CITY, VOL. 15, NO.
5, OCTOBER 2011
What can an assemblage do?
Seven propositions for a more strategic and
politicized assemblage thinking
Bertie Russell, Andre Pusey and Paul Chatterton
T
his piece is written by three people
who are engaged in both social move-
ment activism and academic research.
We are receptive to, and have been inspired
by, the many strands of open and auton-
omous Marxist thought as well as the
heretic writings of thinkers such as Deleuze,
Guattari and Foucault. We are interested in
and committed to theory that produces con-
cepts that can be put to work to galvanize
and aid the organization of radical social
transformation. We want to offer a strong
reminder that the role of critical theory
understood outside the narrow sense of the
Frankfurt Schoolis to expose and criticize,
but also to promote change and help
organize. For us, theoretical reflections need
to be bricks in the hands of whoever wants
to throw them at oppression and exploitation.
Yet we have to be constantly aware of the
Janus-faced nature of this process: A
concept is a brick. It can be used to build
the courthouse of reason. Or it can be
thrown through the window (Massumi in
Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. xiii).
Rather than comment on the specific
content of the debate in City between McFar-
lane and Brenner et al. (see Vol. 15, No. 2),
our aim is rather different. We want to
explore the relevance of assemblage theory
and related concepts for contemporary stra-
tegic action by those involved in social
change activities broadly defined as anti-
authoritarian/anti-capitalist (News from
Nowhere, 2005, Tormey, 2008) or even com-
munist/commonist (see Badiou, 2010; Hardt
and Negri, 2009; Zizek and Douzinas, 2010;
ISSN 1360 4813 print/ISSN 1470 3629 online/11/050577 7 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.609024
De Angelis, 2007; Dyer-Witheford, 2007;
Midnight Notes, 1990; Hardt, 2010). We are
looking for new forms of concepts and
knowledge production that are neither
strictly bound by the legacies of political
economy nor poststructuralism.
We are using the ideas and concepts raised
in this paper as a platform to spark and
demand much needed debate, in academia in
particularly, on political strategy. The basis
of our approach is not to support McFarlane
per se, although as will become apparent we
are broadly supportive of his approach, but
to demand a new starting pointor rather
reconnect with a movement of thought that
emerged in the 1960s and 1970sthat recon-
ceptualizes the political value of concepts
such as assemblage theory and negation. It
is no longer enough to further expound on
the complexities of what we think and feel
we are up against. Our academic political
work must provide resources for us all to
push against, antagonize and go beyond the
present condition. We simply want to ask:
what is assemblage theory for? What can it
do to help us out of this capitalist present?
We respond in the form of a number of
propositions that we outline below. The
argument within the propositions unfolds as
follows: our starting point is that we must
co-produce theory that is committed to a col-
lective anti-capitalist transformation, as well
as the free and open circulation of knowledge.
We must also ensure that when we pass on or
circulate knowledge, we do so in a way that
ensures the political intent, context and
origins of those involved in co-producing it
578 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 5
is similarly passed on. From this it follows
that knowledge production in the university
should also be seen as a site of political
struggle, with its own politicized contexts
that generate knowledge. Given the various
and pressing crises facing our global commu-
nity it only seems logical that the task of
research and theory production is to undo
capitalism in its various guises (e.g. as a
social relation, governance technique, power
geometry, mechanism for dispossession and
accumulation), and to create other worlds.
Indeed, Holloway has suggested that this is
the only meaningful task for the university
today (2011). We therefore see the act of
thinking and theorizing as an unavoidably
political task, in which knowledge is never
neutralindeed the concept of neutrality
itself belongs to a liberal arrangement of
power and knowledge. Like all knowledge,
if assemblage theory or political economy
approaches fail to empower us from where
we currently stand, they run the risk of repro-
ducing relations of power/knowledge that
keep us imprisoned in the present state of
things. This finally leads us to the
common(s) as a key strategic form of assem-
blage, for which real potential lies in the con-
temporary metropolis as the site of doing and
struggles of the multitude. These seven prop-
ositions, rather than fully worked out, rep-
resent signposts, roadmaps and junctions
that can be explored further.
Proposition 1. The co-production of theory is
the only useful kind of knowledge pro-
duction. The age of the ivory tower, or
indeed the idea of a university as the privi-
leged site of knowledge production, is not
only over (if it ever existed), but redundant
and counter-productive to political change.
