Caduff Forum Update2

8/17/2019 Caduff Forum Update2

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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


Carlo Caduff


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.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

http://somatosphere.net/2016/04/

book-forum-carlo-caduffs-the-pandemic-perhaps.html


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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. Thesession, 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 WestAfrican 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 beinglaunched 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 early2014—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 infectiousdiseases, epidemics and bioterrorism”.[2]

To a viewer like myself, the recent policy events around the Agenda have been fascinatingto 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 waysof 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’ functionsimultaneously as judgment about the inadequacies of the recent past and as pressing mandate tocraft 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 Ebolaresponse—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 haveshown—has been anticipated for some time yet.[4]

Nevertheless, following Caduff’s assertion that “faith is never without doubt”, it shouldnot 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 ideaof 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 anissue of security, Jennifer Nuzzo, Senior Associate at the Center for Health Security at the


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University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), noted, “I have heard lots of criticisms about theGHSA 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 GHSAis 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 faithor 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 proponentshave 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 dollarsinvested 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 seemoblivious 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 afterthe 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; fromhealth 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 anumbrella 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 WHOafter 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.


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The Ministerial Meeting Session, September 18, 2015, Seoul, South Korea

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 seemsone 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, butrather 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 globalhealth 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 ‘diseasediplomacy’ 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 andcontradictory 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 ishere 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 oneresist 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 itis…”.[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 ofthe dramatic and prophetic in this realm of public health preparedness; in many instances disbeliefsuspended almost indefinitely by those forecasting the always-already pandemic event. Caduff’s


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detailed analysis of the sites, practices, and poetics of scientific authority and claim-making, inand through both uncertainties and indeterminacy, is uniquely insightful and compelling. His

attentive, detailed, and discerning ethnography performs its own variety of dramatic work—thetext 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 andhis 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.

References Caduff, C. 2014. "On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability." Annual Review of

Anthropology 43(1): 105–121.Calain, P., and C. Abu Sa’Da. 2015. "Coincident Polio and Ebola Crises Expose Similar Fault

Lines in the Current Global Health Regime." Conflict and Health 9(1): 1–7.Collier, S., and A. Lakoff, eds. 2008. Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in

Question. New York: Columbia University Press.Hoffman, S. J. 2010. "The Evolution, Etiology and Eventualities of the Global Health Security

Regime." Health Policy and Planning 25(6): 510–522.Lachenal, G. 2014. Ebola 2014. Chronicle of a Well-Prepared Disaster . Somatosphere, October

5, 2015.Lakoff, A. 2010. "Two Regimes of Global Health." Humanity: An International Journal of

Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1(1): 59–79.Maguire, M., C. Frois, and N. Zurawski. 2014. Anthropology of Security: Perspectives from the

Frontline of Policing, Counter-Terrorism and Border Control . London: Pluto Press.Masco, J. 2014. Theater of operations: national security affect from the Cold War to the War on

Terror . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Moon, S., D. Sridhar, M. A. Pate, et al. 2015. "Will Ebola Change the Game? Ten Essential

Reforms before the next Pandemic. The Report of the Harvard-LSHTM Independent Panelon the Global Response to Ebola." The Lancet, November 26, 2015.

Morrison, J. S. 2014. The Global Health Security Agenda: A Snowy Promising Start .Rabinow, P. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rushton, S. 2011. "Global Health Security: Security for Whom? Security from What?" PoliticalStudies 59(4): 779–796.

Notes

[1] It is important to add that recent increased dialogue has occurred between the US officesspearheading the GHSA (particularly the National Security Council) and the WHO, who have

recently developed the “Joint External Evaluation Tool”—a monitoring and evaluation frameworkthat combines IHR compliance metrics with GHSA-related targets. Even so, the GHSA appears in

this document only through implicit reference.[2] http://csis.org/publication/global-health-security-agenda-snow-promising-start

[3] See the recent joint Harvard-LSHTM Ebola report, Moon et al. (2015).[4] http://limn.it/introduction-ebolas-ecologies/

[5] See Lachenal 2014, Hoffman 2010, Calain and Sa’Da 2015, Rushton 2011; Masco 2014.


