Alcoholic assemblages: Exploring fluid subjects in the night-time economy

•This paper explores drunkenness in the night-time economy of Copenhagen, Denmark.•The paper suggests that drinking alcohol has both positive and negative consequences.•It is argued that drunkenness is induced by other things than alcohol.•Drunkenness is produced in assemblages comprising a variety of actors and forces.

Developing the notion of assemblage, this paper seeks to extend our understanding of drunkenness by exploring young people's drinking practices in the night-time economy of Copenhagen, Denmark. The main argument is that drunkenness is an embodied and social practice which, in relation to a multiplicity of actors and forces particular to the place of drinking, increases and/or decreases the drunken body's capacities to affect and be affected. Accordingly, Deleuze and Guattari's concept of assemblage will be mobilized to cast light on how drunkenness emerges as the product of unpredictable yet patterned encounters between discourses, bodies (human and nonhuman), spaces, different drinks and consumption practices. In the analysis, which draws on qualitative empirical data from extensive fieldwork in a mainstream nightclub in Copenhagen, Denmark, it is shown how the drinking subjects' capacity to initiate and sustain a number of - social, musical and sexual - relationships are altered by the consumption of alcohol in relation to the specific assemblage in which this consumption is enacted.