The ends of an assemblage of health

Abstract

This paper identifies and responds to three key challenges that have emerged in discussions of the assemblage across health geography. These challenges concern the problem of identifying the borders or limits of an assemblage of health; the problem of clarifying how such assemblages change over time; and the more general problem of identifying the affective and material character of the assemblage such that one may distinguish ‘therapeutic’ from ‘oppressive’ arrangements. The paper argues that each challenge calls for a novel analytics of power grounded in assessments of the generative forces of stratification and selection expressed within an assemblage. Assemblages of health are composed in relations of power, affect and desire that stratify the assemblage in ongoing processes of selection, acting upon heterogeneous entities (material and immaterial, intensive and extensive, human and nonhuman), bringing them into contact, causing them to affect one another, transforming their activity. Analysis of these processes provides potent tools for rethinking how relations, events, spaces and encounters mediate experiences of health and illness, and novel grounds for intervening in the formation of an assemblage of health.