TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 117
accompanies and frequently even antedates, the search for a cure. This
search is undertaken not only by those affected personally or
professionally but is oftentimes a collective project undertaken in the
civicculture,aprojectresourcedbytheculturalarchives,byscriptsand
modes of knowability, even as the overwhelming crisis environment
threatens to subvert and transcend them. What adds to the hermeneutic
crisis is the fact, noted above, that the causes of mass diseases are most
of the time not empirically observable, and reveal themselves only
(much) later. Since they cannot be easily represented, they must be
representedbysomethingelse.
"Epidemic" is thus a word that (like the phenomenon it designates)
spawns many words: meanings proliferate, often faster than the
infection. Infectious diseases and what is said about them share "the
same logic of proliferation" (Huet 29), and more often than not, this
proliferation even compounds the effects of the medical emergency by
sparking a civic crisis—as was the case in Philadelphia and Memphis.
As Paula Treichler has famously argued with regard to the HIV-AIDS
crisis, epidemics such as this incubate also what she calls in her essay
"An Epidemic of Signification." However, more meaning does not
necessarily produce more sense, and whatever meanings are generated
mustbechanneledthroughtheconduitsofcommunicationthatare/were
availablewhenthecrisisbroke.
Beforetakingacloserlookatthisparallel,equallyepidemicuniverse
of meaning, in other words before turning to those structures that form
theculturalcontentofamassdisease,Iwouldliketo takeacloserlook
atthematerialstructuresandsitesofcommunicationwherethiscontent
is generated and contested. Once again, the context is primarily a U.S.-
Americanone.
PublicOpinionandPublicDiseases
To suggest that epidemics have cultural content means that a mass
disease is more than a combination of signs and symptoms for medical
expertisetoreadandtreat.Suchaperspectivealsoinvolvesatheoretical
position which takes into account that medical mass events are
essentially public property, not only because they are experienced
collectively, but also because what can be said about them is said