Material assembling and disassembling

The central concept DeLanda brings to neo-materialism is a commitment to a process where contingent forces engage to form an Assemblage. DeLanda develops the ideas of Deleuze, who theorised these ideas in A Thousand Plateaus, using the French world ‘agencement’, translated as ‘assemblage’. The word is intended to describe activities of intensive properties that actively entangle a number of components joined by relations of exteriority. The meshed ensemble creates what DeLanda calls an Assemblage. A problem with the word assemblage in the English language is that it suggests a static structure, whereas the core properties that the Deleuze and DeLanda both attribute to ‘assemblage’ refers to an active group of assemblage processes. A definition covering the two aspects that encompasses this idea is that an assemblage is made up of entities that

continue to be parts within themselves but create a new entity whose properties cannot be reduced to properties of the parts when it is assembled. The identity of an entity can be defined by its tendencies and capacities. Properties are always actual as when then they are manifested or exercised, but tendencies and capacities can be real without being actual (DeLanda, 2002). Transport systems are assemblages that operate in regulated environments and distribute goods over large geographical areas. As assemblages they have high inputs of high transformity fuel energy and move high embedded energy content goods. On both counts transport assemblages pass the test of being able to affect and be affected by other assemblages.

Territorialisation and deterritorialisation are the ends of a continuum that seeks to explain and situate the way diverse elements in assemblages are related. Globalisation is a form of

deterritorialisation as borders are softened, while territorialisation changes come about at time of conflict and war where neighbourhoods become delineated or physically separated. The building of the Berlin wall was an act of territorialisation. Deterritorialisation is the breaking up of boundaries or softening a boundary to the point that it becomes another function. Sub assemblages also have processes of territorialisation and deterritorialisation operating and those changes can influence the overall nature of an assemblage.

A way to gain an idea of assemblage thinking is the process of the consolidation of goods for shipping. A container of consignments that individually constitute less than a full container load can be aggregated in a single container load (LCL) of goods. Considered now as a new entity it consists of a metal box with doors that is built to house and protect its contents – a heterogeneous collection of consigned goods stacked in the container. Each consignment may itself be an assembled collection of smaller consignments. At the next level up, a train pulling containers on

wagons is also an assemblage where the parts include containers, and includes an engine, a driver and communications materials and rails on a road way.

Returning to the container of LCL. The LCL assemblage entity has a consistency and grouping properties through having a common destination and common documentation number. The contents are highly territorialised by being within a rigidly defined space, and the LCL container movements are highly coded through a common manifest destination number, rules of cartage, as well as strapping, stretch wrap and other connecting materials. The LCL container of freight is not a seamless totality. As an assemblage it has properties not found in the cartons of goods and so can be considered irreducible and at the same time analysable.

An assemblage defined in this way has different properties to the material properties of a whole as described in Hegelian philosophy where an assemblage is irreducible and only some aspects can be distinguished. Hegel, who argued that wholes are irreducible, would describe an LCL container as just an aggregation of a mixture of boxes, where the larger LCL entity has no additional properties to those attributable to the boxes.

The LCL container as an assemblage has an identity and functionality not found as properties of its parts, while at the same time the parts continue to have their own properties where some more than others influence the properties of the LCL container assemblage. The history of how it came into being can be tracked through the movement of its component parts, the processes of loading and stacking goods, and the creation of transport documentation. When containerised transport first came into use their properties of secure passage, outer packaging benefits and reduced handling modified then modified, as a feedback result, the way that goods were presented for packaging, and the viability of moving goods over distance in a viable way. The history of how the container itself was constructed is known and can be explained as can the way ‘the box’ acted back on developments to the intermodal goods movement systems (Marc Levinson, 2006) to stimulate a nonlinear expansion of its use in social systems. An emergent property of a container of freight became a property of change to logistic assemblages generally. The LCL container and its contents have a unique identifier, a binder of a common existence until the assemblages ‘death’ at the time of unpacking of the goods. As the goods leave the container the degree of territorialisation then changes, and the goods become reassembled with new highly coded information about delivery, customs and payment and so continue as new assemblages of stored and delivered entities. The empty container’s status also changes as the particular assemblage deterritorialises. It still has status as assemblages of containers for hire; an assemblage of its materials components that form a shape that can be moved and stacked and as an assemblage of empty containers in a container

park. While this example is simplistic, it introduces assemblage terms and concepts that apply in all assemblages at every scale within transport ontology.

