A constructivism of desire: Conceptualising the politics of assemblage with Deleuze and Guattari

Assemblage theory has made a significant impact on the theoretical landscape of human geography over the past decade, providing the discipline with a “radically constructivist” account of social and cultural life that is no longer anchored to the process of human meaning‐making. Despite this growing popularity, however, geographers have recently voiced concerns about the critical efficacy of contemporary assemblage approaches, which often rely on the application of scientific terms like emergence and complexity to social and cultural processes. This temptation to overemphasise the physics of assemblage is problematic, I argue, because it tends to obfuscate the concept’s political significance and leads to accusations of a lack of criticality. In this paper I revisit the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with the aim of bringing the political implications of the assemblage concept into sharper focus. While more commonly associated with A thousand plateaus, I trace the conceptual genealogy of Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage concept through to their earlier collaboration Anti‐Oedipus, where the two philosophers develop a novel framework for political theory based on a radically constructivist model of desire. In doing so, I show how Deleuze and Guattari's political commitment to re‐think desire in machinic terms is what makes assemblage theory both a critique of capitalist subjectivity and a provocation to think the conditions of social and cultural life beyond the human. While the concept of assemblage has made a significant impact on recent debates in human geography, questions remain regarding the political significance of assemblage thinking. This paper returns to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, tracing the relationship between the concept of assemblage that emerges in A thousand plateaus and the political theory of desire developed in their earlier collaboration Anti‐Oedipus. In doing so, I shed light on the significance of assemblage thinking as a framework for re‐thinking the stakes of radical politics in human geography today.