Assemblage theory has made a significant impact on the theoretical landscape of human geography over the past decade, providing the discipline with a “radically constructivist” account of social and cultural life that is no longer anchored to the process of human meaning-making. Despite this growing popularity, however, geographers have recently voiced concerns about the critical efficacy of contemporary assemblage approaches, which often rely on the application of scientific terms like emergence and complexity to social and cultural processes. This temptation to overemphasise the physics of assemblage is problematic, I argue, because it tends to obfuscate the concept’s political significance and leads to accusations of a lack of criticality. In this paper I revisit the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari with the aim of bringing the political implications of the assemblage concept into sharper focus. While more commonly associated with A thousand plateaus, I trace the conceptual genealogy of Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage concept through to their earlier collaboration Anti-Oedipus, where the two philosophers develop a novel framework for political theory based on a radically constructivist model of desire. In doing so, I show how Deleuze and Guattari's political commitment to re-think desire in machinic terms is what makes assemblage theory both a critique of capitalist subjectivity and a provocation to think the conditions of social and cultural life beyond the human.

中文翻译：

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欲望的建构主义：与德勒兹和加塔里一起将组装政治概念化

在过去的十年中，组合理论对人文地理学的理论景观产生了重大影响，为该学科提供了对社会和文化生活的“激进建构主义”描述，不再锚定于人类意义创造的过程。然而，尽管越来越受欢迎，但地理学家最近对当代组合方法的关键功效表示担忧，这些方法通常依赖于将出现和复杂性等科学术语应用于社会和文化过程。我认为，这种过分强调组合物理的诱惑是有问题的，因为它往往会混淆概念的政治意义，并导致指责缺乏批判性。在这篇论文中，我重新审视了德勒兹和加塔里的哲学，目的是让集合概念的政治含义更加清晰。虽然更常与一千个高原，我将德勒兹和加塔里的集合概念的概念谱系追溯到他们早期的合作反俄狄浦斯，两位哲学家在激进的建构主义欲望模型的基础上发展了一个新的政治理论框架。在这样做的过程中，我展示了德勒兹和加塔里对以机械术语重新思考欲望的政治承诺如何使组合理论成为对资本主义主体性的批判和对超越人类的社会和文化生活条件进行思考的挑衅。