Assemblages are a coming together of heterogeneous elements that are entities in their own right and result in a new entity with emergent properties that are not found in the elements that formed it. Also, when assemblages come together, or disperse, their component parts retain their own properties, while those properties interact in a process of ‘transformation’ or the actualisation of the virtual. The virtual, as an ever-present possibility is always real and exists independently of whether they are actual. Assemblages offer a theoretical basis and a major analytical device for understanding how transport fits within the mechanisms of independent intensive processes. Assemblages are always contingent entities that are subject to changes in territorial influences and governance, or rule changes. Over time this may look as though systems are in constant turmoil, but if an historical account were analysed in detail the factors of territorialisation and rules could be uncovered as the life, death, and history or that particular entity. Components of assemblages consist of components with material roles that are functional and components that are expressive. Transport studies may better be considered as a probing of assemblages found in the sciences of other fields with ‘affiliations and alliances’ of the physical ‘graphy’ domains and with those that deal with the physics of load capacity and power and distance, and the social –ology sciences of material interaction through communication as speech acts. To unpack transport as an evolutionary and social entity, we need to get away from a metaphysics of ‘seamless totalities’ and focus on types of intensive relationships that can be found within assemblages.

A way to describe transport in an assemblage like that would be to call it part of a pattern of emergence. This consideration of the abstract is what Alexander observes in urban architecture where he says that individual acts generate larger global patterns (Alexander, 1977). In his work he searches for something to connect humans to the universe. He searches for ‘an underpinning for the structure within which we live. He says that patterns emerge organically and ‘almost of their own accord’ (1977) This suggests that humans can be acted upon by the emergent properties of structures in ways that in turn influence human action. At a social level he observes that the act of building structures causes larger patterns to emerge, and that the creation of boundary areas gives life to a way to express their identity. This is consistent with the properties of assemblages that continue to have the properties specific to, say a specific subculture, while at the same time giving rise to a larger assemblage with its own specific culture that in turn moderates and influences the members of the subculture.

Allen warns of the perils of too detailed an analysis on assemblages (Allen, 2011). Some parts of assemblages can be accepted as having a functional role. The problem of how to gain useful insight about what to look for when assemblages are altered remains. He says that accurate predictions are proving to be very difficult to make (2011, p. 58) but while development and change happen, this theoretical approach is of little use without a methodology and field examples. If we accept that the world comprises a multiplicity of nested assemblages the interactions of which need to be studied and understood for every individual act, then we have a problem of application for this theory. A solution emerging from my research is to identify transport as a primary focus in the composition of assemblages and that the outcomes of some sub assemblages can be assumed and not over

analysed so that the focus becomes to only concentrate on active assemblages that can bring about novel or significant consequences. The issue is how to identify them. There is a need to identify parts of assemblages that most influence the new identities that are created. Candidates for these can be found in historical analysis but may not automatically apply a priori to emerging

assemblages.

Looking at it in another way, where an assemblages’ properties are not part of the main

assemblages of interest to any project, then their unique properties can be taken as a given. For example, if an assemblage such as a driver, a truck and a coal carrying trailer is of interest, the assemblage details of the engine of the truck are unlikely to come under scrutiny, apart from its ability to move the load. The coal truck as an assemblage of high transformity energy will have the capacity to affect the assemblages of coal mines, industry users and other road users. High intensity measures of parts of an assemblage can indicate that the assemblage may enter intensive zones - the crumple zone of possibly space, where the production of novelty could occur.

Where feedback mechanisms are growth stimulating, such as using high transformity energy used to transport fertiliser, which is itself also high transformity energy, the value to farms is the boost to lower transformity energy of pasture growth that so leads to an increase in overall production (see Figure 11). This is also the case for intensities of land use such as increasing dairying on gravel plains where power, water, and fertiliser and large numbers of cows are transported into the farm

assemblage over a short period of time.

From the LCL goods movement example above, we can see that assemblages mix parts at many levels and complexity. To illustrate this, we could use a canoeist as an example of an assemblage, where a canoeist, the paddle and canoe together produce a new entity in the form of a waterborne machine that has new properties and new capacities to affect and be affected. The affects that this assemblage of a canoeist has, on the way trade is conducted for example, cannot be derived from

looking at the canoe, or examining the person, or describing the paddle. As an assemblage the canoeist exhibits new emergent properties not found in the analysis of the parts or as a sum of the parts.

