daily assembling of work, value and supply on the streets. The findings reveal that the collective organisation of traders’ work is strongly based on a ‘cooperative ethos’ that is not only efficient in taking advantage of and adapting to the challenging conditions of street markets, but also is key on the ongoing fostering and strengthening of the local community identity. The findings also show that traders, through their tacit knowledge of the best fits between products, services and sites, are key in shaping the valuation of both formal and informal enterprises as well as urban sites thus bolstering the local economy. Lastly, the findings also reveal that, through their interactions with formal and informal supply circuits, street traders are fundamental for the distribution and promotion of local artists and producers thus helping on the support and fostering of local culture.

The main contribution of this research is it offers novel empirical and theoretical insights on the ways in which formalisation and informality are performed. It richly reveals the contested nature of development that is negotiated daily between the individualist developmentality imposed by formalisation and the communitarian- based development possibilities which are enacted through informal trading practices. These developmental possibilities are turned invisible by formalisation as classification enforces a strong reading of street trade which is ontologically distant and even contrary to the community-based values which make street trade not only resilient to formalising efforts but also adaptive to the challenging conditions and, more importantly, central to the cultural and socioeconomic development of these communities.

2021 edit: An updated and abridged version of this research can be found at https://www.academia.edu/49236053/Whats_the_problem_with_Brexit_notes_from_the_middle_of_Britains_crisis

This thesis is the outcome of three months of ethnographic fieldwork in London, the year after the Brexit referendum. By conceptualising the referendum as a moment of rupture, as the beginning of an in-between period in British society, the central aim of this thesis is to trace some of the ways in which individuals and collectives have started to come together and shape strategic narratives about contemporary British society, articulating different scale-making projects within technological and political assemblages.

The fieldwork upon which this thesis is based is defined as a multi-speed approach to ethnographic research: on the one hand, it consists of embedded and embodied knowledge drawn from participant-observation and from interviews with politically active individuals; on the other hand, it consists of mediated knowledge drawn from research in
and of cyberspace. A secondary aim of this thesis is to account for the role of digital technologies in political discourse and practice.

In terms of theory, this thesis aims for a relational understanding of Brexit, both as a process caught up in multiple flows and relations, and as a force that actively produces relations among different groups in British society. In other words, Brexit is here understood as a problem that catalyses the emergence of different (and divergent) publics,
which in turn frame Brexit within specific scale-making projects.

In the final instance, these scale-making projects can be understood as horizons of public intervention, that is, as alignments of temporalities, spatial scales, and technologies that enact meaningful and intentional public interventions at specific junctures of society. By paying attention to these horizons, this thesis aims to bring into focus some of the potential social formations and cultural becomings that are currently emerging in Brexit Britain, trying as far as possible not to speculate on what will actually happen after Britain leaves the European Union.

The Robot Garden, Architecture & AI

Architecture has rarely found points of intersection with the research conducted on Artificial Intelligence in a global scale. Even today, the discussion of AI and Architecture has barely started. Considering the enormous potentialities of this area of research regarding its application in architecture, it is more than strange that this has not been discussed in wider circles within the discipline. In recent years we have seen a rapid development in the progressive methods emerging from AI research,
resulting in applications that surround us continuously.

Almost undetected, AI applications have seeped successfully into our daily life: voice recognition, ride sharing apps, banking apps, face recognition, AI Airline Pilots, smart home devices and more, are already naturally ingrained into our environment. More are in the pipeline that reach from AI driven Cars to farming with intelligent machines. The possibilities of these methods will transform all areas of our daily life and will mutate the planet.

The oceans are increasingly understood as a security space. Does the new maritime security agenda lead to new spatial configurations? This chapter introduces the concept of 'pragmatic spaces' to explore spatial configurations produced in responses to maritime security. Four exemplary spaces are discussed: how counter-piracy led to the development of high risk areas, how maritime security capacity building produced new regions constructed through codes of conduct, how the identification of smuggling routes established new forms of international partnerships, and how maritime domain awareness systems advance new transnational spaces of surveillance. These new spatial configurations were introduced to manage maritime security issues and enable transnational forms of governance.

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

The history of religion in the United States cannot be understood without attending to histories of race, gender, and sexuality. Since the 1960s, social and political movements for civil rights have ignited interest in the politics of identity, especially those tied to movements for racial justice, women's rights, and LGBT rights. These movements have in turn informed scholarly practice, not least by prompting the formation of new academic fields, such as Women's Studies and African American studies, and new forms of analysis, such as intersectionality, critical race theory, and feminist and queer theory. These movements have transformed how scholars of religion in colonial North America and the United States approach intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. From the colonial period to the present, these discourses of difference have shaped religious practice and belief. Religion has likewise shaped how people understand race, gender, and sexuality. The way that most people in the United States think about identity, especially in terms of race, gender, or sexuality, has a longer history forged out of encounters among European Christians, Native Americans, and people of African descent in the colonial world. European Christians brought with them a number of assumptions about the connection between civilization and Christian ideals of gender and sexuality. Many saw their role in the Americas as one of Christianization, a process that included not only religious but also sexual and cultural conversion, as these went hand in hand. Assumptions about religion and sexuality proved central to how European colonists understood the people they encountered as " heathens " or " pagans. " Religion likewise informed how they interpreted the enslavement of Africans, which was often justified through theological readings of the Bible. Native Americans and African Americans also drew upon religion to understand and to resist the violence of European colonialism and enslavement. In the modern United States, languages of religion, race, gender, and sexuality continue to inform one another as they define the boundaries of normative " modernity, " including the role of religion in politics and the relationship between religious versus secular arguments about race, gender, and sexuality.