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[6] Such criticisms have been rebutted by pointing to the fact that the GHSA today is endorsed andmanaged by a large number of both developing and developed countries. The Steering Group, for

instance, is made up of country representatives from Canada, Chile, Finland, India, Indonesia,Italy, Kenya, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Republic of Korea, and the United States.

[7] For an overview of the large funding increases in the United States around issues of ‘health

security’, see Boddie et al. 2015, Federal Funding for Health Security in FY2016 . Health Security,13(3): 186-206.[8] In fact, Susan Erikson’s recent piece here in Somatosphere on the “Financialization of Ebola”

details very succinctly what large changes are happening at the World Bank in this regard:http://somatosphere.net/2015/11/the-financialization-of-ebola.html

[9] Originally coming from Rabinow’s discussion at the end of French DNA (1999), pp. 173.[10] For a review of anthropological engagements with apparatuses and ‘scapes’ of security, see

Maguire (2014).[11] For a great example, see Alex Nading’s recent piece in Limn: http://limn.it/ebola-chimeras-

and-unexpected-speculation/. See also Collier and Lakoff 2008; Lakoff 2010.

Raad Fadaak is a PhD candidate at McGill University, working with the Departments of Anthropology, Social Studies of Medicine, and the Global Health Programs. His PhD research

focuses on the projects and policies designed by governments, global health institutions, andinternational agencies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from public health emergencies.

Read this piece online: http://somatosphere.net/?p=11454


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Reproducing the Magic: Uncertain Science and Reason+

Karen Jent


In Carlo Caduff's brilliant ethnography The Pandemic Perhaps, we enter a world of delayedapocalypse. The Hn Nn 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 healthorganizations; 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 discussionof 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 atthe 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 theambivalent 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 apocalypticgenre, 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 incessantmutability 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 theelusive entity. How can a virus be defined in the dish, he asks, when even the tiniest of samplescontains millions of mutations due to microbial instability? Vividly invoking scientists' strugglewith 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 isovercome 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 offaith.

In my research about regenerative medicine in Scotland, the stem cell is the similarly, yetdifferently 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 aglorious and hopeful future for human healing, where lab-grown replacement tissues for patientsmight 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. Andyet, 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 byCaduff, might be called reason+. However, while microbial apocalypse adds faith, cellular

salvation sums up with magic.


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In September, I participated in the prestigious Hydra European Summer School on StemCells & 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 commondenominator, the group agreed, was that a stem cell is defined as the dormant cell in a bodily tissuethat, 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 todormancy 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 andrenew 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 canmere 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 difficultto 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 someadvice 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 assessingthe 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 gasexchange 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 cellularsigns - showed some concern.

Next, he peaked through the microscope to look at the cells, which were stuck at the bottomof 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 stemcell 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 occurrencehowever, a monoculture fails to provide the support that stem cells would ordinarily receive from


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the cells in their vicinity as in the bone marrow. If the colony was too sparsely populated, the cellswould 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, Robertsuggested, 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 heterogeneityfrom within the cells, so the culture as a whole stayed in equilibrium between simultaneousdifferentiation 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 painstakinglyacquire. 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 aboutthe 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 inthe 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, bututopia. 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 theintersection of scientific uncertainty and its relationship to the millennial public health message

Caduff's The Pandemic Perhaps is just the right companion.

References Haraway, D. J. 1997. Modest-Witness@ Second-Millennium. FemaleMan [copyright]-Meets-

OncoMouse [trademark]: Feminism and Technoscience. New York & London: Routledge.

Karen Jent is a doctoral candidate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) atthe University of Cambridge. Her PhD project explores benign and malignant growth in stem cell

therapeutic development and regenerative medicine in Scotland. During her ethnographic fieldwork, she engaged in learning the magic of care for cells in the laboratory.



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Plotting Global Health Attention through Pandemics

Ann Kelly


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 thetropical 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, inwhat 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 preemptivelydeployed 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 rearrangeitself 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 comingcatastrophe, 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 dissolveunder 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 spoketo 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 demandlarge-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 publichealth 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


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and policy—its multi-faceted political-materiality—I will offer some brief reflections on how thatconnection 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. Constantlymutating 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 veryconcept of pandemic flu revolves around degrees of genetic difference, and the ensuing

transmissibility across populations with no acquired immunity. This future orientation of pandemicflu, 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 aconsiderable 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 oftransmission that foregrounded the interaction between vector and human population—a

precarious stabilization that, with the advent of DDT, nevertheless promised massive and rapidglobal 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 sheermanpower 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 globalhealth 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 forthe 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 andnovel 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 butit’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 nolonger driven by ideological commitment—the disease owes its salience to the R&D opportunities

it presents.


