THE ARTWORK AS ASSEMBLAGE. NEW MATERIALIST PERSPECTIVES ON AESTHETICS.

To analyse an artwork using the philosophical theory of the assemblage is to expand one’s view of how artworks can be interpreted. In the various and often wildly differing concepts of new materialism, the assemblage acts as a way of describing the agency of matter in general. Following Deleuze and Guattari, who provided various definitions of the assemblage, the new materialist perspectives emphasize, for example, the active linking of heterogeneous parts and a dynamic conjunction of semi-autonomous formations that articulate new affiliations of entities and discourses. 
In this essay, Xinhao Cheng’s multimedia installation The Naming of a River, 2014 to 2018, is described as an assemblage, thereby significantly widening how it is interpreted as the artwork. Cheng describes the manifolds of time-space-dimensions in his simultaneously scientific and deeply personal artistic research project on the Panlong River. 
In the context of an assembled assemblage theory, formed by combining new materialist perspectives, The Naming of a River can be thought of as existing in an innumerable manifold of different versions. With each new connection made, the entire artwork changes completely. The relations exist not only between the material artefacts of the installation and the artist, but also between the institution, the recipients, and the river. The artwork is a self-productive setting that transcends spaces and times, an interpretation derived from approaches by Manuel DeLanda and Karen Barad. In this process, our understanding of what an artwork can be is significantly challenged.

on the assemblage and to use it as an analytical tool. Ian Buchanan's assertion in the quote above is central to this essay, because a pure description of the material components from which a particular assemblage is composed is not useful to a holistic understanding of what an assemblage can be. Of course, analysing, for example, an artwork using assemblage theory involves a far-reaching extension to include its material components and matter in general. But, if the specific agency of the parts is also to be factored in, it becomes equally important to reflect on how to describe that agency, and more to the point, what the (possible) outcome of doing so is.
For this purpose, a contemporary artwork will be viewed as an assemblage from a new materialist perspective and to what extent this perspective is unique will be explored. The artwork is Xinhao Cheng's The Naming of a River (2014 to 2018) both a multimedia installation and a photo book (Fig.1). The artist does not describe his work either with the art historical term "assemblage" nor with the philosophical theory, but there are potential benefits to doing so. Therefore, an assembledassemblage-theory will be used in order to gain new theoretical insights about what an artwork can be. It is important to specify that the question is not primarily what the artwork can contribute to the philosophical understanding of an assemblage, if any at all, but the other way around.
What added benefit is brought to the interpretation of artworks in general and this work specifically by analysing it as an assemblage? The arts' and art history's recent interest in aspects of new materialism opens a wide range of perspectives that can be taken into consideration. This essay focuses on assembling a theory from several approaches, all of which, implicit or explicit, refer to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's assemblage theory.
Deleuze and Guattari describe their concept of the assemblage in A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism andSchizophrenia published in English in 1987 (original: Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie published in French in 1980). One widespread misunderstanding arises from the fact that the two authors did not use the French word "assemblage", which could be translated as "assembly", but rather "agencement", which is more like "arrangement", but which was translated as "assemblage" for the first English version of the book. This must be borne in mind when the word "assemblage" is used in the following, because the focus is not on a general assembly of things, but rather on a well-placed only evolve with and within other assemblages. 7 These co-developments are asserted by the movements of "deterritorialization" and "reterritorialization". Every assemblage immediately starts to deterritorialize, to build "lines of flight" towards others, but this spreading is in a way dangerous for the assemblage, because it can be annexed by other assemblage(s). 8 The reterritorialization as a territorial gesture is an instant reaction designed to prevent this.
At this point, three significant observations can be made. First of all, the assemblage as a complex entity is not (only) the sum of its parts, but actually active at every level. Second, there is a tendency to connect with other assemblages, which is a constantly ongoing process. And third, assemblages are definable as distinct units, and there is a countermovement to the tendency to deterritorialize. When analysing a certain phenomenon using assemblage theory, it is not justifiable to simply mount parts together and describe an ongoing (material) expansion, especially not when using Deleuze's und Guattari's methodological thinking as the starting point.
