The concept of critical assemblage is an attempt to respond to the consequences of the contemporary artistic condition^[1]1Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition, The Contemporary Condition 1 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016). (see Artistic Practice) where the separation ofthe artistic and the non-artistic is hard to maintain in practices that oscillate between political intervention,technological development and legal provocations. The notion of work is troubled when art projects take highlyspecialized forms such as benchmarks, filters or audits. And even more when they become processual or alternatebetween contradictory definitions. And finally when the artist identity is in turn reclaimed and abandoned, leveragedas a legal construct or dissolved in distributed networks of human and non-human agents.

To address the potential of these practices adequately requires a conceptual approach that doesn’t reify the modernist constructs of authorship or assume the already given nature of notions such as field or autonomy (see Autonomy) yet remains attentive to the purchase of these concepts and their effects. Critical assemblage builds on various traditions: Deleuzian such as revisited by Lazzarato^[2]2Lütticken Sven, Cultural Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017). or Delanda^[3]3Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines : Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Signs and Machines : Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 2014). and the Latourian^[4]4Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).. Instead of operating with a priori stable categories, assemblage theory doesn’t presume a locus ofagency (in the artist, the work, the institution) (in that it enters in dialogue with a practice of Unlearning, see below) but privileges a relational approach where the categories arediscovered through networks of agents.

The critical in critical assemblages.

Critical as distributed argument.

As a concept, critical assemblages rest on the assumption that to perform a critical function an actor cannot act alone, it has to do so in alliance with a series of other actors be them humans, objects or processes. Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed. However, it doesn’t follow that the critical subject (the artist, the curator, the spectator) has no responsibility nor initiative, but that their responsibility and initiative are relative and never given a priori.

Critical as threshold (or turning point).

As the critical assemblage is evaluated for what it does as much as for the argument it exposes, the critical assemblage is studied in the privileged context of controversies where (in the context of my study for example^[5]5Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).) its potential to inflect the development of technology can be reflected upon. This intends to respondto the current high flammability of contemporary art which becomes increasinglydefined by disputes that range from cancellations, court cases, accusations and denunciations from different parts ofthe political spectrum. The potential of a controversy study of these assemblages is to acknowledge the role of the“effects of art”, its societal efficacy.

A critical assemblage can go through different states. Above or under certain critical thresholds, it acquires different capabilities and properties or loses them. To study a critical assemblage is not just to map all its pieces together but to understand how certain intensities are reached. At which conditions an assemblage comprising a cast of agents such as a museum, its visitors, its staff, the ministry of culture, a converted industrial building, a host of media channels, a book series, neighbourhood programmes and a gift shop can reach a critical threshold (as opposed to merely host critical content)? Or to think about documenta 15, which parameters (which diagram of forces in Deleuzian jargon) can help understand the crossing of different thresholds and the transformation of the event into an engine of parliamentary politics?

The method of diagramming (see Diagramming) is explored as a means to locate these intensities and critical thresholds.