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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 WorldWar. But this time the public health community had the tools to head off the pandemic before itstarted; the outbreak therefore presented a “splendid opportunity to prove the power of

preventative medicine” (Caduff: 63). With ambition characteristic of the nation that spear-headedGMEP, 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 theoutbreak 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 beenoverdrawn. 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 effectsand twenty-five died.

1976 was an eventful year for Global Health, albeit only in retrospect. A few months afterthe 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 ofterrifying 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 bioterroristagent, 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 of9/11 (Lakoff and Collier 2008; Keck 2014).

That the 2014 Ebola outbreak was partly the product of an emphasis on preparedness at theexpense 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, ungovernablemetropolis 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 beenenough 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 withconsiderable 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 emerginginfections—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 ownmomentum.


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The recent Ebola outbreak has also been configured as a scientific opportunity, though themoral 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 timethe 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; DoctorsWithout Borders) internal review body, back when the outbreak was at its peak: “it’s very hard toimagine 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 andindemnity 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 pharmaceuticalnegligence, 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 deniedcompassionate 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 followedthrough 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 andapproved 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 moralfreight: 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’sown making. While efforts to enhance country capacity—setting up community care centres,

distributing home biosafety kits and training health workers—might help slow transmission onlythe 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 (Kelly2015).

As the epidemic now submerges into endemicity, the apocalyptic outbreak is againdeferred, 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 kindof 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


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is making it easier for projects of “public health vigilance” to impose themselveson 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 thoroughgoingsecuritization of health. The dialectics of faith and reason that Caduff locates at the heart of globalhealth 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 theextension 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-collectedhealth 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 condoningthe 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 willinevitably 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,” saidFlorida 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 thewinds 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.

References

Giles-Vernick, T., and J. LA Webb Jr, eds. 2013. Global health in Africa: historical perspectives

on disease control . Ohio University Press.Fairhead, J., and M. Leach. 2012 Vaccine Anxieties:" Global Science, Child Health and Society" .

Taylor & Francis.Flynn, D., and R.-J. Bartunek. 2014. “Error! Hyperlink reference not valid..” Reuters, Nov. 14.

Keck, F. 2014. Birds as sentinels for pandemic influenza. BioSocieties 9 (2): 223-225.Kelly, A.H. 2015. Ebola, Running ahead, LIMN . http://limn.it/ebola-running-ahead/

Kelly, A.H., & U. Beisel. 2012. Neglected malarias: The frontlines and back alleys of globalhealth. BioSocieties, 4:71-87.

Lakoff, A., and S. J. Collier. 2008. Biosecurity interventions: global health & security in question.Columbia University Press.

Lynteris, C. 2016. "The Epidemiologist as Culture Hero: Visualizing Humanity in the Age of 'the Next Pandemic'”. Visual Anthropology, 29(1), pp.36-53.

McGoey, L. 2015. No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy. Verso Books.

Nading, A. M. 2014. Mosquito trails: ecology, health, and the politics of entanglement . Universityof California Press..

Packard, R. M. 2007. The making of a tropical disease: a short history of malaria. Johns HopkinsUniversity Press.


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Stepan, N. L. 2001. Picturing tropical nature. Cornell University Press.World Health Organization (WHO). 2014. “WHO High-level Meeting on Ebola Vaccines Access

and Financing.” Summary Report, October 23.

Ann H. Kelly is Senior Lecturer of Global Health in the Dept. of Social Science, Health and

Medicine, at King’s College, London. Her work focuses on the practices of global health researchand experimentation, with special attention to the built environment, material artifacts, and practical labors of tropical disease control in sub-Saharan Africa.



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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], theontological 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 “virallife,” the decision by biologists whether or not to put viruses in the category of living things wasat 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 lattercategory[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 suggestin 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 anenvironment[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 theanthropology 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 materialand 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 insightfulideas that shed new light on fundamental aspects of life.

