BOOK DATA Kyle Parry, A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. $120.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. 320 pages.

“An assembly,” for Kyle Parry, “is any combination of expressive elements that maintains and seizes upon the appearance of selection and arrangement” (3; emphasis in original). It may be a meme; a map; a list; a series of photographs, artworks, or everyday media objects; an archive or database (and all of its contents); a juxtaposition; a gathering; an intermixture of verbal and visual elements. An assembly, then, is any combination of things in which both a collective expression and the various individual expressions that it comprises come into view and remain in productive interplay.

At once “a type of thing and something people do,” assembly is by Parry’s mark a cultural form and, indeed, the prevailing cultural form of the postdigital present (4). After...

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