TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 57
moreU.S.-Americanshavecometofeeltheyarelivinginaworldwhere
"indiscriminate threat has become the bellwether of nature" (Massumi,
"Emergency" 27). One may add here that there seems to be only one
other model of sociality that can claim similar persuasiveness in the
public domain today, namely the market whose "invisible hand,"
curiously like that of biology, mysteriously and without prejudice
media-tes the relations between multiple actors and bringsaboutan end
that was nobody's intention (to paraphrase Adam Smith'sWealth of
Nations).
Meanwhile, the stability and containmentachieved by the biological
immune system at any given moment of its operations is not itself
immune from disturbance; each new interaction in/with the biosphere
canbringnewinstabilitiesandcomplicationsfortheorganismsinvolved
(DelvesandRoitt,Martin).Forthisreason,theorganismwecallhuman
life is, biologically speaking, a changing same of ongoing and multiple
interactionswiththebiosphereandtheecosphere.
In speaking here of "biological encounters," I furthermore seek to
capturethefact—cruciallyimportantforbothAmericanCulturalStudies
and their inter- or transnational orientations—that biological encounters
arecrucialsiteswheretheconnectivitiesof"trans"or"inter"areactually
experienced, lived, in many cases even suffered through. Most but
definitelynotallofthepathogenicmaterialinvolvedinsuchencounters
is—in medical-empirical terms but also in phobic imaginative
constructs—comingfrom ecospheresoutsidethecircum-Atlanticworld.
A few years ago, theNew York Times Magazinefound a memorable
image for this passing-on when it asked its readers to contemplate the
limitless possibilities of biological infection generated by fast and easy
airtravel:"amosquitoinfestedwiththemalariaparasitecanbebuzzing
in Ghana at dawn and dining on an airport employee in Boston by
cocktailhour..."(qtd.inAlbertini449).Thispithyimageofbiological
encounters—the central operational fantasy also of films likeInfection
(2011)—with its unacknowledged phobic undertone reminds us that
encounters of the biological kind are a site of intervention where the
proximate and the distant, the local and the global, the private and the
public, intersect and interact, to producead hocrelationships, even
communities of shared biological characteristics.In this contextof such
biological encounters, the biology of the human body functions as the