Summary
An assemblage is a set of unlike things – people, objects, stories, places – that come together for a time and, as an arrangement, produce effects. The idea is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s; the French word is ‘agencement’, an arrangement or layout. Assemblages settle into stable forms and come apart again; nothing in them is fixed.
A rhizome is their image for one kind of assemblage, set out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ (1980): a root-like network that, in their words, “connects any point to any other point”, with no trunk, centre or single way in. They contrast it with the tree, which imposes one order from the root up.
Rationale
Not another name for a deep disposition. More a picture of what holds one in place: Part 2’s “our relationships, everyday habits, involvement with institutions, and environment”, arranged so that each props up the others.