Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order
It is impossible to contemplate the shape of late modern history — in Africa or elsewhere — without the polymorphous presence of HIV/ AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny: the disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations: “AIDS,” wrote Susan Sontag (1989: 122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,” a throwback to an era when sickness was, by its nature, immutable, mysterious, and fatal. Such reactions make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scientific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future. As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering, nor even in the relationship with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied with life and their seemingly limitless capacity to control it. AIDS also casts a premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, free-wheeling desires that animated advanced consumer societies. And, as is often the case when Western self-images of reasoned control face homegrown disruption, the disease was deflected onto Africa as primal other, Africa as an icon of dangerous desire, Africa as the projection of a self never fully tamable.
In more ways than one, then, AIDS represented the return of the repressed, the suppressed, the oppressed. Soon overwhelming the received limits of virology and immunology — indeed, of the restricted lexicon of bioscience sui generis — it set off an avalanche of mythmaking. There have been those in the tradition of Nietzsche (1910: 77) who insist that modernity has banished such mythmaking, that it has condemned us to pain without meaning. In our day, says Jean-Luc Nancy (1997: 149), suffering is “no longer sacrificial.” Our bodies are broken and repaired, but “there is nothing to say.” There certainly has not been a shortage of things to say about AIDS. On the contrary, AIDS has sparked a veritable plague of images: what Paula A. Treichler (1988) memorably termed an “epidemic of signification.” Striking the unstable landscape of the late twentieth century like a “lightening bolt” (Nancy 1997: 146), it cut a swath at once awesome and absolute, marking out the path of economic and environmental changes that sped the evolution and transmission of new viruses across and within species (Davis 2005: 55). In the process, it signaled emerging biopolitical insecurities: unrecognizable aliens capable of disrupting existing immunities, penetrating once-secure boundaries at a time of deregulated exchange. In the West, the disease prefigured a novel order of post – Cold War terrors: of protean, deterritorialized invaders who hijack our defenses and threaten to coexist with us in a deadly symbiosis that sets off rapidly mutating, mimetic forms of violence and counterviolence. In short, it is a process that W. J. T. Mitchell (forthcoming) has called the “cloning of terror.”
As all this suggests, AIDS has been rewriting the global geopolitical coordinates within which we think and act. We may lack the nerve or imagination to theorize it adequately, but it has certainly been theorizing us for quite a while. “It doesn’t matter if you are HIV-positive or negative,” insists South Africa activist Adam Levin (2004: 226), “the world has AIDS. And if you give a shit about the world, you have it too.” The threatening mutability of the disease challenges efforts to impose stable categories of recognition and exclusion in an already disrupted late-modern geography. The pandemic is savagely cosmopolitan, making blatant the existence of dynamic, translocal intimacies across received lines of segregation, difference, and propriety. But it has also revived old specters, marking out pathologized publics and crystallizing latent contradictions and anxieties. And, in so doing, it has exacerbated existing economic and moral divides on an ever more planetary scale. Coming as it did at the time of a radical restructuring of the axes of a bipolar world, of the liberal-democratic nation-state and the workings of capitalism itself, the disease served as both a sign and a vector of a global order-in-formation — and with it, a new sense of the nature and possibilities of the political.
Here again, the timing has not been coincidental. It scarcely needs saying anymore that as states around the world set about outsourcing key aspects of governance, withdrawing from a politics of redistribution, the grand disciplinary institutions of the modern state have shrunk, or that the task of social reproduction — of schooling, healing, law enforcement, frail care — has been ceded to ever more complex public-private collaborations, to volunteer workers and more or less viable communities under the sway of corporatized regimes of expert knowledge. If “family values” are the all-purpose glue meant to ensure social and moral reproduction under these conditions, AIDS has been read as a quintessential sign of all that imperils a civilized future-in-the-world, an iconic social pathology. In its primal association with non-normative sexuality, AIDS also lends itself to a language of revelation and retribution, evoking strong emotions that, at least in the West, suggest barely repressed anxieties about sexual subjectivity and desire at a time of profound upheaval in gendered relations of power and production (Butler 1997: 27).
Also in play in all this is the uncertain issue of citizenship. Here too AIDS has figured as a standardized nightmare (Wilson 1951). Across the world, as nationstates disengage from the regulation of processes of production, the political subject is defined less as a patriotic producer, homo faber, than as a consumer of services; the state, reciprocally, is expected to superintend service-delivery, security, and the conditions of healthy, untrammeled commerce. With the erosion, if not the erasure, of social categories rooted in nation, territory, and class, identity vests ever more crucially in individual bodies: bodies defined as objects of biological nature and subjects of commodified desire. Would-be statesmen represent the predicament of contemporary governance as a Herculean battle to balance minimal government with maximum personal safety and self-realization, their rhetoric focusing centrally on the quality of life, understood in simultaneously moral and material terms. AIDS embodies, all too literally, core contradictions at issue in such discourse. For some, its onset made plain the dangers of laissez-faire and a drastic reduction of the reach of the polis — the erosion of institutions of public health, for example, in the name of corporate science (Brazier 1989). But such critical, social reflection, at least in the global North, has been overpowered by another process already noted: a projection of the dystopic implications of neoliberalism onto the victims themselves. Thus it is that the archetype of the homosexual AIDS sufferer became the specter of a world driven by desire sans moral commitment. The hysteria that erupted in the United States with the first awareness of the epidemic made plain how central is the register of sexual “perversion” to the neoconservative imagination (Berlant 1997). This is an imagination that strives to reduce expansive vocabularies of politics, social debate, and intimacy to a straightjacket of absolute oppositions: nature and abomination, truth and deception, good and evil.
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Notes
I wish to express my gratitude to Steven Robins, Chris Dorsey, Dilip Gaonkar, and John Comaroff for the generous insights they offered on this paper.
