Who Really Speaks? Collective Assemblages of Enunciation

Session purpose. Statements are never produced by an isolated individual alone. Languages, genres, institutions, media, technologies, professional rules, histories, audiences, and relations of power participate in every act of enunciation. This session develops a method for tracing those collective conditions while preserving individual responsibility and the irreducibility of lived voices.

Learning outcomes

• Distinguish utterance, statement, enunciation, expression, and collective assemblage.
• Explain why authorship is real but never socially isolated.
• Map how institutions and technologies authorise, circulate, transform, or silence statements.
• Analyse collective voice without erasing disagreement or appropriating marginalised speakers.
• Build a Collective Enunciation Mapper in the enrolled-only AI Laboratory.

1. From individual speaker to assemblage

Ordinary accounts begin with a person who forms an idea and expresses it. Deleuze and Guattari reverse the priority. Before any individual speaks, languages, categories, genres, legal forms, technologies, and institutional positions already organise what can count as a meaningful statement. A judge, lecturer, journalist, clinician, activist, algorithm, and student do not speak with the same authority because enunciation is distributed across arrangements.

This does not mean that “society speaks” while individuals disappear. People select, improvise, refuse, reinterpret, and bear responsibility. The point is relational: individual agency operates through collective conditions it did not create alone. Analysis therefore asks both who articulated a statement and which assemblage made it credible, visible, actionable, or punishable.

2. Expression and content

An assemblage has material and expressive dimensions. The material dimension includes bodies, rooms, devices, infrastructure, schedules, funding, and procedures. The expressive dimension includes words, images, classifications, metrics, commands, and narratives. They interact without becoming identical. A policy statement gains force through budgets, databases, offices, laws, and enforcement; a platform label changes what users can see and do through interface design.

3. Authority, circulation, and silence

Statements travel through channels that edit and rank them. Peer review, newsrooms, search engines, recommendation systems, translation, bureaucratic forms, and classroom assessment can amplify some voices and suppress others. Silence is not merely the absence of speech. It may be produced by inaccessible language, fear of punishment, lack of credentials, poor connectivity, archive loss, moderation rules, or the extraction of testimony without decision-making power.

In multilingual Indonesia, collective enunciation demands attention to Bahasa Indonesia, regional languages, religious and professional vocabularies, translation, adat institutions, state categories, and digital platforms. The analyst must not treat any community as speaking with one voice. Internal difference, dissent, gender, generation, disability, class, and unequal access to representation remain central.

4. Applied example

Consider a public consultation. Its final report may appear to express “community opinion,” yet the statement is shaped by invitation lists, meeting time, facilitation, questionnaire design, recording practices, translation, statistical aggregation, legal categories, and editorial approval. A collective-enunciation analysis reconstructs the entire pathway from experience to authorised document and asks which transformations occurred at each stage.

AI Laboratory Prototype: Collective Enunciation Mapper

Category: AI Prototypes → Philosophy, Knowledge & Civilization → Deleuze–Guattari Studies. Access: PKC-DG02-enrolled learners only.

1. Define a bounded statement, document, campaign, platform trend, or institutional decision.
2. Identify speakers, audiences, affected groups, intermediaries, editors, translators, and decision-makers.
3. Map material supports: devices, spaces, funding, data, archives, and procedures.
4. Map expressive supports: genres, concepts, classifications, metrics, and authorised vocabularies.
5. Trace circulation, modification, amplification, and blockage.
6. Identify absent, anonymised, appropriated, or strategically silent voices.
7. Record disputes and avoid inventing a unified collective subject.
8. Propose accountable ways to redistribute speaking and decision-making capacity.

AI prompt: “Map the collective conditions of this statement. Separate documented actors from inferred influences; trace material and expressive supports; identify authority, circulation, transformation, silencing, and missing perspectives; and generate counter-readings. Do not fabricate quotations, impersonate communities, infer private motives, or present a group as homogeneous.”

Required output: actor-and-infrastructure map, statement journey, authority matrix, silence register, evidence ledger, three counter-readings, and a 500-word accountability proposal.

Assessment

Analyse one public document, media narrative, institutional announcement, or campaign in 900–1,100 words. Show how its apparent author depends on a wider assemblage and evaluate who can answer, contest, or revise it. Rubric: conceptual accuracy (25%), empirical traceability (25%), power analysis (20%), representation ethics (20%), clarity and reflexivity (10%).

Ethics and safeguards

Collective analysis does not authorise speaking on behalf of others. Obtain consent before using non-public testimony; anonymise personal information; preserve context; identify translation choices; and provide a route for correction. Never upload confidential interviews, protected community knowledge, or identifiable participant data to AI systems. AI must organise supplied evidence, not manufacture consensus or simulate an affected community.

Key distinctions and exit question

• Utterance: a concrete instance of speech or writing.
• Enunciation: the situated production of a statement and its authority.
• Collective assemblage: the heterogeneous arrangement enabling expression and action.
• Silencing: an active process limiting audibility, legitimacy, circulation, or response.

Exit question: Which elements speak through the statement you selected, and who possesses the power to correct its representation?

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