10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17401
application/pdf
2038-3460
17401
1
en
Dario Minervini
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Manuel De Landa, Assemblage Theory, Edinburg University Press, 2016
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
9
Book Reviews
2018-08-06
2023-06-25
2018-08-06
2023-08-28
126-130
TS
Dario Minervini
2018/08/06
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17401
126
Università di Napoli “Federico II”
2038-3460
1
en
130
Manuel De Landa, Assemblage Theory, Edinburg University Press, 2016
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17401/16259
9
126                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

Ingold, T. (2007) Materials against materiality, in “Archaeological Dialogues”, 14
        (1), pp. 1–16.
Latour, B. (1992) Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mun-
        dane Artifacts, in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (eds.), Shaping Technol-
        ogy/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA,
        MIT Press, pp. 225–258.
Meyrowitz, J. (1986) No sense of place: The impact of electronic media on social
        behavior, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Parolin, L.L. and Mattozzi, A. (2013) Sensible translation. Sensitive dimension
        and knowledge within two craftsmen’s workplaces, in “Scandinavian
        Journal of Management”, 29(4), pp. 353—366.
Thrift, N. (1983) On the determination of social action in space and time, in “En-
        vironment and Planning D: Society and Space”, 1(1), pp. 23-57.


                                        ***

   Manuel De Landa
Assemblage Theory, Edinburgh, Edinburg University Press, 2016, pp.
198

Dario Minervini Università di Napoli “Federico II”

    Assemblage Theory is the most recent effort of Manuel DeLanda. It
accounts his own reframing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work.
The book was published in 2016 as part of a series put out by Edinburgh
University Press, which has hosted the debate on the “Speculative Real-
ism”, since the seminal conference held in 2007 at Goldsmiths College in
London on the topic.
    Delanda was fully committed with this intellectual challenge against
the post-modern linguistic turn in humanities and for banishing heuris-
tic textualism (Bryant, Srnicek and Harman 2011). An intense intellec-
tual dialogue with the authors of Thousand Plateaus has opened up sig-
nificant insights into sociological thought and for STS scholars, since
the publication of DeLanda’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
(1997).
    “Agencement” is a concept at the core of the argument explored in
the current book. “Assemblage”, as admitted by the author himself, is a
slippery linguistic solution, which was used to substitute the illustrious
French word with an Anglophone one. Indeed, “assemblage” is intended
as both the process and the outcome of a connection, that is to say a mul-
tiplicity of heterogeneous entities interrelated by symbiotic liaisons. As-
semblage is the pattern of a flat ontological plane consistent with a non-
reductionist account of reality and overcoming the conceptualization of
Book Review                                                                   127
society as a self-sufficient whole.
    The first chapter clearly addresses this point. Both micro and macro
reductionism, respectively detected within phenomenological subject-
oriented sociology and with that establishing structured paths and roles
of actors, are contested. Even if this appears to be a very hurried critique
towards too vague sociological approaches, the proposal to focus on exte-
riority (again a concept taken from Deleuze) is intriguing. Indeed, the ex-
ternal relationship between the parts, which constitute emergent social
aggregates are reversible relationships that never crystallize the reduction
of the parts to the whole and vice-versa. DeLanda provides the readers
with an example in order to make this argument on exteriority explicit.
When talking about how authority and legitimacy work in organizations,
he writes (p. 12):
    Nevertheless, and however centralised and despotic an organization may be,
its members remain ultimately separable from it, their actual degree of autonomy
depending on contingent factors […]. It is this type of irreducible social whole
produced by relation of exteriority, a whole that does not totalize its parts […].
We can refer to these social wholes as “assemblages”.

