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Assemblages, territories, contexts
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Commentary
Assemblages, territories, contexts Cameron Duff * School of Management, RMIT University, Australia
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 2 June 2015 Received in revised form 8 September 2015 Accepted 14 October 2015
Human geographers have been at the forefront of efforts across the social sciences to develop ‘‘assemblage thinking’’, applying and extending this model in a series of highly original empirical studies. This commentary assesses some of the conceptual, methodological and procedural implications of this research for contemporary drug studies. I will argue that the most useful way of approaching assemblage thinking in the analysis of drug problems is to focus on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material forces and entities. I will briefly review these three nodes before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical assessments of drug assemblages. I will conclude by exploring how the assemblage may replace the ‘subject’ and ‘social context’ as a discrete unit of analysis in drug studies. ß 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Assemblage Deleuze Affective geographies Context Drugs
As an object of social science inquiry, the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is almost always situated as a problem with specific personal, social, economic and political consequences. This is as true of epidemiological research that seeks to clarify the incidence and prevalence of AOD use and its sequela in a given population, as it is of social research that seeks to understand this consumption by way of its cultural and political aspects (Fraser, Moore, & Keane, 2014). What these approaches share, beyond the articulation of particular kinds of health and social problems, is an epistemological commitment to the ontological separation of individuals from the social contexts, and the differentiation of drug objects from cultural practices of consumption. Each approach acknowledges the role of social factors in shaping how alcohol and other drugs are used, as well as the problems associated with this consumption, and so each approach is left with the challenge of explaining how these factors actually mediate consumption in particular instances (Fitzgerald, 2015). Bruno Latour (2005:219) calls this the problem of ‘‘action at a distance’’. How, in other words, do social factors held to be distal or remote from events of AOD use – examples may include cultural norms that govern consumption practices, public policy arrangements, legislation and its enforcement, drug market dynamics or economic fluctuations – actually transform the ways substances are consumed in a given setting? It is
* Correspondence to: School of Management, RMIT University, 445 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia. Tel.: +61 3 9925 5920. E-mail address: [email protected]
not enough, Latour adds, to identify associations between these phenomena at a population level. This only yields a probabilistic logic in which factors are more or less likely to mediate AOD use. What is needed is a method for tracing how diverse actors, both distal and proximate, actually intervene in events of AOD use and somehow make a difference (Duff, 2013). One way to do this is to dispense with the notion of distal and proximate actors altogether, to rescind the ontological separation of behaviours from their social contexts, and to revoke the idea of discrete actors and forces mediating each other’s behaviour. As Gomart and Hennion (1999) would have it, the aim is not to look at ‘who acts’ but ‘what occurs’. This paper examines the extent to which emerging notions of ‘‘assemblage thinking’’ (Marcus & Saka, 2006) may assist with this goal, and the ways this thinking may then be applied to studies of alcohol and other drugs. To this end, I will briefly review recent applications of assemblage thinking in human geography (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011) for insights into how this approach may inform novel investigations of AOD use. However, I will start by clarifying what I think the major benefits of adopting this approach may be for studies of AOD use. The assemblage as a novel unit of analysis It should prove useful to introduce assemblage thinking by way of its contrasts with more conventional methods of social science inquiry, and their adoption in contemporary drug studies (see Duff, 2014). Consider the following account of a young person’s AOD use, and its temporal and spatial trajectories:
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Simon began drinking at 14 following the divorce of his parents. He goes to live with his Dad who is often absent from home. He sees his Mother and sister rarely. Most of his friends drink heavily too, although Simon often drinks alone. Simon begins having problems at school, turning up less frequently, preferring to hang out with friends in parks. He starts smoking cannabis and is soon offered ice [methamphetamine]. At 17 Simon is hospitalised following a violent incident at a party. He presents for drug treatment. This account is drawn from an ethnographic study of methamphetamine use conducted in Melbourne, Australia (see Duff & Moore, 2015). Ordinarily, this report might be read as a reasonably coherent statement of ‘Simon’s’ drug problem (or problems given the appearance of several individual substances in this account), and some of the factors that might be said to have mediated this problem, perhaps even caused it. Reflecting the purview of its method of articulation, several factors are jumbled together in this account of Simon’s AOD use; the divorce of his parents, a change in his domestic arrangements and the subsequent estrangement of Simon from his mother and sister, possibly his father too; a change in Simon’s peer networks as he disengages from school; the prevalence of heavy, episodic alcohol use in his peer group; the initiation of methamphetamine use and a violent incident at a party; Simon’s enrolment in drug treatment. Conventional social science analysis of these data would likely concentrate on Simon’s consumption of alcohol and his rapid transition to cannabis and methamphetamine use, such that Simon becomes both the locus and subject of a discrete drug problem. Simon has a drug problem and so he presents for drug treatment. While several factors in Simon’s social context apparently contribute to this problem – such as the breakdown of his parent’s relationship, changes in Simon’s domestic arrangements, or the effect of widespread AOD use in his peer group – the focus must remain with Simon given that he is the one receiving treatment for his problems. Always, conventional analysis is drawn back to the subject, given both its methodological familiarity and its apparent liability to correction. So what of the various social factors described in this report of Simon’s drug problems? These factors are normally granted some mediating role, with the predilections of theoretical preference determining which receive the greatest salience. Perhaps the divorce of Simon’s parents demands the greatest attention in this regard, or the normalisation of recreational drug use in Australian youth cultures, or problems with public schooling in Victoria. The point is that conventional analyses of AOD use make a series of attributions of agency in problematising particular kinds of behaviour (Fraser et al., 2014). First, (human) subjects are ascribed particular kinds of effective agency (capacities for action, intentionality, purpose, volition, and so on), and then broader social and/or political factors are accorded their measure of mediating force. The latter may include social factors or cultural norms within peer groups, trends in parenting and changing attitudes towards AOD use, shifts in drug markets with subsequent changes in the availability of specific substances, or changes in the ways schools respond to the incidence of drug problems in the student body. These factors ostensibly mediate the incidence of problems – they make a difference somehow – and so each may be said to have some measure of agency. Yet no matter how much these contextual or structural factors are said to mediate patterns of AOD use, attention is inevitably drawn back to the subject of this use as the primary ground of the articulation of drug problems. Individuals have drug problems after all. This tendency may be observed in virtually all prevailing analyses of drug use, popular and more technical, from self-help and 12 step narratives, to popular discourses of addiction, contemporary neuroscientific
