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Power and the problem of composition

Sue Ruddick Dialogues in Human Geography 2012 2: 207 DOI: 10.1177/2043820612449300 The online version of this article can be found at: http://dhg.sagepub.com/content/2/2/207

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Commentary
Dialogues in Human Geography 2(2) 207211 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2043820612449300 dhg.sagepub.com

Power and the problem of composition

Sue Ruddick
University of Toronto, Canada

Abstract To accept the constitutive power of assemblages as a composition of forces rather than a form, is to accept that the scale, composition and temporality of the thing in question are not pre-given, but are determined by the thing by going to the limits of its power. Divergent approaches in assemblage thinking differ in terms of how they understand power relations. I propose a point of commonality between approaches drawing on Spinozas distinction between potentia and potere, and Deleuze and Guattaris (2000) distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of synthesis. This doubled concept of power (and of synthesis) provides a basis for distinguishing between oppressive and emancipatory assemblages. Keywords assemblage, constituent power, constitutive power, Spinoza, synthesis

Introduction
The problem, in fact, is not the form of government but the form of liberation. (Negri, 2003: 220)

Somewhat like the massive rise in popularity in the 1990s of the term postmodernism, the profligate use of assemblage and the rise of assemblage thinking in the current moment functions as a large tent including many, often disparate, deployments. In the context of a conjuncture fraught with the destructive impulses of multiple neoliberal projects, wildly uncertain qualities of current capitalist financial markets, ongoing efforts in organizing social movements (global, Arab and Occupying in their various revolutions and repressions), the uncertainties of global warming and global governmental projects of deleveraging one would be hard pressed regardless of which conceptual framework one might engage to disavow any of the qualities characterized

under the rubric of assemblage thinking, in particular an increasing awareness of contingency, relationality, and immanence. Anderson et al. (2012) do an admirable job of detailing the continuities (and to some extent the divisions) subtending various engagements with assemblage thinking, and I am largely in agreement with their contribution, in particular what they argue are the key features of assemblage thinking: the expressive, immanent capacities of assemblages, insistence on distributed agency, non-linear causality, terms whose capacities exceed their relations and the avoidance of any preconfigured spatial imaginary. What I want to do is address the silences in their article, particularly as they pertain to different

Corresponding author: Department of Geography/Programme in Planning, University of Toronto, Toronto, M5S 3G3, Canada. Email: ruddick@geog.utoronto.ca

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208 conceptualizations of power within assemblage thinking, picking up on their concluding question about ethics, the event and politics of assemblages. Under the very large tent of assemblage thinking we find cohabitants, who are co-present but can hardly be considered in conversation with one another. The question of power, and its different conceptualizations, is central here and it is a site of agnosticism in Anderson et al.s intervention. But different proponents of assemblage thinking mobilize very different if not antagonistic or mutually exclusive concepts of power. As Eugene Holland points out, for scholars such as Deleuze:
dialectical thinking is a form of slave morality: the movement of negation so central to Hegelian thought is deemed essentially reactive rather than creative. And yet in most conventional Marxist views of history, the proletariat is the very agent of such negation, struggling valiantly against the superior and insidious forces of capitalist exploitation; capitalist forms of exploitation themselves evolve mainly through competition among capitalists themselves. (Holland, 2003)

Dialogues in Human Geography 2(2) how this relationality is understood. Anderson et al. rightly caution, I think, against a new kind of stasis, whereby all things are simply declared relational without further regard. But relationality often seems to imply a relationality between things envisioned as pre-constituted objects, with a tendency for analysis to settle at one or another scale of spatial and temporal operation. I am thinking here, for example, of DeLandas (2010) treatment of cityassemblages in Deleuze: History and Science. What would happen if we were to accept, in a strong sense, the constitutive power of assemblages that the capacities of things exceed their relations, that the recognizable continuities that express assemblages are themselves becomings, and that assemblages are themselves composed of other assemblages? First, this would entail the refusal of any pre-given ground of consciousness any finalized or pre-given order of being . . . [a refusal] necessary for any rigorous thought of constitutive power (Read, 1999: 4). To understand this in the strong sense is to accept that the scale, composition and temporality of the thing in question are not pre-given, we cannot decide it pre-emptively, but must explore the thing by going to the limits of its power. It is not simply the relationship between things that is called into question, it is the ways in which this relationship engages the things themselves what is brought into play in each multiplicity. This version of assemblage thinking owes its conceptual heritage to Spinozas concept of the individual: as having an infinity of parts which themselves exist as populations, or, as DeLanda says, assemblages are composed themselves of assemblages. To view an assemblage in terms of forces not forms insists on the immanent openended qualities of the assemblage and the things (multiplicities and assemblages themselves) brought together that sustain it, that give it continuity.

