ph34r my assemblage!

It used to be that ‘assemblage’ was a perfectly useful term used by archaeologists. Now however, it seems poised to unseat ‘neoliberalism’ as the theoretical buzzword of choice for bleeding-edge theorists. Or at least so it seems to me.

First there was the edited volume “Global Assemblages”:http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=1405123583 by Ong and Collier. Then there are was “medieval assemblages”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8159.html and now there is “assemblage: the encyclopedia article”:http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2-3/101?etoc. And these are just the (nonarchaeological) uses of this term that hit my inbox recently.

I have to admit I find the idea interesting although I’m not very confident about how it will be used. I will go out on a limb, however, and predict that in 2011 Duke University Press (or its functional equivalent) will publish three books with the word ‘assemblage’ in the title. Ladies and gentlemen: start your engines!

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

12 thoughts on “ph34r my assemblage!

  1. ouch that hurts Rex! Assemblage is so 2004. But as it happens, my assemblage weighs a ton. Not only is it a concept in my book (though I would be happy to have it re-branded by you, my conceptual consultant), but my book will be published by Duke. Talk to me about being on the bleeding edge. I am obviously so hip I should start my own blog where concepts aren’t even discussed and there are no comment fields.

    But honestly, it is a perfectly useful term, and it belonged to the geologists first, then the archaeologists, and you have Deleuze and Deleuzophilia to thank for its spread. I intend to use it proudly. I am a level 12 branded concept cleric after all.

  2. For textual comparison. First, a geological mention of assemblage.

    A classic example of a partial Contact Facies Series is provided by the contact aureole of the Devonian Onawa pluton of Maine (see figure to right). The granitic pluton was intruded into slate country rock previously metamorphosed under regional metamorphic conditions. The country rocks contain the assemblage Fe-Ti oxide + white mica + chlorite + quartz (figure below). The first evidence of contact metamorphism is the appearance of spots in the slates as far as 2 km from the pluton margin. The spots are cordierite porphyroblasts (largely replaced by phyllosilicates) and are part of the assemblage biotite + andalusite + cordierite + white mica + quartz + albite (figure). This assemblage is representative of the Hornblende Hornfels Facies.

    And in art,

    definition of assemblage
    Today the term assemblage … is frequently associated with a very Bauderlarian sensibility in its expression of modern life and, in particular, of urban culture.
    http://www.zwirnerandwirth.com

    as-sem-blage Pronunciation: -‘sem-blij, for 3 also “a-“säm-‘bläzh
    Function: noun
    Date: 1690
    a collection of persons or things : GATHERING
    the act of assembling : the state of being assembled
    an artistic composition made from scraps, junk, and odds and ends (as of paper, cloth, wood, stone, or metal) b : the art of making assemblages
    the history of assemblage art

    Assemblage is basically the three-dimensional cousin of collage. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) can be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he titled assemblages d’empreintes. Dubuffet wasn’t the earliest assemblage artist, however both Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso had been working with found objects for several years prior to Dubuffet.

    In 1961 the medium of assemblage was given a boost by an exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the New York Museum of Modern Art. William C Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, defined the term when he wrote that the assemblages were entirely or in part, their constituent elements are preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.
    This exhibition showcased the work of artists such as Braque, Joseph Cornell, Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Man Ray and Kurt Schwitters.

    Marvelous analogies by the way. The geology described above is an example of contact metamorphism (How appriate for Tsing!) described as follows,

    Contact metamorphism occurs locally, at and near the contacts between intrusions and the surrounding country or host rock. The heat introduced by the intrusion controls the metamorphism. The effects of increased temperature are most pronounced where intrusions occur at shallow levels. There, contrasts in temperature between country rock and intrusion are at a maximum.

    With intrusion=global capitalism and the surrounding country or host rock Kalimantan….

    Oh, well. What is clear is that Tsing’s work looks a lot like an artistic assemblage. A bunch of found objects (observations? fieldnotes?) assembled to produce an artistic effect. But is it ethnography? Let alone theory?

  3. Tsing is clearly pushing the boundaries of what “we” consider ethnography and theory. The undercurrent on many of these posts seems to be a nostalgic hope for a return to the masculine, elitist version of Theory (with a capital “T”).

    Tsing’s work can be easily dismissed (by some) as “hodgepodge”–that narrative suggests that there is no “fit” between the ethnographic “anecdotes” (again a way to dismiss these as not being theory, by way of trivializing them) and an emergent theory.

    Does theory need to be blunt and positivist to be recognized as such? Or is there a different way to consider the “work” that theory does?

  4. Lol. I guess I called it, Chris :?) Well at least you caught the wave before it broke! But seriously one of the reasons I did that post was because each of the links has a PDF (2 of them world readable) which have useful statements about the concept that would be good for anyone who wanted to do a ‘theory clinic’ on it. But already most of that work has already been done in the comments. Thanks John!

  5. Kim asks,

    Does theory need to be blunt and positivist to be recognized as such? Or is there a different way to consider the “work” that theory does?

    Who is this blunt and positivist straw man with his masculinist, elitist pretensions that we are supposed to be in love with?

    Is he the classical physicist’s tidy differential equations whose applicability to reality is tested using controlled experiments?

    Is it the economist’s physicist wannabe equations, whose testing is largely a matter of parsing large volumes of statistical data?

    Is it the detective’s, lawyer’s, historian’s theory about who done it and when, how and why they did it?

