Endemic

Essays in Contagion Theory

Kari Nixon, Lorenzo Servitje, Kari Nixon, Lorenzo Servitje, Kari Nixon, Lorenzo Servitje

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137521415
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book develops a new multimodal theoretical model of contagion for interdisciplinary scholars, featuring contributions from influential scholars spanning the fields of medical humanities, philosophy, political science, media studies, technoculture, literature, and bioethics. Exploring the nexus of contagion's metaphorical and material aspects, this volume contends that contagiousness in its digital, metaphorical, and biological forms is a pervasively endemic condition in our contemporary moment.
The chapters explore both endemicity itself and how epidemic discourse has become endemic to processes of social construction. Designed to simultaneously prime those new to the discourse of humanistic perspectives of contagion, complicate issues of interest to seasoned scholars of science and technology studies, and add new topics for debate and inquiry in the field of bioethics, Endemic will be of wide interest for researchers and educators.

© The Author(s) 2016

Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje (eds.)Endemic10.1057/978-1-137-52141-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction

Lorenzo Servitje¹ and Kari Nixon²

(1)

Department of English, University of California, Riverside, Clarke Court, La Quinta, 92253, CA, USA

(2)

English Department, Southern Methodist University, Westfield Drive, Dallas, 75243, TX, USA

End Abstract

“Why Mass Shootings May Be Contagious, New Study Examines”; “Is there an Antidote to Emotional Contagion”; “Gaining Weight Is Socially Contagious—So Is Losing It.” In 2015, these headlines appeared alongside those pertaining to Ebola virus disease (EVD), West Nile virus, and the recently infamous “Giant Frozen Virus Still Infectious After 3000 Years.”¹

Contagion is not just “in the air” (Weinstein 2003, p. 113); it is endemic to our contemporary culture. The critical landscape of the new millennium has witnessed the advent of a variety of “posts”: post-postmodernism, post-humanism, and post-naturalism. Of course, these critical trajectories reflect cultural shifts and a growing collective desire, even outside of academic and critical discourse, to interrogate the anthropocene (the current zombie craze being one example of this turn in popular culture). However, the decentering of the anthropocene has yet to yield any extensive forays into that which has naturally destabilized it quite literally for millennia—infectious microorganisms.

The ubiquity of antibiotics and vaccines in the First World has sapped contagious disease of much of its perceived phenomenological virulence. Carcinogenic fears and “lifestyle” diseases loom in the popular cultural imaginary. The average Western, middle-class subject, for instance—trained by media campaigns to be obsessively aware of all sorts of cancers—is likely much more concerned about annual mammogram protocols, to name just one example, than the rampant staphylococcal infections in the hospitals that house many mammogram machines. In contrast to biopolitical imperatives surrounding the hygienic containment of infectious disease of the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, neoliberal health states have created an environment in which lifestyle, risk mitigation, pre-treatment, and optimization become the predominant modes to self-fashioning.² Contagion, however, has certainly not gone away, even for Western states and in many ways has intruded upon these paradigms in the era of biomedicalization.³

Nevertheless, the medical golden age of antibiotics became challenged with HIV in the 1980s and 1990s and, of course, most recently with zoonotic influenzas, the 2014 EVD outbreak, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And, perhaps ironically, the characterization of the autism “epidemic” by the “anti-vaxx” movement has ushered in the resurgence of highly infectious childhood diseases that had been controlled by vaccines for some time. It is no surprise, then, that infectious discourse paradoxically continues to intrinsically structure contemporary society even as much of industrialized society imaginatively constructs itself as beyond the pale of infection and serious contagious threats. Contagion is a “cultural logic,” to use Fredric Jameson’s terms. If for Jameson, postmodernism was the cultural logic of a mode of capitalistic rationality, then contagion is a logic that serves dividing practices that subtend hermetic subjectivities, the distinction between self and other, and the supremacy and autonomy of the human. Often, this takes a biopolitical valence, based on what Foucault calls “racism,” (but which might more aptly be termed a hierarchy of life), where the human biological continuum is fragmented and categorized into those who are made to live at the expense of others who are allowed to die. On the one hand, Western cultures in many ways perceive that they have moved beyond contagious disease; on the other, they remain threatened by “foreign” and “emerging” diseases. Furthermore, they expand the biological notion of contagion as a way to understand threats to seemingly all aspects of life. In this capacity, contagion still threatens certain lives whether it be by way of suicidality, chronic diseases such as cancer or obesity, or physical and financial productivity. In spite of First-World nationalism that imagines its subjects as immune to the threat of infectious disease, our post-postmodern, post-human, post-natural society nevertheless retains the structural paradigms of contagion and infection in discourses beyond biomedicine. We are strikingly not post-contagion.

