Assembling the International: Steps Towards a New Social Ontology ...

Assembling the International: Steps towards a new social ontology for international theory Draft Paper prepared for Millennium Annual Conference: Materialism and World Politics, October 20th and 21st, 2012 [Not for citation in this form] Abstract This paper assesses recent moves towards conceptualising social ontology via the figure of the assemblage, and the significance of assemblage theory for International Relations. Its focus is on two distinctive approaches to assemblages: those of Manuel Delanda and Saskia Sassen. The aim is to draw out the theoretical implications of their work for how we might conceptualise international transformation. Assemblage theory calls into question some of IR Theory's dominant modes of discussion. It has the capacity to move us towards very different conceptualisations of the relations between wholes and parts, the nature of systems, the relations between different scales, and the relationship between the material and the cultural. The paper goes on to look at how the international system of states may be in the process of being disassembled and reassembled into a different form, and what mechanisms drive such contemporary processes of assemblage. The Return of Materialism It is increasingly coming to be recognized that our world is a world of hybrids, of combinations of material and social elements. Perhaps this has always been the case: perhaps, as Bruno Latour (1993) memorably argued, we have never been modern, in the sense that the modern subject conceives of a divide between the objects of nature and those of culture, which is itself artificial. Such divisions, Latour argues, have always been illusory. But, as the pace of technological change has quickened in areas such as biotechnology, climate science or the global financial markets, a feeling has persisted that there is a need to develop theoretical perspectives and methodological tools that can enable us to understand the impact of new combinations and mixtures on the natural and the social worlds. The reemergence of different forms of materialism from long subjugation to the ‘cultural’ or ‘linguistic turn’ in the social sciences may be viewed as related to the urgency of such needs. New materialisms may be seen as a reaction against dominant forms of idealism that have appeared to lack any kind of purchase on many of the pressing challenges for contemporary politics: the impact of human practices on the biosphere, the increasingly central role that technology is coming to play in social life, the emergence of new hybrid socio-technical assemblages, the ability to manipulate genetic code via new forms of biological engineering, the political effects of material inequality. Additionally, there is also the argument that the cultural turn itself has been complicit in the neutering of effective political action over the last four decades or so, just at the point at which material economic inequalities were being

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reconstituted and widened by processes of globalisation and hyper-financialisation (Jameson 1991). Materialism is back on the agenda because it speaks to contemporary concerns, although new materialisms certainly do not limit themselves to the movements of an older historical materialism. In the ontology developed by Deleuze, and taken forward by Manuel DeLanda (2010, 78), materialism is recovered from the limitations of formerly dominant philosophies, with their emphasis upon labour processes and modes of production. Instead, the full range of non-social entities are given causal power, and history is broadened beyond the anthropocentric, to account for cosmological, biological and social evolution. What may loosely be described as ‘assemblage theory’ can be seen as belonging to an emerging set of materialist alternatives to an excessive focus on text, discourse, culture, subjectivity and linguistic structures (although it is also capable of including all these aspects by repositioning them within a within a framework that effaces the distinction between nature and culture). The varieties of new materialisms share a realist scientific ontology. They subscribe to the existence of an objective, mindindependent reality that human beings can gain access to, however imperfectly, through their scientific endeavors. Its exponents argue that only a realist ontology can provide the basis for an understanding of those pressing issues of our time that exceed the grasp of the linguistic turn (see Bryant, Srniceck, Harman 2011; Meillassoux 2006; Bennett 2009). There has been much meta-theoretical debate concerning the proper role for philosophy of science in IR in recent years, and assemblage theory’s predilection for accepting a mind-independent reality locates it within this debate (Jackson 2011). Scientific realism has made some headway in international theory, underpinning the discussion of ontology in Alexander Wendt’s (1999) Social Theory of International Politics, and benefiting from the path breaking work of Colin Wight (2006). It is fair to say that these efforts are at an early stage in terms of the development of substantive findings, yet they have generated important discussions and new approaches within the field. It should be noted that there has been a tendency within IR to use scientific realism to rehabilitate the scientific credentials of Marxist theoretical perspectives - a warrant for accepting the causal power of unobservable social structures (Joseph 2007; see Brown 2007 for a discussion). Assemblage theory does not share this trajectory, and offers resources of critique that seek to undermine any reified general category, such as that of the ‘capitalist system’ (DeLanda 2010, 42-47), seeking to replace such abstractions with concrete objects. As part of this realist and materialist movement, the language of ‘assemblages’ makes a steady and insistent claim for attention. Although very much an outlier from mainstream approaches to social theory, and sketchily developed in terms of international theory, the conceptual shift represented by thinking in terms of assemblages bears significant promise for the development of a number of debates that are set to characterize the future direction of those domains. A commitment to a mind-independent reality also brings with it the need to account for entities with stable and enduring identities, and the historical processes that underpin them. Assemblage theory offers resources for this task.

