Introduction

Assemblages

Like scapes, assemblages are interested in relations and processes; unlike theories of scapes, assemblage theory allows for unevenness rather than expecting flow. One of Gilles Deleuze’s dialogues with Claire Parnet articulates an assemblage loosely as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’” (2007, 69). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the assemblage has a tetravalent nature, with dimensions of content, expression, territorialization/reterritorialization, and deterritorialization in various configurations and reconfigurations (2005 [1987]). Beliso-De Jesús finds this useful in facilitating a “focus on the tensions of distinction, fluidity, intensity, dispersal, and temporal-spatial impermanence of categorizations that are mobilized in surprising and often conflicting ways” (2015, 8). By all these accounts, the assemblage has the potential to be as expansive as scapes, inclusive as it is of tangible and intangible alike. Its advantage, for the purposes of my studies of radio and place, is in its positioning of agency.

In the field of critical urban studies, for example, agency is key to analyzing deterritorialization and reterritorialization, meaning that assemblage theory lends itself well to interventions against limited framings of the urban. Brenner, Madden, and Wachsmuth write that “assemblage thinking highlights processes of composition and recognizes diverse forms of human and nonhuman agencies—while striving to avoid reification, reductionism, and essentialism… As urban theory, assemblage thought asks how urban ‘things’—including, quite appropriately, the urban itself—are assembled, and how they might be disassembled or reassembled” (2012, 122). They go on to note that the usefulness of understanding situations as assemblages is contingent on an understanding of the layered forces that shape them; “without a sustained account of… context of context,” they note, “the analysis remains radically incomplete” (129). They suggest that assemblage is best applied in critical urban theory as a means of conceptualizing a research object, rather than as an ontology, in which capacity it tends to obscure issues of agency. Considering WFHB as an assemblage allows for an understanding of the relations that comprise it while also analyzing its broader spatial context. There are thus many inseparable parts at work in such a conceptualization.

Assemblage thought foregrounds the radioscape as a heterogeneous network of agents, ideas, spaces, and things. Charles Fairchild understands the sounds of community radio, for example, as emerging from assemblages shaped by a “particular combination of sonic, discursive, material, technological, social, and historical mediations that are the result of the multitude of social relationships that hold each assemblage up” (2012, 107). I argue, following Beliso-De Jesús, that affective mediations on and off the air are also a crucial part of community radio assemblages. These combinations take place in layers: a given broadcast event might be understood as an assemblage, a given station might be understood as an assemblage, a single song played in a program might be understood as an assemblage, a programmer might be understood as an assemblage, etc. The radioscape is an assemblage of all these assemblages, a thing impossible to study to completion but worth researching in terms of how the agents who are part of it act to influence other pieces of the radioscape. In the case of community radio, one especially important question is how these relationships contribute to the medium’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. WFHB is an organization impacted by many forces out of its immediate control. What station personnel do in response is critical to understanding the significance of the radioscape.