accounts of psycho-pathology and sociological renderings of the social contexts of consumption (Fitzgerald, 2015; Fraser et al., 2014; Keane, 2002). All reify the subject of consumption, even as they endorse the role of select social factors in this use. For all the effort to highlight the manifold risk environments (Rhodes, 2002) that subtend drug problems, little progress has been made in articulating how these environments may be transformed to act differently, to reduce risk and to reduce the incidence of drug problems. This lack of progress, incidentally, is less the fault of scholars interested in developing such lines of inquiry, and more a reflection of the scale of the challenge. So engrained is the habit of treating individual human subjects as the agents of their own biographies, as the authors of their own choices, it appears that no amount of attending to the dynamics of power, social structure or context is ever enough to overcome it. As a result, when it comes time to account for what might be done about problems like AOD use, it is almost always the individual agent that receives the greatest attention (Fraser et al., 2014; Weinberg, 2013). The agency individual’s exhibit is familiar, and the social sciences have recourse to varied technical apparatuses for identifying this agency and tracing its effects (Latour, 2005). The agency of nonhuman, or ‘‘more-than-human’’ forces such as contexts or power, is much more difficult to articulate and investigate empirically (DeLanda, 2006). While the social sciences abound with reports of the force of social factors, agreement about how these forces act, and how they may be made to act differently is rarely obtained (Duff, 2014). Social scientists talk about the force of context, but scarcely know how to change it. I want to argue is this paper that one of the major reasons for this difficulty is the intransigence of the ontological and epistemological foundations on which it rests. For as long as individuals are abstracted from their practices and relations – for as long as the individual subject of AOD use is held to be ontologically separate from and prior to the contexts of this use – it will always be easier to defer to conventional understandings of the force of human agency, and to therefore make individuals mainly responsible for the events that befall them. As a result, analysis of the social dimensions of phenomena such as AOD use will always struggle to match the sophistication, popular awareness and political utility of accounts that privilege the agency and responsibility of the individual subjects of this consumption. A quick scan of popular understandings of addiction, and their foundations in both ‘natural’ and ‘social’ scientific problematisations of drug use, ought to be enough to carry this claim (Fraser et al., 2014; Keane, 2002). This is precisely the ontological, political and empirical challenge that the assemblage addresses; how to account for all the factors, human and nonhuman, individual and social, that mediate or transform a given phenomenon? (DeLanda, 2006) Assemblage thinking starts by dismissing the ontological differentiation of subjects and objects, individuals and contexts, and focuses instead on how action or agency is generated in encounters. From this perspective, there is simply no such thing as an individual body or subject, and no such thing as a reified social context, for these phenomena are always, already a function of many different things acting together (DeLanda, 2006). It is for this reason that Deleuze and Parnet (1987:51) conclude that ‘‘the minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept, or the signifier, but the assemblage’’. Responding to these provocations is the main objective of all ‘‘embodied and affective geographies’’ (Jayne, Valentine, & Holloway, 2010) of alcohol and other drugs. The goal across these emerging geographies is to account for what actually happens in a given event of AOD consumption, who or what acts in and through these events, and the complex or ‘‘emergent’’ causalities that might explain the incidence and prevalence of either safer or harmful events of consumption (see Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Race, 2014).
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What is perhaps most interesting about these geographies however, is the extent to which they have managed to sustain the ontological eschewal of the agent/structure, individual/context dyads that structure so much empirical analysis in the social sciences. This, in my view, is precisely what is needed in contemporary studies of AOD use if the ontological privileging of the subject is to be overcome such that a broader sweep of human and nonhuman forces may be acknowledged. Only then may it be possible to imagine responses to drug problems that don’t inevitably reify the subject of such use, while overwhelming that subject with responsibility to fix these problems. In what follows, I will first briefly describe some of the key features of assemblage thinking before indicating how this thinking has been adopted in recent studies in human geography. Reflecting on these approaches, I will argue that the most useful way of approaching assemblage thinking in the analysis of drug problems is to focus on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material forces and entities. I will briefly review these three nodes before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical assessments of drug assemblages. I will conclude by exploring how the assemblage may replace the ‘subject’ and ‘social context’ as a discrete unit of analysis in drug studies. What is an assemblage? The ‘‘realist ontology’’ (DeLanda, 2006:3–4) that informs the analysis of assemblages does not abandon the subject, much less the realities of social life, yet it does refuse to accept either subjects or contexts as ontological foundations for empirical inquiry. Subjects and their social interactions are not ‘‘given’’ in experience as ontological invariants expressive of a particular set of ‘‘essences’’ or qualities (DeLanda, 2006:1–5). Rather, both subjects and the social lives they participate in are the product of a more fundamental set of relations, affects, events and processes. Hence the interest among philosophers of the assemblage, such as Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda and Bruno Latour, in the ontogenesis of subjects and social organisation; their coming into being. If neither subjects nor contexts are given in experience, they are nevertheless assembled, organised or ‘‘bundled together’’ in unique arrangements of relations, forces, matter, affects, signs and spaces (see Latour, 2005:64–69). Subjects and contexts are made in experience in and through the emergent coming together of heterogeneous materials, forces, spaces, signs and bodies. This explains why thinkers like Deleuze and Latour focus on the ontogenesis of form, rather than the emergent forms themselves. This also explains why the assemblage ought to be regarded as a unique unit of analysis for empirical inquiry, rather than subjects and contexts, insofar as the analysis of assemblages is intended to explain how particular contexts and/or subjectivities actually hold together in experience (Duff, 2014:128–132). Human geographers have been among the most active of social scientists in the adoption and development of ‘assemblage thinking’, applying and extending this approach in a series of highly original empirical studies (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). Reviewing the focus and diversity of this research, Anderson and colleagues (Anderson, Kearnes, McFarlane, & Swanton, 2012:171– 72) note that ‘assemblage’ has been used in recent geographical research in three ways; as a ‘‘descriptor’’ of particular kinds of observable social forms; as an ‘‘ethos’’ that provides a particular orientation to the analysis of social problems; and finally as a ‘‘concept for thinking the relations between stability and transformation in the production of the social’’. I should like to focus on this third dimension as I think it provides the most useful orientation to empirical studies of the assemblage (Dewsbury, 2011), while also helping to indicate how assemblage thinking may be developed in drug studies. As a concept, assemblage provides a
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means of analysing the production of drug problems in ways that refuse to reify the subject of such problems. It eschews the reduction of drug problems either to deficits or ‘unruly’ passions evident in certain individuals, or to the ‘maladaptive’, oppressive or unhealthy effects of particular social contexts. Instead, assemblage thinking serves to emphasise the real conditions in which drug problems emerge by way of the entire cast of human and nonhuman, distal and proximate forces at work in such problems. The point is that problems such as alcoholism, addiction, dependency or drug misuse – the distinctions here really do make a different as we shall see – are personally and socially contingent, meaning that they ought to be regarded as the outcome of relations, practices, forces and processes with discrete spatial and temporal characteristics (see DeLanda, 2006). Accordingly, the individual incidence of drug problems may be treated as an effect of heterogeneous entities (bodies, technologies, practices, relations), operating at varying spatial and temporal scales, that are each subject to processes of stabilisation (territorialisation in Deleuze’s terms) and transformation (deterritorialisation). Such is the realist ontology that underpins assemblage thinking insofar as this reasoning emphasises the importance of interrogating the real conditions of emergence by which problems and their subjects and sequela are produced. Underscoring this ontology is a ‘‘tetravalent’’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88) model of the assemblage and the forces of territorialisation and deterritorialisation by which forms and structures emerge and subside. It is worth briefly reviewing this model to properly introduce the discussion to follow regarding how assemblage thinking may inform novel empirical investigations of AOD use. This model comprises two axes (one horizontal and one vertical) that combine to describe four inter-dependent processes (or valences). The horizontal axis draws together ‘‘forms of content’’ including ‘‘bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’’, with distinctive ‘‘forms of expression’’ or ‘‘acts and statements’’ that are attributed to corresponding forms of content (bodies and passions) in ways that moderate their ‘‘scope of activity’’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88). All assemblages