Of all the concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus, it is the assemblage that has best captured the imagination of theorists working within and outside of Deleuze and Guattarian scholarship. Whilst the concept has been used extensively in geography, such studies do not explain this concept with any depth or precision and rarely connect the assemblage with other concepts like the milieus, territory, machines and the plane of consistency. Geography’s partial engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus means that some of (...) the most pressing questions in assemblage thinking are still unanswered, and opportunities for new directions in geography are being missed. This paper responds to this gap in knowledge by presenting a novel exegesis of one of the most important yet often overlooked chapters of a Thousand Plateaus. In doing so, it provides new insights into the formation, re-formation and dissipation of assemblages. It shows how these states might inform a more nuanced geography of assemblages and how this geography might link to other geographies found in their work: a geography of milieus, a geography of machines and a refrain geography. (shrink)

Much of the literature exploring the intersection between Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy and architecture have focused on abstract theory, experimental projects and practices at the margins of the profession. But, one may ask, what of the mainstream, commercial practices that produce the offices, housing, shops, schools and community buildings that we see and engage with in our day-to-day lives? What of the everyday design decisions made by professional architects and technicians sitting at their desks and drawing boards? Are these to be excluded (...) from architecture's engagement with Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy? As I will show in this paper, Deleuze and Guattari's proposals for the strata and the machinic assemblage are drawn from their underlying attempt to expand Hjelmslev's planar composition from a tool used to analyse language to a conceptual framework used to analyse the formation and evolution of all things. There is nothing within the conceptual framework of the strata/machinic assemblage to suggest, therefore, that they should not be used to analyse such practices. With this in mind, this article considers how these concepts can be translated through and help provide new insight into a real-world design sequence taken from mainstream, commercial architectural practice. In doing so it will show how such practices can offer Deleuzo-Guattarian scholars a more nuanced insight into this conceptual framework and the concepts that form it. (shrink)