62 RüdigerKunow
the business of body parts trade and trafficking^14 take place along the
same channels and across the same geographical spaces as those
traversed by the circuits of capitalist globalization. What matters
culturally about these encounters is the fact that they generate new
modesofrelationalityamongthehumanbeingsinvolvedinthisprocess.
Between donor and recipient of biomaterials, new forms of friendship,
even kinship are forming. Stefan Beck reports that the Cyprus
Bonemarrow Donor Registry sets up regular meetings between donor
and recipients of bone marrow grafts. These meetings, he argues, not
only "produce histocompatible selves—an emergent, new form of life"
butalso"noveltechnogenickinshiprelations"(21).
As the discussion so far has shown, encounters mediated by the
biology of human beings are never merely biological contacts. As
mobile biotic materials pass, they pass on something^15 —the "fatal gift"
(cf. Mayor 56) of disease or the "gift of life" (as organ transplant
advocates argue). Both represent—one might also say, embody—the
"ecstasies and agonies of ubiquitous and relentless connectivity" (A.
Taylor viii) made possible by the joint efforts of the life sciences and
capitalist globalization. And so, in many instances when biological
encounters are making themselves felt, the ties between event and
meaningremainmarkedlyunstable,notamongmedicalorgovernmental
expertssomuchasamongthegeneralpublic.Inotherwords,biological
encounters tax available systems of interpretation in a given symbolic
order to their limits. For this reason, these encounters will in the
following argument be read not so much as merely biomedical events
(^14) The term "trafficking" is here used as a reminder that much of this biological
exchange is secret, even highly illegal and often conducted by criminal
organizations(Scheper-Hughes,"Ends"66-80).
(^15) MichaelHardtandAntonioNegriacknowledgethisfactwhentheyarguethat
"the age of globalization" is the age also "of universal contagion": "The
contemporaryprocessesofglobalizationhavetorndownmanyoftheboundaries
ofthecolonialworld.Alongwiththecelebrationsoftheunboundedflowsinour
newglobalvillage,onecanstillsensealsoananxietyaboutincreasedcontact..
. The boundaries of nation-states, however, are increasingly permeable by all
kinds of flows. Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial
boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion" (Empire
136).