    Is it the doctor’s clinical inference? Or the fireman’s intuition that the fire has reached the basement and it’s time to get off the roof? (Nice discussion in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power.

    Or,for that matter, an argument for Intelligent Design that depends on a patchwork of “evidence” whose relation to the conclusion is dubious as best?

    In Tsingian terms one might note that the old bugabear “blunt, positivist, masculinist, elitest” theory is, while possibly a guy you’d like to have a beer with, as much a figment of the sloppy critic’s imagination as, well, global capitalism. One might then note, too, that the hallmark of useful theories is the friction they encounter in reality and, thus, if they are really good theories, the traction they give to those who are trying to change realities.

    Dear Kim, please show us how Tsing’s “theory” (whatever you mean by that) falls into this category.

  6. John,
    Honestly, I don’t know what to make of most of your post.

    Your quip that:
    “In Tsingian terms one might note that the old bugabear “blunt, positivist, masculinist, elitest” theory is, while possibly a guy you’d like to have a beer with, as much a figment of the sloppy critic’s imagination as, well, global capitalism.”

    So whose imagination? and which “sloppy critic?” Are you actually saying that anthropololgical theory, or any other Western discipline does not have masculinist, elitist roots…seriously? Are you dismissing decades of feminist critique and the colonial enetrprise that was anthropology?

    Tsing is certainly in conversation with these feminist interventions as well as those of the “writing culture” gang which Kelty mentioned in his post.

    Tsing’s ethnography asks us to see theory differently. In order to do this you may need to ask differernt questions and be open to seeing how theoretical insights emerge within narrative, from anecdotes and without bold type and blunt prose.

  7. all the examples of straw men that john mentions seem to be pretty good characterizations of blunt positivist theory (masculinist roots or no). I think the question is rather what would a sharp, neo/non-positivist theory look like. Does Tsing actually look like this theory? The test in this case, as I believe I have said before, is what you can do with it… not whether it is right or not (much less masculinist or elitist, even though I may agree with Kim)… so the burden of proof is on us… not to pronounce on Tsing, but to hitch our wagon to her project and see where it leads. Nowhere? I finding another horse… but until then…

  8. Kim,

    I am not dismissing feminist critiques of anything. I rather suspect that I was a feminist (albeit a male one) before you were born. I have also thoroughly internalized the useful lessons that since social science was largely the creation of elite white men it reflects their prejudices and for years neglected important voices, in particularly those of women, that must be heard to provide the holistic account of human lives to which anthropology aspires.

    Thus, for example, when I wrote “Malinowski, Magic and Advertising: On Choosing Metaphors” (In John Sherry, ed., Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior), I didn’t just reference Malinowski. My literature search alerted me to the existence of Annette Weiner’s Women of value, men of renown: New perspectives in Trobriand exchange, from which I took several useful observations. I was able to write, for example,

    We should note, too, a historical difference between Malinowski’s and Weiner’s accounts. Malinowski’s notebook made him, the anthropologist, the authority on which Trobriand spells were accurate. In 1972, Trobrianders had notebooks, too. On the night of the game Weiner (1976) describes, the winner was Bunemiga whose “magic was written in a thick notebook that his son read to him for part of the time he chanted.”

    I went on to comment, contrasting Trobriand magic with the Taoist magic I had studied in Taiwan,

    For Bunemiga, however, his notebook was, it seems, simply an aid to memory. It enabled him to shout more spells than anyone else and thus emerge the winner of the game. There may be Trobriand scholars who examine such texts with a critical hermeneutical eye. If so, they have gone unrecorded.

    In contrast, the Taoist Canon is an assemblage (an entirely appropriate word here) of hundreds of texts and commentaries spanning centuries. But this diverts us from the line of your question.

    I didn’t just mention Weiner, I preferred her interpretation of Trobriand magic to Malinowski’s. Where M sees magic as a response to uncertainy in the natural environment, W sees clearly (and provides some compelling evidence) that magic is a way of dealing with other people.

    The words of magic spells are the fantasies of private thought and, when spoken, these words are the projection of power. The practice of magic extends the strength of one’s creative and manipulative intent to control and publicly display one’s autonomy.

    I concluded, praising Weiner, that “Substituting ‘ads’ for ‘words’ and ‘products’ for ‘objects,’ it is hard to imagine a finer description of advertising’s intent.”

    So, what are you looking for? Inclusion of other voices? Respect for female scholars? Self-reflexive awareness of polyvocality and and the social situation in which “knowledge” is produced? These are recurring themes in virtually everything I’ve published since getting back into the academic game in the early 1990s.

    What I am accusing Tsing and, yes, now you of is sloppy, stereotyped “critique” that bears as much relation to serious scholarship as defenses of Intelligent Design do to the modern theory of evolution. I am offering the opportunity to prove me wrong by demonstrating a utility in the way that theory as you imagine it “works” (that was your word, wasn’t it?). I’m just looking for something that rises above the level of fashionable jargon.

    The ball is in your court.

  9. Ckelty writes,

    I think the question is rather what would a sharp, neo/non-positivist theory look like. Does Tsing actually look like this theory? The test in this case, as I believe I have said before, is what you can do with it… so the burden of proof is on us… not to pronounce on Tsing, but to hitch our wagon to her project and see where it leads.

    Precisely. A very elegant condensation of the point I was trying to make.

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