New problems for assemblage thinking: materiality, governance and cycling in Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper urges a return to the original formations of Deleuze and Guattari scholarship, to enable issues of sustainability, materiality, and governance to be productively thought together. Assemblage thinking is used to reconsider how roads, machines, bodies, policies, and concepts of sustainability come together in a working arrangement and what might enable rearrangements. This is no easy task, in part because over time assemblage thinking has taken some unhelpful detours, and because policy is too often treated as a thing apart from the worlds we are assembled within. We proceed by confronting two major figures, Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett, to clear space for a repositioned model of assemblage theory. Using the empirical context of cycling in Sydney, Australia, we then grapple with the relationality of sustainability, materiality, and governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Assemblage thinking
• embodied materiality
• tensors
• Deleuze
• urban policy
• governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For an extended ‘real world’ illustration of this framework, albeit one that does not use Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, see Lea (2020, pp. 39–62). For a Deleuzian rewriting of this analysis see Buchanan (2020, pp. 122–132). The present paper is a refinement of positions outlined in these two previous works.

2 https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/areas-of-service.

3 https://www.rms.nsw.gov.au/roads/bicycles/benefits.html.

4 This will be familiar to anyone who has ever biked along similarly poor infrastructure, with discontinuous networks often nominated as a key impediment for ever cycling at all (see, for example, Hull & O’Holleran, 2014).

5 https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/dataset/cycling-data.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under grant number DP190100185 and was conducted with ethics approval from the University of Wollongong and the University of Sydney (Approval No: 2019/548).

Notes on contributors

Tess Lea

Tess Lea is a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney who specialises in organisational ethnography and critical understandings of settler-colonial policy. Her latest book, Wild Policy (2020, Stanford), explores the maddening nature of Indigenous social policy under liberal settler extractivist regimes.

Ian Buchanan

Ian Buchanan is a Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Wollongong. He is recognised internationally for his exemplary work on Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and for finding practical ways to apply advanced cultural theory to diverse social issues.

Glen Fuller

Glen Fuller is a Professor and Head of School, School of Arts and Communication, at the University of Canberra, Australia. His research interests span media and mobility issues.

Gordon Waitt

Gordon Waitt is a human geographer whose work focuses on understanding the actions that comprise everyday life.