The central thesis is that people do not act predominantly according to personal agency; rather, human action requires material interdependencies and a network of discursive devices distributed across legal, geographical, cultural, or economic infrastructures.
[5] A third draws from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari;[6] a fourth from Michel Pêcheux's discourse analysis.
[7] The term assemblage, in a philosophical sense, originally stems from the French word agencement, whose meaning translates narrowly to English as "arrangement", "fitting, or "fixing".
The translation of agencement as assemblage can "give rise to connotations based on analogical impressions, which liberate elements of a vocabulary from the arguments that once helped form it.
[8] An assemblage is a constellation of singularities (ensemble de singularités), stratified into the symbolic law, polis, or era.
Manuel DeLanda detailed the concept of assemblage in his book A New Philosophy of Society (2006) where, like Deleuze and Guattari, he suggests that social bodies on all scales are best analyzed through their individual components.
[12] DeLanda's additional contribution is to suggest that a third axis exists: of genetic/linguistic resources that also defines the interventions involved in the coding, decoding, and recoding of the assemblage.