New problems for assemblage thinking: materiality, governance and cycling in Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT This paper urges a return to the original formations of Deleuze and Guattari scholarship, to enable issues of sustainability, materiality, and governance to be productively thought together. Assemblage thinking is used to reconsider how roads, machines, bodies, policies, and concepts of sustainability come together in a working arrangement and what might enable rearrangements. This is no easy task, in part because over time assemblage thinking has taken some unhelpful detours, and because policy is too often treated as a thing apart from the worlds we are assembled within. We proceed by confronting two major figures, Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett, to clear space for a repositioned model of assemblage theory. Using the empirical context of cycling in Sydney, Australia, we then grapple with the relationality of sustainability, materiality, and governance.