1847
"When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal." - Marx 1955 [1847]: 54
1852
"Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted." - Marx 1973 [1852]: 146 (via Balibar 2007 [1993]: 4, "Sartre, among others, considered [this statement] the central thesis of historical materialism")
1926
"So far as Dasein is at all, it has Being-with-one-another as its kind of Being. [163] ...
"By 'Others' we do not mean everyone else but me — those over against whom the 'I' stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself — those among whom one is too. ... By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. [154-5] ...
"Authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an existentiell modification of the 'they' — of the "they" as an essential existentiale. [168]" - Heidegger 2001 [1926]
"By 'Others' we do not mean everyone else but me — those over against whom the 'I' stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself — those among whom one is too. ... By reason of this with-like Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others. [154-5] ...
"Authentic Being-one's-Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the 'they'; it is rather an existentiell modification of the 'they' — of the "they" as an essential existentiale. [168]" - Heidegger 2001 [1926]
1951
"Gathering or assembly, by an ancient word of our language, is called 'thing.'" - Heidegger 2001 [1951]: 151
1961
"Marx actually took a firm position against a philosophical materialism which was current among many of the most progressive thinkers (especially natural scientists) of his time. This materialism claimed that 'the' substratum of all mental and spiritual phenomena was to be found in matter and material processes. ... Marx fought this type of mechanical, 'bourgeois' materialism 'the abstract materialism of natural science, that excludes history and its process,' [Marx 1971] and postulated instead what he called in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 'naturalism or humanism [which] is distinguished from both idealism and materialism, and at the same time constitutes their unifying truth.' [Marx 1982] In fact, Marx never used the terms 'historical materialism' or 'dialectic materialism'; he did speak of his own 'dialectical method' in contrast with that of Hegel and of its 'materialistic basis,' by which he simply referred to the fundamental conditions of human existence.
"This aspect of 'materialism,' Marx's 'materialist method,' which distinguishes his view from that of Hegel, involves the study of the real economic and social life of man and of the influence of man's actual way of life on this thinking and feeling." - Erich Fromm 1961: 8-9
"This aspect of 'materialism,' Marx's 'materialist method,' which distinguishes his view from that of Hegel, involves the study of the real economic and social life of man and of the influence of man's actual way of life on this thinking and feeling." - Erich Fromm 1961: 8-9
1968
"When [Theodor] Adorno criticized [Walter] Benjamin's 'wide-eyed presentation of actualities' (Briefe II, 793), he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do. Strongly influenced by surrealism, it was the 'attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were' (Briefe II, 685). [11] ...
"How remote these studies were from Marxism and dialectical materialism is confirmed by their central figure, the flâneur. It is to him, aimlessly strolling through the crowds in the big cities in studied contrast to their hurried, purposeful activity, that things reveal themselves in their secret meaning: 'The true picture of the past flits by' ('Philosophy of History'), and only the flâneur who idly strolls by receives the message. With great acumen Adorno has pointed to the static element in Benjamin: 'To understand Benjamin properly one must feel behind his every sentence the conversion of extreme agitation into something static, indeed, the static notion of movement itself' (Schriften I, xix). Naturally, nothing could be more 'undialectic' than this attitude in which the 'angel of history' (in the ninth of the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History') does not dialectically move forward into the future, but has his face 'turned toward the past.' ... For just as the flâneur, through the gestus of purposeless strolling, turns his back to the crowd even as he is propelled and swept by it, so the 'angel of history,' who looks at nothing but the expanse of ruins of the past, is blown backwards into the future by the storm of progress. That such thinking should ever have bothered with a consistent, dialectically sensible, rationally explainable process seems absurd. ...
"In his concern with directly, actually demonstrable concrete facts, with single events and occurrences whose 'significance' is manifest, Benjamin was not much interested in theories or 'ideas' which did not immediately assume the most precise outward shape imaginable. To this very complex but still highly realistic mode of thought the Marxian relationship between superstructure and substructure became, in a precise sense, a metaphorical one. [12-13] ...
"He had no trouble understanding the theory of the superstructure as the final doctrine of metaphorical thinking — precisely because without much ado and eschewing all 'mediations' he directly related the superstructure to the so-called 'material' substructure, which to him meant the totality of sensually experienced data. ...
"It seems plausible that Benjamin, whose spiritual existence had been formed and informed by Goethe, a poet and not a philosopher, and whose interest was almost exclusively aroused by poets and novelists, although he had studied philosophy, should have found it easier to communicate with poets than with theoreticians, whether of the dialectical or the metaphysical variety. [14] ...
"Adorno and [Gershom] Scholem blamed Brecht's 'disastrous influence' (Scholem) for Benjamin's clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics. [15]" - Arendt 2007 [1968]
"How remote these studies were from Marxism and dialectical materialism is confirmed by their central figure, the flâneur. It is to him, aimlessly strolling through the crowds in the big cities in studied contrast to their hurried, purposeful activity, that things reveal themselves in their secret meaning: 'The true picture of the past flits by' ('Philosophy of History'), and only the flâneur who idly strolls by receives the message. With great acumen Adorno has pointed to the static element in Benjamin: 'To understand Benjamin properly one must feel behind his every sentence the conversion of extreme agitation into something static, indeed, the static notion of movement itself' (Schriften I, xix). Naturally, nothing could be more 'undialectic' than this attitude in which the 'angel of history' (in the ninth of the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History') does not dialectically move forward into the future, but has his face 'turned toward the past.' ... For just as the flâneur, through the gestus of purposeless strolling, turns his back to the crowd even as he is propelled and swept by it, so the 'angel of history,' who looks at nothing but the expanse of ruins of the past, is blown backwards into the future by the storm of progress. That such thinking should ever have bothered with a consistent, dialectically sensible, rationally explainable process seems absurd. ...
