"I've watched you build yourself from scratch": the assemblage of Echo

With its many conflicting approaches to issues of body, mind and soul, Joss Whedon’s science fiction television series Dollhouse (2009-2010) has provoked analysis from various philosophical positions. This chapter examines Dollhouse’s complex theoretical underpinnings by utilising the concepts of Poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), as principally espoused in his seminal work A Thousand Plateaus (1987). This approach principally engages with the manner in which the initially ‘fractured and fragmented’ (Perdigao 4) character of Echo performs a gradual construction of ‘self’ throughout the series. Initially this process is examined via the Deleuzian concept of the 'assemblage'; classical ontology (i.e Platonic or Decartian) treats the ‘self’ as a stable, bounded entity, but from the Deleuzian perspective the subject only has meaning dependent upon its relationship with other assemblages, which result in transformations and the potential for the development of new formations. The assemblage therefore offers a theoretical means to elaborate the multiple and collective dimensions of our unconscious: 'these peoples who are in us and who make us speak, and who are the source of our statements' (Deleuze 1987 256). This approach is ideally suited to the analysis of Dollhouse, where the very concept of ‘self’ is malleable and dependent upon external forces, and we are specifically witness to the literal assemblage of Echo as an amalgamation of many forces and personalities. Furthermore, the Dollhouse narrative depicts Echo as unique in her ability to function as a coherent amalgamation of personalities (as opposed to the psychopathic Alpha, for example), and the chapter subsequently considers how she manages to achieve this via the conceit of the Deleuzian ‘Body without Organs’; ‘a body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and subjectified state (as an ‘organism’), to become disarticulated, dismantled, and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in a new way’ (Best and Kellner, 91-92). Ultimately, Echo is positioned in terms of Deleuzian ‘Schizoanalysis’; as she explores, assumes and utilises the many identities of her composite personality, Echo is harnessing the ‘liberatory power’ of the Deleuzian schizophrenic as conceptualised in A Thousand Plateaus. Via these various conceits, the chapter ultimately provides an in-depth and radical poststructural interpretation of how Dollhouse both confronts and negotiates issues of self and identity.