The Descent of Abstraction

Here I place deconstruction into contact with assembly theory, an emerging approach in physics that theorizes life as the “physics of information.” In a detailed examination of publications from across the field, I ask whether assembly theory’s conceptualization of the “object” as a compression of virtual histories constitutes what Jacques Derrida called a thinking of life as iterable trace. Along the way, I detect a logic of “assembly” that, though it cannot be located in assembly theory’s conceptual architecture, nevertheless conditions the entire enterprise. I call this logic assemblance, and I trace its operation as a quasi-transcendental structure through assembly theory’s scientific discourse.