TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 115
themselvesexposedtomobilebioticmaterial,andthissenseofexposure
performed social and cultural work—in excess of the reality of the
dangerinvolvedatthattime.
Precariousness,isaswassaidabove,alatentcondition,attimeseven
an imaginary one while the dangers involved are materially and
empirically real but not yet "there." It is thus a name for a liminal
condition when people think about, feel, and experience real or
imaginarydangerswhiletheythemselvescandoverylittletoameliorate
oraverttherisksinvolved.ThisprecariousnessexperiencedinCubaand
the Philippines or elsewhere is a constitutive factor of the "materialism
of the imaginary" discussed at an earlier moment of the present
argument. The materialism I am talking about here is not unrelated to
another conjunction of the material and the imaginary which Fredric
Jameson, in a famous formulation, has described as "political
unconscious," the site of "the repressed and buried reality" (Political
Unconscious20) of history, a history whose buried recesses include the
sometimes secret, at other time openly experienced, biological
encounterswhichpunctuatethehistoryoftheUnitedStates.
2.ThePublicLifeofPublicDiseases:EpidemicsandtheMassMedia
At the beginning of this book chapter, I have spoken of the
"imaginative surplus" that emerges at the conjunction of biology and
mobility.Atthispoint,Iintendtolookatthisimaginativesurplus,notas
an occasional ad hoc reaction to the disturbing presence of acutely
dangerous diseases but as a carefully thought over, well-conceived
productoftheimagination.
As the argument so far has shown, the nexus in epidemics of
emergence and emergency together with the sense of precariousness
mobilized on such occasions produces a fundamental shake-up in the
status quo. For this reason, epidemics, from the earliest moments of
recordedhistory,havealwaysbeen"big news":theirinterventionswere
dominating and also reshuffling the communicative flows in civic as
wellasexpertcultures;infact,theystilldo,asthe2009H1N1swineflu