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Jeanette Lehn
Dr. Yancey
ENC 5933 Convergence Culture
11/8/15
Assemblage: A Framework for Composing
Reid begins by discussing assemblage in terms of ontology. Reid writes Assemblage
theory offers a method for investigating these questions by establishing an
ontology that focuses on the external relations among objects rather than on
presupposing that objects are predefined by essential, internal qualities (4).
What Reid proposes is that assemblage is a way of viewing composing where
all relationships involved in the assemblage are consideredeven the nonhuman factors of composing. Reid argues that our previous conceptions of
assemblage have been human centric and socially based, but the advent of
computing and big-data has altered our relationship to composing. Reid also
argues that if we factor in the heterogeneous resources available from big
data into our writing processes, we can gain a more robust understanding of
assemblage.
While Reid focuses more so on the ontological aspects of assemblage,
Arola & Arola question the ethics involved in engaging in assemblage when
cultural identity is tied up into the acitivity. The authors compare two
examples of culture being tied up in assemblageone is a song by
M.I.A./Diplo/Santogold in which a powwow was sampled as part of the track
and the other example the authors examine is the work done by a musical
group called A Tribe Called Red. In comparing the two musical examples, the
authors introduce the term creative repetition to discuss the difference
between sampling that does not perpetuate stereotypes and the more
commonly heard term cultural appropriation where some aspect of cultural
identity is used in a way that perpetuates stereotypes. Additionally, an
instance of creative repletion occurs when the ultimate effect is benefit for a
community.
Shipka discusses assemblage in terms of the process, but also the
contemplation of the object. She advocates for rigorous productive play in
pedagogical and scholarly approaches, and she advocates for consider
composers as collectors who pull from a wide range of found resources.
She characterizes collection as selecting, examining, preserving, ordering,
researching, transforming, and displaying (3)a highly involved and active
process. She encourages a type of pedagogical approach that contemplates
the object and the curation of that object among other objects. She also
notes the influence of the collection on the collector and she ends by
gesturing towards how a more playful approach to composing could benefit
the field.
McElroy uses the postcard to show how assemblage can be seen as
product, process and ontology. In his article, he notes the presence of
assembled textual elements in the product, the back of an early postcard,

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and he documents the process of creating a Teich view postcard in which
Teich would construct ideal visions of vacation locales in a process Teich
called fake photography (157). Teich would take pictures of locations and
remove unsightly items such as telephone wires and add in more ideal
backgrounds, all to assemble a more ideal version of a location. McElroy
notes that numerous individuals were required to create these cards. He
writes, the sheer number of collaborators who worked together to create
each of these cards is impressive: theres a photographer who creates the
image; Johnson, who places the order, pays for the cards creation, and
provides specific instructions for the design; and the artists who carry the
design through production (159). One of McElroys key points is that by
taking notes of how these textual practices occurred in response to key
exigencies allows us to see assemblage as an ontology and not just as an
isolated textual practice that occurs solely in one time and place, that
assemblage is a recursive phenomenon.
Assemblage is a term that Ive heard many times before and it was
helpful to gain a more basic understanding from these readings. (On a side
note, I was pleased to see the term being applied in an ethical context in the
case of Arola & Arola as sometimes I think issues of race and alterity get
occluded when we begin to have discussions of the digital.) There are similar
terms to assemblage in circulation like remix, postmodernism and poststructuralism, but what I think that assemblage offers one is a framework
that offers more leverage for discussing the composing processes involved.
Remix or postmodernism might help one to describe an aspect of
assemblage, but assemblage theory offers a fuller vocabulary for examining
fragmentary relationships that exist in composing. One constraint of
assemblage theory is that all of these articles seem to view assemblage
more in light of the composer as opposed to the audience. This aspect of
assemblage theory might pair well with something like Bolter and Grusins
Remediation because a constraint of that text is that it dwell predominately
in the consumption of media. If we combine these theoretical approaches,
we are afforded with postmodern views of both composing and of audience.