In his recent book on assemblages, Buchanan argues against contemporary assemblage theory and tries to tie the concept back to Deleuze and Guattari exclusively. For Buchanan, the assemblage can only be adequately described by looking at each book that Deleuze and Guattari wrote together and selecting some of the subsequent books that either composed individually after Thousand Plateaus. In general, for him the assemblage is a concept that is not fully realized and has potential for further development, but only if there is a strict focus on the writings of 7 Deleuze and/or Guattari. 9 Hence, Buchanan spends many pages describing the assemblage and contextualising it within the concepts of "desire", the "body without organs", or the "abstract machine". He considers desire especially crucial, because it has a productive dimension: "Assemblages have in common the fact that they are all arrangements of desire." 10 Consequently, the most critical remarks of his book are in the chapter "expressive materialism", which focuses on the "vibrant" assemblage thinking of Jane Bennett and (in addition to other chapters) on Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory. Buchanan explains that the two philosophers merely appropriate the term assemblage to "knot" heterogeneous bits of material together, and that Bennett's attempt in particular results in an endless chain of "mapping" things that can never be finished, which leads to "all substance and no form". 11 Buchanan's carping criticism of his colleagues is understandable as long as the new materialist insights are ignored; as soon as they are considered, there is fertile ground to be found in carefully combining the diverging concepts.
A major contribution made by Buchanan are his careful excavations in Deleuze's und Guattari's assemblage concept, which show that not every entity is automatically related, and moreover, that there are different planes for these processes: "Not everything we encounter is an assemblage, or part of an assemblage." 12 This is important to both views, because otherwise only the interconnectedness element is described, 9 Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method, 6. 10 Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method, 79. He further explains that there are three types of "strata" identified by Deleuze and Guattari, the "geological", the "biological", and the "alloplastic", and that all of them require two variables ("content" and "expression"), which impact these strata differently. 11 Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method, 115-119. 12 Buchanan,Assemblage Theory and Method,37,73. which leads to one endless (universe-)assemblage and the potential of the delimited assemblages being lost.
The reflections on the material components, alongside institutional and discursive practices, to interpret an artwork from a new materialist perspective are especially dependent on the thinking of Bennett and DeLanda. However, it should be clear that a certain caution is necessary to prevent the productive dimensions of assemblage thinking from mingling into the descriptions of a generic connectedness -here Buchanan plays a crucial role as a counterpart. Nonetheless, the notion of materiality needs to be expanded within a new materialist ontology.
Materiality can be described as "an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable". 13 Human, non-human and more-than-human things are shaped reciprocally within an assemblage and the material parts havedue to their materiality -the agency to emerge and to create effects.
These determinations will be connected to and critically extended in the light of the writings of Karen Barad below. She describes an interfolded situation, not only of materials, but also of time and space. All of this is connected with ecological thinking. For instance, the artwork is in close connection with, or maybe only thinkable in, the era of the A posthuman approach to entanglements in the Anthropocene can be found in Rosi Braidotti (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. Guattari's famous "three ecologies" as "three fundamental realms" that define human life and which need to be connected anew to prevent the arising of new dangers is another vivid example of this ubiquitous ecological thinking, Félix Guattari (1994). Die drei Ökologien. Wien: Passagen Verlag. 15 Brown, "Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)", 259-260. Brown underlines that Deleuze and Guattari describe William S. Burrough's literary methods as a point of reference for their assemblage concept. 16 Brown, "Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)", 267. His wording of an "assemblage in an expanded field" is informed by Rosalind Krauss's influential book on sculpture. 17 Brown, "Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)", 278. 18 Brown, "Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)", 295.

The Naming of a River as an Assemblage
Xinhao Cheng tries to give the river that he has known since he was a child a name. The river in question is the Panlong River, which flows through the city of Kunming in the province of Yúnnánin. The name has to be "objective", or at least he hopes so. 19 Although the river is ( Zhong describes Cheng's course of action as "ethnography as method and anthropology as theory", both informed by "fieldwork", as he spent more than a year photographing and collecting diverse objects alongside the riverbed. 21 The photo book includes a body of photographs in horizontal format, with the river at the lower edge and the changing landscape above, from forests, to fields, to farmlands, to suburbs, to the city. Cheng also portrayed several people he met during his research who have a connection to or interact with the river. And finally, there are white 19 All the subsequent quotes by Cheng are taken from the texts in his photo book, it has a two-side design and consists of a total of 128 unpaginated fold-over pages, Xinhao Cheng (2016). The Naming of a River. Ningbo: Jiazazhi Press. 20  sheets in the photo book where artefacts, or "pieces of my treasure" or "specimens", as Cheng calls them, are arranged like a biological taxonomy. 22 His specimens are leaves, snail shells, fossils, but also photos of rock formations, all various (material) artefacts the artist collected while he was working on the project.