Academia too often plays a role in co-
opting or sanitizing radical ideas, as the
long March through the institutions indi-
cated. The academic context facilitates the
all-too-easy depoliticization of epochal chan-
ging ideas, turning dangerous and volatile
concepts into sterilized artefacts, allowing
us to place them into glass cases out of the
hands of the very contexts that give them
meaning. How many times have you read a
research article that offers to use a Foucaul-
dian perspective, a Deluezian approach or
will draw on the work of Lefebvre which
has almost none of the critical or radical
intent that put these authors to work in the
first place? On one level, this represents the
widening gap between those teaching, learn-
ing and researching in academia and frontline
social movements. On another level, it rep-
resents the purposeful instrumentalization
of university teaching and research, pulling
us away from active engagement with the
bodies, ideas and emotions that are either
incompatible with, or refuse, the capitalist
status quo.
To be clear, we are not supporting the
co-production of knowledge as currently
conceived by the university that often
equates to further integration of a narrowly
conceived business model into educational
practices and curricula. Instead, we insist on
a co-production of knowledge that works
towards the construction of militant knowl-
edge(s) that form part of a commonwealth
of ideas/concepts/resources emerging from
engagement with groups who are questioning
and resisting capitalism. Framing them in a
commonwealth is essential if they are to be
freely drawn upon by those wishing to
utilize them for the co-construction of
projects/assemblages that work towards
social change and the production of other
worlds. Creating a knowledge commons
and guarding against further enclosure is an
essential part of this co-production. We can
locate this project within the rich traditions
of militant research and popular education
that foregrounds daily experiences and
looks to produce knowledges that have rel-
evance to the challenges and problems faced
by particular groups (see Trapese, 2008;
Edu-Factory Collective, 2007; Really Open
University, n.d.; Graeber et al., 2007).
Proposition 2. Theories become almost mean-
ingless, and often depoliticized, when
abstracted from the contexts that created

them. What the assemblage debate raises is
the potential danger of ideas travelling far
beyond the militant contexts that generated
them and being decoupled from the intellec-
tual and material struggles that helped form
them. As Cleaver points out, Karl Marx
wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands
of the working class (2000, p. 1); we must
constantly ask whether what we produce
helps to do the same. We must all be more
aware of the important historical ruptures
and challenges through which many ideas
emergednot least in the break with psycho-
analysis and structuralism precipitated by the
emergence of forms of resistance that went
beyond the sterile confines of actually exist-
ing socialism and the associated Leninist and
Maoist practices of the 1960s and 1970s.
Rarely produced in a stale environment,
progressions in radical thought dont
emerge from the heavens akin to some trans-
cendental truth about our existence, nor are
they found hidden deep like a biological
truth about our being; they are actively con-
structed through the actual practice of
bodies coming up against the limit of what
is considered possible. It is through attempts
to challenge these limits, through finding
pathways beyond the limits of what is con-
sidered possible, that new concepts are pro-
duced regarding both what is and what can
become.
The context in which thinkers develop their
ideas, then, is crucial. For example, Felix
Guattari (Deleuzes co-author on numerous
works including Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia) was a communist militant and prac-
tising psychotherapist at the experimental La
Borde clinic. Active experiences of struggle
took him away from the Leninist parties of
his youth, and towards more experimental
forms of communist practice. The work pro-
duced with Deleuze and others within his
milieu formed part of this militant experimen-
tation; the concepts produced were immanent
to their construction and participation in left
assemblages. Their task of breaking with
dominant strands of Trotskyist Marxist and
RUSSELL ET AL. : WHAT CAN AN ASSEMBLAGE DO? 579
dialectical thinking and ideas of negation,
and the political reasons for doing so, should
not be underestimated. Indeed, how to
defect from dialectical and structuralist
thought whilst remaining committed commu-
nists was arguably the purpose of their work.
It is this event that remains submerged in
the McFarlane Brenner et al. debate, yet is
fundamental in engaging with contested
accounts of communist/commonist thought
and practice in the present (see, for example,
Holloway et al., 2009; Negri, 2009; Noys,
2010).