"In his concern with directly, actually demonstrable concrete facts, with single events and occurrences whose 'significance' is manifest, Benjamin was not much interested in theories or 'ideas' which did not immediately assume the most precise outward shape imaginable. To this very complex but still highly realistic mode of thought the Marxian relationship between superstructure and substructure became, in a precise sense, a metaphorical one. [12-13] ...
"He had no trouble understanding the theory of the superstructure as the final doctrine of metaphorical thinking — precisely because without much ado and eschewing all 'mediations' he directly related the superstructure to the so-called 'material' substructure, which to him meant the totality of sensually experienced data. ...
"It seems plausible that Benjamin, whose spiritual existence had been formed and informed by Goethe, a poet and not a philosopher, and whose interest was almost exclusively aroused by poets and novelists, although he had studied philosophy, should have found it easier to communicate with poets than with theoreticians, whether of the dialectical or the metaphysical variety. [14] ...
"Adorno and [Gershom] Scholem blamed Brecht's 'disastrous influence' (Scholem) for Benjamin's clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics. [15]" - Arendt 2007 [1968]
1983
"A truly radical geography is merely one important perspective within the practice of a unified field of activity: historical materialism. ... Both Marxism and cultural geography commence at the same ontological point. In strict opposition to any form of determinism or linear causal explanation they insist on characterising the relationship between humans and nature as historical ... men and women make their history and themselves ..." - Cosgrove 1983: 1
1984
"In place of 'force' we may talk of 'weaknesses', 'entelechies', 'monads', or more simply 'actants.' [159] ... An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. [160] ... Nothing is by itself ordered or disordered, unique or multiple, homogeneous or heterogeneous, fluid or inert, human or inhuman, useful or useless. Never by itself, but always by others. [161] ... Some believe themselves to be the molds while others are the raw material, but this is a form of elitism. In order to enroll a force we must conspire with it. ... The words 'necessary' or 'contingent' gain meaning only when they are used in the heat of the moment to describe gradients of resistance — that is, reality. ... Circumstances determine, for a time, the relative importance of whatever it is that makes them up. [161] ... Nothing is, by itself, the same as or different from anything else. That is, there are no equivalents, only translations. In other words, everything happens only once, and at one place. If there are identities between actants, this is because they have been constructed at great expense. If there are equivalences, this is because they have been built out of bits and pieces with much toil and sweat, and because they are maintained by force. If there are exchanges, these are always unequal and cost a fortune both to establish and to maintain. ... [T]he best that can be done between actants is to translate the one into the other. [162] ... 'Nothing can be reduced to anything else, nothing can be deduced from anything else, everything may be allied to everything else.'" [163] - Latour 1988
1986
"Is not the force that comes from outside a certain idea of Life, a certain vitalism, in which Foucault's thought culminates? Is not life this capacity to resist force?" - Deleuze 1988: 93
1991
1991
"[T]he modern critique did not simply turn to Nature in order to destroy human prejudices. It soon began to move in the other direction, turning to the newly founded social sciences in order to destroy the excesses of naturalization. This was the second Enlightenment, that of the nineteenth century. This time, precise knowledge of society and its laws made it possible to criticize not only the biases of ordinary obscurantism but also the new biases created by the natural sciences. ... [A] succession of radical revolutions created an obscure 'yesteryear' that was soon to be dissipated by the luminous dawn of the social sciences. The traps of naturalization and scientific ideology were finally dispelled. No one who has not waited for that dawn and thrilled to its promises is modern.
The invincible moderns even found themselves able to combine the two critical moves by using the natural sciences to debunk the false pretensions of power and using the certainties of the human sciences to uncover the false pretensions of the natural sciences, and of scientism. Total knowledge was finally within reach. If it seemed impossible, for so long, to get past Marxism, this was because Marxism interwove the two most powerful resources ever developed for the modern critique, and bound them together for all time (Althusser, 1992) . Marxism made it possible to retain the portion of truth belonging to the natural and social sciences even while it carefully eliminated their condemned portion, their ideology. Marxism realized — and finished off, as was soon to become clear — all the hopes of the first Enlightenment, along with all those of the second. The first distinction between material causality and the illusions of obscurantism, like the second distinction between science and ideology, still remain the two principal sources of modern indignation today, even though our contemporaries can no longer close off discussion in Marxist fashion, and even though their critical capital has now been disseminated into the hands of millions of small shareholders. Anyone who has never felt this dual power vibrate within, anyone who has never been obsessed by the distinction between rationality and obscurantism, between false ideology and true science, has never been modern.
Solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature's laws, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations. Solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, express indignation at and denounce irrational beliefs, the biases of ideologies, and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom. The exclusive transcendence of a Nature that is our doing, and the exclusive immanence of a Society that we create through and through, would nevertheless paralyze the moderns, who would appear too impotent in the face of things and too powerful within society. What an enormous advantage to be able to reverse the principles without even the appearance of contradiction! In spite of its transcendence, Nature remains mobilizable, humanizable, socializable. Every day, laboratories, collections, centres of calculation and of profit, research bureaus and scientific institutions blend it with the multiple destinies of social groups. Conversely, even though we construct Society through and through, it lasts, it surpasses us, it dominates us, it has its own laws, it is as transcendent as Nature. For every day, laboratories, collections, centres of calculation and of profit, research bureaus and scientific institutions stake out the limits to the freedom of social groups, and transform human relations into durable objects that no one has made. The critical power of the moderns lies in this double language: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake their society, even as they render its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute. - Latour 1993 [1991]: 36-7
The invincible moderns even found themselves able to combine the two critical moves by using the natural sciences to debunk the false pretensions of power and using the certainties of the human sciences to uncover the false pretensions of the natural sciences, and of scientism. Total knowledge was finally within reach. If it seemed impossible, for so long, to get past Marxism, this was because Marxism interwove the two most powerful resources ever developed for the modern critique, and bound them together for all time (Althusser, 1992) . Marxism made it possible to retain the portion of truth belonging to the natural and social sciences even while it carefully eliminated their condemned portion, their ideology. Marxism realized — and finished off, as was soon to become clear — all the hopes of the first Enlightenment, along with all those of the second. The first distinction between material causality and the illusions of obscurantism, like the second distinction between science and ideology, still remain the two principal sources of modern indignation today, even though our contemporaries can no longer close off discussion in Marxist fashion, and even though their critical capital has now been disseminated into the hands of millions of small shareholders. Anyone who has never felt this dual power vibrate within, anyone who has never been obsessed by the distinction between rationality and obscurantism, between false ideology and true science, has never been modern.
Solidly grounded in the transcendental certainty of nature's laws, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, denounce and express indignation at irrational beliefs and unjustified dominations. Solidly grounded in the certainty that humans make their own destiny, the modern man or woman can criticize and unveil, express indignation at and denounce irrational beliefs, the biases of ideologies, and the unjustified domination of the experts who claim to have staked out the limits of action and freedom. The exclusive transcendence of a Nature that is our doing, and the exclusive immanence of a Society that we create through and through, would nevertheless paralyze the moderns, who would appear too impotent in the face of things and too powerful within society. What an enormous advantage to be able to reverse the principles without even the appearance of contradiction! In spite of its transcendence, Nature remains mobilizable, humanizable, socializable. Every day, laboratories, collections, centres of calculation and of profit, research bureaus and scientific institutions blend it with the multiple destinies of social groups. Conversely, even though we construct Society through and through, it lasts, it surpasses us, it dominates us, it has its own laws, it is as transcendent as Nature. For every day, laboratories, collections, centres of calculation and of profit, research bureaus and scientific institutions stake out the limits to the freedom of social groups, and transform human relations into durable objects that no one has made. The critical power of the moderns lies in this double language: they can mobilize Nature at the heart of social relationships, even as they leave Nature infinitely remote from human beings; they are free to make and unmake their society, even as they render its laws ineluctable, necessary and absolute. - Latour 1993 [1991]: 36-7
1992
"Whatever that mysterious organizing principle called 'life' may be, its immediate source is clearly the Ecosphere. Ecology demonstrates that organisms and their earthly matrices are symbiotic and inseparable, differentiated only by our cheating sense of sight. A creative animating process, life is an expression of the blue planet and its 4.6 billion years of evolution. The biological fallacy — equating organisms with life — is the result of a faulty inside-the-system view. ... The idea that vitality characterizes the Ecosphere, rather than just its organic parts, illuminates many bright ideas that the lack of reasonable context has dulled — Gregory Bateson's universal pattern that connects all things, Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields that guide organic development — because the Ecosphere is an organizing entity. It is not a superorganism; it is supraorganic: a higher level of organization than plants and animals, including people. The lively Ecosphere gives the lie to those who see the world's reality as little more than a competitive arena, for without compliant cooperation among its multitudinous parts the diversifying creativity of the planet could not have evolved nor could its overall homeostasis continue." - Rowe 1992: 394
1999
"If the old Constitution required a constant classification of the provisional results of history in the two opposite compartments of ontology or politics, the same is not true of the new Constitution. [From the glossary. p. 239: "Constitution: Term borrowed from law and political science, used here in a broader metaphysical sense, since it refers to the division of beings into humans and nonhumans, objects and subjects, and to the type of power and ability to speak, mandate, and will that they receive. Unlike the term 'culture,' 'Constitution' refers to things as well as to persons; unlike the term 'structure,' it points to the willful, explicit, spelled-out character of this apportionment. ... I set the 'old' modern Constitution in opposition to the 'new' Constitution of political ecology ..."] ... Nature changed metaphysics without anyone's ever understanding what sleight of hand brought this about, since it was supposed to remain, as the name indicates, anterior to any metaphysics. The same is not true of the new Constitution, which has precisely the goal of following in detail the intermediary degrees between what is and what ought to be, registering all the successive stages of what I have called an experimental metaphysics*. [* From the glossary, p. 242: "I call experimental metaphysics the search for what makes up the common world, and I reserve the deliberately paradoxical expression 'metaphysics of nature' for the traditional solution that gave nature a political role."] The old system allowed shortcuts and acceleration, but it did not understand dynamics, whereas ours, which aims at slowing things down and fosters a great respect for procedures, does allow an understanding of movement and process." - Latour 2004 [1999]: 123
