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What do we mean by 'assemblage' in contemporary theory? The constant and seemingly limitless expansion of the concept's range of applications begs the question, if any and every kind of collection of things is an assemblage, then what advantage is there is in using this term and not some other term, or indeed no term at all? What makes an assemblage an assemblage, and not some other kind of collection of things?

Once upon a time when something was simple to do we said: "It's as easy as riding a bike." But switching from driving a car to riding a bike as one's main means of transport is anything but easy. The well-documented obstacles holding people back from cycling include a lack of proper bike lanes, secure parking arrangements, end-of-trip facilities and bike-friendly public transport, as well as lack of convenient storage space. Despite these obstacles, people continue to try to make cycling a central part of their lives, with varying degrees of success. While we know broadly what the impediments are, we don't know how individuals confront them over time. We tend to approach this issue as an "all or nothing" affair - either people cycle or they don't. Research is often framed in terms of cyclists and non-cyclists. But, for most people, our research tells us it is a gradual process of transformation, with setbacks as well as small victories. The hesitant maybe-cyclist of today is potentially the fully committed cyclist of tomorrow. Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. We have taken a lead from research into smoking, which sees failed quit attempts not as failures but as necessary steps on the road to success. Part of our research is interested in the faltering starts people make in transitioning from motor vehicles to bikes. Our aim is to help identify new intervention points for cycling policy.

There is now enough plastic in the world to wrap the entire planet. Plastic is now so pervasive scientists are saying that it is a new geological marker. And no part of the planet has been more affected by the spread of plastic waste than the ocean. Eventually the things we dispose of will dispose of us. We are suffocating the planet in our toxic waste. The ocean, as vast as it is, has somehow slipped from view-it is used as a dumping ground for all kinds of waste, and it is steadily dying, but no-one seems able to raise a hand to help it. In part this is a problem of sovereignty. All nations claim their piece of the ocean, but none own it outright. And now that it is in trouble we must ask who is responsible for fixing it? Global warming is a problem of rubbish-it is caused by the by-products of what we do in our daily lives. We generally expect others to change so we can stay the same, but what would get us to change everything, including ourselves? In critical theory there are essentially only two answers to this question: we either do what we know we must (Kant's categorical imperative is the sine qua non of this position); or we do what we feel we must (Bennett's vital materialism is in many ways the sine qua non of this position). Adherents to the latter view of things describe it as either embodied or material and they castigate adherents of the categorical view for being either disembodied or immaterial. The limits of the former are that it is idealist and, in being so, implicitly tyrannical because the set of things we must do are not defined or decided upon by ourselves. They are instead imposed from the outside and often without any awareness of or interest in history or indeed culture.

It's a local government truism that Australian city dwellers care about only three things - rates, rubbish and parking. They want lower rates, the freedom to turf out as much trash as they like, and convenient free car parking. The arrival of dockless share bikes set these attitudes towards parking and rubbish on a collision course.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was a French philosopher who was born in Paris and, following a long, incapacitating illness, took his own life in the same city. Deleuze's oeuvre is difficult to classify. He described his work as philosophy, 'nothing but philosophy', even when it looked like something else - anthropology, art history, social theory, politics, film theory and so on. As this brief litany suggests, his work ranges far beyond the usual concerns of the discipline. His work is read equally widely - indeed, it tends to be most influential outside philosophy. He has devoted readers in art, architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, politics and sociology. Deleuze introduced both a new way of writing philosophy and a new way of thinking about philosophy that contributed in profound ways to the construction of the new discursive form known today simply as theory.1 His friend Michel Foucault, a towering intellectual figure in his own right, recognised the significance of Deleuze's contribution to twentieth-century thought very early and in 1969 mischievously went so far as to suggest the century would be named after him.2

No other public building excites as much fear and anxiety as an airport. No other building exemplifies more acutely Sartre's cruel judgement that "hell is other people". It is a leviathan space in which everyone fights tooth and claw not to be held up and forced to wait. Now that the online universe of working, shopping, banking, and living has created smooth spaces in which to conduct our lives without ever having to encounter another actual human being, the airport is one of the last places in the first world where crowds are still encountered and queuing is still a necessity (entertainment complexes such as art galleries, cinemas, and theme parks are the only other places where one is likely to queue). And it was of course the queue that denoted the disintegration of society into seriality for Sartre. Experienced travellers know that there is something worse to fear than mere queuing, namely delayed or cancelled flights, but it is essentially the same anxiety: the fear of waiting and more especially the corresponding fear of boredom the waiting will entail.

