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WORK TITLE: The Pandemic Perhaps
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/sshm/people/academic/Dr-Carlo-Caduff.aspx * https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/carlo.caduff.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D.; also holds B.A., B.Sc., M.Sc., and M.A. degrees.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of Zurich, Switzerland, lecturer; King’s College London, England, senior lecturer, director of Global Health and Social Medicine Graduate School, deputy director of Culture, Medicine & Power Research Group; Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland, visiting faculty.
AWARDS:Grants and awards from organizations, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Wenner Grin Foundation.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to scholarly journals, including Anthropological Theory, Cambridge Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, BioSocieties, Current Anthropology, and Cultural Anthropology. Coeditor of special issue of Current Anthropology.
SIDELIGHTS
Carlo Caduff is a writer and educator, who was raised in Switzerland. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Caduff has served as a lecturer at the University of Zurich, a visiting faculty member of the Graduate Institute Geneva, and a senior lecturer and director of the graduate school at at King’s College London’s Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. He is also the deputy director of King’s College London’s Culture, Medicine & Power Research Group. His research has been funded by grants and awards from organizations, including the Swiss National Science Foundation, Wellcome Trust, and Wenner Grin Foundation. Caduff has written articles that have appeared in scholarly journals, including Anthropological Theory, Cambridge Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, BioSocieties, Current Anthropology, and Cultural Anthropology. He is also the coeditor of special issue of Current Anthropology.
In 2015, Caduff released his first book, The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger. In this volume, he chronicles various communicable diseases throughout history. Caduff also analyzes how these illnesses have been portrayed and predicted in literature and religion.
“The Pandemic Perhaps is particularly timely. The book is well documented but complex,” asserted M.D. Lagerwey in Choice. Lagerwey categorized the book as “recommended.” A reviewer on the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Web site remarked: “Caduff’s work will no doubt shed a timely new light on the way that the threat of epidemics shapes health policy and public perceptions of disease.” Writing on the Somatosphere Web site, Raad Faraak suggested: “Caduff’s detailed analysis of the sites, practices, and poetics of scientific authority and claim-making, in and through both uncertainties and indeterminacy, is uniquely insightful and compelling. His attentive, detailed, and discerning ethnography performs its own variety of dramatic work—the text itself is a delightful and gripping read. It is both an erudite collection of insights about that which goes into and makes up the contemporary world of ‘scientific prophecy’.” Faraak added: “Caduff no doubt goes far beyond his modest aims to ‘see like a scientist’, offering a surplus of generative ideas and his own brand of ‘creativity and complexity’ in thinking through the politics of pandemic preparedness—today a domain that often appears at least as fragile as the vision of a threatened ‘humanity’ it intends to protect” Another writer on the Somatosphere Web site, Perig Pitrou, commented: “Focusing on the unique sort of beings viruses are, The Pandemic Perhaps constitutes, without any doubt, a very important work.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, M.D. Lagerwey, review of The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger, p. 1500.
ONLINE
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, https://culturemedicinepsychiatry.com/ (September 2, 2016), review of The Pandemic Perhaps.
King’s College London Web site, http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ (May 22, 2017), author faculty profile.
Swiss Network for International Studies Web site, http://www.swissinternationalstudies.ch/ (May 22, 2017), author profile.*
Dr Carlo Caduff
Carlo Caduff 2016
Carlo Caduff is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. His work explores the emergence of global health at the intersection of science, medicine, media and the state.
His first book, The Pandemic Perhaps, shows how pandemic influenza became a global threat. The book argues that it is crucial to avoid the reproduction of universalist assumptions that in fact limit the very possibility of conceiving the global. Thus the book’s ambition—to demonstrate how the imagination of pandemic influenza as a global threat is anchored in a configuration of temporal sensibilities and institutional anxieties that is characteristic for a specific historical moment.
In addition to The Pandemic Perhaps, which was published by the University of California Press in 2015, his work has appeared in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, BioSocieties, Annual Review of Anthropology, Cambridge Anthropology and Anthropological Theory. Carlo Caduff is co-editor of a forthcoming Current Anthropology special issue on new media. He has published over 40 articles in newspapers and magazines.
More recently, Carlo Caduff started work on a new project, India’s Cancer Crisis, which examines experiments with accessible and affordable care in India. The project situates the experimental in the everyday and thus breaks analytical ground by expanding our understanding of experimentality beyond the controlled setting of the clinical trial.
For his research, Carlo Caduff received funding by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Carlo Caduff serves as Director of the Global Health and Social Medicine Graduate School and Deputy Director of the Culture, Medicine & Power Research Group (CMP). He is Associate Faculty at the India Institute and Visiting Faculty at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
Carlo Caduff received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. He grew up in Switzerland speaking six languages.
Teaching: Programmes
(Undergraduate)
BA Global Health & Social Medicine
BSc Global Health & Social Medicine
(Postgraduate)
MSc Medicine, Health & Public Policy
MA Bioethics & Society
MSc Global Health & Social Justice
Teaching: Modules
(Undergraduate)
4SSHM003 Introduction to Social Medicine 1
6SSHM001 Contemporary Crises in GHSM
Research
Culture, Medicine & Power
Research interests and projects
Publications
Contact Details
Email: carlo.caduff@kcl.ac.uk
Tel: + 44 (0)207 848 7116
Dr Carlo Caduff
Research interests
Sociocultural anthropology, anthropology of medicine, science, experts, crisis, risk, media, and the state; social theory, research methods, ethnography. United States, South Asia.
Biographical details
Carlo Caduff received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. Before joining the Department of Social Science, Health and Medicine at King’s College, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich.
Dr Caduff works on the anthropology of medicine, science, expertise, crisis, risk, security, and the state. His research concerns include questions of global health and disease, knowledge and expertise, science and technology, ethics and morality, safety and security.
He has published a number of articles on the democratization of expertise, the pharmaceuticalization of health and the securitization of science. In this work, he examined how these recent developments have changed the contours of today’s global landscape of therapeutic governance.
Currently, Dr Caduff is completing a book manuscript about pandemic influenza, which is based on fieldwork conducted in the United States and Europe. The book explores how pandemic influenza has been transformed into a prominent object of public concern, political debate and scientific interest. The book highlights the power of influenza to cross boundaries and create public hysteria, while exploring how concerns over the threat of infectious disease have emerged at the center of a global order of post–Cold War terrors.