2000
"A thoroughgoing ecological analysis requires a standpoint that is both materialist and dialectical. As opposed to a spiritualistic, vitalistic view of the natural world which tends to see it as conforming to some teleological purpose, a materialist sees evolution as an open-ended process of natural history, governed by contingency, but open to rational explanation. A materialist viewpoint that is also dialectical in nature (that is, a non mechanistic materialism) sees this as a process of transmutation of forms in a context of interrelatedness that excludes all absolute distinctions. ... A dialectical approach forces us to recognize that organisms in general do not simply adapt to their environment; they also affect that environment in various ways by affecting change in it. The relationship is therefor reciprocal." - Foster 2000: 15-6, via Swyngedouw 2006: 25
2001
"Politics is inseparable from ontology. Every ontology is political and every politics is itself an ontology. The reciprocal relation between ontology and politics can be identified as the question of their 'parallelism'. This parallelism of the ontological and the political is first to be found in Spinoza's thought. Spinoza can only write an ethics and a politics on the basis of his analysis of substance. In this analysis the thesis of 'parallelism' occupies a central position such that his theory of the univocity of being itself rests on this principle. This project of the affirmation of pure immanence is rehabilitated within contemporary thought by Deleuze-Guattari in their own philosophy as a form of radical materialism. Appeals to transcendence are nothing but vestiges of theological reasoning. I will refer to this form of philosophy, guided by the principle of 'parallelism', as ontological materialism. This thought does not stand outside classical ontology but is an offshoot of the ontological tradition itself. Insofar as it belongs to this tradition, it manifests certain specific traits: every materialist ontology denies any pre-constituted structure of being or any teleological order of existence and instead unfolds within a strictly immanent discourse in which only a constitutive conception of practice can serve as foundation. Underlying it is the philosophical insight that a properly thought-out politics requires an ontology. Without ontology politics is merely ideology." - Boyer 2001: 174-5
2002
"[According to David Harvey (1996: 49, 140)] the social and the natural, the local and the global are internally related as particular 'moments' within processes that dissolve ontological divides." - Castree 2002: 128
2003
"Continental philosophy is riven by great divide. One tradition, whose foremost representative is Jürgen Habermas, seeks to complete the unfinished project of modernity, based on the concept of reason that it has enshrined. The other tradition, among whose foremost representatives are Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, wants — according to Habermas himself — "to advance Nietzsche's program of a critique of reason," in the case of Heidegger through a destruction of metaphysics, in the case of Foucault through а destruction of historiography." - Milchman and Rosenberg 2003: 1
2003
"[F]or Foucault, like Heidegger, the key is savoir, or ontological knowledge. What is important is that for Foucault this ontological investigation is historical — it thereby refuses to set universal conditions — something that Heidegger only does in his later works." - Elden 2003: 197
2004
"In later works, beginning from around the mid-1930s, Heidegger starts to redress the balance and to treat questions of spatiality as equally important to those of temporality. The principal thrust of his argument is that space, like time, has been understood in a narrow, calculative, mathematical sense, which is divorced from our experience of space in our everyday dealings with the world. In the case of space, Descartes' understanding of res extensa is the central ontological break. Descartes' distinction between res cogitans and res extensa means that the fundamental ontological determination of substance, material being, is that it is extended in three dimensions. ... Heidegger takes issue with such a reductive analysis. Instead, he suggests that we deal with the world as a matter of concern, acting with and reacting to objects within it in a lived, experiential way, instead of abstracting from them in a Cartesian grid of coordinates. ... Technology, taking the world as a substance which can be ordered, planned, and worked upon — instead of worked with — is a direct consequence of Cartesian metaphysics, and is the condition of possibility for modern science, mechanised forms of agriculture, the holocaust, nuclear weapons and other modern forms of control. Heidegger’s critique of Nazism, such that it is, is principally grounded upon it being a continuation of, instead of a challenge to, this metaphysical understanding of the world (see Heidegger 1977; Elden 2003)." - Elden 2004a: 92-3 (see also Elden 2004b: 188)
2004
"The molecular strategies of capital as mobilised by a myriad of atomistic actors produce rhizomatic geographical mappings that consist of complex combinations and layers of nodes and linkages, which are interconnected in proliferating networks and flows of money, information, commodities and people. The flows that shape and define these networks are of course local at every moment (Latour 1993)." - Swyngedouw 2004: 31
2005
"If hierarchies vanish today in our academic theories, then so too vanish most of the targets of our political critique. One can't fight what one can't see or identify. - Smith 2005: 897
2005
"Time here [in the Beiträge, Heidegger 1989] is the possible truth for being (and the nonmetaphysical beyng at that), but it must be thought in relation to space in this regard, unlike in Being and Time when temporality was the guiding clue for the question of being ... . Indeed, Heidegger's suggestion is more than time-space needing to be thought together, instead of apart. Time-space is not simply the coupling of time and space, but the very notion that allows each to be thought distinctly. Zeit-Raum is not the same as Zeitraum — that is, a span of time, a notion that betrays a measured, mathematical sense. Thinking the idea of time (the Wesen, the essence of time), forces us — through the notion of the Da, the there or the here of being, being-the-there — to come to terms with space. The reverse is also the case. ... Time-space takes on a particularly privileged role in the Beiträge, as 'originally the site for the moment of propriation [Augenblicks-Stätte des Ereignisses]' (1989, page 30, see also page 235). ... [T]his is the way to understand the notion of Da-sein, as 'the site for the moment of the grounding of the truth of beyng' (page 323, see also pages 374-375). [820-1] ...
