A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
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A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
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Overview
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822391111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/16/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 964 KB |
About the Author
Ed Cohen teaches cultural studies and directs the doctoral program in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University.
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A Body Worth Defending
IMMUNITY, BIOPOLITICS, AND THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE MODERN BODYBy ED COHEN
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4535-0
Chapter One
Living Before and Beyond the Law, or A Reasonable Organism Defends Itself
Figures of Science
First published in 1898, H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds introduces a staple of twentieth-century science fiction: the alien invasion. In this seminal narrative, a colonizing force from Mars lands on our planet and within days easily humbles the combined military powers of the world's civilized nations, leaving only death and destruction in its wake. Nothing seems capable of stopping the Martians until one day they suddenly die, vanquished by microorganisms in the earth's atmosphere to which humans have long since become resistant:
The Martians-dead!-slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared ... slain after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God in his wisdom has put upon this earth. For so it had come about, as indeed I and many other men might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our minds. These germs of disease have taken their toll of humanity since the beginning of things-taken toll of our prehuman ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many-those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance-our living frames are altogether immune.
One hundred years later, in 1998, the makers of The X-Files movie (based on the popular Fox TV show) imagine a somewhat different scenario of alien invasion. Seeking to colonize Earth, aliens conspire with a secret cabal of quisling humans to propagate a virus that uses human bodies as hosts to gestate an invasion force destined to claim the planet. FBI agent Fox Mulder defeats the aliens (but only temporarily, we learn in the following television season) after he procures a weak vaccine against the virus from one of the aliens' human co-conspirators and then braves the aliens' headquarters-which also turns out to be their spaceship-under the ice of Antarctic, where he inoculates his partner (and possible love interest) Dana Scully, who is being held in cryogenic stasis after having been infected by the microbial agents of xenogenesis. This single injection causes an immediate, cataclysmic immune reaction to cascade throughout the entire biotech apparatus that sustains the colonization project, thereby causing all hell to break loose in the alien stronghold and forcing them to flee the planet. A hundred years after germs to which humans are immune save the planet from aliens, it is now the immune system that saves humanity from alien germs, or from the germs of aliens.
In the interval between The War of the Worlds and the X-Files movie, biological immunity captures the Western imagination. Figured as a mode of organismic defense, immunity has permeated popular understanding in more and more intimate ways during the last one hundred years. Indeed, in its most general usage, it now signifies a mode of boundary maintenance that characterizes a diverse range of possible actors from bodies to nations to the planet itself. Needless to say, these popular examples neither participate in nor represent bioscientific reflections on immunity. Nevertheless they do mark a graphic transition in immunity's ability to describe how human organisms coexist in environments populated by multiple aliens-some terrestrial, some not-which may challenge our being both as singular organisms and as a species. Today, with its reputation paradoxically enhanced by multiple, well-publicized challenges to its capacities (e.g., AIDS, SARS, and avian flu), biological immunity bodies forth an infectious metaphor that circulates equally within scientific and nonscientific discourses. Yet before achieving this contagious circulation, it initially travels some distance from the domains of law and politics to embody a biological concept in the first place.
Those of us who live within the province of Western medical practice incorporate immunity both in our tissues and in our minds. Most of us who rely on allopathic medicine as our primary means of health care now materially embody immunological doctrine (via vaccines, inoculations, antibiotics, etc.). That is to say, we have been biochemically altered at the cellular, molecular, and perhaps even subatomic levels by the powerful consequences of this transformative image. Furthermore, we not only recognize ourselves through the frame of biological immunity (e.g., believing that we have an immune system or that our bodies defend themselves against pathogens) but also hold that immunity tells us something fundamentally true about our experiences of illness and health. In so doing, we make immunity matter. Clearly, popular perceptions of immunity do not adequately reflect how bioscience uses the concept. Indeed, the state of immunological knowledge unfolds so rapidly (especially in relation to new fields like computational immunology or genetic ontology) that even experts might find it difficult to encompass. Yet, as misinformed or misconstrued as they might be, popular representations of biological immunity do reveal something important about the imaginary work enacted by their scientific twin.
