Global Assemblages

In the last post I wrote talking about maps and how them works in relation with biosecurity, I pointed out one concept that I want to explain better today. This is global assemblage.

Global assemblage is a concept highlighted by Collier and Ong and that is applied to several currently problems from an anthropological view. Thus, in the book titled Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, mentioned authors and others (for instance, Paul Rabinow) talk about this conception in bioscience, right, ethics or populations.

However, what is a Global Assemblage? In Collier and Ong words:

<<Global assemblages are sites for the formation and reformation of what we will call, following Paul Rabinow, anthropological problems. They are domains in which the forms and values of individual and collective existence are problematized or at stake, in the sense that they are subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention>>

Instead we are not work exactly this concept, we are using some approximations that follows the same sense of one key feature of global assemblages, that is, the quality to de-territorialize and re-territorialize. For us, a Global Assemblage would be a kind of operator or dispositif (In the Foucaultian sense) constituted by some techno-scientific elements that can deploy their webs in a variety of social scales (within a seamless as techno-scientific-social works in the Actor Network-Theory): macro (European Union,-level, World-Health Organization-level); mezzo (States-level) and micro (citizenship-level). Thus, one of this techno-scientific element is the realm of biosecurity

What we are paying attention is in this question: how the techno-scientific network of biosecurity is being articulated in those different scales? All kind of answer will be welcomed because we do not have response yet. Nonetheless, one way of research would be understand the macro and mezzo scales because of the practices carried out at the micro level. Some apps for smartphone like HealthMap are able to see all diseases around the world in the current moment and further, registry any new if we are alerted for it. After that, the mezzo and consequently the macro level would be activated in order to check these alarms out and carry out actions in order to cut them off or prevent a major outbreak or pandemics (inside the preparedness logic).

Another possibility in order to apply the global assemblages concept to biosecurity would be to try understand how them are linked with a global vision of the world given by disease’ maps that are more and more frequents accompanying research’ texts about one new outbreak. In fact, when we look to these maps, we are observing not only global-scale events, but also the folding of little practices that biosecurity as a global-assemblage is constantly re-territorializing in local territories; adapting and keeping their global form each time.

References:

Ong, A. y Collier, S. (2005).  Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell.

Photo Credit: Flickr, user NASA Goddar Space Flight Center