combine bodies and statements in the creation of an intensive functional identity. An example might be an assemblage of bodies, objects and spaces in an inner-city club, or assembled in a drug consumption room. Each assemblage may be characterised along one axis by forms of content (bodies, human and nonhuman), and along another axis by forms of expression that are both about, and potentially enunciable by, these bodies. Each axis generates modes of individuation (or identity) for the assemblage. Assemblages are also characterised by a second, vertical axis, comprising forces of territorialisation (stability) and deteritorialisation (transformation or ‘lines of flight’). An obvious example concerns the ways assemblages draw together material resources in the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of place (DeLanda, 2008). All assemblages create a territory in other words. Yet the material elements that comprise territories cannot be regarded as fixed in that the material elements available for the work of territorialisation are always in motion, even if this motion is often imperceptible. Examples include the geological motion of tectonic plates, but also the slow transformations that characterise the built environment of any urban street. Each of these assemblages combines materials in the territorialisation of place, just as this assembling is subject to countervailing forces of change and disruption. In the first instance this involves the selection and combination of materials out of which discrete territories are composed, thereby establishing a ‘‘stable functional structure’’ (form of content) for the elements so combined (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:41). Yet this process of assembling and selection is never completed or fixed insofar as it describes a tendency towards
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stabilisation rather than the final achievement of this state. For DeLanda (2008:164), this means that all material entities, forms, spaces and territories must be regarded as ‘‘objectively changeable: they may undergo destabilising processes affecting their materiality, their expressivity or both’’. This is why Deleuze and Guattari emphasise processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in that all material forms, all assemblages, remain fluid and unstable (objectively changeable) according to the historical, political, social and economic forces applied to, or expressed through, them as they change. Reviewing Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the assemblage, and its utility for geographical research, Dewsbury (2011:149) highlights its capacity to ‘‘fit together all the ways in which the world is now characterised by flows, connections and becomings, whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more emergent than totalizing’’. On the basis of this assessment, and my own reading of the assemblage thinking of Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour (Duff, 2014), I would stress that the most useful way of approaching the tetravalent properties of the assemblage in novel studies of alcohol and other drugs is to concentrate on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material dimensions. Assessments of a given ‘‘drug assemblage’’ (Duff, 2014:128–132) ought to focus on how social, affective and material dimensions are made to hold together in particular instances. I will briefly review these three dimensions before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical investigations of drug assemblages. Assemblages: social, affective and material The production of social life provides obvious examples of how the assemblage may be used as a novel unit of analysis for contemporary drug studies. Social life is almost always characterised in terms of processes that bring together diverse entities in some kind of shared or collective experience (DeLanda, 2006: 52–57). This understanding of the ways sociality is comprised by entities and their collective experiences is not so different from Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in the ways heterogeneous elements (bodies, affects, signs, spaces, objects, forces) combine in assemblages. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the forces by which sociality is enacted may be said to include the asubjective desires which conjoin bodies (human and nonhuman) in social interaction; the affects generated in such interactions, along with the modulations in the power of acting of the bodies so assembled; the beliefs that galvanise practical action in social contexts, such as the beliefs that lead bodies to assemble in pursuit of political, economic and/or social goals; as well as the power relations involved in efforts to regulate the conduct of the varied bodies assembled in a social mass (see also DeLanda, 2006). Each of these forces combines in the assembling of any social entity, encounter or social context. They are at work, for example, in the forces assembled in crowds in the night-time economy, and in the social settings that comprise this economy and in which alcohol and other drugs figure as prominent objects of social interaction and exchange (Jayne et al., 2010). The relationality that is central to the sociality generated in assemblages may be understood by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussion of affect. All drug assemblages should be regarded as affective entities inasmuch as affective processes are at least partially responsible for the formation of the assemblage. Affect is understood here in two distinctive ways. First, affect describes an array of feeling states such as anger, shame, fear, sorrow or happiness. Each of these states corresponds with a specific feeling such that envy, for example, is experienced as a qualitatively different condition than anger or sorrow. However, Deleuze (1988:49–50) stresses that affects convey
something more than a simple concatenation of feeling states. Affects also constitute the body’s ‘‘power of acting’’; its unique capacity to affect (and be affected by) the world of bodies and things that it encounters. Deleuze (1988) insists that every encounter subtly transforms the body’s affective orientations, either to enhance that body’s power of acting or to diminish it. This affective modification involves a transfer of power, capacities or action-potential between bodies (Deleuze, 1988:48–50). The body, itself a complex assemblage of simple elements both human and nonhuman, may in this way be characterised by the modifications in its power of acting that result from the encounters such a body experiences, or becomes capable of experiencing. The focus on encounters introduces the need to examine the material aspects of assemblages, both in terms of the materiality of bodies, but also the varied material infrastructures that characterise ‘‘real experience’’ (Deleuze, 1994). I have already noted the extent to which assemblages function by way of the generation of a unique material territory, yet assemblages also combine other kinds of material forms. Assemblages draw together material resources in the stabilisation of discrete material forms such as places, technologies and objects, along with what DeLanda (1997:27–29) calls the varying material ‘‘exoskeletons’’ that frame the human body (such as clothing, hardware, buildings, modes of transport etc.). These material resources are folded into the assemblage giving it a functional structure that will remain relatively stable for as long as this folding process is not disrupted too significantly (by rupture, shock, line of flight etc.). Put another way, the processes of selection and combination by which material elements coalesce in assemblages necessarily entail the expression of a series of explicit functions, capacities and forms. This latter process establishes (or seeks to determine) the material function, meaning, purpose or identity of a given assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88). An interesting example concerns the formation of crowds and the material and expressive processes involved in the distinctions drawn between peaceable assemblies, insurrectionary mobs, incipient social movements and so on. Yet as I have noted, material processes immanent to the assemblage are never stable, as they are affected by varying processes of change or deterritorialisation. Too much flux and the assemblage and its relations unfold and are replaced by other social, affective and material forms. Drug assemblages So how might assemblage thinking be put to work in the analysis of alcohol and other drugs, and their forms, patterns and consequences? The first point is to emphasise how the assemblage may serve as a unique unit of analysis for empirical research. Above all else, assemblage thinking emphasises the significance of relations, affects and materials in the conditioning of AOD use, rather than the subjects, agents, structures and forms that populate more conventional social research (Dewsbury, 2011:148–150). Deleuze insists that agents and structures only make sense in terms of their relations, and the affective transmissions (capacities to affect, transform or act on other entities) in which specific relations are enacted, and by which specific capacities emerge. Entities such as subjects, agents, practices, norms, groups or collectives, structural forms and organisational processes are a function of particular relations, affects and materials, rather than their source or cause. This does not mean that structures, subjects or organisations do not have significant social effects, only that the relations, affects and events in which such entities emerge ought to be the primary focus of empirical analysis. Relations obtain between entities in their encounters, which modify the affects or capacities these entities may together exercise. Of course, these entities are always, already a function of earlier encounters and