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In this piece I want to focus primarily on two applications of assemblage thinking to what may be thought of as the terrain of international theory: those of Manuel DeLanda and Saskia Sassen (This by no means exhausts the field of assemblage thinking, which has influenced work in anthropology, art history, urban studies and geography: see Marcus and Saka 2006; McFarlane 2011; Anderson et al 2012); Collier and Ong 2005; Latour 2005). My choice of these two is related to their complementarity. Although developed independently of one another, I will argue that these two thinkers draw out in their work precisely what the other lacks: DeLanda providing the missing ontological foundations that are side-stepped by Sassen, Sassen providing, in turn, a more compelling substantive analysis of international change via assemblage thinking. The picture that the work of these theorists begins to reveal is one that significantly challenges many approaches to IR. In this paper I will outline the ontological status of assemblage theory, and discuss the key conceptual shifts that it brings with it. The paper then goes on to examine how assemblage theory may contribute to new ways of understanding international transformation, both historically and in the contemporary world. I consider two particular cases, the emergence of the territorial sovereign state in the seventeenth century, and what John Ruggie (1998) has called the ‘unbundling’ of the territorial state in the late-twentieth century. Finally, I consider the gains to be made from assemblage theorising in IR, but also the costs that the introduction of this radical new social ontology might bring. A New Social Ontology The history of IR is replete with competing ontologies. Assemblage theory is driven in large part by dissatisfaction with the dominant ontologies that have characterized social theory generally, and international theory more specifically. One of the defining characteristics of mainstream approaches has been their state-centrism. This reification of the state is tied up with the history of the social sciences, which rose to their zenith under the power of the state and naturally saw the interests of states as a key object of analysis. States are often introduced as pre-theoretical entities – becoming the starting point for the analysis of international systems. This has had the effect of obscuring important components of international systems (for analysis of the variety of compositions of international systems across the span of world history, see Buzan and Little (2000)). Assemblage theory’s most obvious promise is that it rules out such reification: it seeks to replace such abstractions with concrete histories of the processes by which entities are formed and consist – the state can only be talked about in terms of the heterogeneous elements that comprise it and that gave rise to it historically, thus providing it with the emergent properties and capacities of statehood. Of all the work that we might call ‘assemblage theory, Manuel DeLanda’s approach offers the most sophisticated philosophical foundations, and a level of richness and detail that arguably surpasses the Deleuzian source material that inspire it. The ‘assemblage’, in DeLanda’s hands, represents a sustained attempt to force a paradigm shift in the way we conceptualise the entities that populate both the material and the social worlds. Indeed, as the attempts to reorient international theory along scientific realist lines have shown, battles over ontology are at heart political: ‘politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’ (Wight 2006, 2).

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It will not be possible in the limited space here to give a full account of the richness of DeLanda’s philosophy (1997; 2002; 2006; 2010; 2011), but I will attempt to draw out some of the more salient points for international theory. Standing behind DeLanada is the philosophical system of Gilles Deleuze and his sometimes collaborator Felix Guattari, although it is unclear to what extent what DeLanda retrieves from their work continues to swear fealty to the original. DeLanda is fully aware of this, and of the possible objections of Deleuzian scholars. He is clear that he is concerned with Deleuze’s ontology, and not the multiple ways in which his open philosophical system has been applied to various domains. He is also focusing on the nascent ‘theory of assemblages’, which he recovers from scattered fragments throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre: reclaimed timber for his own construction. What emerges from this reconstruction and interpretation is something distinctive. DeLanda recognizes this, declaring that ‘readers who feel that the theory developed here is not strictly speaking Deleuze’s own are welcome to call it ‘neo-assemblage theory’, ‘assemblage theory 2.0’, or some other name’ (4). I will use the term assemblage theory here, but I also intend for this label to encompass other approaches, beyond the Deleuze-DeLanda hybrid. If DeLanda’s body of work, taken as a whole, represents an attempt to reorient the way we think about ontology in both the physical and the social realm via the figure of the assemblage, Sassen, by contrast, shies away from consideration of the ontological foundations of the historical sociology she develops in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Despite being fully aware of the rich lineage of assemblage thinking, and allowing that these resources have illuminated her own approach, Sassen does not claim to be working in this vein or contributing to the philosophical elaboration of the concept. She declares: ‘I use the concept assemblage in its most descriptive sense….I simply want the dictionary term. I locate my theorization elsewhere, not on this term’ (5). That being said, what Sassen eventually does is to push this approach further than any other scholar towards substantive issues surrounding international transformation. As we will see, in many ways these two approaches considered here, developed without reference to each other, share a number of key features; a resistance to reification, a focus on historical processes, an emphasis upon capabilities and capacities. Sassen, then, is also set upon a task of disaggregation – seeking to break up wholes into their component parts, analysing those parts and their contribution to the whole. Again, she argues that this is a necessary response to the heavy reification of political entities such as the state that have dominated historical scholarship and social science. She views the construction of territory, authority and rights as historically contingent, and is interested in how the components that construct such historical formations may be reshaped or reoriented to different projects from those for which they are originally intended, and plugged into new systems with different ordering logics. Sassen’s goal is, then, to describe the dynamics that result in the transformation of international systems, although she does not formulate her project in this way. She seems to use the term ‘complex system’ to stand in for a pluralist conception of what IR scholars have conceptualised as ‘international systems’. Sassen is careful to point out that her conceptualization of a system is in line with complex systems thinking. Again, although she does not elaborate, this aligns her with those that have sought to

