Commentary

Dialogues in Human Geography

2(2) 190–193
A more than relational ª The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/2043820612449295
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John Allen
The Open University, UK

Abstract
Anderson et al.’s (2012) attempt to put assemblage thinking onto a firmer ontological footing is to be
welcomed. Whether their spaced-out ontology is postrelational, however, is more open to question. The
shadow of realism looms large over their account and poses the question as to what kinds of entities make
and are made through relations. In this respect, I argue that a more than relational geography may be the
more appropriate ontology to think through the basis of assemblage thinking. If so, the kind of realism that
comes into play may be of surprise to some geographers.

Keywords
entanglements, realism, relationality, topology

Introduction thinking? In the overdetermined world of relations

that human geographers currently work within, it
Strictly speaking, a ‘postrelational’ geography is
is refreshing to talk about something as
something of a misnomer. It is, after all, hard to imag-
old-fashioned as an emergent ‘thingness’ beyond
ine a world without relationality as a defining charac- relational effects: real entities like viruses and
teristic of social and material interaction. But we can
multinationals that possess capacities or powers
stop short of believing that constitutive relationships
which are not exhausted by the relations of which
are all that there is to geography and the world at large.
they are a part. Moving beyond relations to consider
If it is revealing to show that power is a relation not a
the nature and kind of entities that make and are
thing, it is not especially illuminating to portray Brit-
made through relationships within assemblages is
ish Petroleum or Wall Street as merely the sum of
the focus of my response here – not, I should add,
their relations. This is the path that the authors Ben
to undermine the contribution of the authors, but
Anderson, Matthew Kearnes, Colin McFarlane and to offer a few signposts along the way to a more than
Dan Swanton take us on in their paper ‘On assem-
blages and geography’ (Anderson et al., 2012). It is
a path, however, that seems to have one rather signif-
icant signpost missing, namely that of realism.
Corresponding author:
In much of what follows, I consider a question John Allen, The Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences,
that is never actually posed by the authors; that is, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK.
what kind of realism works for assemblage Email: j.r.allen@open.ac.uk

