NJournal Notes 8.0 @ Assemblages and nPlx

For an explanation of the @ notation, see NJournal Notes 7.0 The @ symbol and buckminsterfullerene (C60) . 

Notation:

nP @nPlx1  @nPlx2 @nPlx3 @nPlx4   @nPlx5 . . .@ nPlxn.

nP is the situation of interest. 
It could be a school, a student, a country, a community or any living system in situ.

@ nPlxn is an assemblage. In nemetic code we call it a NemiPlex.

Assemblage

A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity is a 2006 book by Manuel DeLanda.^[1] The book is an attempt to loosely define a new ontology for use by social theorists — one that challenges the existingparadigm of meaningful social analyses being possible only on the level of either individuals (micro-reductionism) or "society as a whole" (macro-reductionism). Instead, the book employs Gilles Deleuze's theory of assemblages from A Thousand Plateaus (1980) to posit social entities on all scales (from sub-individual to transnational) that are best analysed through their components (themselves assemblages).

As an example of an assemblage (as defined by DeLanda) consider an ecosystem:

• The material role here is performed by the soil, sunlight, trees, animals, etc.

• The expressive role is performed by the forms, colours, habits, etc. of the aforementioned components.

• The territorializing role would be played by factors such as food chains, adaptive traits, conducive climate and other elements that maintain the components and their relationships and thus the identity and durability of the assemblage.

• The deterritorializing role would be played by such factors as climate change, invasion by exotic species, evolutionarymutation and other elements that recombine or replace various components and roles within the assemblage, leading to its dissipation or reformulation.

• A linguistic/coding role could be played by an environmental discourse seeking to protect an ecosystem.

Consistent with DeLanda's materialist position, the book also includes as a secondary task a sustained criticism of the primacy of post-modernist linguistic analysis in social science (the theory of the linguisticality of experience).