    These assemblages, he continues, are emergent, immanent and con-
tingent as the properties they express. Thus, there is no room for an “es-
sence” of the assemblages that are individual, since the individuals are the
parts that constitute the whole. The reference to the individuality clarify
that all the entities at every scale (from individual persons to individual
planet systems) are unique, historical aggregates. At first sight, it can be
said that this point sounds controversial for those sociologists who en-
dorse the added value of the comparative method in order to unfold the
same “type” of assemblages. At the same time, the argument on individu-
ality does not completely deny the possibility of comparison between as-
semblages, but invite one to take seriously in consideration historical and
geographical differences. Fernand Braudel’s work is quoted in order to
reject the reification of heuristic models in favour of a modular scheme
provided for socio-economic phenomena. In doing so, the famous set of
sets is translated in aggregates of individual infrastructures, accountability
techniques, situated spaces of exchange, temporal repetition of habits,
traders, clients at different levels (from the cities to the international
flows). The aim is to unravel what we usually put aside as general wholes:
the State and the Market. DeLanda emphasizes the urgency to dedicate a
specific commitment to the understanding of the production and mainte-
nance of assemblages more than to the explanation of genuine causes of
social wholes. This is not the only point of contact with a pragmatic soci-
ology sensitivity.
    Moreover, the way DeLanda conceptualizes the stabilization of as-
semblages leads to insights into the social sciences. In this case, the ques-
tion is related to the processes that allows an individual aggregate being
128                                                          Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

stable and legitimate. The parameters, which are used to address the
problem include both the degree of territorialisation/deterritorialisation
and that of coding/decoding. As usual, the vocabulary is directly taken
from Deleuze and Guattari in order to depict either the homogeneity of
an assemblage or the conflicts between its parts. While the first couple of
concepts are intended to address how singularity is stabilized in time and
place, the second couple makes reference to “the role played by special
expressive components in an assemblage in fixing the identity of a whole”
(p. 22). It is interesting how DeLanda uses this meta-vocabulary to ex-
pose the “imperialist pretension” of the linguistic turn in humanities. The
figured, self-consistency of language in respect to material realities are the
ingredients of that representationalist epistemology which several leading
STS scholars have contested from different theoretical perspectives
(Latour 2004; Barad 2007). In chapter two, this liason is made more ex-
plicit through the performative argument, shifting from a linguistic to an
ontological realm. Assemblages are considered, coherently with some Ac-
tor-Network Theory’s assertions, performed by the entities that both con-
stitute and affect them. A point of divergence seems to arise from the is-
sue of relationality with respect to performativity dynamics, but we will
deal with this later.
    DeLanda insists several times on another vexata quaestio: the micro
and macro analytical levels. A flat ontology, even flexible and scalable in
terms of assemblage of assemblages, cannot be consistent with any form
of analytical reductionism. This is why even Foucault and Deleuze are
considered too worried about a social “totality”, the first conceptualizing
the pervasive “disciplinary institutions”, the latter postulating the level of
the “social field”. However, the main target of the controversy seems to
be Marx and his scientific-political heritage. Capitalism, as a whole, and
the reification of those generalities, on which the thinking of the left still
remains tied up, are, of course, criticized. The message of DeLanda is
clear. Revolution can affect only partial, specific and heterogeneous as-
semblages that are just parts of a mind-independent reality. So, the claim
of the ultimate dictatorship of the proletariat is “diminished” here to a
more pragmatic and situated process of social change.
    In the third chapter, an account of the evolution of the army and
weapons is the narrative pretext to clarify how to reconstruct and unfold
assemblages of assemblages. The interplay between the materi-
al/expressive dimensions, territorialisation/deterritorialization dynamics,
and the changing in codes and parameters are addressed here. Within a
complex conceptual framework, the distinction between properties and
capacities is also displayed. This has been a pivotal point of reasoning
since the first elaboration of Assemblage Theory. While properties are
the proof of the irreducibility of entities, capacities are enacted when as-
semblages perform and are performed by the entities involved. As Gra-
ham Harman, the editor of the “Speculative Realism” book series noted,
Book Review                                                                129
the emphasis on capacities, which are actualized when relationality occurs
between entities, seems to be risky in respect to the very realism of the
ontology DeLanda deals with (Harman 2008, p. 378). As said, relationali-
ty constitutes a sensitive point within DeLanda’s construction.
    The second part of the book is centred on the heuristics of scientific
fields, which means the distance between knowledge procedures (axio-
matic versus inductive logic) and phenomena under scrutiny. These fields
are treated as assemblages of assemblages. The heuristic of chemistry, for
instance, is accounted in terms of an historical process of reterritorializa-
tion of its domain through the Periodic Table. Once again, the carto-
graphic discussion of Delanda is quite close to those STS scholars who, in
the last 20 years, have been committed to observing scientific laboratories
“in action”, as well as in deconstructing reified generalities such as Sci-
ence and Nature. However, in this part of the book it seems that any at-
tempt of translation of the ontological stances in terms of sociological in-
quiry appears quite difficult. A kind of meta-reflection on concepts, dia-
grams, and non-linear historical trajectories complicates the discussion on
both how assemblages work and how these can be reconstructed. So, if
“the objectivity of problems, their autonomy from their solutions, implies
that what is problematic is not just what strikes our minds as being in
need of explanation” (p. 178), what could be the role of a social scientist
who feels inspired by this ontological framework? The book of Delanda
does not provide a first-hand response, but instead, raises another helpful
question: Which kind of political action stems from such a theoretical
elaboration? I deem that the answer to the latter question sketches a hy-
pothesis for the first one. If post-Marxism looks too materialistic, but not
realistic enough in the eyes of DeLanda, I see that the work on ontologi-
cal politics developed by John Law (2004), among other STS scholars,
could be a fruitful path to follow. The trait-d'union is twofold: the real
can be seen as ontologically multiple, while the method (i.e. the sociologi-
cal one) can be seen as a partial and situated connection with the real.
    If reality is not dependent on the mind of sociologists, and these
minds cannot be reduced to the assemblages they take part in, sociolo-
gists are still not “innocent” and contribute to the making of reality (Law
and Urry 2005, p. 404). This means that the speculative effort in unfold-
ing reality is, in itself, a political action, even when it consists in the up-
dated empiricism performed by Assemblage Theory.