Appointment
Visiting Lecturer
Carlo Caduff (Recipient), 2015 → …
Carlo Caduff received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He studied History and Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich and worked in the Department of Social Studies of Science at ETH. In addition to his work at the University of Zurich, he works as a regular contributor to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His current research project focuses on emerging infectious diseases and is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
QUOTED: "The Pandemic Perhaps is particularly timely. The book is well documented but complex."
"recommended."
Caduff, Carlo: The pandemic perhaps: dramatic events in a public culture of danger
M.D. Lagerwey
53.10 (June 2016): p1500.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Caduff, Carlo. The pandemic perhaps: dramatic events in a public culture of danger. California, 2015. 254p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780520284081 cloth, $65.00; ISBN 9780520284098 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780520959767 ebook, $29.95
53-4393
RA644
CIP
As this reviewer was writing, reports of thousands of cases of microcephaly, an unprecedented number, in Brazil and other South American countries tied to the mosquito-borne Zika virus appeared in the news. Pregnant women have been advised to avoid mosquito bites and travel to countries in which the virus has been found. Thus, The Pandemic Perhaps is particularly timely. The book is well documented but complex. It provides a history of viral outbreaks such as the "Zika crisis" since and in light of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Caduff (King's College London, UK) traces epidemics, viral mutations, warnings of pandemics, and repeated patterns of outbreaks' waning. At a deeper level, he argues that although viral threats should be taken seriously, public health, government, scientific, and media rhetorics surrounding these events function as prophetic discourses of doom and doubt, contextualized by meaning making and career development. These discourses reify disease and call for more resources for eradication and prevention yet caution that immunization campaigns have limited efficacy. Useful for health professionals and advanced students. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Graduate students, researchers/faculty, professionals/practitioners.--M. D. Lagerwey, Western Michigan University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lagerwey, M.D. "Caduff, Carlo: The pandemic perhaps: dramatic events in a public culture of danger." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1500+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942804&it=r&asid=ab5b211b2f2fe6903fad7e71b6f3b024. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942804
QUOTED: "Caduff’s work will no doubt shed a timely new light on the way that the threat of epidemics shapes health policy and public perceptions of disease."
Book Release: Carlo Caduff’s “The Pandemic Perhaps”
Posted by jknopes
1
Image via UC Press site
Image via UC Press site
Released this August 2015 from University of California Press is Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger. In the text, Caduff focuses on alerts in 2005 posted by American experts about a deadly, approaching influenza outbreak. These urgent messages warned that the outbreak would have crippling effects on the economy and potentially end the lives of millions of people. Even though this potentially-catastrophic outbreak ultimately never occurred, preparedness efforts for the slated pandemic carried on.
The text is the product of anthropological fieldwork carried out amongst public health agents, scientists, and other key players in New York City surrounding the influenza scare. Caduff demonstrates how these figures framed the potential outbreak, and how they sought to capture the public’s attention regarding the disease. The book grapples with questions about information, perceived danger, and the meaning of safety in the face of large-scale epidemics. Likewise, Caduff examines how institutions and individuals come to cope with the uncertainty of new outbreaks.
The book will be of interest to cultural medical anthropologists as well as epidemiologists and scholars in public health. Caduff’s work will no doubt shed a timely new light on the way that the threat of epidemics shapes health policy and public perceptions of disease and security.
Caduff is Lecturer in the Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine at King’s College London. His research addresses the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, as well as issues surrounding knowledge, expertise, safety, and disease.
QUOTED: Raad Faraak: "Caduff’s detailed analysis of the sites, practices, and poetics of scientific authority and claim-making, in and through both uncertainties and indeterminacy, is uniquely insightful and compelling. His attentive, detailed, and discerning ethnography performs its own variety of dramatic work—the text itself is a delightful and gripping read. It is both an erudite collection of insights about that which goes into and makes up the contemporary world of ‘scientific prophecy’."
"Caduff no doubt goes far beyond his modest aims to 'see like a scientist', offering a surplus of generative ideas and his own brand of 'creativity and complexity' in thinking through the politics of pandemic preparedness—today a domain that often appears at least as fragile as the vision of a threatened ‘humanity’ it intends to protect"
Perig Pitrou: "Focusing on the unique sort of beings viruses are, The Pandemic Perhaps constitutes, without any doubt, a very important work.
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
"
Book Forum
Carlo Caduff’s
The andemic erhaps
Raad Fadaak
McGill University
Karen Jent
University of Cambridge
Ann Kelly
King’s College London
Perig Pitrou
Collège de France
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
"
Book Forum
Carlo Caduff’s
The andemic erhaps
Raad Fadaak
McGill University
Karen Jent
University of Cambridge
Ann Kelly
King’s College London
Perig Pitrou
Collège de France
Christos Lynteris
University of Cambridge
Carlo Caduff
King’s College London Edited by
Todd Meyers
New York University - Shanghai
Carlo Caduff's
The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger
(University of California Press, 2015) is a story of the influenza pandemic that never was. Caduff tells this story from an American perspective through his encounters with scientists and other actors who engage in the august work of “preparedness,” but in doing so, often draw upon and amplify an apocalyptic imaginary that doubtless shapes scientific and public priorities (and fears). With lucid and critical detail Caduff shows how forms of prophecy (new and old) push catastrophe towards further and further horizons. We have an incredible group of commentaries on
The Pandemic Perhaps
. We hope you enjoy.
