TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 71
Tobesure,biologicalmobilityisabiochemicalprocessthatisnotin
or by itself meaningful. The same can be said about the often epidemic
effects of this mobility. Rather—given their potential impact on
individuals and whole communities—the restless practices of biological
encounters, especially of the undesired kind, insistently demand to be
madeintelligible.AsLindaSingerhasnoted,"[e]pidemiclogicdepends
upon the perpetual revival of an anxiety it seeks to control, inciting a
crisis of contagion that spreads to ever new sectors of cultural life.. ."
(29)andproducesanimaginativesurpluswhoseintensities—reflectedin
stories, images or concepts—do not fall far behind all the other
intensities that characterize moments of biological encounter. In such
moments,the"phantomevents"(Sampson11)whichunfoldinthewake
ofbioticmobilityhavehistoricallyoftenbeenthestimulusforimportant
innovations in cultural forms and practices. These are not merely
aesthetic by-products but must be counted among the material effects
thatAlthusserwasspeakingof.
The point about biological mobility from the perspective of cultural
critiqueisthereforenotjustlanguage;inmostcasesthevocabularyused
to describe it is, in fact, pretty much the same as that used in
descriptions of other forms of mobility (Sarasin 227; Wald,Contagious
42, 56). What is more interesting for critical projects such as the one
presented here is the often overlooked dynamic of cultural innovation
which manifests itself in this context: biological encounters have time
andagainbeengeneratorsofnewstructuresofmeaning,newtales,new
visions—inshort,animaginativesurplus.
Evidence for this can be found in a long series of seminal texts,
among them Sophocles,Oedipus the King(ca. 429 BCE), Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War (ca. 400 BCE), Boccaccio,
Decamerone(1349-1351), Defoe,JournalofthePlagueYear(1722). In
contextofU.S.-Americanliterature,exampleswouldincludeearly texts
such as Charles Brockden Brown'sArthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the
Year 1793(1799) all the way down to the AIDS-fiction of 1980s and
90s, e.g. Randy Shilts's HIV-AIDS non-fiction novelAnd the Band
Played On(1987). This list would be grievously incomplete without
Poe's"MasqueoftheRedDeath"(1842),Hawthorne's"LadyEleanore's