As the cosmologist Lee Smolin suggests, within scientific knowledge, a recursion occurs between theory and metaphor. The validity of a scientific theory does not-and cannot-exhaust the general significance of the metaphors around which it turns:
Apart from its use to predict the results of experiments, a good scientific theory may function as a metaphor that captures and expresses what we think is essential in the world. We must be able to separate the question of the empirical validity of a theory from the ethical and spiritual implications of its central metaphor; they are not the same thing, even if the metaphor may gain authority from the success of the theory while it in turn shapes our understanding of the theory's meaning.
Here Smolin foregrounds the necessary interplay between metaphorical and theoretical uses of scientific concepts. Metaphor and theory exist symbiotically. The emergent properties of a knowledge formation crystallize around their conceptual seeds. By precipitating unarticulated possibilities percolating through the scientific apparatus and then decisively framing them in newly recognizable forms, the theoretical deployments of metaphor and the metaphorical uses of theory organize the imaginary work of experimentation and research. Changes in scientific paradigms often represent changes in the metaphors used to describe what we take to be "real," as Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse note: "Scientific revolutions are, in fact, metaphoric revolutions, and theoretical explanations should be seen as metaphoric redescription of the domain of phenomena." The Nobel Prize-winning novelist and linguist J. M. Coetzee describes the process succinctly: "One of the chief ways in which science creates new terminology to cover new fields of knowledge is by importing words from elsewhere, giving them a new sense, i.e. by metaphor (Greek metaphero, 'to carry over')." Metaphors shape the way science works by attracting and organizing "interest" and thereby focusing action. Moreover, they engender collectivities of agents who act in their name and thus provide the basis on which humans work in concert to change the world. Indeed, we might conjecture that the more successful a concept is theoretically, the more powerfully it performs metaphorically-and vice versa.
Consider, for example, that many of the concepts which modern physics advances, like gravity, relativity, uncertainty, and chaos, function simultaneously as theoretical and metaphorical tropes. In all these cases, the concepts perform metaphorical work not only in their nonscientific manifestations but, more importantly, in their scientific ones. Indeed, their imaginary valence is what makes them so useful to science in the first place. Take just the oldest (and yet perhaps still least understood) of these: gravity. As often as we may have been regaled with the tale of an apple landing on a professor's head-a tale which Newton promoted to legitimate his claim to the discovery-Newton did not discover gravity per se. Rather, gravitas names an ancient concept that encompasses the material, emotional, and moral senses of weightiness, heaviness, and significance. Thus Newton's theory appropriates the historical and rhetorical accretions of gravitas to affirm a verifiable correspondence between a mathematical construct and the observed patterns of the material world. Through this metaphorical appropriation, Newton rhetorically links the mathematical and the material, facilitating imaginary passage back and forth between realms that might otherwise remain incomparable. The metaphor provides a crucial element of the theory. The theory's meaning and its central metaphor inextricably intertwine precisely because they make the world "make sense," in a most material fashion, in new and compelling ways. Not all that surprising, I suppose, since this transformational capacity defines metaphor wherever and whenever it happens.
In the specific case of immunity, the legal concept predates its biomedical appropriation by at least two thousand years. Originally posited within Roman law, immunity rises to scientific comprehension only after Pasteur's triumphant vaccination experiments at the end of the nineteenth century. Yet as Anne Marie Moulin reminds us, even in such a manifestly scientific context, "the resulting immunity was an obscure image, a poetic borrowing." Of course, this kind of "poetic" appropriation is hardly uncommon and probably not troubling, unless we choose to ignore that it might mean something. The point is not to take issue with bioscience's use of poesis. To the contrary, we need to appreciate much more palpably the imaginary work that metaphor performs in and as science. The scientific and poetic dimensions of bioscience are not only not opposed; they create each other. All this really means is that like poetry, bioscience is an imaginative activity. However, since bioscience, unlike poetry, has a deep investment in guaranteeing the "truth" of its concepts, it often hesitates to acknowledge, let alone interrogate, this kinship.