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their relational and affective valances, just as they will continue to change with future encounters. Certainly, this language may be confounding at first but it is consistent with the idea of refusing to accept either subjects or structures as either ontological conditions or discrete units of analysis for AOD research. Deleuze argues that empiricism traditionally relies on the figure of subjectivity (the intentional agent) to make sense of social life even though the empirical conditions of the subject’s emergence are not given. By way of this aporia, subjectivity is presupposed as a transcendental condition of sensible experience, as the necessary foundation for empirical inquiry. Deleuze (1994), in contrast, treats subjectivity as an effect of sensible experience, not its cause, proposing an ontological model of subjectivation, of the subject’s production in an assemblage of forces. This is why, in the context of empirical studies of alcohol and other drugs, assemblage thinking requires the individual subject to be removed as a unit of analysis and replaced with a logic of relations, affects and materials, and the assemblages in which they form and circulate. One of the most significant implications of this reasoning for studies of alcohol and other drugs is the challenge it presents to conventional understandings of choice and personal responsibility. I mentioned in the introduction to this paper how endemic notions of individual responsibility are in discussions of drug problems, and how often these notions overwhelm understandings of the social contexts of drug problems. The relationality that defines assemblages makes it impossible to reliably attribute intentions, desires or preferences to human agents alone, for intentions and desires are an emergent effect of encounters between entities and the affects they generate. As an obvious example of this point, the desire for drugs cannot exist without an object of this desire, which means from the perspective of assemblage thinking that the desire for drugs is partially a function of drugs themselves (Fraser, Valentine, & Roberts, 2009:124–126). It is not the subject alone that desires drugs, which he or she then procures and consumes; desire is an affective function of encounters between drugs and bodies in an assemblage of forces. This also means that the linear causality with which consumption behaviours are typically characterised, whereby a coherent subjective intention is posited as the temporally and spatially antecedent cause of a subsequent consumption event, must be abandoned both for failing to grasp the character of subjectivity itself, and for misunderstanding the array of agentic forces that participate in any given episode of consumption (Duff, 2014:142– 48). Each episode draws together bodies (human and nonhuman), spaces and settings, objects, technologies and materialities in an assemblage that determines the character, nature and effects of this consumption. Identifying which of these entities may be more or less active in this drug use, and more or less amenable to manipulation, cannot be determined in advance of empirical analysis of a given drug assemblage. This also means that responsibility for drug problems may not be attributed to individual bodies but must instead be distributed throughout the emergent relations that characterise assemblages. These arguments stand in sharp contrast to the ontological assumptions that underpin much of contemporary drug policy, particularly regarding the role of intentional subjects in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, and its consequences. Contemporary drug policies typically rely on a static account of subjectivity and a linear model of the causal relations that may be said to mediate drug use. Yet as a number of scholars have argued, this approach struggles to accommodate the array of human and nonhuman entities that mediate each episode of use (see Moreno & Wilton, 2014). It struggles in particular with the idea of dynamic, nonlinear and emergent modes of causality in which entities establish causal relations with other entities only as a result of particular spatial and temporal configurations, and not as a result
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of their essential, agentic properties. Outside of these configurations, individual entities may exhibit different causal properties, perhaps even none at all. Kane Race (2014:304–306) has recently applied the notion of emergent causality to explore the role of ‘‘sniffer dogs’’ in police operations in Sydney. Despite claims that the use of sniffer dogs has led to reductions in drug related crime in Sydney, Race examines spatial and temporal configurations (assemblages) in which the presence of dogs has had no impact on drug use, and others in which the impact was contrary to the intended outcome, further complicating causal explanations of the role of sniffer dogs in local policing. This suggests once again that causality is not a necessary outcome of a given entity’s agentic properties, rather it is established in encounters between entities whereby the direction of causality may differ from one assemblage to another, just as it may differ from one encounter to another. Race’s (2014:320–322) analysis indicates how the presence of sniffer dogs in a given assemblage instantiates one set of causal relations transforming drug use practices, while in another assemblage (in another space, in another time) it exhibits no significant causal effects at all. The point is that casualty cannot be determined on the basis of a priori assumptions about the behaviour of a given set of entities but must be confirmed in real experience as casual relations emerge in encounters between bodies (human and nonhuman), objects and practices. Of course, this is simply one more way of saying that assemblage thinking furnishes a novel unit of empirical analysis for contemporary drug studies. It may also open up new ways of interrogating the social aspects of drug use, and their manifestations in particular places (or contexts). The goal, in each respect, is to uncover the bodies, objects and spaces that participate in drug use events so that each entity may be given its due in assessments of how drug use may be made safer, less harmful. This is the assemblage thinking that may yield a novel harm reduction praxis. Yet, it may also offer a way out of interminable debates regarding the relative onus of agents and structures, individuals and contexts, in the production of drug problems. From the perspective of the assemblage it simply makes no sense to speak of an individual’s drug problem given how many other forces will be active in the articulation of this problem, including peers, family members, outreach workers, drug objects and paraphernalia, money, gifts and so on. However, it is equally nonsensical to assert that power, context or structure are the ‘real causes’ of drug problems, given the capacities that assemblages avail to individual bodies. Hence, it is not a question of imagining some ‘meso’ level of social interaction in which agents and structures interact in the travails of practice (see DeLanda, 2006). As Deleuze (1994) would have it, the only way between agents and structures is by way of the assemblage; and the only way between debates about individuals and power in the production of drug problems is by way of the assemblage too. Assemblages experience drug problems not (just) individuals or social contexts. A harm reduction praxis of and for the assemblage awaits its proper articulation in policy as in practice. Acknowledgements I thank Stewart Williams for thoughtful and productive advice on an earlier version of this commentary. This research was partially funded with the award of a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University. Conflict of interest statement: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest. References Anderson, B., Kearnes, M., McFarlane, C., & Swanton, D. (2012). On assemblages and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 171–189. Anderson, B., & McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127.
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Fraser, S., Valentine, K., & Roberts, C. (2009). Living drugs. Science as Culture, 18(2), 123–131. Fraser, S., Moore, D., & Keane, H. (2014). Habits: Remaking addiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gomart, E., & Hennion, A. (1999). A sociology of attachment: Music amateurs, drug users. The Sociological Review, 47(S1), 220–247. Jayne, M., Valentine, G., & Holloway, S. L. (2010). Emotional, embodied and affective geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(4), 540–554. Keane, H. (2002). What’s wrong with addiction? Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcus, G., & Saka, E. (2006). Assemblage. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2–3), 101–106. Moreno, C., & Wilton, R. (Eds.). (2014). Using space: Critical geographies of drugs and alcohol. New York: Routledge. Race, K. (2014). Complex events: Drug effects and emergent causality. Contemporary Drug Problems, 41(3), 301–334. Rhodes, T. (2002). The ‘risk environment’: A framework for understanding and reducing drug-related harm. International Journal of Drug Policy, 13(2), 85–94. Weinberg, D. (2013). Post-humanism, addiction and the loss of self-control: Reflections on the missing core in addiction science. International Journal of Drug Policy, 24(3), 173–181.
