Assemblage means mutual mediation. And so does technology. The claim that technology is representation means that technology makes present what is absent or remote, it draws together the disparate in the im-mediacy of space and time. Kallinikos cites the game of chess between Marco Polo and the Great Khan in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities as an example of such making present. The chess board and its pieces came to represent the Great Khan's empire and so enabled an economy of governance through symbolic mediation and action at a distance.
Computerization is the modern equivalent of Calvino's chess game.
The conventional dualisms dissolve here. Producers and consumers, humans and machines, interlace and condense into each other. Desire consumes and consumption becomes desire. Event the aura of the forest abolished by the timber-newsprint assemblage is supplanted by desire in the form of tabloid titillation and paperback dreams. For this reason, Kallinikos suggests that linguistics and literary theory, even fiction, offer more appropriate methodologies for the understanding of economic institutions.