Assemblage Identity

The theoretical position (639)

Note 639 draws on assemblage theory (the text is close to Manuel DeLanda's A New Philosophy of Society) to articulate a middle ground between essentialism and pure particularity:

Assemblages have contingent, historically emergent identities — not guaranteed by a fixed set of essential properties
Each assemblage is an individual singularity: unique because of its history, even if indistinguishable from others by outward appearance
Despite individual singularity, assemblages often belong to populations of more or less similar assemblages — the process of assembly recurs
Identity is embodied in materiality and expressed by it — the material/expressive distinction maps onto matter-energy vs. information

The key maneuver: refuse both the general category (which treats members as interchangeable instances of a type) and the pure particular (which refuses any generalization). The assemblage is a singular individual that belongs to a population — not a specimen of a universal type.

Relational identity, deferred (952)

Note 952 ("Script") arrives at a related position from a different angle. A "cloud" of things whose membership cannot be fixed absolutely — only relative associations can be established:

"Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by its 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."

Here identity is not just contingent but constitutively deferred: it is always arriving, never given in advance. "Taxonomies are ridiculous: there is no map, no overview, no complete model." The navigation is ontological — you don't move through a pre-existing space, you produce the space through the movement.

The counter-pressure: slavery to the particular (581)

Note 581 (Bruner, "Slaves to the Particular") is the counter-argument the work has to hold:

"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."

Categorization is not a distortion of reality but a condition of sanity. Without the capacity to render discriminably different things equivalent, there is no cognition — only paralysis.

This is not simply resolved by the assemblage framework. The tension is productive: the assemblage is the attempt to have both — a genuinely singular individual that also belongs to recognizable populations, without that belonging becoming a classification.

The practice of this tension (1301)

Note 1301 ("Everything vs. anything") enacts this philosophical tension at the level of art-making. The narrative:

A specific, unrepeatable event: all the windows of the Commerzbank at Kottbusser Tor smashed, the safety glass developed into "intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes"
The moment is missed — the event was not photographed in time
Replacement: Google Image Search for "Mannequins in broken shop window" — a generic substitute for the singular event
Further displacement: the stock photo is watermarked (can't be purchased without a credit card); the upscaling software is unregistered (its own watermark added); the protective foil is left on the final sculpture

The title — Everything vs. anything — names the tension directly. Everything is the specific, singular, irreplaceable (the actual smashed windows). Anything is the interchangeable substitute (a stock photo that "stands for" it). The work is built out of the gap between them.

*Assemblage (everything vs. anything)* (2013) — UV print on PET-G; watermarked stock image; protective foil left on

Loin de moi (912)

The sculpture Loin de moi — "far from me" — is linked to the semiotic square (901) and the semiotic squares image (909). The title performs a dissociation: the work is always at some distance from the self that made it, from the event that prompted it. This is the aesthetic correlate of deferred identity — the work's meaning is not in it but at a remove.

The political horizon: Agamben's profane order (→ 1266)

Note 1266 — almost certainly Giorgio Agamben, from The Coming Community or Means Without End — proposes a destination for the singular/universal problem that neither DeLanda nor Bruner reaches:

"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… they would cease to be instruments in the hands of those in power."

The move is not to resolve the tension (not to find the correct middle term between singular and universal, as assemblage theory tries to do) but to drain it of its divisive force. Distinctions remain — "all persons and all objects would not float freely in a space without meaning" — but they lose the capacity to be weaponized. This is a political rather than ontological answer to the same problem: not how to describe identity correctly, but what conditions would have to hold for identity-categories to stop doing violence.

Placed alongside DeLanda and Bruner, Agamben names the stakes: the assemblage framework is not merely an accurate ontology but a sketch of a political horizon where neither the universal (which subsumes the singular into an exchangeable type) nor the pure particular (which refuses generalization and therefore communication) retains coercive force.

The related works linked to 1266 — including Very Beta Still (acrylics, UV print, hand engraving on glass, 2012) and the assemblage works of 2013 — suggest this reading was active in the studio at the moment the assemblage series was being made.

Interval space — the New Museum reading (2013)

The New Museum (2013) catalog text described Dissociations in a formulation that the wiki has not yet picked up but that names a fifth angle on assemblage identity:

"[Dissociations is] a successive presentation of finite objects in favor of tracking an interval space, where the interrelationships between ideas and forms become the focus rather than the works themselves."

The phrase is precise. Where assemblage theory keeps a node-relation grammar (objects exist and are then related), interval space names the move further: the interval between objects is the primary subject; the objects themselves are secondary. This is the operational version of 952's identity-as-navigation — the relevant entity is not "the things" but "the space between them traversed by movement."

The framing matters because it identifies what is positively present in the practice's emphasis on associations. The Dissociations vault is not a collection of things but a recording of intervals: each "Related" link is an interval traversed; what the algorithm trained on is the topology of those intervals, not the inventory of the things connected. See About for the source quotation in its full context; see Subconscious Computation for the related claim that "structure produces meaning" — the meaning lives in the connections, not in the nodes.

The interval-space framing also clarifies the relationship between Dissociations, Delinear.info, and the semiotic square: all three are attempts to make the interval rather than the term primary. The semiotic square's interesting positions are precisely the negations — what is between New and Old, between Same and Different — not the cardinal terms themselves.