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Commentary
Assemblages, territories, contexts Cameron Duff * School of Management, RMIT University, Australia
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 2 June 2015 Received in revised form 8 September 2015 Accepted 14 October 2015
Human geographers have been at the forefront of efforts across the social sciences to develop ‘‘assemblage thinking’’, applying and extending this model in a series of highly original empirical studies. This commentary assesses some of the conceptual, methodological and procedural implications of this research for contemporary drug studies. I will argue that the most useful way of approaching assemblage thinking in the analysis of drug problems is to focus on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material forces and entities. I will briefly review these three nodes before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical assessments of drug assemblages. I will conclude by exploring how the assemblage may replace the ‘subject’ and ‘social context’ as a discrete unit of analysis in drug studies. ß 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Assemblage Deleuze Affective geographies Context Drugs
As an object of social science inquiry, the consumption of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is almost always situated as a problem with specific personal, social, economic and political consequences. This is as true of epidemiological research that seeks to clarify the incidence and prevalence of AOD use and its sequela in a given population, as it is of social research that seeks to understand this consumption by way of its cultural and political aspects (Fraser, Moore, & Keane, 2014). What these approaches share, beyond the articulation of particular kinds of health and social problems, is an epistemological commitment to the ontological separation of individuals from the social contexts, and the differentiation of drug objects from cultural practices of consumption. Each approach acknowledges the role of social factors in shaping how alcohol and other drugs are used, as well as the problems associated with this consumption, and so each approach is left with the challenge of explaining how these factors actually mediate consumption in particular instances (Fitzgerald, 2015). Bruno Latour (2005:219) calls this the problem of ‘‘action at a distance’’. How, in other words, do social factors held to be distal or remote from events of AOD use – examples may include cultural norms that govern consumption practices, public policy arrangements, legislation and its enforcement, drug market dynamics or economic fluctuations – actually transform the ways substances are consumed in a given setting? It is
* Correspondence to: School of Management, RMIT University, 445 Swanston Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia. Tel.: +61 3 9925 5920. E-mail address: [email protected]
not enough, Latour adds, to identify associations between these phenomena at a population level. This only yields a probabilistic logic in which factors are more or less likely to mediate AOD use. What is needed is a method for tracing how diverse actors, both distal and proximate, actually intervene in events of AOD use and somehow make a difference (Duff, 2013). One way to do this is to dispense with the notion of distal and proximate actors altogether, to rescind the ontological separation of behaviours from their social contexts, and to revoke the idea of discrete actors and forces mediating each other’s behaviour. As Gomart and Hennion (1999) would have it, the aim is not to look at ‘who acts’ but ‘what occurs’. This paper examines the extent to which emerging notions of ‘‘assemblage thinking’’ (Marcus & Saka, 2006) may assist with this goal, and the ways this thinking may then be applied to studies of alcohol and other drugs. To this end, I will briefly review recent applications of assemblage thinking in human geography (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011) for insights into how this approach may inform novel investigations of AOD use. However, I will start by clarifying what I think the major benefits of adopting this approach may be for studies of AOD use. The assemblage as a novel unit of analysis It should prove useful to introduce assemblage thinking by way of its contrasts with more conventional methods of social science inquiry, and their adoption in contemporary drug studies (see Duff, 2014). Consider the following account of a young person’s AOD use, and its temporal and spatial trajectories:
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Simon began drinking at 14 following the divorce of his parents. He goes to live with his Dad who is often absent from home. He sees his Mother and sister rarely. Most of his friends drink heavily too, although Simon often drinks alone. Simon begins having problems at school, turning up less frequently, preferring to hang out with friends in parks. He starts smoking cannabis and is soon offered ice [methamphetamine]. At 17 Simon is hospitalised following a violent incident at a party. He presents for drug treatment. This account is drawn from an ethnographic study of methamphetamine use conducted in Melbourne, Australia (see Duff & Moore, 2015). Ordinarily, this report might be read as a reasonably coherent statement of ‘Simon’s’ drug problem (or problems given the appearance of several individual substances in this account), and some of the factors that might be said to have mediated this problem, perhaps even caused it. Reflecting the purview of its method of articulation, several factors are jumbled together in this account of Simon’s AOD use; the divorce of his parents, a change in his domestic arrangements and the subsequent estrangement of Simon from his mother and sister, possibly his father too; a change in Simon’s peer networks as he disengages from school; the prevalence of heavy, episodic alcohol use in his peer group; the initiation of methamphetamine use and a violent incident at a party; Simon’s enrolment in drug treatment. Conventional social science analysis of these data would likely concentrate on Simon’s consumption of alcohol and his rapid transition to cannabis and methamphetamine use, such that Simon becomes both the locus and subject of a discrete drug problem. Simon has a drug problem and so he presents for drug treatment. While several factors in Simon’s social context apparently contribute to this problem – such as the breakdown of his parent’s relationship, changes in Simon’s domestic arrangements, or the effect of widespread AOD use in his peer group – the focus must remain with Simon given that he is the one receiving treatment for his problems. Always, conventional analysis is drawn back to the subject, given both its methodological familiarity and its apparent liability to correction. So what of the various social factors described in this report of Simon’s drug problems? These factors are normally granted some mediating role, with the predilections of theoretical preference determining which receive the greatest salience. Perhaps the divorce of Simon’s parents demands the greatest attention in this regard, or the normalisation of recreational drug use in Australian youth cultures, or problems with public schooling in Victoria. The point is that conventional analyses of AOD use make a series of attributions of agency in problematising particular kinds of behaviour (Fraser et al., 2014). First, (human) subjects are ascribed particular kinds of effective agency (capacities for action, intentionality, purpose, volition, and so on), and then broader social and/or political factors are accorded their measure of mediating force. The latter may include social factors or cultural norms within peer groups, trends in parenting and changing attitudes towards AOD use, shifts in drug markets with subsequent changes in the availability of specific substances, or changes in the ways schools respond to the incidence of drug problems in the student body. These factors ostensibly mediate the incidence of problems – they make a difference somehow – and so each may be said to have some measure of agency. Yet no matter how much these contextual or structural factors are said to mediate patterns of AOD use, attention is inevitably drawn back to the subject of this use as the primary ground of the articulation of drug problems. Individuals have drug problems after all. This tendency may be observed in virtually all prevailing analyses of drug use, popular and more technical, from self-help and 12 step narratives, to popular discourses of addiction, contemporary neuroscientific