Never one to ignore unacknowledged conceptual investments, Jacques Derrida meditates on precisely this troubling yet transforming affinity between metaphor and concept in bioscience in the concluding section of "White Mythology" (his famous consideration of "metaphor in the text of philosophy"). Here Derrida reads Gaston Bachelard's La formation de l'esprit scientifique as suggesting that "metaphor does not appear ... either simply or necessarily to constitute an obstacle to scientific or philosophical knowledge." Derrida thus invokes Bachelard's sense that the metaphoric "obstacle" acts as a "counter-thought" (contre-pensée) within scientific rationality, simultaneously manifesting what Bachelard characterizes as science's "risk" and its "result" (succes). As Derrida remarks:
[The] epistemological ambivalence of metaphor, which always provokes, retards, follows the movement of the concept, perhaps finds its chosen field in the life sciences, which demand that one adapt an unceasing critique of teleological judgment. In this field the animistic or (technical, social, cultural) analogy is as at home as possible. Where else might one be so tempted to take the metaphor for the concept? And what more urgent task for epistemology and for the critical history of the sciences, than to distinguish between the word, the metaphoric vehicle, the thing and the concept?
For Derrida, bioscience provides an exemplary instance of the ambivalence-or, dare I say, différance-that metaphor introduces in "truthful" reflection generally. Within the life sciences, Derrida discloses metaphor lurking in its native habitat: metaphor seems, after all, to encompass a process of the living, if not actually a living process. Nevertheless Derrida also recognizes the danger that metaphor poses for bioscience: the danger-or anxiety-that the scientist might "go native." To foreclose this anxious logic, he suggests, we need to avoid recapitulating the classic opposition between empirical reductionism, on the one hand, and what he calls "a fantastic ideology of truth," on the other. Instead he proposes a new interplay between epistemological and metaphorical effects by reanimating the living metaphor in bioscience. To achieve such a metaphoric renaissance, however, we first need to discern how metaphor informs what we come to know as the vital processes we call "life." We must, as Derrida exhorts us, "take the risk of a continuity between metaphor and concept, as between animal and man, instinct and knowledge."
In reflecting on this risk, which is obviously not born(e) without some cost, Derrida pursues a project initiated in Nietzsche's famous meditation on metaphor, "On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense." It is, of course, not coincidental (since Nietzsche specifically questions how science arrives at its "true" representations) that at the same moment when bioscientists affirm the metaphor of immunity's credibility as a biological truth, Nietzsche depicts all such truth as the forgetting of metaphor:
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins with their images effaced and now no longer of account as coins but merely metal.
Interrogating truth's "binding" attributes, Nietzsche proliferates metaphors to foreground the very imaginative activity that those who traffic in truths necessarily obscure. For Nietzsche, the rhetorical force of metaphor underlies all human knowledge about the world because metaphor informs how humans imaginatively engage in the world. Indeed, metaphor performs itself as knowledge-becomes knowledge-by enabling humans to make the world's otherness familiar. It thereby allows us to transform the world in its and our image. Nietzsche suggests that only in and through metaphor do humans participate in the world as humans: our "humanness" itself perhaps only names a metaphorical effect. Thus he recalls our attention to the rhetorical and poetical transformations which crystallize as truth to affirm the constitutive quality of human agency: creativity.
It is unlikely that anyone would argue that bioscience is not creative activity. However, if it relegates metaphor merely to an instrument, bioscientific discourse can all too readily forget the creative work that metaphor activates within it. In a simple sense, the desire to know with certainty demands that we tame metaphor's creative propensities. Left to its own devices, metaphor would roam freely within the gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar. In its most generative mood, metaphor remains inherently unstable and untamed: its very generativity feeds on a wild instability that nourishes new understandings and meanings. Unfortunately, as Nietzsche intimates, when knowledge recognizes and uses metaphor univocally as truth, this creative instability implodes, rendering meanings static and fixed. Any perturbations that metaphor's unfamiliar incarnations might provoke are contained by the verification processes that establish its "real" correspondences.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixOpening Up a Few Concepts: Introductory Ruminations 1
1. Living Before and Beyond the Law, or A Reasonable Organism Defends Itself 32
2. A Body Worth Having, or A System of Natural Governance 68
3. A Policy called Milieu, or The Human Organism's Vital Space 130
4. Incorporating Immunity, or The Defensive Poetics of Modern Medicine 206
Conclusion: Immune Communities, Common Immunities 269
Notes 283
Bibliography 323
Index 359