Deleuze and Guattari's Assemblage Theory and Becoming

Core Idea

Deleuze and Guattari develop assemblage theory as an alternative to hierarchical structures—assemblages are heterogeneous collections of human and nonhuman elements that function through connections and intensities. Becoming describes continuous transformation and variation, producing difference rather than reproducing identity. Literary texts can be read as assemblages with lines of flight—trajectories of escape from dominant structures and fixed meanings.

How It's Best Learned

Map the heterogeneous elements (characters, objects, institutions, forces) that compose a literary work. How do they connect and function together? What transformations or becomings do they undergo?

Explainer

Post-structuralism taught you to be suspicious of centers, fixed meanings, and stable hierarchies. Derrida showed that texts defer meaning endlessly through différance; Foucault showed that discourse produces the subjects and truths it seems merely to describe. Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory goes further: rather than just deconstructing structures, it offers an alternative ontology — a way of describing how things actually work that is not hierarchical and not centered from the start.

The core concept is the assemblage (*agencement* in French — more accurately, an arrangement or arrangement-of-capacities). An assemblage is a collection of heterogeneous elements — people, institutions, objects, affects, ideas, technologies — that are not unified by a common essence but by the connections and interactions between them. A school is an assemblage of students, teachers, buildings, curricula, desks, schedules, texts, regulations, and affects (boredom, ambition, anxiety). A literary text is an assemblage of language, genre conventions, authorial history, printing technologies, readerly practices, and intertextual relationships. The assemblage does not have a center that generates its parts; it has connections that produce its effects.

Contrast this with the tree model of thought, which Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject. Tree thinking is hierarchical: a central trunk generates branches, which generate sub-branches. The structure flows from a single root, and every element has a defined place in the hierarchy. Most Western philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory has operated on tree logic — tracing everything back to an origin (the author's intention, the foundational sign, the primary meaning). Against this they propose the rhizome: a horizontal, rootless, decentered network where connections can be made between any two points without passing through a center. A rhizome has no beginning and no end, only middles, propagation, and laterality.

Lines of flight (*lignes de fuite*) are the most important concept for literary analysis. Every assemblage is organized by forces that stabilize and repeat it — territorialization — and by forces that destabilize, transform, or escape it — deterritorialization. A line of flight is a trajectory of escape from an existing assemblage: what happens when elements of the system connect in ways that cannot be recaptured by the dominant organization. In Kafka's *The Metamorphosis*, Gregor Samsa's transformation is not best understood as symbolism (what does the bug represent?) but as a line of flight — his body escapes the family-workplace-debt assemblage that has organized his entire existence, producing something that cannot be recuperated into that system. The becoming-insect is not the destination; the point is the process of deterritorialization itself.

For reading texts, this means asking different questions than interpretation usually asks. Instead of "what does this mean?", ask: What are the elements of this assemblage? How do they connect? Where are the lines of flight — the moments of transformation, escape, or becoming-other? What does this text enable or prevent in its readers? Assemblage reading maps intensities and connections rather than decoding symbols, tracing how literary machines produce certain effects rather than what meanings they contain.