Things are assemblages: shifting arrangements of bodies, tools, ideas and desires with no fixed centre.
- +Fits Post-structuralist Epistemology, Pragmatist Epistemology
- –Tension with Positivist Epistemology
The longer story
Deleuze rejected most labels applied to him—fitting for a philosopher of escape and becoming. Yet his work with Guattari is constantly drawn upon in post-structuralist and new materialist research. Forget organic wholes; think assemblages. A rhizome instead of a tree—no root, no centre, connections everywhere. Desire isn't lack; it's productive. Becoming matters more than being. Genuinely useful for understanding creative fields as assemblages of heterogeneous elements—artists, institutions, technologies, discourses—temporarily stabilised but always potentially different. If you're studying how scenes emerge or genres assemble, D&G give you vocabulary for complexity without imposing false unity.