Endemic, therefore, probes the depths of the notion that “going viral” is a pervasively endemic (post)postmodern condition.⁴ Epidemic discourse so thoroughly structures our world that it is endemic to our processes of social construction. That is, our current social constructions rely on paradigms that represent nearly everything as communicable: fears (especially of non-contagious illnesses), media campaigns (such as Susan G. Komen’s so-called “pink-washing” efforts), social activism (the pandemic spread of 5K philanthropy), viral videos and memes, and so forth. Beginning with the notion of the endemicity of epidemiological discourse, alongside the epidemiological spread of endemicity as a concept more broadly, this volume works toward a series of aims: (1) developing a theoretical structure for considering contagion as a paradigm that became a predominant mode of structuring and conceptualizing cultural phenomena following the solidification of germ theory in the late nineteenth century; (2) ensuring the interdisciplinary approach—one that spans the range of humanistic perspectives, incorporating political, economic, philosophical, digital, and media developments—of this framework, in keeping with the biotechnical and critical theoretical advancements seen in the last 15 years; (3) by way of the two former goals, beginning to interrogate the persistence of contagious rhetoric and logic in a society that has ideologically construed itself as impervious to infectious disease; and (4) advancing a bioethics of disease discourse that conceptualizes the overdetermination of contagion and considers both the implications of using contagion as a metaphor and its seeming “contagiousness,”⁵ or, better, its endemicity.

What does it mean that contagion not only continues to be used, but increasingly so, to reflect the replication of ideas, traits, products, processes, and traditionally non-infectious diseases? While our understanding and perception of contagion as a disease and a metaphor has certainly changed significantly over the past 100 years—particularly in the last few decades—contagion continues to influence how we perceive and construct our world. The advent of research on the microbiome and antibiotic-resistant infections, for instance, has significantly changed how we understand humans’ relationship to microbial life. Moreover, recent research and popular media attention to how digital, social, and mobile media affect heath and behavior, while itself often characterized under the rubric of “virality,” speaks to the timeliness of investigating how contagion is currently operating as a discourse and what kind of cultural work it is doing. The conceptual construct has tangible, biopolitical effects in shaping the conditions of our existence. It is this mutual constitution between culture and contagion that concerns this volume.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been a number of influential collections and monographs devoted to the subject, beyond medical histories of “plagues and peoples.” However, the prominent rubric by which cultural studies, science and technology studies (STS), and literary scholars have tended to approach the idea of contagion in their collections and monographs is through the epidemic. That is to say, it is framed as the form of contagion, whether pathogens or ideas, that emerges or, as it is frequently characterized, “strikes,” a population, disrupting the social and biological status quo. This is best characterized in Priscilla Wald’s (2008) landmark Contagious, in which she chronicles “the outbreak narrative,” an emerging story of disease that “dramatizes the most basic of human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact” (p. 2). Wald chronicles the plotting of epidemics from the case of Typhoid Mary to the Cold War era “viral cultures” to the turn-of-the-century Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic, contending that this narrative shapes the material conditions of epidemiology. Much of this kind of cultural studies work began earlier with Laura Otis’ (1999) Membranes and then, notably, with Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker’s (2001) collection Contagion, both of which focus largely on histories and on biological contagion.⁶ Conversely, Peta Mitchell’s (2014) “metaphorological” study presents a history of contagion as a metaphor.⁷

Our volume unites these methodological aims in the pursuit of an innovative theoretical perspective and peers through the interstices of biological materiality and symbolic import. And, in contrast to the prevailing focus on contagion via epidemic patterns, this volume theorizes contagion as operant through an endemic prevalence in discourse and society. While epidemics and their narratives remain important for critical study, there has been little to no work done contextualizing the sheer prevalence of these narratives—a prevalence that constitutes by its very nature, as we argue in this volume, an endemic cultural perspective.

