Defining the USFG as an assemblage does not mean that it does not require government action

To characterise the mode of being of the assemblage, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two axes in it: material and expressive components, and processes that can be either stabilising (territorializing) or destabilising (deterritorializing). The material and expressive components can be roughly categorised as falling under the axis between “machinic assemblage of bodies” (affective materiality) and “collective assemblage of enunciation” (language, semiotics, “incorporeal transformations”).371 This can be schematised as follows: ASSEMBLAGE Material components (“states of bodies”) Territorializing processes Deterritorializing processes Expressive components (“incorporeal transformations”) An assemblage is, then, “an intermingling of bodies”, material and semiotic, which undergoes processes of strengthening or disassembling its current identity.372 An archetypal example of an assemblage would, thus, seem to be a social formation of some kind, such as a political party or an institution of state.373 These clearly consist of material conditions (workers, material assets, et cetera) and expressive components (rules and regulations, statements, symbolisations, et cetera) and they undergo phases of stabilisation and change. A forceful instance of this is the juridical system. It is composed of buildings, clerks, officials and judges, as well as semiotic components such as laws, conducts and practices. It effects corporeal transformations, producing prisoners and enclosing them in special quarters and, in addition, incorporeal transformations such as declaring people guilty or not guilty. Yet, despite the examples traversing the social field, it must be kept in mind that Deleuze and Guattari nominate every single thing as an assemblage. The world is constituted of affects: parts within parts, affecting one another. Phenomena-as-assemblages exist as “boxes” within boxes, or a set of Russian dolls, qualified according to spatio-temporal scale and perspective. There are components great and small, mountains and molecules, and likewise assemblages. I am an assemblage of myriads of parts: physico-chemical, biological, cultural, technical. The parts I consist of are assemblages, too, on their respective levels. The hands that I type this text with consist of formations of flesh, sinew, bones, nerves, arteries and so forth. They have an individual history as “my” hands, and a structural history of the assemblage of human hand evolving through generations of ancestors, as the hand is a deterritorialized paw. My fingertips, pressing the keys, are made of biological cells, which, in turn, consist of molecules which are aggregates of atoms. We can continue into the sub-atomic level and never encounter the foundational stratum of reality which would act as a strictly determining foundation for the “higher” levels.374 Likewise, there are many assemblages of which I am a part of. My family, my university department, my neighbourhood, my nationality, humankind, the whole animal kingdom, planetary organic matter, Earth, the stellar system, Milky Way, the local system of galaxies and so forth into massive scale cosmic structures. At any level of consideration we are dealing with populations, 375 not species, and with relations of parts to a (relative) whole. And, as mentioned above, there is also the question of emergence where different entities and attributes emerge not causally but statistically out of smaller-scale parts, without the larger-scale entities being reducible to their constitutive parts, as well as the wider assemblages affecting their components. As DeLanda phrases it, the world is composed of “nested” sets of individuals of different spatial and temporal scales.376