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move away from those simpler conceptions of international systems, drawn from general systems theory, that inspired early attempts to formalize the logics that emerge at the international level (Kaplan 1957; Waltz 1979). This tradition emphasized simple, closed systems, and, as such, brought with it assumptions about equilibrium, cyclicality and predictability. In general systems theory, systems are commonly seen as no more than the sum of their parts – they do not have emergent properties. Shifting to a complex systems paradigm opens up a new theoretical vista, and engages with concepts such as emergence, non-linearity, openness, adaptation, feedback and path-dependency (Bousquet and Curtis 2011). Predictability in complex systems is tightly constrained, but the possibilities for analysis of the system’s historical development offer a much richer resource for understanding transitions from one system to another. This sensitivity to open systems also indicates that Sassen shares a similar ontology to that developed by DeLanda, which draws heavily on the elaboration of open systems by recent advances in the natural sciences. Assemblage What then, is an assemblage? In DeLanda’s hands assemblages are the entities that populate both the natural and social worlds.1 All entities may be decomposed into component parts that exist at lower levels: biological organisms, geological formations, villages, cities and states are all assemblages. Indeed, everything that exists in the natural and social world may be viewed in this way as an assemblage. Larger social and natural wholes emerge from the interaction of heterogeneous parts at a lower level of scale. This process of assemblage takes place repeatedly at a variety of scales, as larger entities emerge from arrays of smaller components: individual persons emerge from a range of sub-personal components, communities emerge from the interaction of individuals, institutions and networks emerge from the interaction of communities, cities emerge from these networks and institutions, and states emerge from networks of cities as well as other networks and institutions. In this way, assemblages become the component parts of other assemblages. The distinction between the natural and the social world is also relaxed: in assemblage theory components may be material or social – individual persons, for example, are a product of the organic material components that form their bodies, but also of the social components that form their subjectivity. Cities have a material infrastructure (a built environment, transport and utilities networks, defensive walls) but also social components (institutions of municipal governance, city charters, the projection of a unique historical identity). A striking example of an assemblage that unites material, social and technological components is drawn from Deleuze’s discussion of the nomad warrior (man-horsebow assemblage), which formed the component parts of the armies of the Khanates of the Mongolian steppe (although, of course, all military formations may be viewed as assemblages – see Bousquet ). Such armies were assemblages of assemblages: ‘this emergent whole [the nomad warrior] is itself composable into larger assemblages: a nomad army, an assemblage of mobile cavalry formations in which components can 1

Assemblages should not be viewed, however, as fundamental units of reality. Rather they are an instantiation of the more fundamental diagrams that describe a virtual space of possibilities – I will come back to this point later. 5

fight alone or coalesce into teams…(DeLanda 2010, 67)’. This kind of formulation is applicable to the great variety of social-technological-material hybrids that populate the historical record (including , of course, the many various historical forms of organizing armies (see Bousquet 2009)). All assemblages are characterized in DeLanda by the nature of their components, both material and expressive, and by the extent to which their historical identity is stable and enduring. Assemblages have both material components (the raw materials that are used in their construction) and expressive components, which consolidate the material components by providing the assemblage with a stable form and the means to express its identity: the shape or texture of a rock, the genes of an organism, the language and customs of a population (DeLanda 2010, 32-33). The capacities and capabilities of these components are then caught up in processes that work to either stabilize or destabilise the identity of the assemblage over time, by either increasing its degree of internal homogeneity and the sharpness of the assemblage’s boundaries, or by introducing more heterogeneity into the assemblage that may work to destabilise its identity. Such processes are crucial for the analysis of stability and transformation in all types of assemblage – whether it be the degree of homogeneity of a species, or of a nation-state. Even the most homogenized or territorialized (to take the Deleuzian terminology) assemblage may be open to processes of deterritorialisation: the reproductive isolation that contributes to the relatively stable identity of the human species, for example, is likely to be breached in the future by the development of genetic engineering. The far more ephemeral process that created homogenous sociocultural formations such as nation states may be much easier to destabilise. In this way, we can see that assemblages are historically specific – each has a date of birth (the birth of a person, the founding of a city, the evolutionary creation of a new species) and a date of death (the death of an individual, the extinction of a species, the destruction or abandonment of a city, the loss of territorial integrity of a state). There are a number of stances that help us to situate assemblage theory. These are; the focus on historical processes of assemblage, a realist orientation towards both actual and virtual entities, a commitment to anti-essentialism and the rejection of totalities of any kind, a commitment to open systems, and a desire to map causal mechanisms. I will consider each of these positions in turn, before moving on to attempts to find important substantive applications for an assemblage framework with international theory. Historical Processes of Production Assemblage theory is an inherently historical approach to the social and material world: it is concerned with the historical processes that generate the entities of the social world, that stabilize their identity over time, but also the processes that eventually lead to their demise. In this sense, one of its most promising avenues is the application to questions of important points of historical transition. Indeed, one of the key problems for social and international theories has often been their difficulty in dealing with transitions – witness the damage to the political realist paradigm done by its inability to account for the end of the Cold War. However, as noted, assemblage theory would seek also to redress the excessive focus on social construction that has characterized the discipline in the post-Cold War period. Its commitment is to