The photo book is the basis for the installation The Naming of a River, ropes. There are also one or two cubes, which are formed by thin metal pipes, one or more of his photographs are shown by screens or projector, and framed pages from the photo book. The overall impression is that the arrangement of the heterogeneous objects, photos and pieces of material creates a relation between them. Or, to put it more bluntly, a relation is constructed, revealing something about the object of investigation. In the following, the version of The Naming of a River at the Zentrum für Medienkunst (ZKM) in Karlsruhe will be analysed more closely.
Cheng's goal with both the photo book and the installation is to take the river, this ever-changing continuity, and transfer it into his lifetime. It is kind of a translational work because it was not possible for him to perceive the totality of the river, due to the very different time scales.
Only when he is able to transfer some of the dimensions in which the river exists into his limited human scale -with a little help from the specimens -can an objective naming then be envisaged. It becomes clear that the naming has nothing to do with "giving a name" but is a much more complex operation. He tries to illustrate the present by contextualising the different layers of space and time, and since this is almost impossible, it needs a "sophisticated time-space complex". 23 One way to achieve this is by the installation's combining of the various specimens from very different times in one space, therefore conveying them into the new simultaneous time of the exhibition space. The specimens equally consist of all the times and spaces that are sedimented in them -millions or billions of years in the case of rocks and fossils.
Additionally, it is significant that Cheng found the pieces during his one- year research. His project to give the river a name based on his specific space and time makes him an essential part of the installation. The aim of giving an "objective" name is a very personal and, even more, a thoroughly subjective approach. This is not necessarily a paradox, but a To consider the work The Naming of a River using the theoretical concept of the assemblage means that Cheng as a person cannot be excluded. He cannot even be marginalised, which would happen if he were displaced into the periphery of the art-assemblage and the material components were described as the important ones. On the contrary, the artist is not the only entity with agency within the assemblage, and there are several processes which are far beyond his control. A careful convergence is needed in order to reach an appropriate interpretation of a specific artwork using the assemblage concept. River, he is one aspect of the assemblage and must be considered an assemblage on his own already -there is no such thing as a monadic unit.
The two authors together, Deleuze and Guattari, call this a "non-centered manifold". 24 These manifolds establish connections with their neighbours, creating a manifestation that is always instantaneous and undergoing constant change.
The connections are the next step for the assemblage, a step that happens at almost the same time as the territorial gesture. This has nothing to do with the connections within a certain assemblage, which are always present. Moreover, as already described, there are lines of flight in deterritorialization that transverse the manifold towards another assemblage and immediately start the process of reterritorialization; these counter-lines cover the outreaching lines and help to keep the assemblage intact. 25 Cheng initiated the assemblage The Naming of a River but certainly not all the connections and effects that come with it. By arranging material entities in space, Cheng certainly produces connections and interconnections that could not be seen (easily) from a human perspective beforehand. But for assemblages to be possible, everything cannot always be connected, because then we cannot make any distinctions. Frédéric Neyrat makes this very clear in his "ecology of separation", by which he explains that every interconnection must leave room for a separation -nature and ecology are neither a "fixed substance", nor an "indefinite process", both depictions would limit the possible outcome. 28 The separation here is accompanied by a reterritorialization, it is the attempt to avoid the threatening dissolution into an interconnected infinitum. All of this, the territorial gestures, followed by the de-and reterritorialization, can be summed up in Buchanan's claim: "Territorializing is world-making." 29 Every kind of knowledge we produce evolves from the movements inside of an assemblage and from their tendencies to connect with other assemblages, but also from the attempt to stay intact as long as possible.
This is not to assert that an assemblage is static, indeed there is constant and simultaneous change. But still, from the perspective that everyone and everything is already an assemblage, the production of an assemblage leads to the production of knowledge.
