Wellbeing Machine: How Health Emerges from the Assemblages of Everyday Life

Book review: McLeod's book presents readers with a novel application of Deleuzian and new-materialist concepts to health and wellbeing. She does this with a view to developing a new analytic framework through which to approach matters of wellbeing in a way that avoids what McLeod identifies as the problematic politics of blame. This ethico-political approach is a welcome intervention at a time where the responsibilising tendencies of neoliberal rationality penetrate deeper into areas such as health and care. In mind is the discourse of popular self-help books (perhaps the clue is in the very name of the genre), which individualises these sorts of problem, and implores people to take control of their ‘wellness’. Such an approach is framed as though wellbeing itself were a self-contained and coherent whole, and it disregards the well-established social and material shapers of wellbeing. In light of these concerns, ‘Wellbeing Machine’ provides powerful conceptual resources for productive analysis, practice, and intervention.