As orientation I have tried to synthesize some of what Joshua and Tarek have written and have given what they have written a different form, one that I hope is useful in taking forward our work together. I subsequently rework some terms taken from Deleuze and Guattari, that might aid with how “quasi-causal operators” could be used for inquiry, by focusing on operations.

A. ORIENTATION

Proposition 1. Assemblages are made of heterogeneous parts that establish relations of exteriority with each other.

1.1 “No Metaphysics!”

There is no need to account for the “possibility” of the relation of parts; there is no need to take up the ontology of the parts or the ontology of the relation between them: this marks a distance from the so-called “ontological turn”, which in its self-understanding as “pluralist” is — I would argue — a limited proliferation of monisms, which either exclude (or render invisible) the subject position of the anthropological inquirer or else result in a full identification of “self” as Other, opposed to an (naturalist) “ontology” presupposed but never shown, to wit “the West.”

1.2 “Yes to Pragmatic Anthropology!”

“The initial objective of Anthropology is to be an Erforschung: an exploration of an ensemble never graspable in its totality, never at rest, because always taken up in a movement where nature and freedom are bound up in the Gebrauch” (Foucault, KA, 51).

Such an anthropology of assemblage is at root pluralist, attending to the plurality of forms of exteriority, and is serial/proliferative, rather than comparative (I.e. serial/proliferative inquiry produces motion in which the terms of the inquiry can transform).

The results of such an anthropology are dependent on the Gemüt (and thus of the self-affectation and hence self-observation) of the inquirer — the “work of ideas in the field of experience”: the anthropologist is neither invisible nor subsumed by that which is being inquired into.

Perhaps it is here that we can talk, as Tarek indicates, of the conceptual persona of the anthropologist, relative to a “plane”, to concepts as well as in relation to other conceptual personae.

Here is thus where I see the kindred aim of Deleuze’s trio — concepts, plane, conceptual persona — and Foucault’s return to Kant’s account of Gemüt.

Gemüt: disposition. From “Designs on the Contemporary”

Kant in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View asks how questions of “can” and “should” can be given a relation in the self-understanding of anthrōpos. Kant has a cosmopolitical aim in answering this question: knowledge of anthrōpos as a citizen of the world. In his Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology Foucault underscores that although the Anthropology has a cosmopolitical aim, in fact it takes up anthrōpos as an object from the interior point of view of the Gemüt, the site of self-affectation of the human being.

Foucault shows how Kant’s critical philosophical project stems from his anthropological project: the problematic play of the animating principle of the work of ideas (Geist) on the field of experience and self-affectation (Gemüt).

U: Gemüt has proved to be important as the locus of equipmental attention, so as to open the possibility of a pragmatic reduction of possible ideas, values and forms. One specific set of forms in which equipmental attention can be given to the Gemüt is narrative mood.

1.3. “Assemblage” is not foundational

i.e. “assemblage” is not a master category (as Joshua pointed out viz Society/ Culture), which examples can then instantiate and that can then be “compared”.

The concept is pragmatic to the degree that its initial definition aids us to seize relations “in their exteriority”. The major consequence of this presupposition is that it guards against positing necessity (and stasis) of states or situations.

We can here invert Foucault’s Kantian pragmatic formula: the work of experience in the creation of a conceptual plane (a second order working over of experience, I would add).

Proposition 2. Our use of assemblage as a concept/object dyad presupposes the existence of problematizations: i.e. breakdowns and indeterminations around which heterogeneous actors assemble

2.1 From non-determination to indetermination

Elements in relations may be constrained by the relations they are in, but they are not determined by them. Such non-determination, if it is to be worth inquring into should be taken up as an indetermination. Possible parameters of indetermination are: spatial, temporal, historical, pragmatic and conceptual. There are in other words, problems and problematizations out of which we can identify and grasp assemblages.

The kind of assemblage that we seem inclined to pick out are ones where there are indeterminations/discordances in those heterogeneous relations of exteriority.

2.2 Visibility, invisibility

How do those indeterminations appear and disappear for participants and observers: i.e. what is made visible and invisible (when and how).

How to give form to these indeterminations and how they appear as indeterminations and discordances for the anthropologist.

2.3 Viscosity

In insisting on both the appearance and disappearance of problems within problematizations, there is a concern with both the work of giving form to indetermination within assemblage as well as the “viscosity” of these assemblages- “the regular dynamic patterns of motion”; “how movements are sustained.” It seems that an important element in “viscosity” is to avoid or obviate indeterminations.

It seems worthwhile, as a conceptual side point to think about how the concepts we use to name such indetermination / viscosity is distinct from several of Latour’s “Modes of Existence” as well James Faubion’s themitical–ethical distinction (this is footnote labor, but worth attending to I think).

Proposition 3. The observation (and whatever form participation might take) of relations of exteriority in their assemblage is from a position of a second-order.

i.e. Not the observation of the forms of association between terms, or parts, that produce “external” relations (this would seem to me more or less actor network theory).

Rather it would be the observation of how different kinds of actors observe, reflect on, critique, acquiesce to the relations of externality that they create, to which they are incited, in which they find themselves.

The objective, I take it, would be that such observation would enable a situated exteriority of the anthropologist, an adjacency, with respect the assembled relations of exteriority of concern.

B. QUASI-CAUSAL OPERATORS & OPERATIONS.

Tarek pointed out the importance of “Conceptual Personae” as a crucial kind of Quasi-Causal Operator. Deleuze and Guattari (more or less) say this:

In a field of indeterminations, the Conceptual Persona intervenes twice (1 & 2):

(I have tried to identify six operations i-iv)

(1) (i) The conceptual persona plunges into chaos and (ii) draws/drags out determinations [il en tire determinations; the English translation has “extracts”, which seems wrong];

with these determinations drawn from the chaos (iii) diagrammatic features of a plane of immanence are produced;

i.e. determinations are doubly worked over: they are “drawn” (passive) and then they “diagram” (active)—perhaps in our terminology this would be a movement from the present to the actual.

(2) the Conceptual Persona then (iv) establishes a correspondence between the doubly worked over determinations, (v) through groupings of concepts (vi) in a field (plane) whose cleavages follow these determinations (see below).

Therefore:

Conceptual Personae are sites for observation according to which conceptualized planes are distinguished or brought together.

The Conceptual Persona, the site from which the plane is observed and worked over, constitutes the conditions under which each plane is filled with a constellation of concepts.

The Conceptual Personae intervenes between chaos and the diagram made possible by drawing out determinations from the chaos, and between the plane and the intensive features of concepts which populate the plane.

“The conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the persona, which itself appears as a distinct operator.”

Three (basic) Operations:

1. Lay out the plane;

2. Create (groups of) concepts on the plane: affective, veridictional, political, ethical.

3. Create personae

An Operator, Conceptual Persona, is thus the result of an operation.

There is the possibility of an infinite regression here (who is the operator of the operation, etc.).

Since we’re not doing metaphysics, and since were interested in relations of exteriority, we can start where we are, with anthropological problems.