Deleuze, Guattari, and assemblages AI
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed a shared vocabulary across works including Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze was a philosopher; Guattari’s work also grew out of psychoanalysis, institutional practice, and political activity.
An assemblage—a translation of agencement, with a sense of arranging or fitting together—directs attention to heterogeneous elements and the relations through which they act. A writing practice, for instance, can involve people, texts, machines, institutions, habits, and economic arrangements. Listing the parts is only a start; changing their relations changes what the arrangement can do.
Latent Writing uses this perspective to look behind a model’s apparently unified voice. A response depends on an arrangement that includes training material, technical procedures, interfaces, and the person making a request. This is the essay’s application of the concept, rather than a claim Deleuze and Guattari made about today’s models.
“Machinic” in this context need not mean a literal computer, and “multiplicity” means more than having many components. These terms question how identities and capacities arise through relations. They should not be treated as alternative names for a neural-network architecture.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: assemblage in philosophy, including the term’s translation and later development.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Deleuze’s work with Guattari, for the wider philosophical setting.