Introduction

The concept of ‘self-determination’ in social work, medicine, education, human rights and political theory functions on both molecular and molar planes of immanence. The term, however, is often treated as a transcendental phenomenon unconnected to the physical matter of the human drives (desire) to become. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) understand the molecular as the micro affective intensities, which can be produced in relation to macro communities and beyond, but this is complicated with the idea that communities can also become the molecular when talking about, for example, larger bureaucratic agencies, such as government, the United Nations or the NHS, technology, the environment and so on. DeleuzoGuattarian thinking provides an ontological basis for the analysis of multiple governance networks and allows for imaginative modes of non-representative democratic governance because of its refusal to homogenize the affective intensities into binary structure/agency arguments without denying either. DeLanda (2006, 2016) proposes that social complexity connected to governance networks can be thought through assemblage theory and is a valuable basis to conceptualize the heterogeneity of key affect, affecting and being affected by humans.

Each assemblage consists of molecular and molar configurations and exists as a collection of bodies, communities, organizations, technologies and de jure states. As I have argued elsewhere (Davy, 2019), the notion of an assemblage is helpful to understand human connections and relations with other humans, animals, objects, institutions and cultural artefacts. Moreover, an assemblage does not privilege the human (body) as the site where sex/gender and sexual desire is always located. Desire is produced at the interstices beyond the human body. The assemblage disrupts the notion of a unified sex/gender. This is a different approach from that of those who suggest that the quest for self-determination often implies an isolated ‘self ‘ with aspirations for absolute freedom to interact with others (Ronen, 1979). Even in the case of group formation in the work of Ronen (1979), for example, the ‘self ‘ is often understood as a unified monad within that group, forging a crucial alliance to produce new communities that will strive against perceived oppressions created by the de jure state.