accounts of psycho-pathology and sociological renderings of the social contexts of consumption (Fitzgerald, 2015; Fraser et al., 2014; Keane, 2002). All reify the subject of consumption, even as they endorse the role of select social factors in this use. For all the effort to highlight the manifold risk environments (Rhodes, 2002) that subtend drug problems, little progress has been made in articulating how these environments may be transformed to act differently, to reduce risk and to reduce the incidence of drug problems. This lack of progress, incidentally, is less the fault of scholars interested in developing such lines of inquiry, and more a reflection of the scale of the challenge. So engrained is the habit of treating individual human subjects as the agents of their own biographies, as the authors of their own choices, it appears that no amount of attending to the dynamics of power, social structure or context is ever enough to overcome it. As a result, when it comes time to account for what might be done about problems like AOD use, it is almost always the individual agent that receives the greatest attention (Fraser et al., 2014; Weinberg, 2013). The agency individual’s exhibit is familiar, and the social sciences have recourse to varied technical apparatuses for identifying this agency and tracing its effects (Latour, 2005). The agency of nonhuman, or ‘‘more-than-human’’ forces such as contexts or power, is much more difficult to articulate and investigate empirically (DeLanda, 2006). While the social sciences abound with reports of the force of social factors, agreement about how these forces act, and how they may be made to act differently is rarely obtained (Duff, 2014). Social scientists talk about the force of context, but scarcely know how to change it. I want to argue is this paper that one of the major reasons for this difficulty is the intransigence of the ontological and epistemological foundations on which it rests. For as long as individuals are abstracted from their practices and relations – for as long as the individual subject of AOD use is held to be ontologically separate from and prior to the contexts of this use – it will always be easier to defer to conventional understandings of the force of human agency, and to therefore make individuals mainly responsible for the events that befall them. As a result, analysis of the social dimensions of phenomena such as AOD use will always struggle to match the sophistication, popular awareness and political utility of accounts that privilege the agency and responsibility of the individual subjects of this consumption. A quick scan of popular understandings of addiction, and their foundations in both ‘natural’ and ‘social’ scientific problematisations of drug use, ought to be enough to carry this claim (Fraser et al., 2014; Keane, 2002). This is precisely the ontological, political and empirical challenge that the assemblage addresses; how to account for all the factors, human and nonhuman, individual and social, that mediate or transform a given phenomenon? (DeLanda, 2006) Assemblage thinking starts by dismissing the ontological differentiation of subjects and objects, individuals and contexts, and focuses instead on how action or agency is generated in encounters. From this perspective, there is simply no such thing as an individual body or subject, and no such thing as a reified social context, for these phenomena are always, already a function of many different things acting together (DeLanda, 2006). It is for this reason that Deleuze and Parnet (1987:51) conclude that ‘‘the minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept, or the signifier, but the assemblage’’. Responding to these provocations is the main objective of all ‘‘embodied and affective geographies’’ (Jayne, Valentine, & Holloway, 2010) of alcohol and other drugs. The goal across these emerging geographies is to account for what actually happens in a given event of AOD consumption, who or what acts in and through these events, and the complex or ‘‘emergent’’ causalities that might explain the incidence and prevalence of either safer or harmful events of consumption (see Dilkes-Frayne, 2014; Race, 2014).
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What is perhaps most interesting about these geographies however, is the extent to which they have managed to sustain the ontological eschewal of the agent/structure, individual/context dyads that structure so much empirical analysis in the social sciences. This, in my view, is precisely what is needed in contemporary studies of AOD use if the ontological privileging of the subject is to be overcome such that a broader sweep of human and nonhuman forces may be acknowledged. Only then may it be possible to imagine responses to drug problems that don’t inevitably reify the subject of such use, while overwhelming that subject with responsibility to fix these problems. In what follows, I will first briefly describe some of the key features of assemblage thinking before indicating how this thinking has been adopted in recent studies in human geography. Reflecting on these approaches, I will argue that the most useful way of approaching assemblage thinking in the analysis of drug problems is to focus on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material forces and entities. I will briefly review these three nodes before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical assessments of drug assemblages. I will conclude by exploring how the assemblage may replace the ‘subject’ and ‘social context’ as a discrete unit of analysis in drug studies. What is an assemblage? The ‘‘realist ontology’’ (DeLanda, 2006:3–4) that informs the analysis of assemblages does not abandon the subject, much less the realities of social life, yet it does refuse to accept either subjects or contexts as ontological foundations for empirical inquiry. Subjects and their social interactions are not ‘‘given’’ in experience as ontological invariants expressive of a particular set of ‘‘essences’’ or qualities (DeLanda, 2006:1–5). Rather, both subjects and the social lives they participate in are the product of a more fundamental set of relations, affects, events and processes. Hence the interest among philosophers of the assemblage, such as Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda and Bruno Latour, in the ontogenesis of subjects and social organisation; their coming into being. If neither subjects nor contexts are given in experience, they are nevertheless assembled, organised or ‘‘bundled together’’ in unique arrangements of relations, forces, matter, affects, signs and spaces (see Latour, 2005:64–69). Subjects and contexts are made in experience in and through the emergent coming together of heterogeneous materials, forces, spaces, signs and bodies. This explains why thinkers like Deleuze and Latour focus on the ontogenesis of form, rather than the emergent forms themselves. This also explains why the assemblage ought to be regarded as a unique unit of analysis for empirical inquiry, rather than subjects and contexts, insofar as the analysis of assemblages is intended to explain how particular contexts and/or subjectivities actually hold together in experience (Duff, 2014:128–132). Human geographers have been among the most active of social scientists in the adoption and development of ‘assemblage thinking’, applying and extending this approach in a series of highly original empirical studies (Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). Reviewing the focus and diversity of this research, Anderson and colleagues (Anderson, Kearnes, McFarlane, & Swanton, 2012:171– 72) note that ‘assemblage’ has been used in recent geographical research in three ways; as a ‘‘descriptor’’ of particular kinds of observable social forms; as an ‘‘ethos’’ that provides a particular orientation to the analysis of social problems; and finally as a ‘‘concept for thinking the relations between stability and transformation in the production of the social’’. I should like to focus on this third dimension as I think it provides the most useful orientation to empirical studies of the assemblage (Dewsbury, 2011), while also helping to indicate how assemblage thinking may be developed in drug studies. As a concept, assemblage provides a
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means of analysing the production of drug problems in ways that refuse to reify the subject of such problems. It eschews the reduction of drug problems either to deficits or ‘unruly’ passions evident in certain individuals, or to the ‘maladaptive’, oppressive or unhealthy effects of particular social contexts. Instead, assemblage thinking serves to emphasise the real conditions in which drug problems emerge by way of the entire cast of human and nonhuman, distal and proximate forces at work in such problems. The point is that problems such as alcoholism, addiction, dependency or drug misuse – the distinctions here really do make a different as we shall see – are personally and socially contingent, meaning that they ought to be regarded as the outcome of relations, practices, forces and processes with discrete spatial and temporal characteristics (see DeLanda, 2006). Accordingly, the individual incidence of drug problems may be treated as an effect of heterogeneous entities (bodies, technologies, practices, relations), operating at varying spatial and temporal scales, that are each subject to processes of stabilisation (territorialisation in Deleuze’s terms) and transformation (deterritorialisation). Such is the realist ontology that underpins assemblage thinking insofar as this reasoning emphasises the importance of interrogating the real conditions of emergence by which problems and their subjects and sequela are produced. Underscoring this ontology is a ‘‘tetravalent’’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88) model of the assemblage and the forces of territorialisation and deterritorialisation by which forms and structures emerge and subside. It is worth briefly reviewing this model to properly introduce the discussion to follow regarding how assemblage thinking may inform novel empirical investigations of AOD use. This model comprises two axes (one horizontal