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hybridity – the various mixtures of material, cultural and linguistic components2 that go into forming the entities that populate the social world. DeLanda approvingly cites the critique of social constructivism offered by the philosopher Ian Hacking: that the social constructivists’ usage of the term ‘construction’ is purely metaphorical (2006, 3). By contrast, assemblage theory is concerned with the more literal sense of the term, ‘that of building or assembling from parts’. It seeks to chart and reconstruct the objective processes of assembly that construct the entities of the social world. The use of the term objective is indicative that assemblage theory subscribes to a realist scientific ontology. Mechanisms Scientific realism was originally formulated as a philosophical position on the relationship between reality and observer, arguing that reality is independent of human conceptions of it. Its application to questions of social reality emerges in the seminal work of Roy Bhaskhar (1975; 1989). However, when applied to social reality, realism must be qualified, because without the existence of minds, social entities would also cease to exist. The equivalent of mind-independence in DeLanda’s realism is ‘conception independence’: that social entities have a real and objective existence that is separate from and independent of the theories and models we use to describe them, which may be erroneous (2006, 1). As our knowledge of such entities becomes more sophisticated, and our theories and models develop, we come closer to apprehending their real dynamics. In assemblage theory, because social entities of different kinds are the result of objective processes of historical assemblage, its core methodological imperative is the discovery of the mechanisms that drive such processes. This makes it a form of what Nicholas Rescher (1996) has termed ‘process metaphysics’, and reveals its similarities with the philosopher Mario Bunge’s work on causal mechanisms. Only by accounting for the historical identity and properties and capabilities of all components of an assemblage can we gain an appreciation of exactly how an assemblage has been constructed and what its capacities for interaction might be. For Bunge, a mechanism is a ‘process (or sequence of states, or pathway) in a concrete system, natural or social’ (2004, 186). These may be mechanisms of exchange in marketplaces, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in communities, political mechanisms such as democracy, control or military aggression, or the movement of plate tectonics as a mechanism for creating geophysical features. Indeed, there are, for Bunge, no universal mechanisms: all mechanisms are specific to concrete systems that have resulted from historical processes. The stress that Bunge places here on ‘concrete systems’ is entirely compatible with an assemblage ontology, if we conceive of systems as open (as opposed to closed totalities). Again, as with assemblage theory, such systems may be material, social, or conceptual, and are held together with bonds of some kind. Mechanisms are frequently unobservable, and need to be conjectured and often identified by mathematical or scientific techniques. Anti-Reductionist The focus on mechanisms is a form of mid-range theorising, and a key contribution of assemblage theory is its ability to accommodate both analysis and synthesis, without 2

In DeLanda the role of language is accorded due importance, but languages hold the ontological status of an assemblage in their own right, constructed from the smaller components out of which they emerge, individual sounds, words, sentences (2006, 15).

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falling into the trap of micro-reductionism or macro-reductionsim - reducing explanations to the agency of individuals only, in the first instance, or to the causal power of social structure in the second. Social entities are always conceptualised in assemblage theory as being constructed from heterogeneous components: the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is symbiosis, a sympathy (Deleuze and Parnet 2002, 69 cited: DeLanda 2010, 10). What is important, in order to avoid essentialism, is that the identity of the component parts are not given by the whole that they are assembled into. This was the chief failure of earlier sociological approaches to social wholes that were derived from biology, using organismic metaphors. Although parts are synthesized into wholes via specific processes, they retain autonomy, allowing them to be removed from the current assemblage, becoming available for the construction of a different assemblage, where they would, again, retain their identity. It is this autonomy that allows analysis, breaking down an entity into its component parts. By contrast, in an organismic metaphor the removal of any particular part from a whole results in the destruction of both. We know now, as scientific knowledge has advanced, that living organisms can avoid this fate: the removal of an organ from a live individual and its replacement with another organ from a different individual, or the replacement of a defective body part with an artificial substitute, testify to this. What allows DeLanda to escape from the organismic mistakes of the past is the distinction between relations of interiority and relations of exteriority. In the first case, the case of a seamless totality, the component parts of the social whole are constituted by the relations they have to other parts of the entity. Being a part of this entity gives the component its identity. The shift to relations of exteriority views the properties of the component parts as distinct and independent from the whole, deriving from both latent and actualized capacities to act in concert with other components. From these interactions, emergent mechanisms are generated. One of the useful results of this way of thinking about parts and wholes is that we are left with a ‘flat ontology of individuals’. By this, DeLanda means that any assemblage, as a concrete historical individual, has the same ontological status as any other assemblage, regardless of size or scale. Given that IR has moved in the general direction of pluralist conceptions of the international system, this ontology can provide a valuable starting point for the analysis of various social actors, such as transnational corporations, institutional networks, epistemic communities, nationstates, cities, terrorist networks, which are often kept separate in theories founded on ontologies that make them incommensurable. The obvious example here is the statecentric systems level theoretical tradition, which has left scholars with difficulty in coming to terms with a world of non-state actors interacting with states. Assemblage theory’s flat ontology circumvents this difficulty. Such individuals always exist in populations of similar individuals created from the same historical processes of production. As DeLanada declares, ‘at any level of scale we are always dealing with populations of interacting entities (populations of persons, pluralities of communities, multiplicities of organisations, collectivities of urban centres, populations of states) and it is from the interactions within these populations that larger assemblages emerge as a statistical result, or as collective unintended consequences of intentional action’ (DeLanda 2010, 12). It is here that the intellectual

