HIV and the Apparatus of Capture: Biomedical Surveillance and the State-Form What is the true value of Our Own HIV data? The political value of HIV biomedical data cannot be understood simply by asking what an HIV test tells a physician. A viral load measures the concentration of virus in a person's blood. A genotype can help determine drug resistance. A sequence can identify genetic similarities among viruses. A positive test establishes an epidemiological event. Each of these measurements appears, at first, to belong to medicine. But Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari give us another way of understanding information. Things do not possess a fixed political meaning in themselves. Their meaning emerges through the assemblages into which they enter, the connections they establish, and the capacities those connections produce . The critical question is therefore not simply: What does HIV biomedical data tell us? It is: What can HIV biomedical data become once it enters the State ass...
Writings in Anthropology & Public Health