Proposition 3. The university must be a site of
struggle for those within the academy. We
have to develop our understandings of how
we are put to work within the university,
and strive to resist the (anti)social role of
the university as a machine for (re)producing
either docile, disciplined workers and forms
of research and teaching, or a successive
class elite in society. Both tendencies are
becoming all the more explicit, with the
emergence in the UK of Morrisons degrees
and A.C. Graylings elite university of the
humanities, respectively, but we must per-
ceive these processes in the quotidian func-
tion of the university.1 We need to assess
the impact of mechanisms such as the
Research Excellence Framework and aca-
demic profiling (amongst others) upon our
own subjectivity, questioning the extent to
which our consequential self-governing has
got anything to do with acting in our collec-
tive self-interest (De Angelis and Harvie,
2009; Gillespie et al., 2011).
Embracing the claim that there is no such
position as the neutral or objective
researcherand that any such claim is itself
a reactive political decision (cf. Guattari,
2008)we must recognize that every action
we take has the potential to either contribute
to the reproduction of the conditions of the
present or to aid us in the creation of new
ways of coexisting. In the same breath, we
must not become purist or utopian in
reading this as an ultimatum, but rather
recognize that we must act in, against and
580 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 5
beyond the confines of the university. This
means struggling where we are, building col-
lective counter-power, finding strategic
points of intervention in order to create
space inside within which we can move
against and beyond the existent.
As Mies states, the postulate of value-free
research . . . has to be replaced by conscious
partiality, which is achieved through partial
identification with the research objects
(1983, p. 122). Whether looking at biomass
in forest ecosystems, or perceptions of
gender, our task is to resist the cumulative
depoliticization of concepts and the sugges-
tion we are producing impartial information.
Instead, we must realize that every truth pro-
duced has concrete power effects, and con-
versely, that we live in regimes of power
that regulate what is considered a legitimate
process for producing truths, the types of dis-
course that are capable of being recognized as
truth and the status accorded to those who
produce them. As Foucault understood:
Truth isnt outside power, or lacking in
power: contrary to a myth whose history and
functions would repay further study, truth
isnt the reward of free spirits, the child of
protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those
who have succeeded in liberating themselves.
Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced
only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.
And it induces regular effects of power.
(1980, p. 131)
Proposition 4. The task of research is to undo
capitalism, as Antonio Conti states, the goal
of research is not the interpretation of the
world but the organisation of transformation
(2005). Research needs reorienting towards
understanding the constantly changing tech-
niques through which we are governed (and
govern) in the interest of capital and the
dominant arrangement of power, and in the
same move our capacity to undo these tech-
niques of governance. Our role as critical/
radical geographers should be to produce a
cartography of dispositifs of power (Lazzar-
ato, 2009, p. 114), peeling back the myths of
society so as to reveal the heterogeneous
domains where different forms and strategies
of government are exercised through various
technologies (ibid.). Such a process provides
us too with a cartography of possible terrains
of confrontations (ibid.), allowing us to
produce the diverse forms of struggle
required to transform society. The aim of
critical/radical geographers must not be to
produce theory compatible with the present;
we are not interested in reproducing a knowl-
edge of a possible that is constantly being
defined on our behalf. The only knowledge
worth producing is that which contributes
to the doing of the impossible, of aiding us
to do things we are told cant be done or
thought (Swyngedouw, 2009; Chatterton,
2010).
Proposition 5. Precise detail on the actual
workings and features of potential new
assemblages is crucial. It is not enough just
to state that things, molecules or actors are
assembledas found in the depoliticized
adoption of assemblage or complexity
theory from mathematics or the biological
sciences. Assemblages are not political in
and of themselves; it is what puts them in
movement, what composes them or decom-
poses them that is the object of the political.
Imagining and actively producing new
assemblages is an unquestionable task, but
more needs to be stated about their genesis,
growth and decline. What allows us to de/
reassemble according to our collective self-
interest? What obstructs, arrests or confuses
this movement? This is not a discussion of
political purity, of some perfect form we all
must strive towards, but one of strategy
towards the radical restructuring of what cur-
rently exists. We need to move beyond
utopian ideas of creating a different world
outside capitalism (as if we would not just
be recaptured anyway), and also beyond the
false assumption it is possible to just
destroy capitalism through a line of attack.
As John Holloway (2006, 2010) stresses,
there has to be a recognition of a three-way
mode of being in-against-beyond the
present condition.

Proposition 6. We are not interested in assem-
blages for the sake of assemblage thinking.