and one vertical) that combine to describe four inter-dependent processes (or valences). The horizontal axis draws together ‘‘forms of content’’ including ‘‘bodies, actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’’, with distinctive ‘‘forms of expression’’ or ‘‘acts and statements’’ that are attributed to corresponding forms of content (bodies and passions) in ways that moderate their ‘‘scope of activity’’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88). All assemblages combine bodies and statements in the creation of an intensive functional identity. An example might be an assemblage of bodies, objects and spaces in an inner-city club, or assembled in a drug consumption room. Each assemblage may be characterised along one axis by forms of content (bodies, human and nonhuman), and along another axis by forms of expression that are both about, and potentially enunciable by, these bodies. Each axis generates modes of individuation (or identity) for the assemblage. Assemblages are also characterised by a second, vertical axis, comprising forces of territorialisation (stability) and deteritorialisation (transformation or ‘lines of flight’). An obvious example concerns the ways assemblages draw together material resources in the deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of place (DeLanda, 2008). All assemblages create a territory in other words. Yet the material elements that comprise territories cannot be regarded as fixed in that the material elements available for the work of territorialisation are always in motion, even if this motion is often imperceptible. Examples include the geological motion of tectonic plates, but also the slow transformations that characterise the built environment of any urban street. Each of these assemblages combines materials in the territorialisation of place, just as this assembling is subject to countervailing forces of change and disruption. In the first instance this involves the selection and combination of materials out of which discrete territories are composed, thereby establishing a ‘‘stable functional structure’’ (form of content) for the elements so combined (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:41). Yet this process of assembling and selection is never completed or fixed insofar as it describes a tendency towards
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stabilisation rather than the final achievement of this state. For DeLanda (2008:164), this means that all material entities, forms, spaces and territories must be regarded as ‘‘objectively changeable: they may undergo destabilising processes affecting their materiality, their expressivity or both’’. This is why Deleuze and Guattari emphasise processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, in that all material forms, all assemblages, remain fluid and unstable (objectively changeable) according to the historical, political, social and economic forces applied to, or expressed through, them as they change. Reviewing Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the assemblage, and its utility for geographical research, Dewsbury (2011:149) highlights its capacity to ‘‘fit together all the ways in which the world is now characterised by flows, connections and becomings, whose functioning logic is more about folds than structures, more complex than linear, more emergent than totalizing’’. On the basis of this assessment, and my own reading of the assemblage thinking of Deleuze, DeLanda and Latour (Duff, 2014), I would stress that the most useful way of approaching the tetravalent properties of the assemblage in novel studies of alcohol and other drugs is to concentrate on the ways assemblages draw together social, affective and material dimensions. Assessments of a given ‘‘drug assemblage’’ (Duff, 2014:128–132) ought to focus on how social, affective and material dimensions are made to hold together in particular instances. I will briefly review these three dimensions before indicating how their analysis may inspire novel empirical investigations of drug assemblages. Assemblages: social, affective and material The production of social life provides obvious examples of how the assemblage may be used as a novel unit of analysis for contemporary drug studies. Social life is almost always characterised in terms of processes that bring together diverse entities in some kind of shared or collective experience (DeLanda, 2006: 52–57). This understanding of the ways sociality is comprised by entities and their collective experiences is not so different from Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in the ways heterogeneous elements (bodies, affects, signs, spaces, objects, forces) combine in assemblages. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the forces by which sociality is enacted may be said to include the asubjective desires which conjoin bodies (human and nonhuman) in social interaction; the affects generated in such interactions, along with the modulations in the power of acting of the bodies so assembled; the beliefs that galvanise practical action in social contexts, such as the beliefs that lead bodies to assemble in pursuit of political, economic and/or social goals; as well as the power relations involved in efforts to regulate the conduct of the varied bodies assembled in a social mass (see also DeLanda, 2006). Each of these forces combines in the assembling of any social entity, encounter or social context. They are at work, for example, in the forces assembled in crowds in the night-time economy, and in the social settings that comprise this economy and in which alcohol and other drugs figure as prominent objects of social interaction and exchange (Jayne et al., 2010). The relationality that is central to the sociality generated in assemblages may be understood by way of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) discussion of affect. All drug assemblages should be regarded as affective entities inasmuch as affective processes are at least partially responsible for the formation of the assemblage. Affect is understood here in two distinctive ways. First, affect describes an array of feeling states such as anger, shame, fear, sorrow or happiness. Each of these states corresponds with a specific feeling such that envy, for example, is experienced as a qualitatively different condition than anger or sorrow. However, Deleuze (1988:49–50) stresses that affects convey
something more than a simple concatenation of feeling states. Affects also constitute the body’s ‘‘power of acting’’; its unique capacity to affect (and be affected by) the world of bodies and things that it encounters. Deleuze (1988) insists that every encounter subtly transforms the body’s affective orientations, either to enhance that body’s power of acting or to diminish it. This affective modification involves a transfer of power, capacities or action-potential between bodies (Deleuze, 1988:48–50). The body, itself a complex assemblage of simple elements both human and nonhuman, may in this way be characterised by the modifications in its power of acting that result from the encounters such a body experiences, or becomes capable of experiencing. The focus on encounters introduces the need to examine the material aspects of assemblages, both in terms of the materiality of bodies, but also the varied material infrastructures that characterise ‘‘real experience’’ (Deleuze, 1994). I have already noted the extent to which assemblages function by way of the generation of a unique material territory, yet assemblages also combine other kinds of material forms. Assemblages draw together material resources in the stabilisation of discrete material forms such as places, technologies and objects, along with what DeLanda (1997:27–29) calls the varying material ‘‘exoskeletons’’ that frame the human body (such as clothing, hardware, buildings, modes of transport etc.). These material resources are folded into the assemblage giving it a functional structure that will remain relatively stable for as long as this folding process is not disrupted too significantly (by rupture, shock, line of flight etc.). Put another way, the processes of selection and combination by which material elements coalesce in assemblages necessarily entail the expression of a series of explicit functions, capacities and forms. This latter process establishes (or seeks to determine) the material function, meaning, purpose or identity of a given assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987:88). An interesting example concerns the formation of crowds and the material and expressive processes involved in the distinctions drawn between peaceable assemblies, insurrectionary mobs, incipient social movements and so on. Yet as I have noted, material processes immanent to the assemblage are never stable, as they are affected by varying processes of change or deterritorialisation. Too much flux and the assemblage and its relations unfold and are replaced by other social, affective and material forms. Drug assemblages So how might assemblage thinking be put to work in the analysis of alcohol and other drugs, and their forms, patterns and consequences? The first point is to emphasise how the assemblage may serve as a unique unit of analysis for empirical research. Above all else, assemblage thinking emphasises the significance of relations, affects and materials in the conditioning of AOD use, rather than the subjects, agents, structures and forms that populate more conventional social research (Dewsbury, 2011:148–150). Deleuze insists that agents and structures only make sense in terms of their relations, and the affective transmissions (capacities to affect, transform or act on other entities) in which specific relations are enacted, and by which specific capacities emerge. Entities such as subjects, agents, practices, norms, groups or collectives, structural forms and organisational processes are a function of particular relations, affects and materials, rather than their source or cause. This does not mean that structures, subjects or organisations do not have significant social effects, only that the relations, affects and events in which such entities emerge ought to be the primary focus of empirical analysis. Relations obtain between entities in their encounters, which modify the affects or capacities these entities may together exercise. Of course, these entities are always, already a function of earlier encounters and