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Allen
relational geography that places topological entan-
glements at the heart of assemblage thinking.
Realism and relationality
Realism in human geography was in vogue for much
of the 1980s and early 1990s, certainly on the
European side of the Atlantic, but more or less fell
out of favour with the ‘cultural turn’ and the take-
up within the discipline of relational ways of under-
standing the social construction of space, place,
identity and countless other phenomena. Realism,
as Rom Harré (1986) reminded us, comes in many
different varieties, but it was Roy Bhaskar’s
(1975, 1979, 1989) variety of critical (or transcen-
dental) realism that took hold within geography, pri-
marily through the more accessible works of
Andrew Sayer (1984; see also 2000). Sayer now plies
his trade in the discipline of sociology, and much of
geography, as the authors point out, has become
thoroughly relational in its thinking, to the extent that
it has lost much of its cutting edge as an explanatory
device, with objects often melting into a constitutive
pool of relations. It is against this disciplinary back-
drop that the notion of a postrelational geography
seems to make sense. Well, almost.
Assemblages, after all, are formed out of compo-
nents in relation. What is significant about assem-
blage thinking, as is continually stressed in the
paper, is that those relations are external to their
terms; that is to the entities so related. In practice,
that means that what links BP, a faulty well seal, the
Maconda spill and the loss of marine life in the Gulf
of Mexico is a set of external contingent relations,
nothing more intrinsic or essential. Much the same
can be said for the links between Goldman Sachs,
securitization, the housing bubble and the actions
of the US Treasury. There is no internal logic deter-
mining the mortgage default outcome or working
behind the scenes to dispossess poorer homeowners.
The exteriority of relations, a Deleuzian inflection,
is critical because it draws attention to the fact that
BP and Goldman Sachs are made up of powers that
have the potential to be actualized differently
depending upon the relations of which they are a
part and such arrangements may even throw up new
capacities. Plug them into a different set of external
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191
relations and who knows what powers and capaci-
ties will come to the fore. So it is not relations per
se that are at issue, but those that set themselves
up as internal relations and, on that basis, claim prior
knowledge of what the powers of a particular object
or entity can necessarily do.
Critical realism works with both internally and
externally related phenomena, where, broadly speak-
ing, the former account for the powers of a particular
entity, their tendencies and potential, and the latter
make up the empirical realm of the contingent where
entities interact and tendencies are realized, if at all.
On this view, powers may exist unexercised and
unrealized, and what happened in the past does not
exhaust what is possible in the future. So, outcomes
are open-ended and never fully determined, much like
the authors’ account of things and their capacities.
The big difference, of course, is that critical realists
like Bhaskar and Sayer hold onto some form of essen-
tialism that has internal relations written all over it.
And that is anathema to Anderson and his collabora-
tors, as much as it is to Manuel DeLanda (2002, 2006),
whose arguments are central to their paper.
DeLanda is a self-confessed realist, but of the
variety that attempts to blend the arguments of
Deleuze with those of Bhaskar to arrive at an inter-
esting eclectic mix. As Graham Harman (2010) has
pointed out, DeLanda considers Bhaskar to be a kin-
dred spirit when, for example, it comes down to a
belief that an entity’s generative powers depends,
in part, on their relation to others and that such pow-
ers are never fully actualized by their surroundings.
While the kindred spirits part company over
whether or not entities posses essential powers,
there is nonetheless a commitment from DeLanda
that the capacity to affect and be affected by others
also depends upon the dynamic, yet enduring, nature
of entities. Anyone familiar with the bird flu virus,
H5N1, knows that the major concern is less its geo-
graphical spread and more its potential to mutate,
drift and reassort into a more virulent pathogenic
strain that affects people. Even slight changes in the
exchange of genetic material during a co-infection
of a host can trigger a pandemic. The potential for
viruses to be actualized differently points to the sig-
nificance of its particular entanglements, which are
as much internal as they are external.
192
Not every entity acts like a virus, of course, but
what the example shows is that the internal/external
binary, with capacities on the ‘inside’ and contin-
gent relations on the ‘outside’, so to speak, lacks any
real meaning or significance in this instance. If there
is an interior of sorts it may be thought about as pro-
duced in relation to an exterior, where, following
Deleuze’s (1988) idiosyncratic account of power
in Foucault’s work, the outside is more than an
exterior and is folded topologically by an inside that
is not enclosed or bounded. In that sense, there is no
line which marks the outside off from the inside,
only entanglements of a topological kind. Things
may and indeed do endure in many respects, but that
is not the same as saying that there is a fixed,
unchangeable essence to them. The integral powers
of Goldman Sachs mutate in much the same ways
that those of a virus do, from corporate domination
through to financial manipulation and selective
inducement, depending upon the tangled arrange-
ments of money and influence that they find them-
selves caught up within.
Behind all this is a simple suggestion by Deleuze
and Parnet (1987) that we substitute AND for IS in
our thinking; that we no longer follow traditional
logic and first define what something IS in terms
of its essential properties before entering a world
of relations, but rather plunge ourselves into an
entangled world of powers that make AND are made
through their relations with one another. This is not
to simply substitute a conjunction for a verb, but, as
Deleuze and Parnet say, to give relations another
direction, another set of arrangements within which
a different set of capacities may emerge and change
those around it, no less than itself. This may not be
realism as we know it, but it may be a kind of
realism that works for assemblage thinking. It has
nothing to do with adding things together in a mind-
less descriptive exercise, yet everything to do with
the careful conceptualization of entities and their
powers in relation; that is, in the tangle of relations
and things that comprise an assemblage.
Entangled geographies
Entanglement is not a term employed by Anderson
et al. in their quest to put assemblages onto a firmer
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Dialogues in Human Geography 2(2)
ontological footing, except when they draw upon
the work of Karen Barad (2007). She argues for a
notion of causality that is not located in the powers
of entities, but rather in the intra-action of entangled
agencies. Barad is a realist, though not of the kind
that I have spoken about thus far, and intra-action
is her way of shifting causality away from things and
locating it in already entangled real phenomena.
Phenomena are not distinct entities for Barad, so
perhaps one way to think about this is to return to the
virus example. Viruses do not merely spread out
over space from a known source – rather pathogens
and hosts intra-act as they move, generating the
potential for a new strain; that is, the emergence
of a phenomenon that was not in evidence before
and is not reducible to the combination of pre-
existing objects. The authors distance themselves
from this view in order to preserve their ‘exteriority
of relations’ stance, but not without cost. One conse-
quence is that they frequently fall back upon the
more familiar notion of interacting agencies and
what could be read as a rather passive geography
where the mix of space/times embedded in the
entanglement of distributed entities largely fails to
register.
This is somewhat odd, as the spaces of possibility
that they highlight are suggestive of something more
than a world of things and their potentialities merely
actualized in space. Barad, for one, is clear that
‘space is not a collection of preexisting points set
out in a fixed geometry’ (2007: 180), preferring
instead to emphasize the topological qualities of
intra-actions where proximity and presence are not
straightforward givens. What I take from this is that
there is no inside or outside to entanglements, only
spaces in the making which take their shape from
the mix of elements, some close by, others folded
in from afar, detached and re-embedded in ways that
give rise to new and novel arrangements (Allen,
2011). The ‘interactive processes of composition’
that the authors describe hint at this, but stop short
of giving a role to geography in the dynamic process
of composition. Indeed, the way in which assem-
blages hold together without actually forming
coherent wholes is arguably attributable to a geogra-
phy of relations and things that is, in part, assembled
through parts of elsewhere (Allen and Cochrane,
Allen
2007). It is precisely for this reason that the local/
global binary has as little purchase within assem-
blages as does the micro/macro divide. I would add
to that list the idea of a fixed line between internal
and external relations.
Anderson et al. have set out a much-needed
assessment of what assemblage thinking has to offer
sociospatial theory and their real contribution is
their attempt to give assemblages a firmer ontologi-
cal basis. The shadow of realism, however, looms
large over their assessment and represents a lost
opportunity to think through what kind of realism
works for assemblage thinking. In fact, the very
attempt to spell out a postrelational ontology begs
such a question. Moving beyond relations to con-
sider the nature and kind of entities that make and
are made through relations is not especially
‘postrelational’; rather it is closer to Deleuze’s ‘rea-
lism’ without, that is, the baggage of western philo-
sophy’s internally inscribed essences. In a similar
vein, it might have been useful for the authors to
think through what kind of geography works for
assemblage thinking, beyond that of its various
topographical forms. Insofar as many of the metrics
of topography are a product of space/time as a
dynamic and changing topology, such thinking
could have taken us towards a more than relational
geography.
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