Asexual Assemblages, Part 1: Machinic (Non-)Desire
A critical exploration of labels, assemblage theory, and the search for a vibrant, non-totalizable asexual identity in a queer context.
This is the first entry in a three-part essay series. The other parts may be accessed here:
Introduction
Maybe I'm learning
Why the sea on the tide
Has no way of turning
— Roxy Music
In their essay “Embracing Incoherent Asexualities”[1], bindweed explores the proliferation of labels and microlabels to define and characterize asexual experience and identity, observing that while these labels are necessary to give ace people a way to talk about “the vast space of non-normative intimate experience and desire and repulsion that has left us speechless”, they also tend to be limiting distortions of lived experience that are often deployed in ways that restrict and essentialize.
Indeed, it hardly needs to be remarked that the reification and hierarchization of identity and relational labels has been cause for incalculable violence on a world-historical scale, especially when these labels are adopted as integral functional components in oppressive ideological superstructures such as statism, capitalism, patriarchy, and fascism. That is not to say labels such as “cisgender”, “heterosexual”, “monogamous”, “vanilla”, and “allosexual” are inherently hegemonic—but it is equally beyond dispute that “identity labels”[2] often come to serve the purposes of discursive regimes that amplify and entrench the material and biopolitical power of the contemporary global hegemonic order, especially the pervasive form of liberalism characterized by highly-militarized nation states and late-stage global capitalist production.
The question, then, is this: how can asexual people, and the LGBTQIA+ community more broadly, deploy labels where they are necessary, while acknowledging their inherent distortions and restrictions, and avoiding using them in ways that merely recapitulate the mechanisms of historic prejudice and marginalization in a queer context?
As a way out, bindweed advances a new ethos of labels, proposing that you “have to take the labels lightly, have to acknowledge their fragility, their incoherence, their overlap, their complete inadequacy in describing the greater mysteries of true human experience behind them”. This yields a politics of asexual identity that makes use of labels but short-circuits their essentializing tendencies by granting individuals the epistemic autonomy to shape that label to the context of their own experience, and vice versa.
For bindweed, this ethos and politics, when combined with the proliferation of labels and microlabels, will yield more frequent encounters with the incoherence and transcendence at the heart of asexual identity, producing experiences in which the purportedly discrete and well-defined labels are made to give way to the potential for new, crucially incoherent, experiences of asexuality in oneself, in the other, in relationship. These experiences, by virtue of their incoherence, are more resistant to capture by the discursive field of compulsory sexuality and compulsory romanticism.
This is a crucial intervention in the construction of asexual identity with implications for many more kinds of non-normative, marginal identities. I am broadly supportive of such a goal. However, there is a risk that the proliferation of labels that bindweed advocates for may not ultimately give way to the “surrender” or “incoherence” that they imagine. Rather, such labels can easily be deployed in their normative function, namely to restrict, essentialize, and exclude, sometimes violently. Such an outcome would not create the connective, liberatory incoherence that bindweed imagines, but rather a destructive incoherence that atomizes, alienates, and ultimately forecloses the possibility of connection and community.
This is a serious risk that warrants a careful analysis of the function of identity labels, especially in an asexual and queer context. Improved understanding in this area will improve our ability to develop, discuss, deploy, and discard identity labels in ways that allow us to embrace incoherence without falling into discourses of separation and exclusion.
Overview
The remainder of this essay elaborates an analysis and theory of labels that avoids these negative outcomes. First, I provide a brief summary of the theory of assemblages developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia (especially A Thousand Plateaus[3]). Assemblage theory provides a critical-theoretical account of the mechanics and interplay between meaning and incoherence at stake in bindweed’s essay. This accounting can be used to expand bindweed’s exploration into a theorization of asexual and queer identity, and to relate the function and shape of these identities to the broader discursive, psychic, and material contexts and power structures out of and within which these identities have emerged.
This expanded contextual scope provides a critical lens for the second part of the essay, an analysis of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation. Coppola’s film is dominated by encounters with linguistic and relational incoherence, most centrally in the non-normative, apparently asexual intimate relationship that emerges between the main characters Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). Analyzing this film through the lens of assemblage theory provides rich insight into the challenges of constructing non-normative personal and relational identities in a spatiotemporal context where no language yet exists to bridge the gulf of incoherence, where subjects are constantly pressured into hegemonic ways of thinking, being, and relating.
The fraught dynamics in Lost in Translation closely parallel the challenges inherent to projects of asexual identity construction and queer theorization that are ongoing at an individual and community level today. Thus, in the third part of this essay, I extend these analytic conclusions along a variety of fronts. I reflect on my own experience of the film at the time of its release as an aceflux person who had not yet found that label; I also relate the tension in the film with the norms in the contemporary LGBTQIA+ community that can cause asexual people to be marginalized and doubly-othered. Finally, I conclude by contemplating ways in which bindweed’s notion of “epistemic autonomy” can be preserved from the essentializing counter-force introduced by a proliferation of labels.
Assemblage Theory
For Deleuze and Guattari, an assemblage is a set of material or social elements whose arrangement, operation, and productive outputs are determined by sets of conditioning relationships called “abstract machines”. Critical theorist Manuel DeLanda, in his further elaboration of assemblage theory, adds the important criteria that an assemblage is characterized by emergent properties that are not simply reducible to the isolated operation of one or more parts[4]. This factor differentiates the assemblage from a “mere collection” of elements, which lack emergent properties. The properties of an assemblage are emergent, rather than essential: assemblage theory is non-essentialist and indeed was devised in part to contest and provide an alternative to the traditional “logic of essences” in Western metaphysics.
