Steering clear of the X gathering
In 2016, Dr Gareth Abrahams embarked on an intriguing experiment to draw-out the concepts of "A Thousand Plateaus" by Deleuze and Guattari. This journey led him to publish a second academic paper in 2025 in the journal Deleuze and Guattari Studies, titled (Title not provided).
The paper proposes a significant shift in understanding the geographies that intertwine in Deleuze and Guattari's work. It emphasises the need to comprehend how and where these geographies relate to each other within a broader geography of the refrain.
This exploration began as simple scribbles in a sketchbook, gradually expanding to A1 sheets of paper, and eventually becoming digital drawings. The drawings, a significant part of Dr Abrahams' ongoing diagrammatic reading of Deleuze and Guattari's work, are presented in his published papers.
Interestingly, many assemblages discovered in various fields, including arts, humanities, and social sciences, are not based on Deleuze and Guattari's definition of the term. Dr Abrahams' second paper provides new insights into the concepts of the strata, machinic assemblage, milieu, infra-assemblage, intra-assemblage, inter-assemblage, and beyond.
Despite numerous studies referencing their texts, they rarely delve deeply into these concepts. Most of these assemblages rely on second or third-hand readings of their work. However, Dr Abrahams, who found Deleuze and Guattari's work through architecture, specifically from the professor of architecture Jean Claude Burdese at l'Ecole d'Architecture de Lille, offers a fresh perspective.
Dr Abrahams, a leading scholar in the relationship between philosophy and architectural theory, has published extensively in the field of philosophy and its relation to architecture, art, and planning. His current research focus is on the development of novel materials for energy storage applications.
In addition to his work in academia, Dr Abrahams is also the author of the article "Drawing-out Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage: new insights for geography" in issue 19.3 of the journal "Deleuze and Guattari Studies."
The X assemblage, according to Dr Abrahams, is not produced by moving outwards from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, but by not starting from within Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy in the first place. This approach offers a unique perspective on the understanding of assemblages.
Moreover, Dr Abrahams suggests using cartographic skills from spatial disciplines to map out geographies of milieus, geographies of the assemblage, and machinic geographies. This new approach reveals new lines of enquiry within geography, as drawing-out often leads to re/drawing, and acts of territorialisation are followed by acts of de/re-territorialisation.
As Dr Abrahams approaches the final stages of a monograph entitled Drawing out Peirce: from chaos to the edge of meaning, his contributions to the field of Deleuze and Guattari studies continue to offer fresh insights and perspectives on their work.