Beyond Belief: The Work of Global Health Security
Raad Faraak
McGill University
Forgetting Faith and Reason
Just a few months ago, at the end of September, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) held a 'Grand Rounds in Public Health' event at its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The session, an installment in a monthly series intended to “foster discussion on major public health issues”, showcased a trio of public health experts reflecting on the ‘lessons learned’ from the West African Ebola crisis, now in its final twilight. Rather than a look back at the details of the response, however, the webcast was a look forward to the new programs and policy initiatives being launched under the umbrella of the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA).[1] The GHSA— announced coincidentally as the first cases of Ebola spread undetected across West Africa in early 2014—is a US-led diplomatic collaboration designed to “accelerate the strengthening of capacities among low and middle income countries to prevent, detect, and respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases, epidemics and bioterrorism”.[2] To a viewer like myself, the recent policy events around the Agenda have been fascinating to watch for a number of reasons. It is one of the first instances where ‘global health security’ has moved outside of the realm of policy-discourse and become a mandate for public health ‘action’. It is a framework that leans heavily on a faith in the ‘prophetic’ inevitability of the next major epidemic event.[3] But moreover, it is one site to take up Caduff’s claim “that there are other ways of bringing faith and reason into balance”; recalibrations that “offer us other possibilities of thinking about infectious disease” (2015: 29). Inasmuch as the GHSA is precisely such a site of recalibration, the three presenters at the CDC came to the podium convinced of the timeliness of this Agenda, particularly following the Ebola crisis. Now at the end of the epidemic, the torrent of ‘lessons learned’ function simultaneously as judgment about the inadequacies of the recent past and as pressing mandate to craft a ‘safer future’. In other words, we no longer need the prophet to warn us; we must work to prepare. Their calls to action—primarily couched as reflections on the failures of the Ebola response—in many ways suggest a contracting gap in Povinelli’s ‘future anterior’; between a present moment of
decision
and a future moment of
judgment
, which—as Lakoff and others have shown—has been anticipated for some time yet.[4] Nevertheless, following Caduff’s assertion that “faith is never without doubt”, it should not be surprising that the doubts about this Agenda have been flooding in from all directions. There has been a tremendous amount of skepticism, hesitancy, and outright criticism of these projects, alongside other efforts to ‘securitize’ public health—both from within the academy and from health and development agencies.[5] As one health systems specialist opined to me, the very idea of global health security is decidedly “anachronistic”, a relic from an age of American Empire and the War on Terror. What dramatic irony that such a timely political framework relies on such a ‘temporal incongruity’. The ‘spirit’ of the GHSA is clearly not shared by everyone in the public health community. For at least one speaker at the September CDC event, such critique was a topic worth tackling explicitly. Addressing the criticisms of positioning public health capacity building as an issue of security, Jennifer Nuzzo, Senior Associate at the Center for Health Security at the
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
$
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), noted, “I have heard lots of criticisms about the GHSA from people, saying it’s too American-centric, it’s too Western…[but this is about] building core public health capacities”. She concluded, suggesting that “if you don’t think that the GHSA is right for you,
call it whatever you want
. If you want to strengthen your capacity in the name of [tuberculosis] control, that’s fine. We just
have to do something
”. This is no longer about the push and pull of prophecy and counter-prophecy. Forget faith or reason—there is
work
to do.[6]
Beyond Belief
For as much prickly grief, censure, and outright lamentation that the entry of security into health issues has produced, I cannot help but be struck in equal measure by which many of its proponents have
dispensed
with the language, or outright rejected it. On the one hand, it should not be surprising that such fervent policy-discourse might be frankly dropped or sidestepped, or deployed primarily with strategic considerations—as one architect of the early Agenda noted, you don’t have to be a believer to know that ‘security’ is where the money is. With over a billion dollars invested in programs related to the GHSA, US government offices working on global health security don’t need to be reminded of this fact.[7] On the other hand, there are some who seem oblivious to the scrutiny, suggesting that the concept of GHS simply addresses any and all “efforts to prepare for and prevent the next epidemic”—something nearly beyond argument a year after the peak of the Ebola crisis. Of course, prioritizing what exactly “must be done” in the name of preparedness is a rather uncertain process, invoking a very broad collection of endeavors; from health systems strengthening, laboratory capacity development, to biotech R&D reform, health workforce training—the list goes on.[8] Whether these experts are ‘believers’ in the counsel of the pandemic prophets or not, it’s clear that they are convinced of the work that remains to be carried out in its name.
This capricious movement between endorsement and outright disregard over the issue of ‘security’ suggests that the survival of such an idea is not (necessarily) an issue of conviction, of belief, or even faith—less a matter of a “formal pact” and something more like a “flexible partnership”. In Caduff’s incisive turn of phrase, the effort to make global health
work
under an umbrella of security today seems to be more about managing one’s
infelicities
than it is about actually meaning what one says. Nobody understands this better than the officials at the WHO after the tragedy in West Africa, who only seem eager to speak of ‘global health security’ as an “Agenda” when the Americans are around.[1] So, the question seems to be less who these actors ‘are’ or what they believe underneath their masks of strategic
policy ‘as-ifs’
, but rather, what kind of work can be accomplished when they are all at once on stage.
A Culture of Danger?
Caduff’s work both here in
Pandemic Perhaps
and in his recent review article on biosecurity (2014) suggest that “to enter a world of security is to enter a world of insecurity, a world of endless suspicion, speculation, deception, anxiety, uncertainty, obscurity, and paranoia” (110). No doubt, in many instances, this is the
mise-en-scène
. However, working in ‘global health security’ today seems as much about entering a world of negotiated suggestions, fragile policy collaborations, and political mobilizations as it is about performative promises or the perpetual politics of Fear. The only thing one
ought
to feel, in other words, is
urgency
. Caduff’s turn to the dramaturgical seems one powerful way to address this strategic
as-if
that positions the ironic tone of what ‘security’ means today in the world of global health. In some ways, this is a (by)product of the contingency of contemporary global health projects. That is to say, GHS today does not name a set of stable commitments or projections, but rather a number of rapidly shifting possibilities and projects. Like the radically indeterminate ‘viral clouds’ of influenza that Caduff traces at the benchside, the policy maelstrom surrounding global health security is at once ambiguous, infectious, and powerful. Yet, it is striking that a project that aims at such a profound reconfiguration of the coordinates and stakes of today’s ‘disease diplomacy’ has not been a question of
faith
or
belief
as much as it has been of elastic
iterability
. Like the diseases it aims to combat, the Agenda aspires to travel unimpeded across borders. How might one study such an object, if the question no longer becomes about
belief
and its political consequences? It is here that I find Caduff’s resistance to producing an exercise in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” both prudent and refreshing.[9] By refraining from an analytic bent on ‘debunking’ or ‘revealing’, Caduff is able to more carefully attend to “the complex and contradictory ways” that his ethnographic object appears (or fails to appear altogether), and in doing so, situates the possibilities within the science and politics of pandemic influenza. But it is here we might ask: when ‘security’ becomes dispensable, and the question is no longer about
believing
, but
getting things done
—what kind of analysis becomes possible? How might one resist the prophetic urge itself, a reliance on the “assumption that there is a truth that must be revealed” (Caduff 2015: 21)? I think it too early to declare, as the prophets do, “This is how it is…”.[10] In this regard, with Caduff (and James Ferguson) in mind, I would like to see more written today about the ‘uses’ rather than the ‘abuses’ of global health and its various projects, including global health security.[11] It is clear, in any case, that Caduff’s book shows us the generative and captivating force of the dramatic and prophetic in this realm of public health preparedness; in many instances disbelief suspended almost indefinitely by those forecasting the always-already pandemic event. Caduff’s detailed analysis of the sites, practices, and poetics of scientific authority and claim-making, in and through both uncertainties and indeterminacy, is uniquely insightful and compelling. His attentive, detailed, and discerning ethnography performs its own variety of dramatic work—the text itself is a delightful and gripping read. It is both an erudite collection of insights about that which goes into and makes up the contemporary world of ‘scientific prophecy’. Caduff no doubt goes far beyond his modest aims to “see like a scientist”, offering a surplus of generative ideas and his own brand of “creativity and complexity” in thinking through the politics of pandemic preparedness—today a domain that often appears at least as fragile as the vision of a threatened ‘humanity’ it intends to protect.
