Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory PDF
Preview Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory
ESSAYS IN CONTAGION THEORY Edited by KARI NIXON and LORENZO SERVITJE Endemic Kari N ixon • Lorenzo Servitje Editors Endemic Essays in Contagion Theory Editors Kari Nixon Lorenzo Servitje English Department of English Southern Methodist University University of California Riverside Dallas , Texas , USA Riverside , California , USA ISBN 978-1-137-52140-8 ISBN 978-1-137-52141-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944549 © Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016 Th e author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Th is work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and t ransmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Th e use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Th e publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover image © Scott Camazine / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper Th is Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature Th e registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London Foreword Nothing in the past half century has dramatized the global ecosystem as profoundly as the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It lacked the stunning immediacy of the explosion of an atom bomb, or the dismaying alien- ation of the revelation of genocidal violence. But in its powerful narrative arc, it is a human drama writ large. It is the story of ecological violence in its broadest sense told on a planetary stage: a tale of destruction, discrimi- nation, and resilience infused by, but exceeding, the experiences of every individual whose life it took or touched. And who really was exempt? It is therefore not surprising that the scenario of an outbreak e xploding into a species-threatening pandemic (or threatening to) proliferated in the wake of the fi rst decade of the pandemic, from the more or less journalistic accounts such as Hot Zone , Th e Coming Plague , and their c inematic manifestations to the veritable industry of zombie apocalypses from I Am Legend to W orld War Z , Zone One , and beyond. But even the world-changing HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot suffi ciently account for the popularity of these contagion narratives. Th ere is something oddly—almost perversely—compelling about the idea of contagion. Th e authors of a recent textbook Th e Politics of Global Health: United by Contagion call “health … the ultimate unifying issue for humankind.” In what has become a convention of global health discourse, Mark W. Zacher and Tania J. Keefe muse, “the world is b ecoming an ever smaller place, and microbes that cause devastating diseases do not stop for v vi Foreword border guards.”1 Health slides almost i mperceptibly into contagion, as it so often does in the mainstream media and popular fi ction and fi lm when an outbreak reminds us that we are all, as the subtitle puts it, “united by contagion.” United, that is, by the common experience of being human and susceptible, but also literally, as the microbes make their way around the globe. Communicable disease is, of course, but one concern in the massive fi eld of global health, and, by most standards of measure, not the most pressing. It is also but one of many issues that manifest worldwide connectivity. Th e year 2008 made global economic ties abundantly clear, and deniers notwithstanding, climate change is a demonstrably global phenomenon. In many ways, the world is indeed becoming increasingly interconnected, but then again, we have always been global. Y et there has also always been a peculiar way in which the idea of con- tagion compels. Etymologically from the Latin con (together with) and tangere (to touch), the word itself suggests the primal contact of a touch. Contagious means communicable by contact, a subset of the broader infectious. From at least the seventeenth century, and especially in con- junction with revolutions, c ontagious spoke as much about the powerful circulation of ideas, emotions, or aff ects as about disease agents, and that may be what makes the concept so ineluctable. Contagion tells us about the many ways in which we are in contact; it shows us whom we have touched both literally and fi guratively, or more to the point, it blurs the distinction between them. C ommunication shapes communities; the early sociologists at the turn of the twentieth century coined “social contagion” to express the material impact of the circulation of concepts and beliefs. Against the backdrop of the emerging fi eld of bacteriology, microbes were both analogue and explanation for the emergence of social bonds: ideas and attitudes cir- culated like microbes, but also perhaps as microbes, as a not yet visible substance or energy. In all of its manifestations, contagion illuminates the connections that turn bodies into bodies politic. As Zacher and Keefe, and many others, make clear, contagion confi gures the contours of the shrink- ing world: “More and more we are coming to understand that people with 1 Mark W. Zacher and Tania J. Keefe, Th e Politics of Global Health Governance: United by Contagion (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2008), p. 1. Foreword vii diseases located anywhere from down the street to the other side of the globe have important and varied impacts on our well-being” (1). Border-crossing microbes materialize the abstractions of contemporary geopolitics, manifesting the dangers and possibilities of the new connections, physical and metaphysical. As these microbes map the changing borders and relationships of a globalizing world, they are also vivid analogues for the mystical bonds of community. Th e scale of that community is variable: the outbreak narrative can mark the danger of strangers, hence reinforce the boundaries of the imagined community of the nation, for example, or it can envision humanity united by their fragile humanity, their vulnerability, and, viscerally, by the contact illu- minated by the circulating microbes, a mystically informed tactility. Th e outbreak narrative compels as it harnesses the danger and reverence of the sacred in its depiction of the communal bonds of an i nterconnected world. It is at once a global and a planetary narrative. Th e HIV/AIDS pandemic shone, and continues to shine, a spotlight on global inequities, even as it lit up the geopolitical and ecological con- tours of a changing globe. It made transparent, to quote Zacher and Keefe again, that health “is more than a medical issue; it is a development issue, a commercial issue, a humanitarian issue, and a security issue” (1). But it also illuminated once again how the very notion of community on any scale rests in the profound power of attraction—the mystical force of the sacred—that infuses the concept of contagion. Endemic begins from the premise that the notion of contagion in the form of a devastating pandemic so thoroughly saturates the contempo- rary imagination both as a looming threat and as a principle of cohesion that it has become endemic in contemporary discourse. In the chapters that follow, the turn to endemicity underscores the centrality of the powerful concept of contagion to contemporary biopolitics, which is to say the power that emerges through the discursive management of life itself. Th is volume considers contagion as the very principle of cohesion that threatens not by virtue of its menace from without, or even by the ever-present possibility of eruption, but by its very nature as a precari- ous necessity. If epidemics of catastrophic diseases loom as the potential terror of destruction and possible annihilation, endemic diseases remind us of the fragile balance of human existence in a world in which the viii Foreword forces of destruction are the sources of sustenance writ large. Each chap- ter explores a facet through which contagion elucidates that precarity, constitutive of social bonds and potentially corrosive or corrupting in its excessive generativeness. Th rough its timely study of contagion as the life principle of com- munity, Endemic shows how our greatest collective fears inhere in superabundance—in the uncontrolled proliferation of meanings as well as circulation of goods and peoples. In so doing, E ndemic off ers contagion as a way to understand power as operating through the fundamental precariousness of communication and the bonds it forges. Priscilla Wald Contents 1 Th e Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction 1 Lorenzo Servitje and Kari Nixon Part I Contagious Culture and Cultures of Contagion 19 2 Contagion and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and the Disease of Modern Life 21 Lorenzo Servitje 3 Dark Zones: Th e Ebola Body as a Confi guration of Horror 43 Catherine Belling 4 Needles and Bullets: Media Th eory, Medicine, and Propaganda, 1910–1940 67 Ghislain Th ibault ix
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