48 RüdigerKunow
material sides. I will do this by calling this conjuncture anencounter, a
term that carries very well the unpredictable and effective quality of
such constellations. My use of the term has profited greatly from the
reflections of Louis Althusser on what he calls "the materialism of the
encounter"(Ph ilosophy168).Eventhoughthesereflectionsdonotform
a systematic body of theory and do not explicitly address biology, an
Althusserian perspective, by understanding conjunctures of biology and
mobilityas"aprocessthatitselfhasnosubject..."(Philosophy190),as
anagenticprocesswithoutagentsintheconventionalsense,allowsusto
detach biological encounters from the usual desires of attribution (to
origin, person, cause). Even so, it retains a sense of their immense
impact or consequences. In speaking here of encounters, I furthermore
seek to capture the fact that such encounters do not occur in the empty
spaces of theoretical reflection. Instead, they are crucial sites where the
connectivities of "trans" or "inter" which matter so much for American
Cultural Studies today are actually experienced, lived, in many cases
evensufferedthrough.
The main body of this chapter will present a series of such
encounters across the history of the United States. Their trajectory will
move from individual cases to collective allegations and demonstrate
howtimeandagaintheimaginativesurplusofbiologicalencountersfed
into new and more rigid forms of population control, a "government of
species" (Ahuja). Then, the argument will shift gears and move from a
personal to a positional perspective, analyzing the biology-mobility
nexus in the context of geopolitics and empire. On the basis of the
material provided so far, the next section will then address in a more
systematic and theoretic fashion the issue of the imaginative surplus
unleashed by biological encounters. It will show how narrative formats
and rhetorical patterns are used to make sense of and perhaps to
culturallycontainthehermeneuticemergenciesexperiencedduringsuch
moments of intervention. The concluding reflections will address the
roleoftheimaginativesurplusinthepublicsphere.
OntheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters
The biology of human life is not contained in the human body; it is
always relational and interactive. In terms of its biological make-up the
human body is porous, unstable, and at any given moment of its