Reproducing the Magic: Uncertain Science and Reason+
Karen Jent
University of Cambridge
In Carlo Caduff's brilliant ethnography
The Pandemic Perhaps
, we enter a world of delayed apocalypse. The H
n
N
n
mutation of the influenza virus is on the radar of the WHO; scientists prognosticate the next pandemic; preparedness measures are put in place by public health organizations; a flu vaccine is ready to be shipped by the pharmaceutical company. But, once more suspended, the pandemic does not happen today.
It will take place tomorrow.
Caduff’s discussion of pandemic prophecy captures the strange exchange between influenza as a matter of scientific prognosis
and
of quasi-religious belief. His account thus reveals how fundamental uncertainties at the heart of the public health message are not only subject to reason, but also faith. In the genre of pandemic prophecy, scientific reason is augmented with faith, as scientists grapple with the ambivalent state of not knowing what will but suspecting that the worst might happen. Despite its sombre vision of the future, pandemic prophecy is not strictly speaking of the biblical apocalyptic genre, Caduff points out, as "it lacks the hope and desire for another world" and predicts "destruction without purification, death without resurrection […] dystopia without utopia" (7). Part of what makes prophetic prognosis credible, in spite of its continued failure to predict, is what Caduff calls the "cosmology of the mutant strain" (80). Emphasizing its incessant mutability and volatility, scientists identify the virus as an erratic agent that constantly mutates and shifts shape, and is hard to pin down even in the lab. Showing how pandemic prophecy roots in the intricacies of research, Caduff powerfully describes scientists' tireless efforts to define the elusive entity. How can a virus be defined in the dish, he asks, when even the tiniest of samples contains millions of mutations due to microbial instability? Vividly invoking scientists' struggle with matter that is "constantly making itself different from itself" (88), Caduff shows how the conundrum is resolved in a statistical consensus. That is, the problem of microbial instability is overcome by a consensual agreement that indeed the dish contains a comprehensive entity. This makes the virus something scientists can work with, dealing with uncertainty by taking a leap of faith. In my research about regenerative medicine in Scotland, the stem cell is the similarly, yet differently unstable agent that links scientific practice with public health millennialism. Like the virus, the stem cell is said to harbor an enormous capacity for shape shifting. Unlike the virus however, this capacity is not imminent apocalypse and doom, but instead nourishes visions of a glorious and hopeful future for human healing, where lab-grown replacement tissues for patients might become a salvational reality one day (Haraway 1997). Growing bodily tissues from stem cells is often perceived as a technical issue that can be overcome, once science is advanced. And yet, as I recently learned at a stem cell scientific conference, there is an element of "magic" to the salvation that stems from tissue regeneration. Stem cell science too depends on what, inspired by Caduff, might be called
reason+
. However, while microbial apocalypse adds faith, cellular salvation sums up with magic.
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
)
In September, I participated in the prestigious Hydra European Summer School on Stem Cells & Regenerative Medicine on the Aegean island of Hydra. As the meeting began, the participants set out to define the concept that had all brought them together. "What are stem cells?" asked one of the conveners, and at the time, it seemed like a provocative question. Nervous laughter, silence, reluctant replies, and at last heated arguments ensued. The discussion revealed the conceptual complexity of the question as well as its myriad array of possible replies. A common denominator, the group agreed, was that a stem cell is defined as the dormant cell in a bodily tissue that, once activated, has both the capacity to
differentiate
into varied resident cell types, repairing the tissue damage at hand, and also to
self-renew
, creating a copy of itself that goes back to dormancy as a backup system for future damage. Together differentiation and self-renewal are viewed as the baseline biological functions that assure the body's ability to continuously repair and renew itself. This innate ability, stem cell biologists hope, might inform the regeneration of damaged tissues in patients suffering from a vast array of degenerative diseases. In practice, the Hydra discussion revealed, differentiation and self-renewal make strange bedfellows. For instance in the bone marrow, the hematopoietic stem cell - that can give rise to all blood cell types - is surrounded by many other cell types. It is held in place by bony connective tissue, it is catered for by blood vessels, it is protected from harm by resident immune cells. Enveloped in this diverse environment, the dormant stem cell is activated when it receives signals to produce more of any one type of blood cell. Only then, the cell awakens and starts to divide, creating two daughter cells, one differentiating for the reproduction of blood cells and the other one self-renewing for future stem cell stock. But practically, the Hydra delegates debated, how can mere cell division be distinguished from differentiation and/or self-renewal? Is self-renewal just division? And, at what stage does differentiation initiate and consequently start to differ from self-renewal? These uncertainties were not abstract questions, but of vital practical relevance for bodily repair: It is, one eminent scientist highlighted, where the "magic" happens. The translation of bodily topographies - where stem cells live in, and are sustained by, the company of other cells - into the petri dish is a difficult endeavor as cells' mutual support is difficult to model
in vitro
. Consequently, if magic is needed to grasp the stem cell's capacity for self-renewal and differentiation
in vivo
, it might be even more magical to make it happen in the lab. Then, how is the magic reproduced in the lab? I asked Robert, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, the same question when on a rainy day during fieldwork he offered some advice on a cell culture that I had been growing for a few days. The first step was to assure that cells were content. As we took the cells from the incubator, Robert looked at the flask assessing the color of the medium. The medium looks orange-red when fresh and turns into yellow when the nutrients are used up, suggesting hungry unhappy cells, while it turns into purple when the O2-CO2 exchange in the flask is disturbed, suggesting that cells are asphyxiating, he explained. That day, I had screwed the lid of the flask on too tightly, and by now the bright purple of disturbed gas exchange was showing: an ominous sign. Even though the mishap could be corrected easily, it was a bad sign, cells were not too happy and Robert - knowing how to read the minutest of cellular signs - showed some concern. Next, he peaked through the microscope to look at the cells, which were stuck at the bottom of the flask as translucent dots and surrounded by the gooey gel added to mimic the feel of connective tissue. He lamented: "They are too sparsely populated" and continued, that for stem cell populations in particular, it was essential to get the cell density right.
