TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 155
diseased than others and for this reason as all-out security threats the
well-beingofEuroAmericans.^101
Such an imaginary, properly called abiomedical imaginary, opens
up rich but also somber semantic fields. A closer look, such as I have
undertaken in this chapter, at these fields and their narrativizations, will
reveal a certain histrionics, a distinct dramaturgy with a marked
preferenceforthehighjinxoflast-minutesolutions.Suchhistrionicsare
oftentimes, and especially in pop-cultural representations, deliberately
highlighted so that mass diseases are represented for no other purposes
thanthatofgeneratingdramaandsuspense,"creatingthethrillofamore
exalted life," as Horkheimer and Adorno asserted (24), or, as I have
calledithere,diseasethrill.
However that may be, the intervention of the language of the
collectiveanditsnarrativearsenalintotheexistentialcrisisofamedical
catastrophe comes with a characteristic delay, however small the delay
may be. The catastrophe has already occurred, produced its terrifying
and numbing results. Writing mass diseases thus amounts to little less
than re-writing them, re-creating the temporal imminence of biological
catastrophes in terms and forms already available in the cultural
archives.Thesetermsandformsmaywellbeunderstoodasprovidinga
form ofcontainmentofthecatastrophe,animaginarycontainmenttobe
sure, which, however, following what Linda Singer has called an
"[e]pidemiclogic"(29),willproducematerialresultsbyinterveninginto
the lives of individuals and collectives. This is also the reason why
narratives about biological or medical contamination are often
themselves contaminated by scapegoating, by prejudice, if not outright
hatredofsocialandculturalothers.
Suchsecondary contaminations(as they may be called) seem to
speakofandtoacollectivedesire,theneedofimaginedcommunitiesfor
imagined immunities, however spurious, for strategies of containment
(^101) As discussed in the previous chapter, such an imaginary also worked on a
globalscalewithAfricascriptedastheheartofdarknessofbiologicalhazards.–
The relationship between colonialism and (contagious) diseases has been
explored, with emphasis on administrative issues by Alan Bewell, in his
Romanticism and Colonial Disease(2003) and, within the U.S.-American
contextbyWarwickAndersonwhoseworkisrepeatedlyreferencedhere.