"It should of course be mentioned that we cannot simply try to return to the origin, a way of thinking before the metaphysical fall. We cannot simply turn back metaphysics. Rather, we need to think historically about the problem, and retrace the 'descent out of the history [die Herkunft aus der Geschichte]' (page 372) ... [822]" - Elden 2005a
"It should of course be mentioned that we cannot simply try to return to the origin, a way of thinking before the metaphysical fall. We cannot simply turn back metaphysics. Rather, we need to think historically about the problem, and retrace the 'descent out of the history [die Herkunft aus der Geschichte]' (page 372) ... [822]" - Elden 2005a
2006
"The English word assemblage is gaining currency in the humanities and social sciences as a concept of knowledge, but its uses remain disparate and sometimes imprecise. Two factors contribute to the situation. First, the concept is normally understood to be derived from the French word agencement, as used in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (who, furthermore, do not use the French word assemblage in this way). Tracing the concept in its philosophical sense back to their texts, one discovers that it cannot easily be understood except in connection with the development of a complex of such concepts. Agencement implies specific connections with the other concepts. It is, in fact, the arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense. For Deleuze and Guattari, a philosophical concept never operates in isolation but comes to its sense in connection with other senses in specific yet creative and often unpredictable ways. This in connection with already provides something of the sense of agencement, if one accepts that a concept arises in philosophy as the connection between a state of affairs and the statements we can make about it. Agencement designates the priority of neither the state of affairs nor the statement but of their connection, which implies the production of a sense that exceeds them and of which, transformed, they now form parts.
"Secondly, the translation of agencement by assemblage can give rise to connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate elements of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it. One of the earliest attempts to translate Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term agencement appears in the first published translation, by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, of the article 'Rhizome'. The English term they use, assemblage, is retained in Brian Massumi’s later English version, when 'Rhizome' appears as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. Since then many (though by no means all) translators and commentators have agreed, in a loose consensus, to keep to this early translation of agencement by assemblage, while acknowledging that the translation is not really a good approximation." - Phillips 2006: 108
"Secondly, the translation of agencement by assemblage can give rise to connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate elements of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it. One of the earliest attempts to translate Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term agencement appears in the first published translation, by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, of the article 'Rhizome'. The English term they use, assemblage, is retained in Brian Massumi’s later English version, when 'Rhizome' appears as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. Since then many (though by no means all) translators and commentators have agreed, in a loose consensus, to keep to this early translation of agencement by assemblage, while acknowledging that the translation is not really a good approximation." - Phillips 2006: 108
2006
"Metabolic circulation, then, is the socially mediated process of environmental, including technological, transformation and trans-configuration, through which all manner of “agents” are mobilized, attached, collectivized, and networked. The heterogeneous assemblages that emerge, as moments in the accelerating and intensifying circuitry of metabolic vehicles, are central to a historical-geographical materialist ontology ..." - Heynen et al. 2006: 32, see also 23-4
2006
"For Marx, it is not a question of understanding how nature and society interact; rather the point is that nature is incomprehensible except as mediated by social labour, and consequently there has to be a rethinking that posits labour as central to nature. This flies directly in the face of either an external notion of nature, which excludes labour, or a universalist notion which broadly refuses labour as the nexus of society and nature.
"The notion of metabolism sets up the circulation of matter, value and representations as the vortex of social nature. But, as the original German term, 'Stoffwechsel', better suggests, this is not simply a repetitive process of circulation through already established pathways. Habitual circulation there certainly is, but no sense of long-term or even necessarily short-term equilibrium. Rather 'Stoffwechsel' expresses a sense of creativity in much the same way that Benjamin talks about mimesis: the metabolism of nature is always already a production of nature in which neither society nor nature can be stabilized with the fixity implied by their ideological separation. Society is forged in the crucible of nature’s metabolism, for sure, but nature is equally the amalgam of simmering social change." - Smith 2006: xiv
"The notion of metabolism sets up the circulation of matter, value and representations as the vortex of social nature. But, as the original German term, 'Stoffwechsel', better suggests, this is not simply a repetitive process of circulation through already established pathways. Habitual circulation there certainly is, but no sense of long-term or even necessarily short-term equilibrium. Rather 'Stoffwechsel' expresses a sense of creativity in much the same way that Benjamin talks about mimesis: the metabolism of nature is always already a production of nature in which neither society nor nature can be stabilized with the fixity implied by their ideological separation. Society is forged in the crucible of nature’s metabolism, for sure, but nature is equally the amalgam of simmering social change." - Smith 2006: xiv
2007
"Twentieth century biology (especially microbiology) was structure oriented, reductionist, and temporal in its view of life. The biology of today must be evolutionary, holistic, and process oriented.