When examining more closely the material parts of The Naming of a River and their connection-producing placement in the exhibition room, Jane Bennett's concept of an assemblage should be considered. Her vibrant approach has several basic assumptions. She makes a distinction between "humans" and "non-humans" in general, but humankind is never isolated, instead we are always in an assemblage with non- because the processes and the mutual interferences are too extensive. 31 Furthermore, the non-human is not a clear one-dimensional category; instead, the term covers a broad range of entities and agencies. To clarify this, Bennett uses the term "thing", because when things are in an assemblage they can act as "vivid entities", which are never "reducible to the context in which (human) subjects set them". 32 According to Bennett, things have a certain power -even if they are (still) inanimate, they have the ability to produce and act, especially because of the close interrelations of the assemblages. She calls this thinking a "vital materialism", and its application makes it possible to limit the superiority of mankind, for example by recognising that the (formerly) human construct called "culture" has always been shaped by "biological, geological, and climatic forces". 33 It is important to mention that Bennett retains a certain division between humankind and things. We as humans -considered an assemblage that is not clearly delimited -still have more power, there is no completely horizontal plane, but everything is ultimately a "material configuration". 34 This is not necessarily a contradiction -for instance, the political process of participation and power is very unequally distributed, but this does not necessarily mean that one side has no power at all. In general, for Bennett, an assemblage is a "dense network of relations", which are "ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts". 35 The phrase "ad hoc groupings" is criticised by Buchanan multiple layers. 40 The agency, as Bennett points out, of this everchanging manifold is not a "strong, autonomous kind", but always "porous, tenuous, and thus indirect". 41 Agency in this case can be further described as an ongoing process of becoming, in which both the human and non-human parts have transformational powers. 42 To grasp The Naming of a River as an assemblage, it is necessary to extend this processuality into space and time, an act of extension implied by several aspects in the artwork and in Cheng's texts in the photo book.

The Naming of a River as an Interfolded Space-Time Assemblage
Cheng's strategy of creating a space-time-complex through his artwork and his attempt to grasp the river from his ( How these interweaving processes can be thought of in the context of the artwork as an assemblage and with a new materialist view is best described using aspects of Manuel DeLanda's and Karen Barad's writings. DeLanda names two main aspects that are crucial for every assemblage: [that] the parts that are fitted together are not uniform either in nature or in origin, and that the assemblage actively links these parts together by establishing relations between them. 45 Both assumptions can be found in The Naming of a River, the relations and the links already being present from the very moment in which Cheng assembles the parts in the exhibition space. But it would be wrong to claim that only the human (mind) is capable of establishing connections. Further, DeLanda describes that there must always be "assemblages of assemblages", so there is nothing singular about an assemblage, and even more importantly, every one of these bundles is a "concrete historical individual". 46 The assemblage The Naming of a River consists of "properties", which are "always actual" and therefore exclusively present in the here and now and which have the capacity to change completely as soon as a new connection is made. 47 At the same time, the assemblage has "dispositions, tendencies and capacities that 43 Cheng, The Naming of a River. 44  are virtual", they are as "real" as the actual properties but not manifested at the very moment -the virtual properties are far greater in number. 48 Within a virtual sphere that has no correlation with our minds and is therefore not tied to our scales of time and space but nonetheless fully exists, these two realms of the assemblage lead to a far-reaching extension of the assemblage. 49 This indicates that it is necessary to excavate as many connections, properties and capabilities as possible, because most of them exist (hidden) in a virtual sphere.
This virtual sphere in which most of the agencies of the assemblage can be found is nothing nebulous. For Barad, it can be described in new materialist terms and from a quantum theory perspective. In her posthuman and performative approach, she uses quantum-entanglement and quantum-field-theory to define an agential realism. 50 This profoundly challenges the conventional views of space as a container, time as linear and matter as passive. All three of them make a significant contribution to a progressive and entangled becoming, whereby everything is "intraactively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world". 51 Barad describes "diffractive apparatuses" as processes, the very reason the phenomena are produced. 52 These apparatuses are not technical, reconfigured". 53 This cannot be seen as a linear process either, but shows multiple disruptions: The point is that it is the intra-play of continuity and discontinuity, determinacy and indeterminacy, possibility and impossibility that constitutes the differential spacetimematterings of the world. 54 In conclusion Barad, with  the ZKM installation, it is placed at a certain distance from the other specimens, the metal cube and the photo projection. A spotlight highlights the layers of soil and at first, they seem somewhat isolated. But the shape is reminiscent of the metal cube, making the connection obvious. In the installation, the metal cube is kind of a placeholder for the cubic layers of soil. The rocks are arranged around the artificial structure, but they could surround the natural structure as well. In fact, following DeLanda and even more so Barad, both options are equally present. The actual appearance in the ZKM is just one "here and now" manifestation, and all the connections, not only between the specimens and the Panlong, but between the exhibition, the visitors and the geological taxonomy as well, to name just a few, are very small in number compared to the virtual ones.
