Articulation V Assemblage

Chapter 11 in Culture and Technology was titled Articulation and Assemblage. Reading this passage for the first time was actually very confusing to me. It was in fact not until the lecture in class where I began to understand what Slack and Wise (the authors) were attempting to express.

The way I now understand the denotations of these words is “articulation” is single groups or points. Assemblage is the overall group that links the articulations into a cohesive web of reality. This whole process is what the authors call the “actor-network” web.

For example, in class we talked about guns. The articulations would be the NRA, liberals, conservatives, military and law enforcement and hunters. These were just a few of the examples we listed, however one can get the idea. We then linked each articulation by what affects other articulations. For instance we linked NRA with conservatives. Even though this is a generalization that does not always hold true, however one can establish the connection there. We then linked all other articulations to finally for one large assemblage about guns.