References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the En-
       tanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham, Duke University Press.
Bryant, L., Srnicek, N. and Harman, G. (eds.) (2011) The Speculative Turn: Con-
        tinental Materialism and Realism, Melbourne, re.press.
Delanda, M. (1997) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Zone Books, New
        York.
130                                                              Tecnoscienza – 9 (1)

Harman, G. (2008) DeLanda's ontology: Assemblage and realism, in “Continen-
        tal Philosophy Review”, 41 (3), pp. 367-383.
Latour, B. (2004) Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to
        matters of concern, in “Critical Inquiry”, 30, pp. 225-248.
Law, J. (2004) After Method, London, Routledge.
Law, J. and Urry, J. (2005) Enacting the Social, in “Economy and Society”, 33 (3),
        pp. 390-410.

                                        ***

    Benoît Godin and Dominique Vinck (eds.)
Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to the Pro-
Innovation Bias, Cheltenham and Northampton, Edward Elgar, pp.
335

Alessandro Mongili Università di Padova

    Studying innovation, I found processes addressed as “innovations”,
which did not change anything, and processes, which had a relevant im-
pact, with many consequences, which were not considered “innovations”
(Mongili 2015). What do we make then of the concept of “innovation”
and its incongruities?
    The book Critical Studies of Innovation. Alternative Approaches to
the Pro-Innovation Bias (CSoI), edited by Benoît Godin and Dominique
Vinck, is an attempt to remediate the lack of analysis concerning such in-
congruities and, at the same time, it is a relevant effort to develop a new
research program, in order to include innovation within a broader
framework, avoiding an ideological use of this concept.
    The main issues tackled by CSoI are: (a) the reconceptualization of
the very notion of innovation, as it appears in scholarship and in public
discourse; (b) the analysis of the phenomena, which are excluded from
current concepts of innovation; (c) the development of a theoretical pro-
posal, NOvation, aimed at a more comprehensive approach to socio-
technical phenomena, both included and excluded from the current defi-
nition of innovation.
    The book is organized in four parts containing a total of seventeen
contributions, enclosed within Godin and Vink’s “Introduction” and
“Conclusion”.
    In the first part, inconsistencies of the usual ideas of innovation are
analyzed. For instance, Godin’s opening article reflects about the fact
that imitation has no place in current analyses of innovation; whereas Ti-
ago Brandão and Carolina Bagatolli’s one analyzes the double bind be-
tween technoscience and politics focusing on the innovation policies in
