The Identity of an Assemblage

The historically contingent identity of 'wholes' is defined by
their emergent properties, capacities, and tendencies. What we
need is a concept that allows us to retain both irreducibility
and decomposability, a concept that makes the explanation of
synthesis and the possibility of analysis intelligible. We will
refer to these wholes as assemblages.

The identity of an assemblage is always contingent and it is not
guaranteed by the existence of a necessary set of properties
constituting an unchanging essence. Or to put this differently,
assemblages are not particular members of a general category but
unique and singular individuals. Even if two assemblages
resemble each other so much that no one can tell them apart,
each will still be unique due to the different details of its
individual history. All these different assemblages are born at
a particular time, live a life, and then die. It follows that
knowledge about an assemblage does not derive from a "botanical"
classification that takes properties for granted but from an
account of the origin and endurance of those properties.

Given the importance of the ontological status of assemblages we
will need a technical term to refer to it: every actual
assemblage is an individual singularity. Emergent wholes are
defined not only by their properties but also by their
tendencies and capacities.

Although each assemblage is a unique historical entity it often
belongs to a population of more or less similar assemblages. In
other words, despite the individual singularity of each
assemblage the process of assembly behind it tends to be
recurrent so what is synthesized is never a single individual
but many of them. To facilitate "population thinking" we need a
means to specify not only the possible ways in which the members
of a population can change but also the state of their identity
at any particular point in their history. This can be achieved
by parametrizing the concept of assemblage, that is, by
providing it with modifiable settings: the values which
determine the condition of the identity of an emergent whole at
any given time.

The more homogeneous the internal composition of an assemblage
and the better defined its outer boundaries the more
"territorialized" its identity may be said to be.
The identity of an assemblage is not only embodied in its
materiality but also expressed by it.
This distinction corresponds to that between matter-energy on
one hand and information on the other, not the semantic
information conveyed by the meaning of words or sentences, but
raw physical pattern.

While the distinction between the material and the expressive,
between matter-energy and information, is important to track the
parallel histories of bodies and minds, it is also relevant
because computer simulations are emergent wholes composed of
information existing above the computer hardware that provides
their material and energetic substratum. The technology that
makes simulations possible had to undergo several
transformations that can also be explained within the framework
of assemblage theory. Thus the first deterritorialization brings
the metalevel (operations on data) into direct contact with the
object level (data) creating the possibility of assemblages made
out of operators and data. The main danger of this account is
making universal singularities into transcendent entities,
entities existing entirely independently of the material world.
It will point to an intimate link between ontology and
epistemology. And the existence of such a link, in turn, will
constitute a powerful argument for breaking with the ontology we
inherited from the classical Greek philosophers, an ontology
based on the general and the particular, and an incentive to
develop a new one based on the individual singular and the
universal singular.

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