Dan Swanton

On Assemblages and Geography

In this paper we explore what assemblage thinking offers social-spatial theory by asking what questions or problems assemblage responds to or opens up. Used variously as a concept, ethos and descriptor, assemblage thinking can be placed within the context of the recent ‘relational turn’ in human geography. In this context, we argue that assemblage thinking offers four things to contemporary social-spatial theory that, when taken together, provide an alternative response to the problematic of ‘relational’ thought: an experimental realism orientated to processes of composition; a theorization of a world of relations and that which exceeds a present set of relations; a rethinking of agency in distributed terms and causality in non-linear, immanent, terms; and an orientation to the expressive capacity of assembled orders as they are stabilized and change. In conclusion, we reflect on some further questions of politics and ethics that follow from our account of the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought.

Sorting Bodies: Race, Affect, and Everyday Multiculture in a Mill Town in Northern England

This paper examines how race might be understood differently when social interaction is taken as the starting point of analysis. I argue that dominant modes of theorising race as a biological construct or epistemological marker remain insufficient for understanding the multiple, contingent, and devious ways in which race takes form in, and gives shape to, encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley—a former mill town in northern England—the paper assembles narrative fragments that reconstruct encounters with difference (that vary in intensity from the mundane to terror alerts). In each of these encounters I return to the question: what does race do? The paper offers a reconsideration of race and racism. I theorise race as a technology of differentiation that sorts human difference in ways that acknowledge the malleability of race and the more-than-human composition of social relations. I go on to outline an understanding of racism—a racism of assemblages—that recognises that the sorting of human difference is also accompanied by judgments that prefigure encounters. The racism of assemblages offers an opportunity to address the operation of race at the level of nonconscious thinking and the affective intensities through which the sorting and judging of human differences are performed. The work of gathering fragments to reconstruct encounters also generates insights into the microsociality of multicultural life in Keighley, disrupting narratives that argue that white and Asian communities lead ‘parallel lives’ in northern mill towns.

Materialism and the politics of assemblage

In response to the commentaries on Anderson et al. (2012), the authors’ short response raises questions about, first, the status of materialism and realism in current debates around relations and relationality and, second, the implications of understanding assemblage as a particular kind of ethos for the politics of assemblage-based thinking.

Afterimages of Steel Dortmund

This essay works with afterimages of the steel industry to explore the material legacies and many afterlives of industrial remains in Dortmund. Inspired both by Walter Benjamin’s writings on the afterimages of capitalist modernity in the Arcades Project, and by the afterimages of steel produced by Haiko Hebig, the article gathers fragmented encounters in an account that evokes the materiality, textures, co-habitations, and memories of Dortmund’s postindustrial landscape.

Global Shifts in contemporary times: the changing trajectories of steel towns in China, Germany and the United Kingdom

At one level, this paper centres on the closure of a steel plant in Germany, the closure and then reprieve of another in the UK and the expansion of a third in China, but at another level this changing geography of steel production can be seen as symptomatic of and symbolizing profound changes in the global manufacturing economy. The closures at Dortmund (permanently) and Redcar/south Teesside (temporarily) both reflected the growing international – not to say global – restructuring of the steel industry and the strategies that steel-producing companies adopted in the face of profound changes in markets and patterns of production and trade. To that extent, at first sight this might appear to be a familiar and not unexpected outcome of those processes. However, the outcomes both at local level and for the steel plants themselves turned out to be very different because they reflected the complexity of global processes and the interacting effects of many influences operating at different spatial scales within the complex social relations of capital. Not least this was because the closure in Dortmund and the ending of steel-making there were directly implicated in a major expansion of steel production in China, by Shagang in Jiangsu Province, via the transfer of a major steel complex, disassembled in Dortmund and reassembled in Jinfeng. The disassembly of a major production complex, its transport to the other side of the world and its reassembly there as functional fixed capital added a dramatic and radical new twist to the meaning of global shift.

Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis: Part Three

I n this issue of City we continue our fourpart special feature on Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis. The special feature was initiated by Colin McFarlane’s (2011a) paper ‘Assemblage and Critical Urbanism’, and a response by Neil Brenner, David Madden and David Wachsmuth (2011). In his paper McFarlane mapped out a terrain of engagement between assemblage thinking and critical urban theory. In particular, McFarlane argued that assemblage thinking makes three key contributions to critical urbanism: (i) it produces a critical urbanism that embraces ethnographic detail and emphasises the practices and processes through which urban life is produced; (ii) it acknowledges how the materiality of the city actively shapes urban life and inequalities; and (iii) it energises critical urban imaginaries. In their response Brenner et al. welcomed the methodological experimentation and intellectual adventurousness that assemblage thinking injects, but they were troubled by a sense that assemblage theory displaces what they called ‘the context of contexts’. In their view assemblage thinking does not fully appreciate how capitalism shapes contemporary urbanisation. Part Two of Assemblage and Critical Urban Praxis (City 15:3-4) opened up the debate. It included three responses (Dovey, 2011; Simone, 2011; Farı́as, 2011) to the initial exchange between McFarlane and Brenner et al., all of which shared a conviction that assemblage thinking makes significant contributions to urban studies, although they differed considerably in their evaluation of the prospects for a productive coupling between assemblage thinking and critical urban studies. Part Two also included an interim response by McFarlane (2011b) that sought to address some of the concerns that Brenner et al. raised. In this issue the debate continues with five further commentaries on the initial exchange. In places consensus seems to emerge. Most conspicuously this occurs where commentators agree that assemblage gets to grips with the complexity and messiness of urban processes and struggles. But there are also dissenting voices. These include concerns that assemblage thinking relinquishes the explanatory power of political economy; worries that assemblage is simply a theoretical fad; and the conviction that the radical potential of concepts is too often blunted by academic debate. In ‘Putting ANTs into the mille-feuille’, Michele Acuto develops a detailed case in support of the critical potential of assemblage thinking, and in particular actor network theory. Acuto declares his subscription to the project of critical urbanism, but worries that Brenner et al. are too quick to dismiss assemblage and actor network theory. And so Acuto’s response is concerned with establishing ANT’s critical credentials and framing ANT as a reflexive, collaborative endeavour – and not a coherent theoretical edifice offering an alternative ontology for critical urbanism. He reminds us that from its beginnings actor network theory has been concerned with analysing the ‘tactics and strategies of power’ and unsettling entrenched categories of thought. Acuto concedes that sometimes practitioners