Sociomaterial Assemblage

Sociomaterial assemblage is the concept — developed across the STS tradition, including work by Bruno Latour, Annemarie Mol, and Donna Haraway, and sharpened in Suchman's analyses of AI — that technologies are not autonomous objects with stable properties but configurations of heterogeneous elements whose behavior emerges from their specific arrangement. An AI system is not just a model but the model plus the training data plus the corporate decisions that selected the data plus the labor that annotated it plus the deployment context plus the user practices. The concept is central to Suchman's argument against the reification of AI as a thing — because accountability, understanding, and effective governance all require engaging with the assemblage rather than with a hypostatized entity.