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history of assemblage theory begins to reveal itself. Deleuzian philosophy is heavily influenced by a number of scientific and mathematical developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, drawing upon the new mathematics of topology or abstract spaces, of set theory, and of population thinking drawn from advances in evolutionary biology. Structure and Agency The upward movement of processes of assemblage through the various wholes that emerge should not lead us to discount the causal power of what have previously been termed ‘structures’. Although assemblage theory offers a bottom-up perspective, it also contains an account of emergent top-down causality: the ability of entities at larger scales to react back on the parts that comprise them: ‘once a larger scale assemblage is in place, it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and resources for its components.’ (2010, 12). This bears similarity to the conception of structuration in Anthony Giddens (1984) or morphogenesis in Margaret Archer (1995), but here it is the concept of emergent capabilities that explains the structuring capacities of heterogeneous social entities. Sequence and temporality are important: most assemblages are born into a pre-existing configuration of other assemblages – so although theoretically we are asked to follow the upward movement of processes of assemblage, social reality is actually inherently non-linear. Assemblage theory is here rejecting two forms of reductionism that are prevalent in the social sciences – macro-reductionism and micro-reductionism – offering instead a via media that can accommodate the existence and agency of a variety of different social actors of various scales. The focus on processes and mechanisms at various spatial and temporal scales offers great promise for the opening up of new research agendas, and is naturally suited to a reinvigorated historical sociology of IR (Curtis and Koivisto 2011). DeLanda argues that the promise of an assemblage approach is that it can unify other sociological approaches that have also tried to avoid micro and macro-reductionism but have not related to each other: Erving Goffman’s (1967) work on conversations, Max Weber’s (1964) on institutions, Charles Tilly’s (2002) on social movements. ‘Assemblage theory can provide the framework in which the contributions of these and other authors (including the work of those holding reductionist stances) may be properly located and the connections between them fully elucidated…assemblages, being wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between their parts, can be used to model any of these intermediate entities’ (DeLanda 2006, 5). Assemblage theory links the different levels of social reality, providing a new outlet for the perennial problem of structure and agency that characterizes all social theory. However, it brings with it a cost: the different solutions to this problem must involve the careful discovery, tracing and mapping of historical mechanisms (32). The Actual and the Virtual Replacing the essentialism of much of the Western philosophical tradition is a new philosophy in which the identity and properties of components arise in interaction with other components (10). The properties of an entity are not given by any transcendental nature of the entity, but rather from its capabilities and capacities to generate various mechanisms, in interaction with other entities. Often only some of

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these capacities are exercised in a given assemblage, while others remain latent (although they could be activated by plugging the entity into a different assemblage). What this hints at is the role of the important distinction between the actual and the virtual in DeLanda’s work, without which a full appreciation of his assemblage ontology cannot be grasped. The historical evolution of an assemblage can provide an account of its actualization in the flow of time. But the many paths that that assemblage could have taken but did not, the many interactions that could have caused a particular capacity to be used but that never came to pass, remain virtual. For DeLanda the virtual is no less real than the actual. A complete account of the latent and unexercised capacities for interaction of an entity requires an analysis of a space of possibilities, a task for which DeLanda borrows resources from mathematics and computer simulation (10). Derived from topological mathematics, models of phase space became part of the emerging science of dynamical systems in the 1960s. Phase space is a way of understanding the entire set of possibilities for a particular dynamical system - it is a way to visualise the dynamics of a system. As a given system moves through time, 'any state of the system at a moment frozen in time [can be] represented as a point in phase space; all the information about its position or velocity [is] contained in the coordinates of that point. As the system change[s] in some way, the point move[s] to a new position in phase space' (Gleick 1987, 49-50). Such phase spaces may be simple, describing the degrees of freedom of open to a swinging pendulum, or incredibly complex, depending on the system they are mapping. Within a phase space, certain special points, or singularities, act as attractors for the trajectory of the system – such singularities are used to represent the long-term tendencies of a system. The analysis of such spaces has been formalized in the hard sciences via mathematical models and computer simulation, although the application of these resources to social analysis is currently very rudimentary (DeLanada 2006, 29). The closest approximation in IR is perhaps the attempts to produce agent based computer models of networks of individuals (see Pepinsky 2005 for a discussion), but these do not come close to capturing the full complexity of social reality, and have difficulty accommodating top-down causality. It is the structure of the space of possibilities for an assemblage that maps out all the sets of possible capabilities and capacities of that assemblage. The complete account of a space of possibilities constitutes a diagram of the assemblage in question. The diagram is a virtual entity: it is the structure of the space of possibilities for a given assemblage that provides the map of all the sets of capabilities of the component parts and their possible interactions. There are also phase or possibility spaces for the social world that have a virtual structure and include singularities that structure that space. DeLanda’s attempts to port these concepts into social theory rely on a suggested equivalence between singularities/attractors and ideal types. Drawn from the sociology of Max Weber, in DeLanda ideal types represent extreme forms of authority structures that, although unlikely to be actualized fully in their ideal form, are the invariant points in a space of possibilities to which social assemblages of different institutional forms are drawn. An analysis of hierarchical social orders drawing on Weber’s ideal type yields a possibility space with three ideal types of authority and legitimacy acting as

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attractors: one based on tradition or custom such as religion, one based upon bureaucratic rational-legal orders, and one based upon charismatic leadership. The virtual component of such spaces is outlined in the treatment of the example of primitive societies, where DeLanda argues that such societies must have ‘already contained in their associated possibility space a line of flight prefiguring a state apparatus…. Hence Deleuze and Guattari characterize primitive societies by their mechanisms of prevention and anticipation with which they guard off this possibility: burning all surplus food in ceremonial rituals, for example, to prevent it from becoming a reservoir of energy that a centralized authority can use to promote a division of labour, forcing primitives to cross the town-threshold and state-threshold’ (DeLanda 2010, 135). Our ability to map these social possibility spaces is currently limited – although the fact that it has been possible to reproduce mechanisms of emergence in computer simulations promises future advances (DeLanda 2011). In the physical sciences more progress has been made, but in the biological and the social sciences ‘we do not yet have the appropriate tools to investigate the structure of their more complex possibility spaces’ (2006, 29). This places limits for the time being on our ability to fully map components and their capacities. International Change Where does this novel social ontology take us in terms of substantive analysis of international systems and their transitions: what does it offer for analysis of the problem of international change? Social constructivists and some wings of the English School have sought to develop historically sensitive approaches to international systems, but the more mainstream works continue to reify states (or other entities, such as cities, empires, firms) as units (exemplars here are Buzan and Little 2000 and Wendt 1999), effectively shutting down analysis of much of their composition and capacities. An assemblage approach thus goes beyond the limitations of the empty signifier of ‘unit’, to demand a more comprehensive account of international order. Only by opening up these black boxes to an analysis of their mechanisms, components and capacities can we hope to grasp process of international change. In an assemblage approach, transformations must be accounted for not just at the level of the population of states, but at every linked scale – international system, states, institutions, networks, individual subjectivities, languages, as well as the operation of non-human systems such as ecology and climate. Assemblage theory complements attempts to develop a relational approach to international systems, perhaps most fully explored in Daniel Nexon’s The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe. Nexon (2009, 22) describes the study of international change as focused on ‘transformation in the structure of international relations. These transformations involve alterations in the pathways of and proclivities for collective mobilization in the international arena. This emphasis on structural change is not a problem for assemblage theory if we remember that top-down causation is an emergent property of assemblages at lower levels. Nexon finds the very dynamics of international transformation in early modern Europe to be related to the composite

