Future Aztec - Assemblage.audulus4 (1.7 MB)
“Every assemblage is, as we saw, a concrete historical individual, from individual atoms and molecules to individual cities and countries. As such, assemblages are characterised by enduring states defined by properties that are always actual, existing in the here and now. But in addition to properties, assemblages also possess dispositions, tendencies and capacities that are virtual (real but not actual) when not being currently manifested or exercised. Moreover, when the concept of assemblage is endowed with parameters, the zones of intensity defined by the latter, and the critical values of the parameters mediating between zones, have the same ontological status as dispositions. When at a given point in time the setting of a parameter happens to be a critical value and the assemblage undergoes a transition (to become, for example, a stratum), the zone of intensity it finds itself in, and the crossing of the threshold, are actual states and events. But most of the time the zones and thresholds that structure the space of possible parameter values are not actual but virtual.”