TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 47
In this latter view mobility is one of those "processes by which
embodied subjects, simultaneously produced and foreclosed via the
violence of neo-colonial, capitalist, racial, gendered, and sexualized
regulatoryschemaspresentthemselves"(ButlerandAthanasiou193-94)
tothepresenceandreflectionofothers.
Even though especially this latter perspective has in recent years
engaged the interest of some Humanities research, I will here follow a
different route,one thatacknowledges the material existence of biology
andmobilitywhileallowingaspacefortheculturaleffectsproducedby
their conjuncture. Biology and mobility, together with their
conjunctions, have never been met with indifference in the public
sphere. Severe illnesses or the arrival of differently embodied strangers
have in all times precipitated a hermeneutic crisis which mobilized the
interpretive,eventhespeculativeabilitiesofindividualsandcollectives.
With that in mind, I will in the following pages read the nexus of
biology and mobility as a site of intense, at times even hectic human
inventiveness.
Insuchconstellations,humanbeingsarerarelysatisfiedwithamere
tabulation of the "hard facts"; they invoke their inventive, speculative,
even fanciful faculties, for good or bad, for inspiration and
encouragement as much as for concern or outright suspicion. I will call
the result of such activities theimaginative surplus of the biology-
mobility conjuncture. The material presented below is a cultural
catalogue of sorts which registers how that surfeit of meaning produces
imaginary but also material effects. These effects are intensified by the
unique temporalitythat is a characteristic of many moments of the
biology-mobility conjunction. For the most part, such moments are
perceived as unexpected, highly evental, calamitous, catastrophic,
marking a clear distinction between a pre-lapsarian state of carefree
existenceandthenewfallenstateoffearandsorrow.Suchcontrastsact
as a further powerful stimulus on the human imagination; they also
producematerialeffects.
The inquiry attempted here must therefore attend to both, the times
andthespacesoftheconjunctureofmobilityandbiology.Inaccordance
withmyoverallperspectiveonbiologyasafigureofintervention,Iwill
begin my argument with a reflection on how the evental quality of this
conjuncture can be theorized, and I will do so in a way that
acknowledges their essential doubleness, their imaginative as well as