The rocks and the layers of soil have a close relation in the assemblage manifold of The Naming of a River, both include the various times and places, as well as the overall processes that lead to their physical appearance. There is a connection with the deep time of the earth's history but at the same time with the choices Cheng made. The layers of soil show very clearly the different sedimentary strata of the Panlong region. It acts as an indicator for a timescale far beyond a human lifetime and the difficulties that arise when one individual tries to perceive the ever-changing river -or to give it a name. In addition, the brownish vegetation and even more so the many shells and fossils in the strata illustrate clearly the constructed dichotomy between life and non-life that Povinelli challenges. The advantage of Cheng's inclusion and presentation of the layers of soil is that it leads to far more "bundle[s] of lines", as DeLanda puts it, which are the "virtual dispositions", the hidden "objectivity" that could be revealed in novel conditions, such as a new installation. 58 In connection with Barad's apparatus theory, whereby each new boundary produces the phenomena, the (artwork-)assemblage has an extension into the entanglements of time, space, and matter. 59 Barad describes how to think about this in a more recent essay, in which she explains the idea of "diffraction as methodology": "[It is] a matter of reading insights through rather than against each other to make evident the always-already entanglement of specific ideas in their materiality." 60 The diffraction is not a separation from the outside but a difference which is inside each entity and must be accepted as factual. Barad uses waves as an example, because when it comes to time and space "multiple waves can be in the same place at the same time, and a given wave can be in multiple places at the same time". 61 She describes experiments from quantum physics to prove her point and concludes that the "diffraction pattern" is present for each entity and on each scale. As a result, we are always confronted with "different times bleeding through one another" and are far away from any kind of linearity when it comes to time. 62 The concept of space is profoundly challenged by Barad as well. She argues using the image of quantum fluctuations that require "virtual particles" to be something factual: "Virtual particles are experimenting with the im/possibilities of non/being, but that doesn't mean they aren't real; on the contrary." 63 They are equally existent and non-existent, and even more important, they are indeterminate in their core. The virtual particles are "intra-acting" with every entity, allowing them to exist.
Therefore, space has nothing to do with the "logics of the void", there is no vacuum that can be filled with entities like a container, but the "virtual particles" produce several spaces of existence and non-existence at the same time, an "ontological indeterminacy". 64 Clearly DeLanda does not argue from a quantum physics perspective, but his descriptions of the virtual as existing in multiple shades and with a far greater capacity than that which is presently perceptible, resonates with Barad's writings.
Overall, the new materialist assemblage challenges our (epistemological and metaphysical) understanding of entities, whereby artworks as reflective and thought-provoking things provide the best tools to catch up with these developments -they are "a thing to think with", as Brown This shows that the artwork itself has an unlimited potential -each new specimen or the entry of a new beholder changes the work immediately.
Cheng manifests a short standstill, with all the virtual manifolds buzzing around his assemblage. A radical openness to the constant transformation must be maintained because this is not the only version of the artwork. Rather, the work exists equally in different places and 63 Barad, "Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness", 78. 64 Barad, "Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness", 76, 80. 65 Brown, "Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)", 247.
times. The version that manifests, and the connections we as viewers can draw from it at that moment, are outstripped by the virtual possibilities behind it. Nonetheless, the work as we see it is the initial starting point to be engaged with, but this does not in any way mean that we should stop at that point if the artwork is assumed to be a new materialist assemblage. For Deleuze and Guattari, it is the process of writing that enables a deterritorialization and therefore the building of an assemblage. 66 Cheng does the same with the assemblage practice in his installation. The assembly of specimens, together with his writings, can be described as the development of an assemblage and at the same time as the reflection of this process -both expand our understanding of what an artwork can be.