The schematic diagrams of Swenson and Odum indicate how feedback paths lead to system complexity. In this way an energy transformation process is also an assembling process that has a bottom up mechanism and a top down mechanism. The same mechanism may also be the case in social systems. As people group together in villages and towns the effect of the group brings about a need for collective management and control of the space, via the implementation of rules that apply for all those in community. As the community takes shape as a new entity, properties develop that are not previously found in individual households. These properties emerge from the

complexity within the community within which they are generated. The emergent community can then legitimately feedback territorial and behavioural controls over its individual members through rules and sanctions. Community governance organisations, resident interest groups, and the like have emergent properties that are real and influential on how the village develops into a town. This leads to realist theories and materialist ontology, and social commitments mechanisms such as those developed by Lawson (Lawson, 2012) and Offer (Offer, 2006).

I have explained the neo-materialist basis of my approach to the ontology of transport and how it is articulated via the idea that all material entities are assemblages. A neo-materialist philosophy can also provide a grounding for the processes and language that describe the nature of the abstract architecture of wide-ranging complex systems. The metaphysics of neo-materialism provides ways to discover and explain the common principles and abstract architecture that give transport processes a place and a set of common principles that underpin its execution within diverse complex systems. Central to methodology consistent with neo-materialism is the existence of entities as assemblages, where self-organisation and morphogenesis generate novel structures. There are implications for both predictions and simulations where the capacity to be affected is very large and wide ranging and dependent upon how attractors and bifurcations structure the space of possibilities. Here specific properties are unpredictable but informative in understanding how transport within emergence is part of the process of creating novelty.

Understanding the primacy of the structure of matter and energy flows may offers a partial solution to a better understanding through simulating the characteristics of abstract machines that operate within possibility spaces that are bounded by ‘a space pre-organised by attractors and bifurcations’ that limit the space of possible forms. The nature of emergence rules out prediction of specifics

however, through simulation offers ways to understand the creation of main forms within a possibility space but does not predict the particulars of new emergent entities.

with a way to start is through an understanding of what the immanent features are and draw out what you want to better express through an understanding of the territorial and coding parameters. Neo materialist philosophy coupled with current scientific theories and methods provide a

principled account for the emergence of life in general. To ground a new approach requires clarity about what kinds of beings, or things, or forces in the world must be considered as legitimate and that then flesh out a robust framework for all the different types of transport activities so far identified and considered in preceding chapters.

A commitment to the material role that active transport processes play in the creative processes of assembling and disassembling real entities is central to the metaphysics of naturalised transport processes. It allows for different types of physical assemblages that have the same diagrams are generated by the same abstract diagrams and are mechanism independent. Changes to parts can change the properties of the assemblage depending on their overall significance. The concept of an assemblage addresses several problems of the relation between the parts and the whole and emergence of new properties. To illustrate, transport systems can be seen as assemblages of assemblages, and are structure generating processes that result in strata’s and hierarchies

(DeLanda, 1997, p. 185). An Assemblage can then be accepted as the interaction in a state space of existing assemblages that act together to form a new assemblage with its new emergent properties, while the contributing assemblages continue as whole entities that maintain their own emergent properties. Assemblages are therefore analysable but not reducible. Simulations are a tool of assemblage analysis, as simulations can manifest the behaviour of intensive processes of abstract architecture. The understanding of the influence that intensive properties exert within matter in assemblages can be increased through mathematical simulations that approximate the abstract architecture of the causes that produce entities. Abstract architecture and mathematical simulations are not the same thing, but they overlap in their ability to make abstract processes evident to a degree that is meaningful in this context. An exploration of possibility space in

transport systems is an area where research could be fruitful. A better understanding of the shape of possibility space would help explain emergent mechanisms. An assemblage within this

commitment is the resultant and real entity formed through interaction and relations of externality within a group of already existing entities. Those contributing entities continue to be analysable in themselves, as well as components to the assemblage.

5.8

Chapter summary

The transport ontological commitments described in this chapter allow for and situates transport within the essential activities of a living planet. The ontology commits to the existence of active presence of transportation within thermodynamic flow processes and at all scales. Transport is best theorised in a realist material ontology, with its commitment to a mind independent existence of the world which allows that one event objectively produces another event.

A naturalised transport ontology allows for an account of different types of flows, where there those combinations include informational flows that in their nature are a type of material flow. These are low energy cost flows of ‘information about’ that tell or signal food location and spatial orientation and so are flows of perception and information about the state space where transport happens. The commitment in an ontology for all living things having ‘information about’ capability requires that the living thing and their environment constitute the definition of the entity. The commitment to transport ontology increases sensitivity to the influence that the historic context of how structure develops in time and space as the result of an evolutionary understanding of energy flow as selecting for processes that create order as soon and whenever possible in an end directed