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nature of the key political actors: ‘the composite character of early modern states accounts for why the spread of religious heterogeneity triggered a crisis in the European order’. We can however read this not as simply a feature of this period, but as a general characteristic of all political entities: they are composed of heterogeneous elements that can be reoriented to destabilise the current assemblage and compose another. Contemporary processes of ‘globalisation’ also offer a clear point of analysis for international change. Unhappy with the terms of a globalisation debate that verges between extremes, where either everything has changed, or all remains within the parameters of earlier social and material transformations, Sassen is drawn to assemblages in pursuit of a more sophisticated analytical language. Sassen is keen to trace the construction of capabilities as they are constituted in the various political, social and economic struggles that animate history. It is this focus on historical construction that moves her away from essentialist interpretations of the international system. And it is the analytic priority given to processes that offers a promising path to understanding moments of transition. Such moments need not entail the destruction of the order that is being transformed – what happens instead is that capabilities and capacities constructed as part of political projects that gave that order its character are reoriented towards other goals: ‘…a given capability can contribute to the formation of a very different relational system from the one it originates in’ (2006, 8). One of Sassen’s key terms here is ‘valence’ (the combinatorial possibilities or powers of an element (or capability)): the valence of particular capabilities arises out of the organizing logics within which they are inserted’. Sassen’s social ontology, then, also appears to be one of ‘components’ – parts that are arranged in particular historical formations, tied into patterns of interaction via specific logical bonds: ‘logics of organisation’. At certain historical tipping points, such components can be reoriented towards different objectives – effectively creating a new assemblage. This social ontology clearly bears many of the characteristics of DeLanda’s. Sassen operationalizes this social ontology to provide new insights into the historical emergence of the system of territorial national-states, and the forces of ‘globalisation’ that are argued to be currently recalibrating that system. Sassen argues that the globalisation debates have become caught in an ‘endogeneity trap’: globalisation being explained by the very characteristics of its processes and institutions (this is an argument that will be familiar to IR scholars from the work of Rosenberg (2000)). Her concern is the nature of historical change. Rather than view transformation as the wholesale replacement of one historical structure with another, Sassen sets herself the task of recovering how capacities and capabilities forged in one context can suddenly be reoriented towards very different goals and projects than those for which they were originally intended. She calls this phenomenon ‘jumping tracks’, and in Territory, Authority, Rights it accounts for how the ‘global scale’ is produced within the existing structures of states, utilizing the very capacities that nation-states had built up in the period of their own historical assemblage. These would include the building of international institutions, designed to maintain international order during the early part of the twentieth century, and later pressed into the project of stitching together a global market after the collapse of the Bretton Woods settlement in the 1970s. But they also include those processes that have traditionally been viewed as national in scale, such as the creation of state

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bureaucracies whose competences can be reoriented to global projects, via particular monetary and fiscal policies, for example, or by internalizing international norms, such as human rights law. As she declares: ‘the epochal transformation that we call globalization is taking place inside the national to a far larger extent than is usually recognized’ (2006:1). Here, the global and the national are not mutually exclusive, one emerging from the destruction of the other, but are co-constituted scales. It is the language of assemblages that offers the appropriate venue to theorise these developments. Sassen’s strategy for uncovering the key moments in which capabilities ‘jump tracks’, and destabilise the context in which they were constructed, is to take three components that she argues are trans-historical (always present in any form of historical society), territory, authority, and rights, and to show how different configurations have been assembled, disassembled and reassembled into new forms within the maelstrom of history. Two historical tipping points organize the work – two key moments where the organizing logics of one system are transmuted: the emergence of the national state from out of the European feudal system, and the subsequent emergence of the global scale from the chrysalis of the international system of nation-states. The debate on the formation of the state-system has, of course, a very extensive historiography, drawing in historians, historical sociologists, world-systems theorists, and has been one of the crucial sites in which the very nature of IR as a discipline has been contested (Wallerstein; Rosenberg; Hobson; Spruyt; Tesche; Nexon; ****). Sassen’s new theoretical framework offers some intriguing possibilities for understanding this period, even as it is developed primarily as a historical foundation for her analysis of contemporary globalisation. In particular, she traces the construction of a number of proto-capabilities in the medieval period that later get reoriented to form the basis of national states. These include: power as legitimate authority, monetization, centralized bureaucratic structures, urban territorialty, and new subjectivities. Sassen argues that the available pool of material, social, technological and conceptual resources from which national states could be built contained a number of key components. Any new order does not have to invent all of the capabilities it requires – it transforms existing capabilities. In the task of accounting for the emergence of territorial sovereign entities from out of the complex non-territorial, fluid, overlapping authorities of the feudal period, it is necessary to show how this new system was constructed from materials of the past. Although the feudal patchwork of jurisdictions, authorities and bonds was non-territorial, and had no clear concept of territory, Sassen recovers precursors for the new system of centralized and exclusive authority. The first of these she finds in forms of centralized and exclusive authority that did exist in the feudal period, such as the universalist claims of the Church and the Holy Roman Empire, each of which claimed superior and singular authority within their domain. She also stresses the role of amore patria, the love of ones country, in providing an imaginary account of homeland that later exclusive territorial political entities could draw upon. In addition to these ideational components, attention is given to earlier projects to construct centralized imperial bureaucracies to increase the control of Kings over their