In vitro
colonies are often set up as monocultures, a dish with just stem cells. Compared with their bodily occurrence however, a monoculture fails to provide the support that stem cells would ordinarily receive from
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*+
the cells in their vicinity as in the bone marrow. If the colony was too sparsely populated, the cells would die for lack of mutual support. If the cells were stacked on top of each other, they would cause each other to differentiate losing their valued stem cell state. The trick was, Robert suggested, to make a monoculture that wasn't indeed a monoculture, where part of the cells spontaneously differentiated and part self-renewed. Successful stem cell culture necessitated, in other words, the introduction of heterogeneity from within the cells, so the culture as a whole stayed in equilibrium between simultaneous differentiation and self-renewal. This balance could be struck - in spite of the stem cells' lack of support from their neighbors - by regulating how densely seeded the cells were in their container. Having observed the minute intricacies of cell density time and again, Robert is proficient in the necessary conscientious care of 'just getting it right', a skill cell growers need to painstakingly acquire. This magic of care amplifies scientific reason about stem cell differentiation and self-renewal in order to deal with the uncertainties of cellular growth. If scientific uncertainties about the virus require
reason+
that is augmented by faith, ambiguities about the stem cell are partly resolved by the addition of magic. Taken forward into the realm of the public health message however, scientific uncertainties about the virus have an entirely different inflection than they have for the stem cell: While faith in the pandemic threatens with apocalypse, stem cell magic promises salvation, allowing for a peculiar relationship with the volatile and unpredictable entity at the heart of the public health project. With its spark of magic, regenerative medicine offers a vision of a better world with a capricious protagonist that is not threat, but hope; not death, but resurrection; not dystopia, but utopia. Just like pandemic influenza though, the bodily cures of regenerative medicine are in equal temporal deferral, not quite there yet.
The cure will be ready tomorrow.
To further think about the intersection of scientific uncertainty and its relationship to the millennial public health message Caduff's
The Pandemic Perhaps
is just the right companion.
Plotting Global Health Attention through Pandemics
Ann Kelly
King’s College London
I might have mistaken my intensified attention to the wind for intensifying wind.
Ben Lerner,
10:04
In late August 2011, on the eve of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Hurricane Irene tore northwards up the Atlantic, its projected path fixed over the U.S. East Coast. So great was the force of the tropical storm’s anticipation that flood-prone and low-lying metropolitan areas from Virginia Beach to Providence were preemptively evacuated. New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, in what would later be dismissed by some as an overblown display of preparedness, closed the New York City transit system, shut off water and electricity in lower Manhattan, and preemptively deployed the National Guard. It is under Irene’s kinetic spell that we find the protagonist of Ben Lerner’s novel,
10:04
, stocking up on provisions alongside other New Yorkers enrapt by the imagination of her landfall. Crowds effervescing sociality, groceries radiating an aura of scarcity—the city seems to rearrange itself around the storm’s approach: “what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs” (19). It is the strange serendipity of maternity leave that finds me reading
10:04
and
The Pandemic
Perhaps
at odd hours and in tandem; two books for which hurricanes—or, more specifically, the preparations they precipitate—relay the condensed temporality of the coming catastrophe, a dovetailing of past perils and precarious futures for which a New York City ‘on the brink’ provides a hyperactive backdrop. Through often-exquisite prose (Lerner is a poet; Caduff’s formulations can approximate verse) these authors explore the worlds that surface and dissolve under the shadow of prediction and the modes of attention that give them their shape. This late-night imagined conversation turned on the performative power of engrossment—a topic that spoke to my state of attenuated awareness, and offered an unexpected entry point to the nexus of issues elaborated by
The Pandemic Perhaps.
Global Health Attention
Global Health attention is intense, but fickle. An awkward compromise of economic interests and geopolitics, moral and epidemiological logics, global health ‘emergencies’, as Caduff shows, crystalize around distinct and often countervailing values. There are emerging threats and persistent plagues; examples of gross negligence and near-triumph; devastating illness that demand large-scale investment and mundane suffering that could be redressed with the application of minimal resources. But whether it is HIV, Guinea Worm or obesity, the ways in which a public health issue becomes a global concern depends on how its present danger is drawn to our collective future. Following Caduff’s deft descriptions of influenza’s configuration as an object of research
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*"
and policy—its multi-faceted political-materiality—I will offer some brief reflections on how that connection is drawn in other corners of the ever-shifting global health landscape.
Attention to what?