Example: an envelope is an arrangement of material elements: some combination of paper, gum, stamp, cellophane, ink, and contents. In addition to the elements of the envelope itself, it may also incorporate a stamp, a cancellation mark, one or two windows, and/or addresses, each of which inscribe—literally and conceptually—different functions on the arrangement of elements. An envelope is not a mere collection because it has emergent properties that are not reducible to those of its elements—a United States postage stamp affixed to an envelope contributes a property that it would not if it were affixed to a wall. However, if the envelope exists outside of the United States, or in a time after the United States has ceased to exist as a state entity, the stamp may cause a decorative or historical property to emerge, instead.
This example also illustrates the notion that assemblages tend more-or-less toward distinct political functions, categorized by Deleuze and Guattari as territorial, state, capitalist, and nomadic assemblages. A full discussion of these types is beyond my scope and ability, here; instead, I recommend Thomas Nail’s very helpful articulation of the theory in “What is an Assemblage”, which I quote throughout[5].
Suffice it to say, the first three functions—territorial, state, and capitalist—respectively restrict, accumulate, and generalize the flows of desire and productive output of an assemblage in the service of their ideological superstructures. By contrast, the nomadic assemblage is “arranged in such a way that the conditions, elements, and agencies of the assemblage are able to change and enter into new combinations without arbitrary limit or so-called ‘natural’ or ‘hierarchical’ uses and meanings”.
Due to this ongoing fluctuation in arrangement, meaning, and political orientation, an assemblage can never be a “seamless totality”; rather, elements and operations are always rearranging, transforming, and changing members in ways that always contest the conditioning relations set out by the abstract machine.
Indeed, it is possible for elements in an assemblage to mutate to such an extent that they come to form a line of flight, a configuration that is decisively “new” and cannot, at that moment, be ordered by any known conditioning relations. Lines of flight have destabilizing, and revolutionary, potential to the extent that they may pose a threat to hegemonic power that relies on the enforcement of particular conditioning relations for legitimacy or dominance. Ultimately, lines of flight must resolve in one of several ways:
Destruction. Lines of flight are by definition unstable and, in the context of the current discussion, incoherent. This poses a risk that the configuration will be too volatile to achieve stability without the restriction of its originating conditioning relation. In this case, the line of flight would decohere
Example: an intentional community is an assemblage that rejects one or more of the conditioning relations that constitute the hegemonic definition of community or society. These definitions may be deemed repressive but nevertheless provide a structure without which the community often decoheres—fails to thrive, or survive, materially or socially
Capture. There is a tension between the line of flight and the hegemonic power structure. If a line of flight is sufficiently compatible with an existing assemblage or conditioning relation, the latter may simply expand to accommodate, recuperate, and/or resorb the line of flight.
Example: a same-sex marriage was an assemblage that deviated from the traditional discursive construction of marriage in America to a degree that it constituted a line of flight. Ultimately, the label “marriage” was able to be adjusted sufficiently to recuperate same-sex assemblages without threatening the priorities of state and capital.
Becoming. Sometimes, a line of flight achieves a relatively resilient, stable, or metastable existence as a new type of assemblage with an accompanying new abstract machine.
Example: “asexual” is the oldest label used to describe non-allosexuality, but is insufficient for capturing the full spectrum of lived ace experience. People who identified as asexual but also sometimes experienced sexual attraction constituted a line of flight that ultimately resolved in the creation of “aceflux”, a new label and discursive space with a relationship to, but not an identity with, the term “asexuality”.
Lines of Flight
Assemblage theory is necessary to expand our understanding and engagement with ace identity in a way that opens up novel ways of being while avoiding collapse into isolating incoherence. Specifically, assemblage theory provides a means to elaborate, and navigate, bindweed’s notion of incoherent asexuality, to systematically advance the work described in the conclusion of their essay:
You have to let go of single definitions and instead grant the label-user epistemic autonomy: You listen to them and understand what the label means and how it fits them in their narrative of why they use it, and you listen again when context or life experience changes that meaning, or when they change labels. We collectively co-create the definitions of these words, as language-users do with all words, and none of them hold the exact same nuances of meaning for any two people. Labels for asexualities are personal and collective just as all words are personal and collective
The coherence provided by labels is necessary but not sufficient to give shape to the lived experience of an intra- or interpersonal relational assemblage. We may even go so far as to say that a relational assemblage has become nomadic to the extent that it is able to disavow the fantasy of the transcendence of labels and instead become immanent in the particular, momentary configuration of its elements.
To arrange oneself in such an odd, unfamiliar, specifically queer manner is to risk annihilation, as well as potentially violent reshaping or capture by hegemonic power. Yet it is only in this way that I-you-we can discover ways of Becoming and relating to one another that are vibrant, intensive, and non-totalizable.
In the next part of this essay, I will deploy this understanding of assemblage theory in a new analysis of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation which understands the film’s principal relationship as not merely a set of romantic-comedic, fish-out-of-water tropes, but rather as a radically other form of intimate assemblage. This assemblage both fails to map to known labels, and constitutes a line of flight which challenges the very presuppositions of those labels, including embedded hegemonic notions of compulsory sexuality, romanticism, and monogamy.
This essay continues in Part 2:
[1] bindweed, “Embracing Incoherent Asexualities,” Substack newsletter, Some Sort of Radical Asexual (blog), August 1, 2023,
[2] Note, too, that these labels can be combined to further differentiate, restrict, and oppress. Judith Butler’s description of a “heterosexual matrix” in Gender Trouble (1990) is a classic example: a social structure which substantializes and relates sex, gender, and sexuality into a discursive matrix which assigns every subject to a specific position within this tripartite system—and in so doing designates their performance as proper or deviant.
[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
[4]Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016).
[5] Thomas Nail, “What Is an Assemblage?,” SubStance 46, no. 1 (2017): 21–37..