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lands and revenues. Sassen traces such capabilities in a lineage from the central bureaucracy of the fifth century Merovingian Kings, through the territorially centralized imperial administration of Charlemagne in the ninth century, and on through the boundary fixing wars and tax system that came from the Capetian Kings of France in the thirteenth century (37-44), which she views as auguring the emergence of proto-states. From the Capetian Kings onwards, a groping towards an idea of exclusive sovereignty is discerned. The Captetian’s claimed an exclusive authority over lands and the goods within them, an authority legitimized by divine right, to be sure, but one that could later be re-oriented towards secular projects. The emergence of a notion of secular authority is seen as a direct response to the Church’s attempts to extend the remit of its authority. Parallel to the formation of these capabilities is the increasing monetization of the economy in Europe in this period, which worked in combination with the more centralized bureaucracy in France to increase the tax revenues available to the Kings. This was bound up with the reemergence of towns and urban life, which, it is argued, are crucial components in the eventual emergence of states. Sassen’s emphasis upon the intricate relationship between cities and states is a key feature of her work that distinguishes it from much IR scholarship, where it has been a neglected element. The importance of cities arises from a number of inter-related components: their economic generative power, their form of territoriality (the production of a specific kind of spatiality), and in the evolving subjectivity of the citizens that constructed them. The resurgence of urban life in Europe went hand in hand with a revival of trade, both long distance and local. Cities operated as strategic sites for the contestation of political and economic advantages (Weber 1958). In the period between the mideleventh century and the thirteenth century over 5000 cities were founded, each with its own system of urban law and governance, and its own charter. These experiments in what was effectively a new social contract can be read as proving ground for a new relationship between citizens and territory, a new sense of community, which could later be scaled up to the nation state level. As citizens negotiated their daily lives, they built up a system of institutions and procedures, such as courts and an emerging secular urban law, that placed them outside of the traditional command by fiat of monarchs or the reach of ecclesiastical authority. The historical emergence of the figure of the Burgher, around the eleventh century, is important here: such town and city dwellers, seeking to protect their autonomy and the roots of their wealth in trade and property, became key social and economic actors in the power dynamics of the medieval political economy. The increasing wealth that towns and cities derived from trade peaked the interest of monarchs, lords and church. The various bargains struck between these factions in this period, and their impact on the development of European history, are outlined in the work of Tilly (1990) on the dynamics of state formation. Over time, city dwellers came to develop a shared political and legal culture that stood out from that which had preceded it, even as it drew upon sources in Roman and Cannon law (Berman 1983). The final capability that emerges in this period and is later harnessed to projects of national state building is the formation of networked spatial relationships between different urban territories. Trade and commerce tied urban spaces together in a mesh of relations, which would later be crucial for the assembling of larger scaled national

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territories. These inter-city networks were not territory in the modern sense, but they did suggest a logic of exclusivity. An example here would be the Hanseatic League in Northern Europe, with its commercial and security privileges. The formation of cityleagues was partly a response to the defensive vulnerabilities that cities felt in an age of proto-states – a vulnerability that both Tilly (1990) and Spruyt (1994) have argued was a major factor in the eventual subjugation of cities to the new institutional form of the territorial state. But for Sassen it is not just the superior war-making capacity of the state to the city-state or city-league that counts – it is the ability of the state to reorient the capabilities that cities had begun to build up: their economic wealth, their novel political and legal cultures, and their ability to tie various spaces together (2006, 53-60). She posits ‘that cities and intercity mobilities constituted a larger networked territorial formation, one arising from the ground up, which eventually functioned as in-built capability for the emergent territorialities of national states’ (73). If these are the capabilities that went into making the system of territorial states, what were the forces that worked to stabilise that formation over time, and what are the forces that are today said to be destabiling it? The period between the sixteenth century and the late-twentieth century Sassen reads as one in which capabilities are oriented to projects of nation-state construction and the building of national capitalisms (74-140). Leaving discussion of this period aside, I want to focus here on Sassen’s analysis of the disassembling of these projects and the reorientation of the capacities that they had developed towards the production of a global system. Sassen argues that the ‘critical capabilities for entering the global age were put in place in the first two decades after World War II and into the 1970s’ (144). These capabilities were forged for the earlier project of forming and stabilizing the national assemblage, but in the crucial tipping point of the late-twentieth century they get realigned. The experience that policy makers had gained in building and running international regimes and international institutions, such as the Bretton Woods system (which was initially designed to protect and build national economies) enabled them to move more easily towards the creation and management of global scale entities. The very capacities and competencies acquired while running such instittuions were used by leading states to underpin a new regime of global governance, including the creation of global markets. In addition, some of the capacities built up in the bureaucratic administration of nation states have also been realigned by political projects that have sought to realign the relationship between states and economies via privatization. The locus of authority has been destabilised by deregulation, moving in important ways from the public to the private sphere, often via the privatization of formerly public authorities. New types of authoritative actors have emerged in areas requiring specialized technical knowledge (the role of credit ratings agencies; commercial arbitration in law; the assemblage and maintenance of digital networks) or specialist capabilities (the increasing salience of private security firms). Sassen argues that what we see here is the emergence of a new private institutional order, with which the bureaucratic apparatus of states must now interact in novel ways. Often the agenda is now set by private actors: ‘with economic globalisation it has become increasingly common for rules originated by private actors to be eventually enacted by governments’ (203). In this way, the transformative effects of ‘globalisation’ are created deep within the national assemblage. Sassen charts the effect of this reorientation, drawing out the