Like the concept of the assemblage, the body without organs is much written about, but unlike the assemblage there are no specific schools of thought associated with the body without organs, much less any agreed definitions. As such, it tends to be used in a very vague manner, with most accounts of it ignoring its practical dimension and instead focusing on its aesthetic (Artaud) and philosophical (Spinoza) origins. However, Deleuze quite explicitly positions the assemblage as a contribution to an understanding of behaviour, so the purely philosophical accounts of the body without organs that give no account of how it can be used analytically are not helpful in my view. I demonstrate that the practical conception of the body without organs is an effective way of understanding the concept. I use the example of George Mallory's attempt to climb Everest to illustrate this point. I argue that if we focus only on the symbolic attainment of being the first person to climb the world's tallest mountain and consign the actual act of climbing to the realm of mere entry price, then we effectively destroy the assemblage by rendering it teleological. Now, one might think that this means one should balance the equation by focusing on the bodily dimension of the climb, and certainly that is the direction we need to take, but to do that we need to conceive of a space where that physical dimension can be registered in something other than purely biological terms. If, as Spinoza and after him Deleuze have argued, we do not know what a body can do, it is because we do not have the conceptual means of capturing and expressing its capabilities. We can record its achievements, but we cannot map its capabilities because the body seems always to be capable of doing more than anyone thought possible. Until 1953 when Hillary and Norgay reached the peak of Everest climbing Everest was generally regarded as impossible. A view that was reinforced by the dozen or so failed attempts, not to menti

Boredom, so we have been taught to believe, signifies the failure of a given semiotic regime-whether that's a lecture, a TV show, a news article or a place. Boredom is presented to us as a common enemy that like witches and sinners of old must be driven out. Perhaps though boredom is a form of cognitive defence we should cultivate. Boredom isn't necessarily a sign of failure; one might also see it as a sign of success, a sign that one has held onto the integrity of one's thoughts despite the constant pressure of external stimuli in the information rich age we live in. We must ask, what does it say about a culture if it loses the art of being bored? Does that not mean we who make up 'this' culture no longer know how to amuse ourselves with only our inner selves for company? By conquering boredom consumer capitalism has extinguished its most potent critic. Boredom is our defence against the present.

Cycling bodies Bicycle NSW and the Victorian-based Bicycle Network want laws changed so that people over the age of 12 can cycle on footpaths. We think this call is a symptom of the spectacular failure of Australia's governing bodies (at every level from local through state and federal) to make our roads safe for cyclists.

If the development of assemblage theory does not need to be anchored in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as increasingly seems to be the case in the social sciences, then cannot one say that the future of assemblage theory is an illusion? It is an illusion in the sense that it continues to act as though the concept was invented by Deleuze and Guattari, but because it does not feel obligated to draw on their work in its actual operation or development, it cannot lay claim to being authentic. That this does not trouble certain scholars in the social sciences is troubling to me. So in this paper I offer first of all critique of this illusory synthetic version of the assemblage and accompany that with a short case study showing what can be gained by returning to Deleuze and Guattari.

As Baudrillard's essay on the hypermarket makes clear, the mall is the true face of Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality. It is not merely the simulation of reality; it is, in fact, a vast, multilayered consumerist dreamscape in which everything you can imagine yourself wanting can be had in commodity form, even if that wasn't what you originally wished for. Today, though, Baudrillard's hyperreal hypermarket is to be found online and thanks to the smartphone it is constantly in reach. Smartphones are not just re-shaping space; they're also transforming time, most noticeably in our apparent loss of the ability to wait. Nowhere is that 'truth' felt more keenly than in airport departure lounges where waiting is widely considered torture. But contrary to the popular view, it is not torture because it is boring - it is torture because boredom is no longer possible. We embrace our electronic thralldom and thank the Gods for the fact we've conquered boredom once and for all. By conquering boredom consumer capitalism has extinguished its most potent critic. Boredom was our defense against the present.

