Unpacking and Repacking the "Assemblage"

This week, we were graced by the presence of numerous critically confusing texts; however, I was fortunate enough to discover that there was a common thread, I guess you could consider it to be a nuance of sorts, between a few of our assigned readings. But first, I ask you to think: What is an assemblage? At first glance, I flightily thought of an assemblage as something simple and mundane, like decoupaging a collage of pictures and using modge-podge to strategically arrange snippets of paper and images onto a substrate in an arts and crafts assemblage. Speaking from the literary aspect of assemblage, clearly I am wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary describes an assemblage as “the joining or union of two things; conjunction; the joining, putting together of parts; a collection; a work of art consisting of miscellaneous objects fastened together”. In this blog though, I decided to chart the course of “assemblage” and see how this term was interrelated throughout a few texts, taking on similar but different meanings in regards to who the author of the text was, and also, put it into context with the documentary we watched last week, Good Copy Bad Copy, and see how assemblage can be seen similarly to another two words.

So by now, we should be familiar with what a hypertext is and how it functions in relation to rhizomes. After reading “Hypertext and Critical Theory” by George Landow, I think we can all agree that a loosely defined meaning of hypertext is one that claims it to be a “vast assemblage” and a “fundamentally intertextual system which has the capacity to emphasize intertextuality in a way that page-bound text in books cannot” (35). As for what it allows you to do, it “permits one to make explicit…the linked materials that an educated reader perceives surrounding it” (35). Clearly, hypertext is something that is interactive, laced with intricate pathways leading to different threads of text and visuals, too. It allows readers to approach a medium in a way that won’t allow them to have the same experience twice. This focus on the reader’s experience rather than having the attention be on the author is something I think is imperative to focus on.

When it comes to rhizomes, from Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, it is my understanding that rhizomes construct a model, or map, for understanding the crevices of a text. A rhizome is an assemblage that establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from different arrangements. But you have to see the rhizome as a “mapping rather than a tracing”, ceaselessly “establishing connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power…and social struggles” (7), one which spreads continuously without a beginning or even an end.  

So both of these texts have one major point and word in common: assemblage. While we know the Oxford English dictionary definition (refer to the first paragraph), in this context, in regards to hypertext and rhizomes, I think another couple of words spawn out of assemblage: remixing and sampling. In the documentary that we watched last week, Good Copy Bad Copy, sampling is a key word that describes taking a piece of something and mixing it into something else. There are so many things that can be considered as sampling – mashups of songs when two artists come together to collaborate on the same song, mashups of speeches/video clips that can be put together to send a completely different message, like the George Bush example we saw in Good Copy Bad Copy, and legal cases such as Bridgeport vs. Dimension Films, which was also talked about in Good Copy Bad Copy, and told us about how just taking two seconds from the song “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” is all it takes for a lawsuit to procure. “Assemblage” is so similar to the words remixing and sampling, and takes on a new life of its own in relation to examples from Good Copy Bad Copy.

Furthermore, I want to bring “Metapictures” by W.J.T Mitchell into the mix. It’s a text that discusses the obvious, metapictures, which “epitomize the tendency of technologies of visual representation to acquire a figurative centrality in theories of the self and its knowledges” (49). Basically, metapictures are “movable cultural apparatuses”, which can be used to show what a picture is or give something to think about to the reader. More than that, metapictures “are not merely epistemological models, but ethical, political, and aesthetic ‘assemblages’ that allow us to observe observers. In their strongest forms, they don’t merely serve as illustrations to theory; they picture theory” (49).

All of this reminds me of the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed through the Internet. The Internet is something that has no real center; it is composed of infinite links. There is no beginning or end to the Internet, it just is. Just like Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari talked about rhizomes having roots that expand horizontally, that even if you rip them up from beneath the ground you won’t get all of the fibers because they are interconnected at such a detailed level, thus is the Internet. I mean, do you know what website started as the first page on the Internet? Is there really a home base with the Internet? I surely don’t know the answer. What I do know though is that somehow, these three texts (and one documentary) are interconnected thanks to one distinct term: assemblage.

-Morgan Crawford