The etymology of epidemic and endemic is useful here to distinguish the relationship between a communicable disease and its specific proximity to and influence on a population. The term epidemic originates from the Greek roots epi (“upon” or “over”) and demos (“people”). In other words, epidemics are diseases that come from without to intrude upon a people. The “en” prefix in endemic on the other hand, in its original meaning, is that which is “in a people.” Said differently, it is a regular condition of a population, if not characteristic of it. Contagion is itself, in its etymology—“to touch together”—and as a target of public health an inherently biopolitical concept, at least, according to Foucault, since the end of the eighteenth century. While we naturally think of this in terms of “epidemics,” from suicide to EVD, again, we might recall biopolitics in its genealogy is conceptually more aligned with endemicity:

At the end of the eighteenth century, it was not epidemics that were the issue, but something else—what might broadly be called endemics, or in other words, the form, nature, extension, duration, and intensity of the illnesses prevalent in a population. These were illnesses that were difficult to eradicate and that were not regarded as epidemics that caused more frequent deaths, but as permanent factors which…sapped the population’s strength, shortened the working week, wasted energy, and cost money…In a word, illness as phenomena affecting a population. Death was no longer something that suddenly swooped down on life—as in an epidemic. Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it. (Foucault 2003, p. 243)

Today it is the lingering chronic illness, both figurative and metaphorical, that structures our cultural anxieties. The chronically ill citizen cannot contribute to a neoliberal society that prizes production, quotas, and stamina in the extreme social environment of the modern state that is increasingly devoid of social support for such “productivity.” Making live and letting die become a question of calculating and calibrating endemicity and its effects. The victim of an epidemic disease, that is, at least functions in their death to relieve society of an unproductive member. The endemically ill linger and metaphorically contribute in the social imaginary to the troubling endemic conditions of “wasted energy” and “costs” which neoliberal actors seek to track, mitigate, and eliminate both in and beyond traditional disciplinary structures of the school, the prison, and the workplace.⁸ In the First World, this often translates to so-called “diseases of civilization” such as hypertension, obesity, and drug abuse; however, we also suggest that this is not only indicative of endemics such as “diseases of civilization” or microbial endemics such as TB in Africa but also indicative of how we perpetually tend to construct threats to governmentality as contagious, such as social-media-inspired suicide, financial collapse caught from Asian markets, or, emergent exotic disease such as EVD—in short, how we construct an endemic of epidemics. We suggest that the discourse of endemicity stresses the particular dimensions surrounding the object described. It highlights how whatever is being described as “endemic” is characteristic of its context or milieu.

Contagion can be broadly characterized as any kind of influence that threatens our agentive control of our health, behavior, emotions, and social bonds. The relationship between biopolitics and contagion is ultimately about the production of self and the social. In this capacity, whenever we are investigating contagion we are investigating subjectivity, particularly Western, liberal subjectivity—that autonomous, self-contained, sealed-off self. The anxiogenic penetration that threatens the boundaries between the self and the other is based on the “membrane model,” in which identity is constructed upon the ability to resist external influences and forces, which are often “projections of undesirable internal drives” (Otis 1999, p. 7), a characteristic, for instance, of Western constructions of EVD as Catherine Belling suggests in her chapter; selfhood is compromised by the penetration of one’s “membrane,” in the form of pathogens or foreign ideas (Otis 1999, p. 7). Thus, contagion in its ideative and biological forms threatens the very fiber of our insulated subjectivities. It is in this power, however, where its revolutionary potential lies.

By understanding the ways that this pathogenic model is so imbedded in our cultural logic, contagion becomes a w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. The Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction
• 1. Contagious Culture and Cultures of Contagion
• 2. Digital Virality
• 3. Theorizing the Politics of Contagion in a Neoliberal World
• 4. Reconstructing Contagion
• Backmatter