Assemblage Identity

DeLanda's assemblages (639)

Note 639, "The Identity of an Assemblage", is a collage of passages from Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory; the note names no source. It makes four claims:

• "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."
• "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."
• "Although each assemblage is a unique historical entity it often belongs to a population of more or less similar assemblages."
• "The identity of an assemblage is not only embodied in its materiality but also expressed by it", a distinction between matter-energy and information in the sense of "raw physical pattern".

The passage ends by calling for "breaking with the ontology we inherited from the classical Greek philosophers, an ontology based on the general and the particular", in favour of "a new one based on the individual singular and the universal singular". DeLanda does not look for a middle between the general and the particular; he replaces the pair. An assemblage is a singular individual that belongs to a population without being an instance of a type.

The counterweight: Bruner (581)

Note 581, "Slaves to the particular", copies the opening page of A Study of Thinking (1956) by Jerome Bruner, Jacqueline Goodnow and George Austin:

"Were we to utilize fully our capacity for registering the differences in things and to respond to each event encountered as unique, we would soon be overwhelmed by the complexity of our environment... [It] would make us slaves to the particular."

The resolution, the passage goes on, "is achieved by man's capacity to categorize. To categorize is to render discriminably different things equivalent". Bruner says why categories are needed; DeLanda says why they do not describe what things are. The wiki reads the assemblage as the attempt to keep both: singular individuals that still fall into recognisable populations.

Script: relations without categories (952)

The artist's own note 952, "Script", describes the procedure behind Dissociations. Of a set of three, Palindrome, Twelve and Energy Drink: "The Energy Drink stands out for some particular criteria (possible to observe without requiring a definition of similarity). Because of this Twelve and Palindrome are automatically related, and there are negative ties to Energy Drink. Effectively three new relations have now been defined, and we have not sought refuge to seemingly unavoidable proxies such as categories, groups, tags, etc." It ends:

"The complex graph of 'weighted' connections is permanently incomplete. Taxonomies are ridiculous: there is no map, no overview, no complete model. Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by it's associations. Identity is deferred. We are somewhere, we can navigate elsewhere, and the destination emerges from our move. It wasn't there before and we weren't there (…) and upon arrival its novelty fades immediately."

DeLanda's individuals still have histories of their own. In 952 a node's character comes from its associations, and its identity is deferred. The New Museum's First Look text of 2013 described Dissociations as "tracking an interval space, where the interrelationships between ideas and forms become the focus rather than the works themselves" (→ About).

Assemblage (everything vs. anything) (2013)

The photograph shows the sculpture hanging: an open sphere of curved transparent strips printed with two mannequins in tuxedos behind cracked glass, with spiral watermarks across them and blue protective film still on. Note 1293 and note 1290 give 120 × 100 × 110 cm. The material is PET-G, as the artist's text says (1301) and as he confirmed in November 2026; the former harm.work entry, since removed from the site, gave acrylic glass at 110 × 110 cm.

Note 1301, "Everything vs. anything", tells how it was made. One night at Kottbusser Tor the artist found the windows of the Commerzbank kicked in, the safety glass turned into "intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes". When he came back the next day the windows had been replaced. In the studio he searched Google Images and found "Mannequins in broken shop window", a stock photo he could not license without a credit card, so he used the watermarked version. An unregistered copy of PhotoZoom Pro 5 enlarged it and added its own watermark, and the print was assembled with the protective foil left on. The chain of substitutions is followed layer by layer on Mediation and the Archive.

The title sets everything against anything. One reading takes everything as the singular event and anything as its interchangeable stand-in. The artist's own gloss is about language: "In the Dutch language, it is hard to translate the distinction between the English words 'anything' and 'everything'. In a language course, this would be a slightly more advanced topic" (1302).

A profane order (1266)

Note 1266 copies, without naming it, Leland de la Durantaye's summary of Giorgio Agamben's "profane order":

"An integrally actual and integrally profane order in which the destructive distinctions between sacred and profane, the exception and the norm, the singular and the universal are neutralized - and put behind us. They are not to be somehow magically destroyed, not to be annihilated from the memory of man, but instead are to be seen in a new light. In such a profane order, distinctions would continue to exist; all persons and all objects would not float freely in a space without meaning, but they would cease to have the divisive force they carry today; they would cease to be instruments in the hands of those in power."

The distinctions are neutralized, not destroyed: they "continue to exist" and lose their divisive force. Beside 639 and 581 the passage moves the question of singular and universal from ontology to politics. The categories stay; the wiki reads 1266 as describing the point at which they would stop being used against anyone. Its Related list links Very Beta Still (996: "Acrylics on paper, digital UV print and hand engraving on glass. 100 × 70cm") and two image-only notes added in 2013 (1239, 1225).

See also

• Sculpture and the Object — the Assemblages series (2011–2018) as objects
• Mediation and the Archive — the layers of Everything vs. anything
• About — Dissociations — the trio procedure and the "interval space"
• The Semiotic Square — four positions, each negation with content of its own
• Limit Experience — 1266 read with Bataille
• Protocol, Taste, and Systems — Delinear.info and relations as interface