154 RüdigerKunow
extend far beyond the realms of the biological and resonate powerfully
within the civic culture, its communicative flows, its street talk and its
expert communication. In this way, through the replicative flows of
pathogenic materials, matters biological function as a powerful social
andculturalimaginary,asIhaverepeatedlyassertedinthischapter.
Encounters of the biological kind, as the above examples have
shown,speaktoandspeakofthenovelmaterialandculturalrealitiesin
the U.S. at the time of empire and migration. Moving across the
timespacesofanincreasinglyU.S.-Americanmodernity,"acrossdiverse
geopolitical and biopolitical locations" (Berlant,Queen of America7),
and being connected in intimate ways to myriads of unknown others,
among them social and cultural others, created new, non-trivial
relationships between biological endowment and social or cultural
membership.
The new, informal but nonetheless affectively intense forms of
community in their various shapes and guises can thus be taken to give
texturetopeople'sexperience,individuallyandcollectively.Atthesame
time, and especially in their epidemic form, biological encounters have
created a tremor in the experience of community (and often enough it
still does), a shake-up in what is, breaking though the otherwise placid
texture of the everyday. Thus, biological encounters can serve as a
hermeneutic Geiger counter of sorts which brings to light "the best and
theworstofpeople,andthelowerandhighermotivesthatbusinessmen,
newspaper editors, politicians, and physicians normally repress"
(Kalisch136)—inshort,themeaningofthe"we"in"wethepeople."
Forallthesereasons,encountersnegotiatedbythebiologyofhuman
beings are not a case for epidemiologists or other health experts alone,
but an important subject also for cultural critique. After all, as the
incidents presented above show, the meaning that is emerging in these
moments was before negotiated in the public sphere, utilizing available
materialsfromthesocialandculturalarchivesaswellasgeneratingnew
ones. On this basis, colonialism and imperialism in both its European
and U.S.-American variants have produced a global disease imaginary
which peremptorily designated some regions and some people as more