Boredom, so we have been taught to believe, signifies the failure of a given semiotic regime-whether that's a lecture, a TV show, a news article or a place. Boredom is presented to us as a common enemy that like witches and sinners of old must be driven out. Perhaps though boredom is a form of cognitive defence we should cultivate. Boredom isn't necessarily a sign of failure; one might also see it as a sign of success, a sign that one has held onto the integrity of one's thoughts despite the constant pressure of external stimuli in the information rich age we live in. We must ask, what does it say about a culture if it loses the art of being bored? Does that not mean we who make up 'this' culture no longer know how to amuse ourselves with only our inner selves for company? By conquering boredom consumer capitalism has extinguished its most potent critic. Boredom is our defence against the present.

Objective: To identify distinct profiles of Ironman participants based on levels of exercise dependence, and examine whether these profiles differed in relation to eating patterns and psychological distress. Design: Cross-sectional survey study of 345 Ironman participants in Australia. Main outcome measures: Exercise dependence symptoms were assessed via the Exercise Dependence Scale. Eating patterns were assessed via the three-factor eating questionnaire, and psychological distress measured using the Kessler 6 scale. Results: Latent profile analysis identified five distinct profiles based on responses to the Exercise Dependence Scale, which were labelled: Asymptomatic; Time Committed; Low psychological dependence; Symptomatic; and At-risk. The At-risk and Symptomatic profiles had less healthy eating patterns and higher psychological distress compared with the other profiles. Conclusions: These findings suggest important individual differences in the nature and severity of exercise dependence symptoms in Ironman participants. The majority of Ironman participants appeared to have a healthy involvement with Ironman. However, approximately 30% of Ironman participants belonged to the At-risk and Symptomatic profiles, which could reflect maladaptive patterns of exercise.

There can be few messier or more urgent problems facing the world today than the state of its oceans. “The last two hundred years have seen marine habitats wiped out or transformed beyond recognition. And with an ever-accelerating tide of human impact, the oceans have changed more in the last thirty years than in all of human history before it.” Needless to say that change has been anything but beneficial. Indeed, it has been nothing short of devastating, and the carnage continues. “In most places, the oceans of have lost upwards of 75 percent of their megafauna – large animals such as whales, dolphins, sharks, rays and turtles – as fishing and hunting has spread in waves across the face of the planet.” For some species numbers are down by as much as 99 percent and there are dozens more that have literally disappeared.[1] And that doesn’t even begin to cover the full extent of the destruction. One must also mention algal and jellyfish blooms, acidification, coral bleaching, the appearance of and spread of deoxygenated ‘dead zones’, rising water temperatures and the incredible volume of biological and non-biological pollutants and rubbish that has been pumped into the ocean without a second thought for either the present or the future. “Yet outside the world of marine science, this global catastrophe pass[es] largely unseen and unremarked.

The events of September 2011 will probably go down in history in much the same way as the events of May 1968, with no-one being able to decide what, if anything, actually happened.1 Zuccotti Park in New York City briefly flickered in the global consciousness as the spark that threatened to ignite a global revolution, just as the Latin Quarter of Paris had four decades earlier (Buchanan 2008: 7–12). Within a month over 150 Occupy events were taking place all over the world and as one expects these days the movement was even more prominently and diversely represented on the internet. The message the occupiers wanted to relay was both simple and complex. ‘We are the 99%,’ they said: the part that in Rancière’s terms effectively has no part because the other 1% control a profoundly disproportionate share of national – global – wealth (the top 1% in the US have a greater net worth than the bottom 90%), (Rancière 1999: 9). They demanded nothing except to be noticed.

If Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic thought can be said to apply to specific places, then airports and art galleries are surely just such spaces. After all, what could be more nomadic than an airport, the gateway to anywhere in the world your desire and credit card can take you? Similarly, what could be more nomadic than an art gallery, filled as it is with examples of wild, unrestrained creativity? Yet one might also say the very opposite, because they are also highly circumscribed and gridded spaces with rigorous schedules and tight access rules. The final chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, which is in many ways its most concrete chapter, takes up precisely this problem by proposing a distinction between two different types of space: the smooth and the striated.

At least since the publication of Taylor Webb’s landmark work Teacher Assemblage there has been a high level of interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work in Education Studies. Undoubtedly the major reason for this interest is the perceived close connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and Foucault’s concepts of power and governmentality. Webb explicitly situates his work at this intersection of these three concepts, with the aim of using the combination to map the effects of surveillance on teachers (Webb 2009: 30). Webb’s work offers a salient reminder too that assemblage theory, at its origin in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, was always concerned about questions of power.

