116 RüdigerKunow
epidemic, the "epidemic that never happened," demonstrates.^71 "Big
news" also meant "big money," and this conjunction hasmade sure that
epidemics would always win the attention of those who owned and
controlled the mass media of their time, from market bulletins, church
sermons,andbroadsheetstotoday'sFacebookandTwitter.
The intervention of a dangerous disease into people's lives, its
infectiousspreadfrombodytobody,persontoperson,placetoplace,is
somethingthathumanbeingscannothelpbuttalkabout;nobodyshrugs
off the presence of a dangerous infectious disease, collectivities no less
sothanindividuals.Diseasecommunicabilitygeneratescommunication,
oftentimesanexcessofcommunication,andthedynamismofspreading
news—itself infectious—is unchecked by considerations of medical
accuracy, public expediency, even government control. Instead, it is
often accompanied by equally infectious bouts of panic or hysteria.
Medical emergencies are almost always alsohermeneutic emergencies
which produce their own material effects. These latter emergencies are
effects that are often overlooked in the Althusserian sense of a
materialismoftheencounter.
Infectious mass diseases such as the ones discussed in the previous
section are moments of mass(ive) cognitive dissonance; their
interventions trouble if they do not outright undermine the knowledges
in which people were trained, individually as well as collectively.^72
Preciselybecauseofthecrisisinmeaningwhichtheyinitiate,epidemics
possess what might be called cultural content. In the "generalized crisis
environment" (Massumi, "Emergency" 153-55) evolving in moments of
medical crisis, the search for a cause, an explanation,anyexplanation,
(^71) Whether or not the "swine flu" was a substantial health threat or whether it
was the result of an unfortunate management of insufficient evidence both by
medical experts at the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and the media is still
hotly debated. For the larger ramifications of the incident, especially with the
new role of social media, cf. Ives, Mike. "When Epidemics Go Viral."The
Atlantic.TheAtlanticMonthlyGroup,18Oct.2016.Web.9Apr.2017.
(^72) AsAdrienneMayorhasshowninherdiscussionofbiologicalwarfareagainst
Native Americans (the infected blankets incident), the ravages of infectious
diseases for which traditional healing methods provided no cure effectively
undermined the authority of native shamans and creating an opening for
Christianmissionaryefforts(58).