CommentaryAssemblages, territories, contexts
Section snippets
The assemblage as a novel unit of analysis
It should prove useful to introduce assemblage thinking by way of its contrasts with more conventional methods of social science inquiry, and their adoption in contemporary drug studies (see Duff, 2014). Consider the following account of a young person's AOD use, and its temporal and spatial trajectories:
Simon began drinking at 14 following the divorce of his parents. He goes to live with his Dad who is often absent from home. He sees his Mother and sister rarely. Most of his friends drink
What is an assemblage?
The “realist ontology” (DeLanda, 2006:3–4) that informs the analysis of assemblages does not abandon the subject, much less the realities of social life, yet it does refuse to accept either subjects or contexts as ontological foundations for empirical inquiry. Subjects and their social interactions are not “given” in experience as ontological invariants expressive of a particular set of “essences” or qualities (DeLanda, 2006:1–5). Rather, both subjects and the social lives they participate in
Assemblages: social, affective and material
The production of social life provides obvious examples of how the assemblage may be used as a novel unit of analysis for contemporary drug studies. Social life is almost always characterised in terms of processes that bring together diverse entities in some kind of shared or collective experience (DeLanda, 2006: 52–57). This understanding of the ways sociality is comprised by entities and their collective experiences is not so different from Deleuze and Guattari's interest in the ways
Drug assemblages
So how might assemblage thinking be put to work in the analysis of alcohol and other drugs, and their forms, patterns and consequences? The first point is to emphasise how the assemblage may serve as a unique unit of analysis for empirical research. Above all else, assemblage thinking emphasises the significance of relations, affects and materials in the conditioning of AOD use, rather than the subjects, agents, structures and forms that populate more conventional social research (Dewsbury, 2011
Acknowledgements
I thank Stewart Williams for thoughtful and productive advice on an earlier version of this commentary. This research was partially funded with the award of a Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellowship at RMIT University.
Conflict of interest statement: The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest.
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2020, International Journal of Drug PolicyCitation Excerpt :Both tend to posit a singular reality, and treat it as stable. The approach I identify here sees reality as fundamentally iteratively produced in spatio-temporally specific encounters (Dilkes-Frayne et al., 2017; Bøhling, 2015; Duff, 2016; Farrugia, 2015; Race, 2014) and this includes research encounters. As I argue, this approach offers a convincing account of the variability, instability and multiplicity of drug actions, events and encounters at the same time that it allows a degree of political optimism in the flexibility and contingency it identifies in how realities are made and can be remade.