The misuse of the concept of assemblage within digital social science
I’ve seen a growing trend to use the Deleuzian concept of assemblage in a way that fails to distinguish between internal and external relations. What distinguishes an assemblage from an entity or a totality is these elements are externally related, rather than the internal relation between elements which jointly constituted a whole. Or at last they are a mix of internal and external relations. But what an assemblage is not is a purely internally related entity. That’s the whole reason for coining the neologism in the first place, to distinguish it from a being/whole. It’s the difference between a relation which cannot exist apart from through its connection to a whole, as opposed to a relatively autonomous relation that can manifest in a different form. So for example the battery on my iphone has an internal relation to the phone, whereas the airpods have an external relation to it. You could extract the battery and install it somewhere else but it would have to enter a constitutive relation with another iphone, whereas the airpods can be used in relation to a range of entities.
This matters because if we treat assemblages as containing internal relations, we are basically talking about totalities while imagining we are doing the opposite. The analytical virtue of assemblage theory is that it helps us sketch out how heterogeneous elements are drawn together into complex coalitions of existing things, able to form and reform in dynamic and multifaceted ways. If you treat the assemblages as if they have internal relations then you are suddenly imagining vast totalities which loom across the social world, without recognising the dynamic character which is the whole analytical point of the theory. In this sense if you imagine ‘AI’ as an assemblage, without making this distinction, it becomes this vast and impenetrable juggernaut which rampages obscenely across a world which it transforms. It becomes a mega force, to use Filip Vostal’s phrase, to which we must either subordinate ourselves or reject in its entirety.
If you treat an assemblage as an internally related thing you’re effectively just connecting up a load of heterogeneous elements and saying ‘this is a thing’. But things being connected don’t make them a thing, even in terms of assemblage theory. What matters is how they’re connected, under what circumstances, with what results. This is why assemblage theory is powerful but you completely miss that if you lose the internal/external distinction, whether explicitly in terms of conceptualisation or tacitly in terms of how you’re narrating the analysis.
I’ve wondered recently why some critics of generative AI see it as uniquely obscene, as opposed to another expression of platform capitalism. Fundamentally I don’t see it as any different on a moral level (clearly technologically and potentially socially it is very different) to watching YouTube, posting on Instagram or using Uber. Or for that matter driving or taking flights. It involves a complicity in a system you would rather was different, licensed by the affordances of that system. You can respond to this in multiple ways but these responses tend to be connected into the practical logic of living a life e.g. non-drivers sometimes using Uber. I often agree with much of the substance of the critique, yet don’t end up in the same place politically and morally as they do. I wonder if there might, at last sometimes, be a disagreement about the ontology of ‘AI’ underpinning this. To the extent its seen as a totality, whether deliberately or through its misattribution as an assemblage, I part ways at an analytical level and I think a difference of moral and political opinion follows from this.
#AI #assemblage #deleuze #DigitalSocialScience #generativeAI #LLM #socialOntology
James Smithies
Mark Carrigan
