Paper long abstract:

In this paper I will attempt a re-rendering of health and medical interventions and, specifically, a prevailing 'problem' of the treatment user deficient in some form of capacity—knowledge, circumstance, morals—by recasting treatment as a positive/productive, generative force or set of forces. I ask what possibilities arise when intervention—here, pharmaceutical intervention in the form of a daily pill—is not confined to a prevailing anxiety about lack or deficiency? What are the implications of posing the treatment field in this way? Relatedly, what happens to the inquiries of intervention when entities—now actualized through their relations with others —are allowed to exceed disciplinary constraints? The focus of my efforts will be the reliance on 'the treatment user' in efforts to deal with HIV/TB co-infection—a condition that calls up a tripartite of management, cure and management of exacerbation as the virus (HIV) and bacteria (TB) become together in the Deleuzian sense of becoming. Staying close to natural scientific inquiries and its own productive contributions to altering both virus and bacteria—at least as my initial point of departure—I am interested in what happens when these differentiated yet co-affecting life forms invivo are reconceived with an orientation toward this generative feature. Does such a re-rendering give ground to a mode of speculative practice oriented to taking to task the limits of the existing problem and, hence, abandoning the very reasoning in its formulation?