Given the precarious constitution of the category and the difficulty of defining pandemic influenza, what are the prophets of pandemic influenza actually predicting? (Caduff, 98)
Influenza,
The Pandemic Perhaps
teaches us, is a quintessential moving target. Constantly mutating and recombining, the flu’s identity is a statistical compromise of emerging strains and classic pathologies, a rapprochement of laboratory practice and clinical experience. The very concept of
pandemic
flu revolves around degrees of genetic difference, and the ensuing transmissibility across populations with no acquired immunity. This future orientation of pandemic flu, its potential to spread and spread widely, provides the ground for large-scale global health intervention—an epidemiological
perhaps
that governments cannot afford to ignore. Malaria shares influenza’s ontological slipperiness: whether the disease is understood as primarily a problem of the parasite or the vector, of the clinic, the home or the field, has a considerable impact on how it comes to matter for global health. The Global Malaria Eradication Program (GMEP), launched in the mid-1950s, was built upon a mathematical model of transmission that foregrounded the interaction between vector and human population—a precarious stabilization that, with the advent of DDT, nevertheless promised massive and rapid global health dividends. Linked to the abundance and longevity of mosquitoes and to the chemical agency of residual insecticides, malaria became an object of technocratic intervention: with sheer manpower and manufacturing efficiency transmission could be irreversibly interrupted within a matter of years. In this way malaria-control became a global event, a contest between an emerging public health internationalism and the mosquito's adaptive resistance. The collapse of the GMEP has been etched in the annals of environmentalism and global health policy as a parable of American hubris and of the limitations of vertical interventions. In the last decade, however, those failures have been recast (Kelly and Beisel 2011). Malaria’s persistence, we are told, was the product of the program’s lack of follow-through rather than its overreaching ambition—a tragedy of untimely abandonment that has served as the rallying cry for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A new eradication campaign, a new malaria: this time defined by the parasite. Doubling-down on the “high risk-high reward” strategy espoused by GMEP, the effort to remove the parasites from the human population has precipitated a new arsenal of experimental vaccines and novel drug regimens. Launched in 2013, the Foundation’s “Accelerate to zero” strategy reprises the race against resistance, but this time its end game is not the interruption of transmission but it’s preemption, assured through an ever-intensifying hail of magic chemical bullets (McGoey 2015). Once the instrument for the West ‘to win hearts and minds’ in the war against Communism, malaria has returned to the limelight as an engine for biomedical innovation. Its eradication is no longer driven by ideological commitment—the disease owes its salience to the R&D opportunities it presents.
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*#
Salient Experiments
Once the virus was detected in the bodies of soldiers at Fort Dix, the outbreak was considered a significant sign, announcing the event, and the fulfillment of a prophecy. (Caduff, 71)
The swine-flu strain isolated from recruits at Fort Dix in 1976 triggered memories of overwhelmed army infirmaries, a materialization of the past that had haunted global health since the First World War. But this time the public health community had the tools to head off the pandemic before it started; the outbreak therefore presented a “splendid opportunity to prove the power of preventative medicine” (Caduff: 63). With ambition characteristic of the nation that spear-headed GMEP, the 1976 National Influenza Immunization Program (NIIP) sought to vaccinate the entire U.S. population by the end of the year, reaching over 40 million Americans in 10 weeks. That the outbreak originated in an army base Caduff finds apposite—the program was, in the rhetoric of the time, “a declaration of War”. The rally, however, quickly became a rout—the campaign was, ultimately, sabotaged by its own weapons. The strain’s similarity to the one that swept the globe in 1918 had been overdrawn. Eventually only one death would be attributed to it. The vaccine became a greater source of suffering: by the time NIIP was shutdown, 500 recipients had suffered serious side effects and twenty-five died. 1976 was an eventful year for Global Health, albeit only in retrospect. A few months after the virus was identified at Fort Dix, a storekeeper fell ill in Sudan, suffering from a disease that after a second outbreak in DR Congo (then Zaire) would come to be known as Ebola. A disease of terrifying but ultimately self-limiting virulence, for decades it was solely the province of remote sub-Saharan villages and apocalyptic fantasy (Lynteris 2016). Classified as a potential bioterrorist agent, Ebola took center stage in a new regime of scenario-based exercises and emergency simulations, surveillance systems and intensive R&D investment intensified in the aftermath of 9/11 (Lakoff and Collier 2008; Keck 2014). That the 2014 Ebola outbreak was partly the product of an emphasis on preparedness at the expense of investments in basic clinical infrastructure is an irony that does not escape Caduff (see also Lachenal 2014; Nugyen 2014). More telling is that Ebola became a global health problem— or formally, a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ (PHEIC)—neither at the point of its detection nor even when it had devastated communities across the Mano River Region. Rather, it crystalized into a global health emergency after an infected Liberian collapsed upon arrival at an airport in Lagos, threatening the apocalyptic scenario of a gigantic, ungovernable metropolis in the grip of a lethal virus. At this moment, the outbreak shifted from a humanitarian crisis to international security threat, best contained by checkpoints and border controls and, critically, by accumulating vaccine stockpiles. This is where Caduff’s reading of the response to flu at Fort Dix is most instructive. The NIIP, he argues, was propelled by two opposing figures: the virus, a “living fossil” of a past catastrophe, and the novel vaccine, a harbinger of hope. For previous outbreaks there had not been enough time from initial detection to manufacture a viable vaccine on a large scale. The early isolation of the strain in Fort Dix made population-wide immunization a possibility, but only with considerable political and financial capital. In hindsight, nation-wide immunization was perhaps a reckless gamble—the WHO, for instance, shifted to a ‘wait and see’ policy, monitoring emerging infections—but in the U.S., where the battle between virus and was closer to home, the moral imperative to vaccinate “every man woman and child” quickly became a feature of its own momentum.
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*$
The recent Ebola outbreak has also been configured as a scientific opportunity, though the moral logics of experimental exigency have been decidedly more complex. Unlike the 1976 strain of swine flu, the transmissibility of this pathogen was, if anything, underestimated. By the time the pharmaceutical companies entered the scene, policy discussions were not characterized by bold decisions but by desperate measures. “We wasted time before speaking about a vaccine and treatments” lamented Jean-Hervé Bradol, the director of Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF; Doctors Without Borders) internal review body, back when the outbreak was at its peak: “it’s very hard to imagine controlling this epidemic now without a vaccine” (Flynn and Bartunek 2014). Urgency, again, provided the syntax for policy decisions: within a matter of months, consortiums of international experts, government and industry representatives were assembled, charitable funding was released, clinical trials designed, regulatory requirements streamlined and indemnity funds set aside by the World Bank. But a large-scale immunization program resonates rather differently in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa than it had in Gerald Ford’s America, buoyed by the resounding success of the campaign against polio. A long and sinister history of unethical experimentation and medical iatrogenesis, from forced sterilizations to pharmaceutical negligence, has generated popular suspicions of vaccine as vehicles for western imperialism (e.g. Giles-Vernick & Webb 2013; Fairhead and Leach 2012). That legacy cast its shadow over high-level meetings at the World Health Organization regarding design of vaccine trials, where West Africans were, at once, cast as needy patients denied compassionate access and as guinea pigs exposed to unnecessary risks. Either way, the belatedness of the global health response meant that the experimental delivery of the vaccine could only be justified by the protection it would bring to future populations. As the WHO summarized in its report of the meeting that "all efforts to develop, test, and approve vaccines must be followed through to completion at the current accelerated pace even if transmission dynamics meant that a vaccine was no longer needed…as a contribution to global health security, fully licensed and approved vaccines should be stockpiled in readiness for the next Ebola outbreak” (WHO 2014). Caduff reads the NIIP as the moment when the future took precedence over the present: “American experts,” he writes, “took rapid action, leaped over the present, and rushed forward to the conclusion” (65). The haste triggered by the Ebola outbreak carries an even heavier moral freight: the experimental deployment of untested vaccines was compelled by the scale and severity of the outbreak; a present that, owing to the belatedness of the response, was of global health’s own making. While efforts to enhance country capacity—setting up community care centres, distributing home biosafety kits and training health workers—might help slow transmission only the vaccine trials offered a way to make up for lost time, to halt the current outbreak while, at the same time, refashioning response time oriented towards the inevitability of future outbreaks (Kelly 2015). As the epidemic now submerges into endemicity, the apocalyptic outbreak is again deferred, while for those populations in its immediate reach Ebola becomes an everyday reality. Transformed from extreme event to, as Caduff puts it, “an ordinary harm”, it is unclear what kind of sustained global health attention the virus will receive, other than as an object of research and continued experimentation.