"We meet 21st century biology right now in terms of two grand problems: 1) the evolution of the cell; and 2) an understanding of the global environment. While these two may seem quite unrelated, the one as fundamental as biology now gets, the other essentially applied (and of pressing concern), this is not so. At base both represent problems in biological organization. And the two will become closely joined when biology comes to study the early stages in the evolution of the cell, when horizontal gene transfer dominated the evolutionary dynamic, leading to an evolution that was essentially communal ..." - Woese 2007: 15
"We meet 21st century biology right now in terms of two grand problems: 1) the evolution of the cell; and 2) an understanding of the global environment. While these two may seem quite unrelated, the one as fundamental as biology now gets, the other essentially applied (and of pressing concern), this is not so. At base both represent problems in biological organization. And the two will become closely joined when biology comes to study the early stages in the evolution of the cell, when horizontal gene transfer dominated the evolutionary dynamic, leading to an evolution that was essentially communal ..." - Woese 2007: 15
2007
"For a short while, materialism seemed to be a foolproof appeal to a type of agency and a set of entities and forces that allowed analysts to explain, dismiss, or see through other types of agencies. Typically, for instance, it was possible to explain conceptual superstructures by means of material infrastructures. Thus an appeal to a sound, tablethumping materialism seemed an ideal way to shatter the pretensions of those who tried to hide their brutal interests behind notions like morality, culture, religion, politics, or art. But that’s precisely the point: it was an ideal and not a material way of making a point. Materialism, in the short period in which it could be used as a discussion-closing trope, implied what now appears in retrospect as a rather idealist definition of matter and its various agencies. I am not enough of a historian to put dates on this short period where the materialistic explanans had its greatest force, but it might not be totally off the mark to say that it persisted from the era of post-Marxism (Marx’s own definition of material explanation being infinitely more subtle than what his successors made of it) all the way to the end-of-the-century sociobiologists (who tried without much success to insert their own simplistic mechanisms into the glorious lineage of Darwin)." - Latour 2007: 135
2008
"The ontologisation of theory in human geography marks a distinctive inflection of a broad array of post-foundationalist philosophies. Post-foundational philosophies hold that the world of human affairs is not only held together by relationships of knowledge, and where it is, knowledge is not a matter of certainty ... . They promise to deflate approaches that prioritise the epistemological aspects of action, and which assume that non-cognitive grounds of action and belief are suspect. The resurgent theme of affect in the social sciences and the humanities is illustrative of this post-foundational deflation of overly cognitivist models of action. ...
"Thrift's work [2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007] has explicitly set out to invent a field of 'nonrepresentational theory' in which affect is ascribed considerable significance as both an object of analysis and as a theoretical orientation. ... Affect is presented as an ontological layer of embodied existence, delimited by reference to the purely formal relationship of the capacity to be affected and to affect. In this presentation, affect is doubly located: in the relational in-between of fields of interaction; and layered below the level of minded, intentional consciousness. This vocabulary of the 'layering' of thinking, feeling and judgement is fundamental to the political resonances claimed on behalf of ontologies of affect. [187-8] ...
"This is ambivalence between claiming that any and all subjective apprehension of the self relies on a background of affective dispositions, and a politically inflected claim that the manipulation of these background conditions in particular situations carries with it a normatively charged threat of harm or injustice, in the form of involuntary submission to the will of others. What remains unexplored is how and when one might tell the difference between these two aspects of life, or even what reconfigured understanding of criteria might help in this task. [198]" - Barnett 2008
"Thrift's work [2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007] has explicitly set out to invent a field of 'nonrepresentational theory' in which affect is ascribed considerable significance as both an object of analysis and as a theoretical orientation. ... Affect is presented as an ontological layer of embodied existence, delimited by reference to the purely formal relationship of the capacity to be affected and to affect. In this presentation, affect is doubly located: in the relational in-between of fields of interaction; and layered below the level of minded, intentional consciousness. This vocabulary of the 'layering' of thinking, feeling and judgement is fundamental to the political resonances claimed on behalf of ontologies of affect. [187-8] ...