The  chapter argues for the complex middle position in aesthetics as the most radical. The picturesque, "a station between beauty and sublimity," as Uvedale Price argued in 1796, views the forces that either make or destroy things as coexistent with their form. The chapter culminates in a fictional skirmish between Heidegger and Ruskin where for the first the sublime is what all things strive for, while for the latter it merely consists of a point to grow away from.

(co-authored with Dai Whan An, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Chungbuk National University, Korea)

This article explores the changing values of heritage in an era saturated by an excess of media coverage in various settings and also threatened by either natural or manmade disasters that constantly take place around the world. In doing so, we focus on discussing one specific case: the debate surrounding the identification of Sungnyemun as the number one national treasure in South Korea. Sungnyemun, which was first constructed in 1396 as the south gate of the walled city Seoul, is the country’s most acknowledged cultural heritage that is supposed to represent the national identity in the most authentic way, but its value was suddenly questioned through a nationwide debate after an unexpected fire. While the debate has been silenced after its ostensibly successful restoration conducted by the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2013, this article argues that the incident is a prime example illustrating how the once venerated heritage is reassembled through an entanglement of various agents and their affective engagements. Methodologically speaking, this article aims to read Sungnyemun in reference to the growing scholarship of actor-network theory (ANT) and the studies of heritage in the post-disaster era through which to explore what heritage means to us at the present time. Our synchronic approach to Sungnyemun encourages us to investigate how the once-stable monument becomes a field where material interventions and affective engagements of various agents release its public meanings in new ways.

This article explores a new model of urban practice that is not limited by environmental moralism by investigating theories of plastic, which is today’s prevailing environmental problem and also a ubiquitous strata of everyday life. In doing so, it investigates the following two things. The first is to speculate about the ontological dimensions of plastic. Often thrown away after a single use and thrown into the ocean in the form of microplastics, plastic is rubbish and also a toxic material influencing climate change on a global level. It is both a problematic material and an object to overcome. However, such an objectification is a result that does not pay enough attention to its ubiquity. By considering plastic as a crucial form of life, this article pays close attention to its ontological dimensions. The second thing is to examine “assemblage urbanism” as a new form of urban model that could be further explored in relation to the plastic ontology. Assemblage urbanism brings Gilles Deleuze’s notion of assemblage into urban discourses, thereby trying to rethink the conventional theories of the city, represented by its counterpart known as “critical urbanism” that highlights an analytical approach. This article examines the debate between those two camps, which appeared in serial issues of the journal City in 2011, as well as paying attention to the weak points of assemblage urbanism. What this article derives through the investigation is a theory called “plastic urbanism,” a new form of urban practice that is not subjugated by the Anthropocene as a grand narrative, but offers a microscopic and diagrammatic model of the city.

This essay begins by arguing that discussions of interdisciplinarity between literature and science have been overly preoccupied by problems of counting: the issue is not that there are or are not Two Cultures, but that we start from defining and delimiting specific numbers of disciplines. It then suggests that that the works of Margaret Cavendish, a philosopher, scientist, playwright, and poet from the mid-seventeenth century, offer two concepts that may help us escape the traps of counting. With her concepts of grounds, she insists on fiction or literature as a mode of rationality parallel to and comparable to reason or science. She also attempts to re-orient contemporary debates about the possible grounds of scientific knowledge, insisting that Nature herself, in all of her variety, must serve as the ground or basis of nature. The essay then shows that the concept of the creature, as Cavendish develops it in her late works, offers a generative model for thinking about combination, cooperation, and association, and might therefore be a useful concept for helping us think beyond the numbering of disciplines.

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

How do a city and a nation deal with a legacy of perpetrating atrocity? How are contemporary identities negotiated and shaped in the face of concrete reminders of a past that most wish they did not have? Difficult Heritage focuses on the case of Nuremberg-a city whose name is indelibly linked with Nazism-to explore these questions and their implications. Using original archival, interview and ethnographic sources, it provides not only fascinating new material and perspectives, but also more general innovative theorizing of the relationship between heritage, identity and material culture. The book looks at how Nuremberg has dealt with its Nazi past post-1945. It focuses especially, but not exclusively, on the city's architectural heritage, in particular, the former Nazi party rally grounds, on which the Nuremberg rallies were staged. The book draws on original sources, such as city council debates and interviews, to chart a lively picture of debate, action and inaction in relation to this site and significant others, in Nuremberg and elsewhere. In doing so, Difficult Heritage seeks to highlight changes over time in the ways in which the Nazi past has been dealt with in Germany, and the underlying cultural assumptions, motivations and sources of friction involved. Whilst referencing wider debates and giving examples of what was happening elsewhere in Germany and beyond, Difficult Heritage provides a rich in-depth account of this most fascinating of cases. It also engages in comparative reflection on developments underway elsewhere in order to contextualize what was happening in Nuremberg and to show similarities to and differences from the ways in which other 'difficult heritages' have been dealt with elsewhere. By doing so, the author offers an informed perspective on ways of dealing with difficult heritage, today and in the future, discussing innovative museological, educational and artistic practice.