Time to Take Note
To what extent is the notion of a ‘new regime’ of ‘public health vigilance’ itself a force in the making of structure and order?...to what extent such a form of analysis
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*%
is making it easier for projects of “public health vigilance” to impose themselves on populations in the global South. (Caduff, 195)
In an extended footnote to the introduction, Caduff suggests how
The Pandemic Perhaps
departs from dominant critiques of biosecurity. To describe the “prophetic scene of influenza” demands an ethnographic attention that goes beyond the geopolitical consequences of a thoroughgoing securitization of health. The dialectics of faith and reason that Caduff locates at the heart of global health expertise turn upon the failures of pandemic prediction and the structures of expectation, interest and investment the non-catastrophe precipitates. Thus rather than marveling at the extension of preparedness policies, our analyses would be better served plotting the points at which the problems that do the most damage and those these initiatives anticipate diverge. Zika is now in the global health spotlight, and there is much here to catch our anthropological attention: the tragic spectacle of microcephaly, the uncertainty of state-collected health statistics, the rapid dissemination of conspiracy theories. Could there be a more invasive biopolitics than a policy dissuading pregnancy? If even Pope Francis comes close to condoning the use of contraception, has global health reason overtaken the sovereign doctrines of faith? As the shadow of Zika moves across the Americas, the responses it will elicit will inevitably vary according to the ways in which global health problems have been historically brought to light, particularly when it comes to vector borne diseases (e.g. Lees-Stephan 1997; Nading 2014). To indicate their readiness for the coming outbreak in the US, decision-makers there have returned to a familiar figure: “The way I think about it, it’s just like a hurricane,” said Florida Governor Rick Scott, “get prepared, hope for the best. So what we’re doing is we are preparing and we’re doing everything we can to make sure this does not get worse.” Whether the winds will intensify or dissipate remain to be seen, but in either case, it will not be the last time our attention is directed towards the coming viral storm.
Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s
The Pandemic Perhaps Somatosphere
| April 27, 2016
*'
The Many Lives of Viruses
Perig Pitrou
Collège de France
In chapter 1, Carlo Caduff aptly explains how, since André Lwoff’s seminal 1957 paper [1], the ontological status of viruses has remained ambiguous. Indeed, “The fact that viruses can multiply rapidly and adapt systematically to changing circumstances suggests that they are living things. The fact, however, that they can multiply, mutate, and adapt only in the presence of living cells suggests that they are not autonomous organisms. Furthermore, viruses are also unable to perform essential metabolic functions” (57). As discussed by Thierry Bardini, who is working on “viral life,” the decision by biologists whether or not to put viruses in the category of living things was at the beginning of virology “une affaire de goût”–although, since then, the discovery of Mimivirus, Mamavirus and Spoutnik has supported the argument to place these beings in the latter category[2]. In any case, it seems that, instead of the quite sterile ontological question–“alive or not alive”–it is much more fruitful to adopt a pragmatic standpoint on this topic, and, as I suggest in recent papers, to study living beings within the “agentive configurations” where they appear, in order to better understand both the evolution of living beings and their relations with an environment[3]. Although the main topic of
The Pandemic Perhaps
is to develop a multi-scale study of flu pandemics, I should say that I consider this book as a great contribution for the anthropology of life and it is on this point I would like to comment. Caduff’s excellent investigation, both ethnographic and historical, offers a very convincing analysis of the material and conceptual configurations in which viruses are engaged, hence demonstrating the value of approaches which explore the agency of living beings and vital processes[4]. He offers insightful ideas that shed new light on fundamental aspects of life. First of all, the depiction of technological devices invented by scientists to observe and manipulate the virus shows an interesting entanglement between vital and technical processes[5]. At the beginning, the aim of virology was to make “the invisible agent concrete: The virus became detectable, maintainable, manipulable, and transferable. However, what researchers revealed was not the virus itself, but the trace it left after it had entered susceptible bodies” (39). In these conditions, after various experimental assays, microbiologists discovered that the body of a ferret could be used as a “living test” for investigations into the influenza virus, “Constituting the influenza virus as a unique causative agent, as a concrete biological entity, required–literally–the construction of a living test subject susceptible to the disease and capable of consistently manifesting its clinical form” (45) [6]. In
The Pasteurization of France
, Bruno Latour explains how the scientific construction of microbes in the nineteenth century implies a double operation of isolation of living material in the laboratory and of reconnection with society, through the dynamics
in vitro
/
in vivo
. With viral entities the situation became even more complex as the manipulation of a virus in the laboratory imply indirect actions on living beings–namely, the breeding of animals susceptible to show symptoms indicating the presence of a virus. Likewise, the fact that, for the hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay, “fertilized chicken eggs containing a living embryo eight to eleven days old are commonly used as the primary medium to isolate and grow influenza viruses in the laboratory” (89), offers another good example of the imbrication of vital and technical processes. In addition to the exploration of the complexity of the inclusion of viruses in various spatial environments, it is also their temporal evolution, which is scrutinized. Caduff shows how, instead of the idea of “regular pandemic cycles”, the concept of “emerging viruses” has been invoked (78). This shift in theorization has consequences for the perception of pandemic phenomena: “At the heart of the concept of emerging viruses is a particular temporality, a temporality that has left behind the numerological hope of regular cycles and predictable patterns” (78). But it also leads to a growing complexity the conception of life as a reproduction–and evolution–of forms through linages. Phenomena such as lateral transfers, metagenomics or epigenetics, underline the instability of the notion of individual and offspring; they also force anthropological investigation and epistemological reflection to take into account interspecies relations[7]. In this framework, the newness of emergent viruses is all the more complicated to understand that it could be, from another point of view and through the transfer from animals to humans, a resurgence of a former one. “The swine flu virus appeared as a ‘surviving agent’, a ‘living fossil’ [… But] the “fossil”, after all, was “alive”, not in the humans but in swine. Thus, there was