---
title: "Cognitive Assemblage"
description: "Hayles's unit for cognition distributed across humans and technical systems: an assemblage \"operates at multiple levels and sites, transforming and mutating as conditions and contexts change,\" with…"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-assemblage"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/cognitive-assemblage"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Cognitive Assemblage

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/cognitive-assemblage), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Hayles's unit for cognition distributed across humans and technical systems: an assemblage "operates at multiple levels and sites, transforming and mutating as conditions and contexts change," with information transactions running across the cognitive nonconscious, consciousness and sensory systems alike. Chosen over Latour's "network" because networks are sparse nodes-and-edges while assemblages are "fleshy" — entities that touch, incorporate, repel, mutate. Cavalli uses it to update 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) for environments dense with AI agencies, yielding a "planetary cognitive ecology" that he maps onto Bratton's planetary-scale computation — i.e. the philosophical version of the compendium's own term, Cognitive Infrastructures.

## Appears in

- [Cognition With and Beyond the Brain: Assemblages, Endosomatization, and AI-Driven Sensory Technologies](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/cognition-with-and-beyond-the-brain) (2025-05-10)
- [Modes of Cognition](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/modesofcognition) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._