"This is ambivalence between claiming that any and all subjective apprehension of the self relies on a background of affective dispositions, and a politically inflected claim that the manipulation of these background conditions in particular situations carries with it a normatively charged threat of harm or injustice, in the form of involuntary submission to the will of others. What remains unexplored is how and when one might tell the difference between these two aspects of life, or even what reconfigured understanding of criteria might help in this task. [198]" - Barnett 2008
2008
"[M]aterialism hardly represents an advance over idealism if it is only able to account for meaning by postulating an originary principle of intelligibility in matter. Thus it is not only meaning's emergence from meaninglessness that must be accounted for; it is also the emergence of the intelligible from the sensible. The first is an ontological problem about what meaning is; the second is an epistemological problem about how intelligibility is possible in a world whose structure does not depend upon thought. It is imperative not to elide these two, on pain of mystifying both the nature of meaning and that of thought." - Brassier 2008: 2
2009
"Latour grants no initial principle of endurance over time, just as he accepts no force of temporal flux over and above specific actors themselves. Latour is no philosopher of becoming, no 'process philosopher' except in the trivial sense that he tries to account for changes in the world, as every thinker must. As we have seen, Latour goes so far as to claim that time is produced by the labour of actors, and that only such actors create an asymmetry of before and after. For exactly the same reason, the links between one instant and another must also be produced through the labour of actants, for they are not pre-given in some sort of internal drive or conatus in the heart of things that would free them from the prison of single instants. After all, the utter concreteness of actants actually requires that they be incarcerated in an instant. More occasionalist than Bergsonian, Latour's actors have no choice but to occupy punctiform cinematic frames." - Harmon 2009: 105
2010
"Spinoza stands as a touchstone for me in this book, even though he himself was not quite a materialist. I invoke his idea of conative bodies that strive to enhance their power of activity by forming alliances with other bodies, and I share his faith that everything is made of the same substance. Spinoza rejected the idea that man 'disturbs rather than follows Nature's order,' and promises instead to 'consider human actions and appetites just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes, or bodies.' [x] ...
"I pursue a materialism in the tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze more than Hegel-Marx-Auorno. It is important to follow the trail of human power to expose social hegemonies (as historical materialists do). But my contention is that there is also public value in following the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power, the material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts. [xiii] ...
"Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain, what registers on it is a set of material constraints on or a context for human action. Dogged resistance to anthropocentrism is perhaps the main difference between the vital materialism I pursue and this kind of historical materialism. I will emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts) in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. [xvi]" - Bennett 2010
"I pursue a materialism in the tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze more than Hegel-Marx-Auorno. It is important to follow the trail of human power to expose social hegemonies (as historical materialists do). But my contention is that there is also public value in following the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power, the material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts. [xiii] ...
"Because politics is itself often construed as an exclusively human domain, what registers on it is a set of material constraints on or a context for human action. Dogged resistance to anthropocentrism is perhaps the main difference between the vital materialism I pursue and this kind of historical materialism. I will emphasize, even overemphasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces (operating in nature, in the human body, and in human artifacts) in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. [xvi]" - Bennett 2010
2010
"Bennett [2010] uses materialism in a way that could easily apply both to object-oriented philosophy and to the closely related writings of Latour. She takes materialism to be a suitable name for any philosophy that dissolves the usual strict opposition between free human subjects and inert material slabs. Naturally, I am all in favor of this dissolution; I simply doubt that 'materialism' is the best name for it.
"In one sense, terminology is always somewhat arbitrary, and we should be free to coin and use it as we wish. But as a general rule, it seems best to avoid confusion by grounding terms in their tradition of historical use. What links Bennett's position most closely with Latour's and my own is that she opposes reduction as a general philosophical method: music and governments cannot be reduced to carbon, oxygen, metal, or some deeper alternative structure. Instead, all human and nonhuman things of every scale are placed on the same footing. By contrast with this position, materialism throughout the ages has generally been reductive, and its victim of choice has been medium-sized everyday objects. One form of materialism tears these objects down to reveal their deeper physical foundations, as if mocking them from below. Another rejects the reality of these objects for precisely the opposite reason, denying them any depth beneath the way they are given to us, as if jeering from above. Given the apparent opposition of these two strategies, it is remarkable that both are often denoted with the term 'materialism'. Although I used to wonder why the second was called materialism at all, I now think there is good reason to accept this dual usage. For the two positions share much in common, are beginning to form a strong unspoken alliance, and are even on the brink of dominating continental philosophy in our time." - Harmon 2010: 774
"In one sense, terminology is always somewhat arbitrary, and we should be free to coin and use it as we wish. But as a general rule, it seems best to avoid confusion by grounding terms in their tradition of historical use. What links Bennett's position most closely with Latour's and my own is that she opposes reduction as a general philosophical method: music and governments cannot be reduced to carbon, oxygen, metal, or some deeper alternative structure. Instead, all human and nonhuman things of every scale are placed on the same footing. By contrast with this position, materialism throughout the ages has generally been reductive, and its victim of choice has been medium-sized everyday objects. One form of materialism tears these objects down to reveal their deeper physical foundations, as if mocking them from below. Another rejects the reality of these objects for precisely the opposite reason, denying them any depth beneath the way they are given to us, as if jeering from above. Given the apparent opposition of these two strategies, it is remarkable that both are often denoted with the term 'materialism'. Although I used to wonder why the second was called materialism at all, I now think there is good reason to accept this dual usage. For the two positions share much in common, are beginning to form a strong unspoken alliance, and are even on the brink of dominating continental philosophy in our time." - Harmon 2010: 774
2010
"Staunchly opposed to essentialism of any sort, ANT sees the world as immanent, contingent, absolutely heterogeneous, and as ontologically flat, disclosing no other levels, final explanations or hidden core. [584] ...