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage theory, as it has come to be known in recent years (largely due to the efforts of Actor Network Theory rather than Deleuzians, I might add), is steadily gathering a significant following in the social sciences. There can be no question that it has generated interesting and important new ways of thinking about the complex nature of social reality (again, largely due to the efforts of Actor Network Theory).

Dr. Ian Buchanan is one of the world’s leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari. He is a contributing editor to the “Deleuze Connections” series as well as editor of “Drain” magazine and a faculty member at the University of Wollongong in the Institution of Social Transformation Research. It is a true honor to receive his insight on the works of Deleuze and Guattari. Michael Ely is an aspiring Deleuzian, graduate student, and debate coach at the University of Texas at San Antonio

There is no straightforward way to say to what schizoanalysis is. It can’t even be said that it is wholly opposed to psychoanalysis. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari only offer to re-engineer psychoanalysis, not repudiate it or replace it. The problem isn’t so much that the question isn’t answered by Deleuze and Guattari or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather, the problem is that it has several answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of “formula” or “model” that would enable us to simply “do” schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g., the family), which is what they thought psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their work raises. Deleuze and Guattari’s elaborate system of new terms and concepts is of a piece with this strategy of providing multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the reductive tendencies of the “practically-minded.” This isn’t to say schizoanalysis is either incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one, it is necessary to engage with the other.

Jindabyne (a movie directed by Ray Lawrence, 2006) begins with the murder of a young aboriginal woman, but its real focus is the way people respond to this murder. In doing so, it tells several interesting truths about race relations in Australia today. I want to suggest that Jindabyne can usefully be read as a national allegory (in Jameson’s sense of the word). It maps or diagrams the cultural and political tropes of the present moment in history. My basic hypothesis is that it cannot be a coincidence that Jindabyne should give such prominence to the cultural problematic of the apology at this particular juncture in Australia’s history. Although this aspect of the film is scarcely mentioned in any of the reviews that accompanied the film’s premier, it strikes me that the timing is symptomatic: it is a topic that as Deleuze once said about difference was very much in the air. Produced only two years before the official national apology the Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd made to the Indigenous peoples of Australia on February 13, 2008, Jindabyne responds to a complex assemblage of cultural problematics that have been on the national political agenda ever since the release in 1995 of Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report on its national inquiry into the so-called “Stolen Generation”.

This paper argues that it is problematic for the future of Deleuze studies that it is difficult if not impossible to answer the question `what is the right thing to do?' from a Deleuzian perspective. It then argues that one of the key reasons Deleuze studies has made limited progress in this area is its over-emphasis on desire and the corresponding tendency to extrapolate 'ought' from 'is', which as Hume showed is a category mistake. It proposes that to develop a workable ethical discourse from Deleuze's work we need to rethink how we read his work and approach it afresh.

In a short but intriguing essay entitled “Clutter: A Case History”, Welsh psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks what clutter – e.g., a messy bedroom, an untidy studio, a disorganised desk, and so on – might mean, or rather ‘do’, for the person doing the cluttering. For Phillips, the questions ‘what does clutter mean?’ and ‘what does clutter do?’ are related, obviously, but also distinct, and one senses that he shares Deleuze and Guattari’s view, or at least intuits the substance of their argument, that one can only properly engage the second question by first of all renouncing the first. [1] Psychoanalysis, especially but not exclusively its British, empirical strain, is, Phillips observes, curiously ambivalent about disorder, or what he prefers to call clutter. Virtually all its “categories of pathology” are, as Phillips puts it, “fantasies of disorder”, yet its critical language “repudiates chaos” as its basic duty. [2] On the one hand, psychoanalysis is professionally fascinated by instances of disorder and is constantly on the alert for slips of the tongue, tics, compulsions, anything that might be construed as betraying a second order of psychical activity; yet, on the other hand, it cannot accept that disorder really is what it appears to be, it must uncover the hidden pattern, the secret order that renders the slips of the tongue, the tics, the compulsions, and so on, legible. What it cannot countenance, then, is the idea that clutter might be meaningless and still purposeful. The conflict between these two questions, ‘what does it mean?’ and ‘what does it do?’, pushes contemporary psychoanalysts like Phillips in a similar direction to Deleuze and Guattari’s work.