Contagion: Health, Fear, Sovereignty

3 Governments, scientists, politicians, doctors, law enforcement officials, journalists, gadflies, and others periodically alert us to potential devastation, potential catastrophe, an imminent moment of life and death resulting from a successful virus, whether the SARS virus of 2003 or HIV/AIDS for the last three decades, Communists in the 1950s, the hairtrigger possibility of nuclear war, a terrorist with the right weapon, irreversible invasions of documented and undocumented immigrants, an awakening sleeper cell in a bedroom community, or a cyber-terrorist capable of rendering helpless a multitrillion-dollar defense system. In 2009, we watched, organized, practiced, and inoculated as the country and the world were alerted to the potential catastrophe of a new H1N1 influenza virus. Global, national, state, and local institutions, businesses, communities, colleges, and prisons all organized themselves around the identification, surveillance, and control of that particular virus. More importantly, they developed contingency plans of enormous proportion for the potentially uncontrollable and unmanageIntroduction The Hydra of Contagion Bruce Magnusson and Zahi Zalloua bruce magnusson and Zahi Zalloua 4 able threat. We are warned; we organize; we practice; we adjust to the “new” circumstances. We do so out of fear of everything from historical memories of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide, to the more contemporary reading of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an infection of what is referred to as “radical Islam.” A virus lies in wait, ready to breach the most elaborate hygienic, physical, intellectual, and moral defenses of sovereign states and sovereign individuals. Over many decades, contagion has been a metaphor of choice for everything from global terrorism, suicide bombings, poverty, immigration , global financial crises, human rights, fast food, obesity, divorce, and homosexuality.1 The unprecedented proliferation of contagion as a heuristic tool or interpretive category should give us pause, however. What happens to the concept of contagion when it exceeds its original epidemiological context and starts contaminating other discourses in the social sciences and humanities? Is this contamination to be celebrated as a positive effect of cross-fertilization, that is, for the cross-disciplinarity that it affords? Or do we need to scrutinize more carefully the ideological underpinnings of its dissemination in contemporary debates (keeping in mind who defines contagion and what or who gets defined as contagious )? Does an affirmative answer to the latter question render the former moot? We do not believe so. Contagion as such is to be neither celebrated nor condemned out of hand. Rather, we need to examine how the concept operates in a given system and fully explore its interpretive potential. To be sure, this is a daunting task. For this reason, a crossdisciplinary approach to contagion is not only useful but also necessary to understanding the complexity of contagion today. We have adopted the lenses of global studies in our examination of contagion. In doing so, however, we have taken care not to merely translate, apply, and/or transpose global insights onto the language of contagion. Rather, we propose to explore contagion not as an object of global interest but as a vexed trope for globalization itself, as a double-edged sword for thinking about global processes. The Politics of Contagion/The Contagion of Politics Understood as a particular kind of threat to the body, the body politic, [3.149.243.32] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 17:34 GMT) INTRODUCTION 5 the nation, global institutions, and the essential normative infrastructure of global life, contagion has served as a productive metaphor of globalization. But what are the consequences of the strategic enactment of institutional responses to biological contagions for thinking about security issues more generally? In chapter 1, “Rethinking the ‘War on Terror’: New Approaches to Conflict Prevention and Management in the Post-9/11 World,” Paul B. Stares and Mona Yacoubian recommend “a counter-epidemic approach” to global terrorism.2 Is contagion, then, contagious? Does it slip the containment of microbiology and enter other living realms of ideas, violence, fear, government, politics, and ethics? If so, how has it shaped our ways of thinking about, responding to, and reproducing global phenomena? More importantly, how does it shape our approach to organizing for the out-of-control? These questions are related to but travel beyond social contagion theory by asking how the inchoate fear of microbial disaster becomes a framework for larger questions about the nature and location of sovereignty and the related questions of contact and hygienic isolation, fear and invisibility, the hazards...