Agencement
An assemblage is a heterogeneous set that brings together elements of different kinds—bodies, statements, affects, tools—to function as one. It unfolds along two axes: on one side, content and expression, distinct in reality yet reciprocally presupposing each other; on the other, territoriality, which stabilizes it, and lines of deterritorialization, which run through it and carry it toward something else. What constitutes it is not a fixed structure but a double movement, always in progress.
Tout agencement est d'abord territorial. La première règle concrète des agencements, c'est de découvrir la territorialité qu'ils enveloppent, car il y en a toujours une.
The word agencement captures something that “structure” cannot. A structure is closed, hierarchical—it posits its elements before their relations. Agencement, on the other hand, begins with relations: they bring terms into existence, not the other way around. A feudal lord, his lands, his serfs, his weapons, his rituals, his legal pronouncements form an agencement—not an organic totality but a heterogeneous machine in which each part derives its meaning from the whole’s operation.
Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two intersecting axes. The first contrasts content and expression—what is done and what is said, bodies and signs—not as substance and form, but as two genuinely distinct articulations that presuppose each other without mirroring one another. The second contrasts the agencement’s territoriality (what stabilizes it, encloses it, gives it its “home”) and the lines of flight that run through it, destabilizing it, propelling it toward other configurations. These two axes do not overlap: an agencement may have shifting content and rigid expression, or strong territoriality on one edge and accelerated flight on another.
Territory is the primary condition: every agencement begins by carving out a space of operation. Yet no territory is impermeable. A bird’s refrain marks a territory; it can also open it onto a cosmos, become cosmic rather than local—this is deterritorialization at work within the agencement itself.
≠ structure. Structure seeks invariants, oppositions, transformation rules that preserve form. Agencement seeks speeds, intensities, thresholds of passage: it does not ask “what is it?” but “how does it work?” and “where is it fleeing?” Agencement is not an organization but a machine, in the sense that it is defined solely by its functioning and its connections, never by an internal essence.