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their relational and affective valances, just as they will continue to change with future encounters. Certainly, this language may be confounding at first but it is consistent with the idea of refusing to accept either subjects or structures as either ontological conditions or discrete units of analysis for AOD research. Deleuze argues that empiricism traditionally relies on the figure of subjectivity (the intentional agent) to make sense of social life even though the empirical conditions of the subject’s emergence are not given. By way of this aporia, subjectivity is presupposed as a transcendental condition of sensible experience, as the necessary foundation for empirical inquiry. Deleuze (1994), in contrast, treats subjectivity as an effect of sensible experience, not its cause, proposing an ontological model of subjectivation, of the subject’s production in an assemblage of forces. This is why, in the context of empirical studies of alcohol and other drugs, assemblage thinking requires the individual subject to be removed as a unit of analysis and replaced with a logic of relations, affects and materials, and the assemblages in which they form and circulate. One of the most significant implications of this reasoning for studies of alcohol and other drugs is the challenge it presents to conventional understandings of choice and personal responsibility. I mentioned in the introduction to this paper how endemic notions of individual responsibility are in discussions of drug problems, and how often these notions overwhelm understandings of the social contexts of drug problems. The relationality that defines assemblages makes it impossible to reliably attribute intentions, desires or preferences to human agents alone, for intentions and desires are an emergent effect of encounters between entities and the affects they generate. As an obvious example of this point, the desire for drugs cannot exist without an object of this desire, which means from the perspective of assemblage thinking that the desire for drugs is partially a function of drugs themselves (Fraser, Valentine, & Roberts, 2009:124–126). It is not the subject alone that desires drugs, which he or she then procures and consumes; desire is an affective function of encounters between drugs and bodies in an assemblage of forces. This also means that the linear causality with which consumption behaviours are typically characterised, whereby a coherent subjective intention is posited as the temporally and spatially antecedent cause of a subsequent consumption event, must be abandoned both for failing to grasp the character of subjectivity itself, and for misunderstanding the array of agentic forces that participate in any given episode of consumption (Duff, 2014:142– 48). Each episode draws together bodies (human and nonhuman), spaces and settings, objects, technologies and materialities in an assemblage that determines the character, nature and effects of this consumption. Identifying which of these entities may be more or less active in this drug use, and more or less amenable to manipulation, cannot be determined in advance of empirical analysis of a given drug assemblage. This also means that responsibility for drug problems may not be attributed to individual bodies but must instead be distributed throughout the emergent relations that characterise assemblages. These arguments stand in sharp contrast to the ontological assumptions that underpin much of contemporary drug policy, particularly regarding the role of intentional subjects in the consumption of alcohol and other drugs, and its consequences. Contemporary drug policies typically rely on a static account of subjectivity and a linear model of the causal relations that may be said to mediate drug use. Yet as a number of scholars have argued, this approach struggles to accommodate the array of human and nonhuman entities that mediate each episode of use (see Moreno & Wilton, 2014). It struggles in particular with the idea of dynamic, nonlinear and emergent modes of causality in which entities establish causal relations with other entities only as a result of particular spatial and temporal configurations, and not as a result
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of their essential, agentic properties. Outside of these configurations, individual entities may exhibit different causal properties, perhaps even none at all. Kane Race (2014:304–306) has recently applied the notion of emergent causality to explore the role of ‘‘sniffer dogs’’ in police operations in Sydney. Despite claims that the use of sniffer dogs has led to reductions in drug related crime in Sydney, Race examines spatial and temporal configurations (assemblages) in which the presence of dogs has had no impact on drug use, and others in which the impact was contrary to the intended outcome, further complicating causal explanations of the role of sniffer dogs in local policing. This suggests once again that causality is not a necessary outcome of a given entity’s agentic properties, rather it is established in encounters between entities whereby the direction of causality may differ from one assemblage to another, just as it may differ from one encounter to another. Race’s (2014:320–322) analysis indicates how the presence of sniffer dogs in a given assemblage instantiates one set of causal relations transforming drug use practices, while in another assemblage (in another space, in another time) it exhibits no significant causal effects at all. The point is that casualty cannot be determined on the basis of a priori assumptions about the behaviour of a given set of entities but must be confirmed in real experience as casual relations emerge in encounters between bodies (human and nonhuman), objects and practices. Of course, this is simply one more way of saying that assemblage thinking furnishes a novel unit of empirical analysis for contemporary drug studies. It may also open up new ways of interrogating the social aspects of drug use, and their manifestations in particular places (or contexts). The goal, in each respect, is to uncover the bodies, objects and spaces that participate in drug use events so that each entity may be given its due in assessments of how drug use may be made safer, less harmful. This is the assemblage thinking that may yield a novel harm reduction praxis. Yet, it may also offer a way out of interminable debates regarding the relative onus of agents and structures, individuals and contexts, in the production of drug problems. From the perspective of the assemblage it simply makes no sense to speak of an individual’s drug problem given how many other forces will be active in the articulation of this problem, including peers, family members, outreach workers, drug objects and paraphernalia, money, gifts and so on. However, it is equally nonsensical to assert that power, context or structure are the ‘real causes’ of drug problems, given the capacities that assemblages avail to individual bodies. Hence, it is not a question of imagining some ‘meso’ level of social interaction in which agents and structures interact in the travails of practice (see DeLanda, 2006). As Deleuze (1994) would have it, the only way between agents and structures is by way of the assemblage; and the only way between debates about individuals and power in the production of drug problems is by way of the assemblage too. Assemblages experience drug problems not (just) individuals or social contexts. A harm reduction praxis of and for the assemblage awaits its proper articulation in policy as in practice. Acknowledgements I thank Stewart Williams for thoughtful and productive advice on an earlier version of this commentary. This research was partially funded with the award of a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University. Conflict of interest statement: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest. References Anderson, B., Kearnes, M., McFarlane, C., & Swanton, D. (2012). On assemblages and geography. Dialogues in Human Geography, 2(2), 171–189. Anderson, B., & McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127.
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Please cite this article in press as: Duff, C. Assemblages, territories, contexts. International Journal of Drug Policy (2015), http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/j.drugpo.2015.10.003