We are not even interested in assemblages
per se, but rather the forces of composition
and de-composition that form them. The pro-
duction and circulation of the common(s) is
key to understanding the potential of new
assemblages (Dyer-Witheford, 1999, 2006),
those that promote and enhance the ideas,
practices and potential common(s). The
common(s) are spaces of collaboration,
cooperation and community. They are
process based, made and remade, through
the collective act of commoning (Linebaugh,
2008). It is both a noun (such as knowledge
or land-based commons) and a verb (the
doing of commoning) as well as having com-
municative features (the act of commoning to
create a social relation to protect the
commons). We can see the (re)production of
the common(s) as relating to what John Hol-
loway (2010) has termed, cracks in capital-
ism, spaces where we are attempting to do
something other than reproduce capitalist
social relationships. What we are interested
in, in terms of assemblage thinking, is how
do we stop the capture and appropriation of
this common doing within the circuits of
capital? What assemblages of the
common(s) are necessary to increase their
wider resonance and capacity? What forms
of assemblage-in-common would increase
their ability to bolster our counter-power.
But also how are the commons being used
as neoliberalisms plan B (Caffentzis, 2010).
Crucially, in all this, it is worth recalling
Deleuze and Guattaris warning that we
must never believe that a smooth space will
suffice to save us (2004, p. 551). Just as we
must not valorize static and immobile assem-
blages, we must not fetishize movement for
movements sake. Indeed, perhaps the
problem we are facing now is that we are
induced through capitalism into moving too
fast for our minds to comfortably compre-
hend the world we are (re)producing. As
Franco Bifo Berardi suggests (2009), capital
is causing us to accelerate through
RUSSELL ET AL. : WHAT CAN AN ASSEMBLAGE DO? 581
assemblagesunderstood perhaps as islands
of recognition or semiotic consistencyat
an ever increasing speed, resulting in a psycho-
logical cycle of anxiety panic depression.
The point is not, however, to counterpose
this with slowness as some inherently
radical strategy, but to find ways to take
control of the speeds at which we de/re-
territorialize.
Proposition 7. The contemporary metropolis
is where we can see the potential to enact
the common as a noun and verb, as material
content and strategic process, most clearly.
In the context of our largely urbanized, and
increasingly urbanizing, world (in the sense
of both material and symbolic extent),
Hardt and Negri (2009, p. 250) insightfully
comment the city is to the multitude what
the factory was to the industrial working
class. Hence, the city is both the ultimate
nodal point in the organization and govern-
ance of neoliberal capital, but so too is it the
ultimate site for resistance and struggle, and
articulating and circulating alternatives
through the productive capacities of the mul-
titude. This takes numerous formsattempts
to create alternative commons in terms of
open source web applications and site,
patents and knowledge banks, repertoires of
social movement organizing that increase
our ability to be in common be they more
temporary forms such as flash mobs and
direct action, or organizing autonomous
spaces, squats and occupations (Pusey, 2010).
Our intention in this short piece has been
to make a claim for a more politicized and
strategic form of assemblage thinking. We
have found the idea of the common(s)
useful here, which is at its most clearest in
the contemporary city. We recognize that
many contemporary academic commentators
often present depoliticized versions of radical
concepts that then become easy targets for
critique. Straw-people arguments are set up
that caricature these ideas and do not fully
reflect the original radical spirit of the ideas
discussed. The result is often debates that
582 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 5
can miss the point of the ideas in the first
place. These concepts, such as assemblage
theory, and the struggles that generated
them, deserve more, they are tools to be
used to take apart and reconstruct the
present order of things. We would like to
suggest that we carry on using them indig-
nantly, dangerously and with the original
heretical intent in a way that reflects their
original radical spirit of those who developed
them, approaching the[m] [. . .] from behind,
and making [. . .] a child, who would [. . .] be
monstrous (Deleuze, 1977, p. 117). We are
not trying to generate perfect interpretations
of the world, but interpretations that can
give us greater purchase so that we can radi-
cally transform it. Our business is opening
up cracks in this capitalist present. That is
what an assemblage can do, as Deleuze
states, there is no need for fear or hope, but
only to look for new weapons (1992, p. 4).
Note
1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/
19/morrisons pay university tuition fees; http://
www.brad.ac.uk/management/programmes/
undergraduate/ugmorrisons/
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Bertie Russell is a PhD candidate researching
theories of power and resistance. Andre Pusey
is a PhD candidate researching social move-
ments and the common. Both Andre and
Bertie are teaching assistants on the MA in
Activism and Social Change at the University
of Leeds. Paul Chatterton is Senior Editor of
the journal City and Reader in Cities and
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See www.paulchatteron.com.