In A New Philosophy of Society, Manuel DeLanda develops a rigorous reconstruction of assemblage theory in order to formulate a realist social ontology capable of overcoming the limitations of both methodological individualism and macro-structural totalisation. Drawing extensively upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, DeLanda argues that social entities should not be understood either as unified organic wholes or as reducible aggregates of isolated individuals, but rather as historically contingent assemblages composed of heterogeneous components whose interactions generate emergent properties irreducible to their constituent parts. Against classical sociological traditions that conceptualise society through organismic metaphors or transcendental structures, DeLanda insists that assemblages remain fundamentally exterior to their components: parts may be detached and inserted into new relational configurations without losing their ontological autonomy. Consequently, social reality is conceived not as a totality governed by essence, but as a multiplicity of dynamically stabilised formations operating across distinct scales, from interpersonal networks and institutional organisations to cities, states, and transnational systems. Particularly significant is DeLanda’s rejection of essentialism through the concept of historical emergence, according to which enduring identities are produced through processes of territorialisation, coding, and repetition rather than through immutable essences. His critique of both micro-reductionism and macro-reductionism becomes theoretically decisive because it reveals the existence of multiple intermediary strata of social complexity neglected within conventional sociology. Assemblages therefore possess not only properties but also capacities, meaning potentials for interaction and transformation that emerge relationally rather than intrinsically. A paradigmatic illustration appears in DeLanda’s treatment of cities as assemblages constituted simultaneously by populations, infrastructures, institutions, material flows, and communicative networks, none of which alone exhausts urban ontology. The enduring contribution of DeLanda’s project resides in its reconceptualisation of society as an open-ended ecology of emergent relations in which stability is provisional, hierarchy contingent, and social order continuously produced through nonlinear processes of interaction and transformation.
URBANISM MEETS ART