"[W]hereas Marcuse-style critical urban theory expressly engages with politics, ANT pointedly sticks to an apolitical, ironic stance. ... [O]ntological boundary-pushing is grafted onto epistemological boundary-policing. It verges towards something like a postsocial, reconstituted positivism. ... [T]he very category of 'radical' — of getting to the root of things — is completely alien to the actor-network worldview. ANT’s supposed radicality undermines itself. Its version of relationality, far from being radical, is so broad and undifferentiated as to blur the many diverse ways that things interact, rather than bringing relational difference into sharper focus. Unable to detect exclusion, negation, or antagonism, ANT, unaided by other sociological sensitivities, has a hard time dealing with some of the most obvious and horrific aspects of contemporary urban life. While it registers that networks decay and break down, this is an insufficient way to think conflict and inequality. As a consequence, most actor-network studies of cities tend to eschew analyzing exclusion, domination, elitism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation, segregation or any other variety of ubiquitous, quotidian urban violence the denial of which renders any urban studies paradigm useless at best. [586-7]" - Madden 2010
"[W]hereas Marcuse-style critical urban theory expressly engages with politics, ANT pointedly sticks to an apolitical, ironic stance. ... [O]ntological boundary-pushing is grafted onto epistemological boundary-policing. It verges towards something like a postsocial, reconstituted positivism. ... [T]he very category of 'radical' — of getting to the root of things — is completely alien to the actor-network worldview. ANT’s supposed radicality undermines itself. Its version of relationality, far from being radical, is so broad and undifferentiated as to blur the many diverse ways that things interact, rather than bringing relational difference into sharper focus. Unable to detect exclusion, negation, or antagonism, ANT, unaided by other sociological sensitivities, has a hard time dealing with some of the most obvious and horrific aspects of contemporary urban life. While it registers that networks decay and break down, this is an insufficient way to think conflict and inequality. As a consequence, most actor-network studies of cities tend to eschew analyzing exclusion, domination, elitism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation, segregation or any other variety of ubiquitous, quotidian urban violence the denial of which renders any urban studies paradigm useless at best. [586-7]" - Madden 2010
2011
"It is not enough to evoke a metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, in the manner for instance of ‘object-oriented philosophies’, since the absence of any reliable cognitive criteria by which to measure and specify the precise extent of the gap between seeming and being or discriminate between the extrinsic and intrinsic properties of objects licenses entirely arbitrary claims about the in-itself." - Brassier 2011: 52
2011
"Does the term assemblage describe a type of hitherto-neglected research object to be studied in a broadly political-economic framework-thus generating a political economy of urban assemblages? Is assemblage analysis meant to extend the methodology of urban political economy in new directions, thus opening up new interpretive perspectives on dimensions of capitalist urbanization that have been previously neglected or only partially grasped? Or, does the assemblage approach offer a new ontological starting point that displaces or supersedes the intellectual project of urban political economy?" - Brenner et al. 2011: 230
2011
"Perhaps the major advantage of introducing the concept of assemblage into the field of urban studies (cf. Bender, 2009; Farías, 2009b [see 2009]; McCann and Ward, 2011; McFarlane, 2011 [see 2011a]) is that it allows us to move away from a notion of the city as a whole to a notion of the city as multiplicity, from the study of 'the' urban environment to the study of multiple urban assemblages. The concept is thus coined to make sense of processes of construction by which cities, urban phenomena and urban life are constituted. Yet the constructivism underlying the notion of urban assemblages does not reflect an epistemological problem, but is an ontological proposition." - Farías 2011: 369
2012
"Harman claims to get at the reality that the sciences can never describe by closely describing the structure of seeming. Far from challenging the retreat of philosophers from the world into the bastion of consciousness, he has simply extended the domain of consciousness into the world." - Wolfendale 2012: 365
2012
"Any strand of urban research reflects ontological positions about the constitution of the world, and we have to be careful not to suggest that assemblage thinking can be ontological while other strands of urban thinking somehow remain non-ontological, that is, without any implicit or explicit claims about the nature of the urban world, its constitution and its being. ... I am not suggesting here that it is possible for one approach to have more than one ontology at a time, but that does not mean that different ontologies cannot offer prompts, questions, generative conflict, directions and orientations to one another, or, crucially, that an ontology of assemblage supersedes political economy." - McFarlane 2011b: 377
2013
"I've titled this review essay 'The Nadir of OOO' because I think that the absurdities of Realist Magic are due at least in part to those it inherits from the incoherent ontology it wants to popularize and extend. In order to stake its claim to originality and supremacy, 'OOO' has to fulminate against what it sees as a threatening field: materialists, purveyors of 'scientism,' process philosophers, Deleuzians, and systems theorists. It has to establish itself as 'the only non-reductionist, non-atomic ontology on the market.' So Marx, as well, will have to be laid low. Since it would be difficult to mount a plausible or relevant critique of historical materialism from a perspective committed to a universe of objects withdrawn from relation, the object-oriented ontologist can only flail wildly at his target, hoping to construct arguments so preposterous that they can’t possibly be accused of trying to be serious." - Taylor 2013: 68
2013
"Both Marx's and Heidegger's thought are grounded in an understanding of history, and above all, how philosophy itself is historical. ... The productive dialogue that arises between Heidegger and Marx does so through Hegel, and through the interpretation of history." - Hemming 2013: 41