For neovitalists, whose focus is rather the pulsing of life through matter, the romance of matter (Braun, 2008: 675), arguably affirmation takes precedence. The mechanisms of stabilization and destabilization in these approaches proceed on very different registers. What might assemblage thinking look like were neovitalist and neo-Marxist approaches brought in closer conversation? Might this even be possible? My intention is not to exaggerate a division but to point to a site where conversation might be extended between different camps. What new productive associations and expanded capacities might emerge from eliciting such a conversation? Or to borrow from Wendy Larner, in an earlier contribution to Dialogues, what new institutional forms or associations might we develop that are still in the making?

Assemblages as composition of forces not forms

If relationality (and the immanence it implies) is the nec plus ultra of assemblage thinking, we must ask

A doubled ontology of power: Force as potentia and potestas

What then distinguishes one assemblage from another? The challenge in taking on a notion of assemblages in this strong sense, in terms of a

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Ruddick composition of forces, without a position from which to evaluate, is that we might quickly become lost, enthralled perhaps by seemingly endless points of connection and disjunction, complex webs of interconnection. Deleuze posed a similar question vis-a-vis Spinozas concept of the individual and its component parts:
if the parts which compose me take on another relation, at that very moment, they no longer belong to me. They belong to another individuality, they belong to another body. Hence the question: what is this relation? Under what relation can the infinitely small elements be said to belong to something? (Deleuze, 1981a)

209 to participate in/with other assemblages without losing its capacity to act; an encounter with exterior parts that disagree or decompose aspects of the assemblage threaten its existence, threaten to decompose it. Or in Deleuzian terms death (or the negative) comes from the outside. It is not part of the assemblage. Put another way, the essence of the assemblage as a force is the continuous expansion of its constitutive power. To persist an assemblage must always be combining with exterior parts in a way that does not threaten its own existence this might take the form of recomposition with those parts in a mutual enhancement or decomposition of those parts in their destruction. Following the distinction between potentia and potere we can see very different principles predominating in different kinds of assemblage. In Deleuzes (1981b) discussion of the forest, which I have discussed elsewhere (Ruddick, 2008), he insists on the forest as a composition of forces which go to the limit of what it can do made visible in the gradual gradation/diminution of the forests edge, not a boundary but the limits of its capacity. Here we might understand assemblages as multiplicities that we participate in, in fact are constituted through, whose forces compose us in relation to a doubled concept of power some assemblages we might be open to because they enhance our potentia or capacity to act, others we attempt to avoid because they constitute apparatus of capture, separating us from what we can do, participating in our destruction. All assemblages are in a sense individuals and all enhance their capacity to act, but arguably there are different ways to do this. Transecting Deleuze and Guattaris discussion of a vast array of machinic assemblages is an evaluation of the affective dimensions of their capacities. In an emancipatory gesture, an assemblage would seek the continuous expansion of constitutive power of its parts and as far as possible those parts it encountered that were external to it. This is not to say it would not engage in acts of decomposition or even destruction. But the moment of pars destruens/pars construens what Jason Read (1999) calls the antagonistic ground of constitutive power, operates principally in the destruction of ontology

Anderson et al. remain for the most part agnostic on this question, with a tacit acceptance that different conceptual frameworks engage this question in different ways (compare, for example, their treatment of Harvey, Cowan and Smith, Bennett, DeLanda) all equally valid so long as the criteria of indeterminacy is met (compare their critique of Jessop et al.). In this instance I think more could be made of their otherwise accurate and extensive use of a Deleuzian approach to assemblage thinking: in particular Deleuzes emphasis on the symbiotic nature of assemblages, and their constitution through alliances. Or, in Spinozas reasoning things are parts of a whole to the extent their natures adapt themselves . . . so that they are in the closest possible agreement (Spinoza, 2002: Letter 32). If we think of assemblages as wholes (albeit non-totalizing wholes) this terminology implies a very specific affective quality to assemblages, that harks back to Spinozas doubled ontology of power, that can help us, first of all in conceptualizing a whole not in terms of the boundedness of a pre-given category (a city, a rat, a schoolbus, a nation) but in terms of the distinction between forces of composition and decomposition. That is, to the extent we acknowledge it, the boundedness of the object is the outcome of a process rather than a pre-given final form. Deleuze would argue that the distinction is drawn first in terms of potentia an encounter with exterior parts that act in concord with the assemblage extend and enhance its capacity to act, enabling it