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decline in powers of legislatures relative to the executive arm of government, as well as the importance of novel ‘networked assemblages’ such as electronic financial markets or networks of global activists. From this analysis of the changing orientation of capabilities, and the emergence of new ones, we can see that it is not that the ‘state’ is declining in significance relative to the ‘global’, but nor is it business as usual. Rather, capacities and capabilities brought forth in the era of nation building are now being used in different ways and for different ends, meaning that the assemblage that we call the state is being transformed via a reorientation of its components. Conclusion As part of a wider reaction to the dominance of the linguistic turn, and the rise of the social constructivists, assemblage theory takes its place in the revived interest in materialism, a revival that promises new possibilities for understanding the history and evolution of social forms and dynamics. Assemblage thinking offers an ontology that is capable of accommodating the various hybrids of material, biological, social and technological components that historical sociological analysis must be concerned with. It moves away from reified general categories and ill-defined abstract concepts (state, market, society, capital, globalisation): abstractions that have made successful analysis of contemporary crises, and, as a result, effective political intervention, problematic. It also moves away from the anthropocentrism that characterizes the vast majority of historical and political writing, replacing it with a form of materialism that lays emphasis upon the creative capacities of matter and energy, and the processes that instantiate them in their great variety of forms, including those that emerge in social interaction Focusing upon historical process of assemblage shows us a world of becoming, process and relationships, a world of movement and change, a world of emerging structures with causal powers, yet one that does not fall prey to the errors of structuralism. It encompasses novelty, contingency and unpredictability, in addition to qualities of order, stability and endurance (Marcus and Saka 2006). Such a worldview is inherently historical – any understanding of the assemblages that populate the world requires an understanding of the historical processes and mechanisms that produced them. As DeLanda (2006, 4) declares ‘once historical processes are used to explain the synthesis of inorganic, organic and social assemblages, there is no need for essentialism to account for their enduring identities’. With the coherent philosophical position laid out by DeLanda with such care across multiple volumes, we have a clear and consistent starting point for the analysis of how historically unique entities are generated, how they evolve and how they die. This applies as much to individual states, the populations of states that form the macroassemblage that we call ‘international systems’, as to individual persons or to species. It is this historical sensitivity that makes assemblage thinking such a useful starting point for the analysis of both historical and contemporary transformation. In this essay I looked at the contribution that this style of thought can make to two periods of international change: the emergence of the modern state system, and the emergence of a ‘global’ scale of social assemblage. Sassen’s account of how the emergence of nation-states resulted from the reorientation of capabilities built up in earlier eras and

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for other purposes, and her similar analysis of how the contemporary transformation of existing capabilities are building new global assemblages and changing the orientation and nature of states, is perhaps the most detailed work of this kind to date. Although there are clearly incongruities between the works of these two, I have tried to show that they share many features of a common ontology. Sassen’s substantive analysis offers new avenues for international theory to examine the problem of international change, and, by extension, the dynamics of contemporary global politics. Assemblage theory also draws on advances in the natural sciences, and from critiques of scientism. Eschewing the closed totalities that postmodernists rightly battled against, assemblage theory is a theory of open systems and their interaction. This form of open systematism is crucial for an understanding international dynamics. As Bunge (2004, 191) has argued that ‘systematism is the approach adopted by anyone who endeavors to explain the formation, maintenance, repair, or dismantling of a concrete complex thing of any kind’. This is the style of thinking that the social constructivist turn made unfashionable. Certainly there are limits to how far an assemblage theory can take us at the present time, not least the underdevelopment of its methodological tools. As mentioned, in the social sciences we have limited methodological tools to fully capture the historical dynamics of complex systems – the analysis of spaces of possibilities, for example, is far more advanced in the physical sciences. However, in reorienting our ontologies towards open systems and assemblages, we open up a vista of analytical promise that may well be crucial for the future of the discipline. References Anderson, B., et al. (2012). "On Assemblage and Geography." Dialogues in Human Geography 2(2): 171-189. Archer, M. (1995). Realist social theory : the morphogenetic approach. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter : a political ecology of things. Durham, N.C., Duke University Press. Berman, H. J. (1983). Law and revolution, Cambridge. Bhaskar, R. (1975). A realist theory of science, Leeds: Leeds Books. Bhaskar, R. (1989). The possibility of naturalism : a philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. New York ; London, Harvester Wheatsheaf. Bousquet, A. and S. Curtis (2011). "Beyond Models and Metaphors: Complexity Theory, Systems Thinking and International Relations." Cambridge Review of International Studies 24(1): 43-62. Brown, C. (2007). "Situating Critical Realism." Millennium 35(2): 409-416. Bryant, L., et al. (2011). The speculative turn : continental materialism and realism. Prahran, Vic., re.press.

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