156 RüdigerKunow
that control or minimize the threat posed by an infectious other. In this
perspective, the performance of medicalizing Otherness, of biological
xenophobia, reveals itself as a particular form of community formation
in which groups of people become ecosystems, systems moreover, that
are constantly haunted, constantly under threat by invasions from the
outside. Perhaps it is no accident that in the post 9/11 United States,
infectiousdiseaseiscurrentlytheprevalentrepresentationofthebiology
ofhumanlifeinthepopularmedia.
Conclusion:BiologicalEncountersandtheCultureofBlame
The main body of this chapter has focused on a series of biological
encountersandtheir,oftenintense,culturalresonancesacrossthehistory
of the United States. Its trajectory went from individual cases to
collective allegations and demonstrated how theimaginative surplus
unleashed in moments of biological encounter has fed into new and
more rigid forms of biological othering. As I have repeatedly argued,
epidemics, unlike most other biological dangers to human life, are
inherently evental, are almost always experienced as coming like a bolt
outoftheblue.Their"anywhere,anytimepotentialfortheemergenceof
the abnormal" (Massumi, ''Emergency'' 155) provides an imperious
challenge to the available resources of meaning-making in the
community afflicted but also in the country as a whole. I have shown
how narrative formats and rhetorical structures in texts and films are
used to make sense of and perhaps to contain by cultural means the
hermeneutic emergencies experienced on such occasions. Such
containment, regardless of its functional achievement, always comes
with a price, producing a cultural praxis organized around blame and
individualorcollectiveculpability.
Asidethenfromtheirobviousfunctionashelpingpeoplecope,many
oftheculturalrepresentationsdiscussedhere can forthis reason also be
read (perhaps against the grain) like an ultrasound image which
producesanegativeimageofthediscordantconnectionswhichmakeup
thetextureofcommunitylife.