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:

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:

  1. A specific, unrepeatable event: all the windows of the Commerzbank at Kottbusser Tor smashed, the safety glass developed into "intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes"
  2. The moment is missed — the event was not photographed in time
  3. Replacement: Google Image Search for "Mannequins in broken shop window" — a generic substitute for the singular event
  4. 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)
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.

See also