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210 as a reification, in favor of an immanent organization engaged in creation. Holland suggests a temporal division between constituted and constitutive power as discrete moments of destabilization and restabilization a kind of temporal pendulum swing in the balance between a revolutionary moment and a state form (or what we might see as emancipatory and restrictive assemblages). Here we might envision the emergence of emancipatory assemblages that must always guard against their reification into a kind of stasis, in which the codification of relations would prohibit the development of new capacities.
In revolutionary moments of accelerated historical time, constituent force prevails, subverting the old constitution and calling forth a new form of constituted power, which will then prevail during normal or (retarded) historical time by organizing and always to some extent constraining constituent force within the bounds of the new constitution. At stake in the struggle between constituent force and constituted power are the degrees of freedom, equality, democracy, cooperation, creativity, and enjoyment actualized in the institutions of a given constitution. (Holland, 2003: 123)

Dialogues in Human Geography 2(2) between legitimate uses of connective, disjunctive and conjunctive synthesis and illegitimate ones. To summarize briefly, the qualities of legitimate synthesis enhance open-endedness, non-restrictive, nomadic and polyvocal forms of synthesis and connection, open to fullest expression of enhancement of capacities contrasted with exclusive, restrictive, and segregated ones. For Deleuze and Guattari, illegitimate synthesis returns all lines of conflict and contradiction to a singular source of power and explanation. A full discussion of this is not possible in the restricted space of a commentary, but to think the simultaneous operation of legitimate and illegitimate synthesis, this doubled ontology of power, enables us to envision and describe a myriad of human and non-human assemblages that operate in the creation of value, and as far as possible the creation of positive encounters, even as capital organizes the restrictive appropriation of this value, in a false theater of movement in which it posits itself as the sine qua non of creativity and (particularly in a neoliberal framework) the family as the reductive explanatory model for all manner of strategies of governance from organization of the military (the military family) to a model for bringing ones economic house into order. This doubled understanding of modes of synthesis enables a conversation between neovitalist and neo-Marxist perspectives on assemblage without having to choose between the either/or of negation and affirmation.

Deleuze and Guattari, however, stake their claim more on organizational forms, emphasizing a different kind of composition at work in emancipatory assemblages tending towards molecularization rather than the molar, suggesting that although the emergence of the state form is always an inherent danger, some organizational forms are more open to perpetual renewal than others [inhibiting] the installation of stable powers in favor of a fabric of immanent relations (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 358). The underlying principles that might distinguish emancipatory and restrictive assemblages (those maximizing constitutive power versus those emphasizing constituent power) can be found in their discussion of legitimate and illegitimate forms of synthesis. This distinction of the composition of forces along the lines of two modalities of power (one enhancing capacity the other acting to restrict or as an apparatus of capture) in the determination of assemblages resonates with the distinction that Deleuze and Guattari (2000) draw, in Anti-Oedipus,

Assemblage and event

To understand the assemblage from this doubled vantage point of legitimate and illegitimate synthesis also offers us some tools in relation to a concluding question in Anderson et al. in relation to the event. For Deleuze, to become worthy of what happens to us, the event, is to will not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs (Deleuze, 1990: 149). The optimism of intellect implied in this stance does not imply a kind of teleological progression in which we see the current state of affairs as necessarily suggesting greater opportunities for societal transformation than those historically prior (something Holland

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Ruddick rightly critiques in Negri), nor as a resignation to an existing state of affairs but a determination to search out new vantage points, make operative undiscovered capacities that are latent within a given assemblage and its constitutive components. Arguably the current debates around the Occupy Movement can be viewed as a struggle, around what kind of synthesis will be made to prevail. The openendedness of the movement, and its refusal to designate a single cause or leader has been both a source of frustration for those opposing it and its ongoing regenerative and constitutive power, never settling on a single identity (beyond the 99%) or single voice which might be represented in the restrictive pluralist discourse of a special interest group. In many ways we might see the Occupy Movement as embodied, even developing the qualities of a legitimate synthesis in its various practices of conjunction and connection. The event of the coordinated eviction of protestors squatting the multiple urban centers, their restriction to use of these sites for daily protesting (commuter-protesting), might be viewed as a setback if we were to fixate on a particular fault line, or to make the fact of occupying a specific site the endgame of the movement. But it is an open question as to whether this prohibition constitutes in the end. An alternative trajectory was recently proffered in the repurposing of the poster Occupy Wall Street to RE-Occupy WaAll StreetS suggesting an alternate trajectory, turned from dissolution to its diffusion and dispersal to multiple sites a contagion rather than defeat. In the creation of emancipatory assemblages, this is indeed the question we must ask, as Deleuze (1988: 126) argued in a different context: it is a question of knowing whether relations (and which ones?) can compound directly to form a new more extensive relations and whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a more intense capacity or power. References

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