the theoretical possibility that this type of influenza might come back one day and infect humans again” (70). On another scale, not only in the laboratory but also in the outside world, we find that the vitality of the virus should be studied not only with a microscope but with a kind of kaleidoscope, in order to explore the connections than can exist between a multiplicity of living beings, each of them possessing its own temporality. Last but not least, Caduff’s work on the role of information in the modelization of the virus tackles various important issues regarding the articulation between matter and form. In chapter 4, he examines “how biological matter has increasingly become informed matter, arguing that this informational redefinition of biological matter has opened up new opportunities for the understanding of a catastrophic disease” (33). What is at stake here is the fact that, to a certain extend, life can be conceptualized through the assemblage of data that can be, then, manipulated. So, the problem is not just the question of transfer of virus between living bodies, but the possibility of a conversion of vital processes in technical and informational devices in a context where “the biological body is a body of information”. Using the work of Hannah Landecker, Caduff explains “that the biological body is circulated and exchanged in informational forms does not imply that it is somehow not material; the body in-formation has, on the contrary, its own distinctive materiality” (115). Even if the convergence between a biologic and informatic virus is a possibility that should not be ruled out–cf. Bardini’s paper quoted above–for the moment, the virus is a “moving target” which is good to think because the cognitive and technical devices used to catch it seem to objectify two distinct conceptions of life. On the one hand, an ecological conception, the “borrowed life” (56), in which the development of each living being depends on a set of biological relations it establishes with other living beings–on this, see Latour’s analysis of Lovelock and Margulis’s theories in
Facing Gaia
. On the other hand, life can be considered as a more abstract phenomenon that can be modelized and imitated, even using non-biological processes. In this context, we are not in front of two separate options, but of two complementary ways of capturing vital processes. The co-presence of these two models in scientific activity is described by Caduff as a kind of odd assemblage–in this case, the test with eggs–tinkering with elements belonging to various worlds and temporalities: “In an age of supercomputers, smartphones, and reverses genetics, microbe farmers continue to depend on chicken eggs and chicken blood, the nuts and bolts of scientific research” (89). For millions of years viruses have lived many lives through a multiplicity of forms connected to numerous of living beings. With the development of biotechnology, the array of possibilities has become even more larger, since a great diversity of interrelation between vital and technical processes is about to be explored by humans. Together with investigation on “archaic biotechnologies” (Dagognet)–domestication, cultivation, interpretation of signs, etc.–the anthropology of life has a lot to learn from the observations of new technologies, such as (re)programation, modelization or gene-editing for instance. With the accurate description of all these new ways humans experiment their engagement with materials, the aim is nothing less than obtaining a better comprehension of the contemporary redefinition of what is life; in particular analyzing how evolutions of life forms can be correlated with evolutions of forms of life. Along this path, focusing on the unique sort of beings viruses are,
The Pandemic Perhaps
constitutes, without any doubt, a very important work.
Pandemic Returns
Christos Lynteris
University of Cambridge
Pandemic prophecy is the prophecy not of an event, but of an eventual return or recurrence. If the “next pandemic” is a biopolitical apparatus revolving around the anticipation of a 1918-influenza- pandemic-like event, what needs to be noted is that the formation of this recurrence-structure is contemporary to the systematization of the notion of the pandemic. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in the course of what came to be known as the “third plague pandemic” (1894-1959, following WHO chronology), the chain of bubonic plague epidemics striking harbors, cities and villages across the globe was made sense of as the reappearance of a medieval scourge: the Black Death. Yet this was always already an incomplete return. On the one hand, it was the bacteriological anchoring of modern plague that allowed the serialization of the pandemics preceding it. And on the other hand, though microbiologically identical to them – and hence, as Caduff would put it, the return of a fossil – the mortality resulting from modern plague did not match the apocalyptic image of the event it was supposed to replicate. What this prophetic discourse then generated was not simply a failed pandemic, but a recursive indivisible remainder: the successive deferment of the pandemic event in its eternal return. Within the biopolitical context of turn-of-the-century Empire, this pandemic vision rhymed with the overall conception of disease as resulting from decay and degeneration. By contrast, in our times the temporal ontology of the “return of the virus” seems to be at odds with the temporality underlining the biological phenomenon said to be the driver of the “next pandemic”: emergence. Yet what we have here is not a move away from the former towards the latter; for rather than displacing recurrence, emergence envelops it in what Caduff calls its constitutional temporal incongruity. Whereas in the model of degeneration the pandemic returns through the recrudescence of a dormant disease, in the case of emergence pandemic recurrence results from the generation of a “new virus”. Rather than interrupting the eternal return of the pandemic as the eventalization of human-extinction, emergence -- that diagram of “protean” viral ontogenesis -- is the condition of its biopolitical efficacy. For if, as Caduff notes, the definition of what counts as “new” forms the undecidable arcanum of emergence ontology, that which anchors the “next pandemic” as an imaginable and hence “preparable” catastrophe is precisely the fact that it is projected as something which is not (at) all-new. From preparedness exercises to pandemic movies and novels, whilst the identity of the killer virus remains speculative, its social impact is depicted in a trite way, which can only be described as “the banality of plague”: a meltdown of private property and law-and-order. It is hence less the supposed biological impact of the “next pandemic” than the failure of its “prophets” to imagine human suffering in any other way than in the form of a rupture of bourgeois values which is striking here. What “returns” in the form of the “new virus” is not simply the specter of human extinction, but, even for those few who survive, the bane of life not simply without but “before” capitalism; a Hobbesian dystopia where humanity is led “back” to an animalistic state of mutual predation. For this prophetic regime, the only true future for humanity is the present; any other future would be simply a return to “the dark ages” or “the stone age”. It is this pandemic vision, as a vision of no imaginable alternative, which sets the “prophetic scene” of the coming plague.