First of all, the depiction of technological devices invented by scientists to observe andmanipulate 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 becamedetectable, 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 theseconditions, 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 theinfluenza 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 consistentlymanifesting 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 operationof 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 themanipulation 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,


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the fact that, for the hemagglutination inhibition (HI) assay, “fertilized chicken eggs containing aliving 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 ofvital 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, insteadof 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 throughlinages. Phenomena such as lateral transfers, metagenomics or epigenetics, underline the

instability of the notion of individual and offspring; they also force anthropological investigationand 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, fromanother 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 anotherscale, 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 explorethe 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 theunderstanding 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 thatit 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’stheories 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 arenot 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 oddassemblage–in this case, the test with eggs–tinkering with elements belonging to various worlds


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and temporalities: “In an age of supercomputers, smartphones, and reverses genetics, microbefarmers 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 andtechnical 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 thanobtaining 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. Alongthis path, focusing on the unique sort of beings viruses are, The Pandemic Perhaps constitutes,

without any doubt, a very important work.

References and Notes [1] Lwoff, A. 1957. "The concept of virus." Journal of General Microbiology 17: 239–253.

[2] Bardini, T. 2015. "Vade retro virus." Terrain, Special Issue "Virus," Nicolas Auray andFrederic Keck (eds,), 64, March 2015.

[3] Pitrou, P. 2015. "Life as a process of making in the Mixe Highlands (Oaxaca, Mexico).Towards a ‘general pragmatics’ of life." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21: 86-

105.[4] Caduff mentions David Napier, who notes that “microbiologists tend to ascribe notions of

agency, mobility, and intentionality to viruses precisely because there is no straightforward answerto the ontological question” (58).

[5] On this topic, see Pitrou, P., L. Coupaye, and F. Provost. 2016. "Des êtres vivants et desartefacts. L’imbrication des processus vitaux et des processus techniques." Actes du colloque,

musée du quai Branly 9/10 avril 2014.[6] “What microbiologists revealed at the threshold of the living and the nonliving turned out to

be an organic entity with a potential for life, a creature on the verge of the vital. The nature of thiscreature made it difficult for microbiologists to reproduce it under artificial conditions. The virus

did not grow in the lifeless media of bacteriologists; it could not reproduce on its own and requiredthe active support of a living body. Its life turned out to be a contingent on someone else’s life”

(58).[7] On this topic, see my review of Ingold and Palsson’s book in Somatosphere.

Perig Pitrou is a researcher in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire

d’Anthropologogie Sociale, Paris. He is the author of Le chemin et le champ. Sacrifice et parcoursrituel chez les Mixe de Oaxaca (Mexique) and the co-editor of the book La noción de vida en

Mesoamérica (CEMCA-UNAM, 2011). In 2013-14, he directed the research programme ‘Of Living Beings and Artefacts: The Interrelation of Vital and Technical Processes’ ( Des êtres vivants

et des artefacts - Musée du quai Branly (département de la recherche et de l’enseignement). He isnow Deputy Director of the interdisciplinary programme ‘ Domestication and Fabrication of the

Living ’ (CNRS-PSL)Read this piece online: http://somatosphere.net/?p=11850


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Pandemic Returns

Christos Lynteris


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 nineteenthcentury, 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 andvillages 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, asCaduff 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 propheticdiscourse 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, inour 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 temporalincongruity. 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 ofa “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 ofits biopolitical efficacy.

For if, as Caduff notes, the definition of what counts as “new” forms the undecidablearcanum 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 ishence 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 ofhuman 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 ofmutual 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


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vision, as a vision of no imaginable alternative, which sets the “prophetic scene” of the coming plague.

Christos Lynteris is a social anthropologist working on biopolitical and visual aspects of infectious

disease epidemics. He is Senior Research Associate at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, and

Principal Investigator of the ERC funded research project Visual Representations of the ThirdPlague Pandemic. Christos is the author of The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China: SocialistMedicine and the New Man (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) and Ethnographic Plague: Configuring

Disease on the Chinese-Russian Frontier (Palgrave Macmillan, to appear in spring 2016).



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A life that is not its own: A Reply

Carlo Caduff


It is a tremendous pleasure to encounter unforeseen readers in the process of exploring unforeseen

lines of thought. Such readers offer The Pandemic Perhaps the gift of a life that is not its own. Thethoughtful comments assembled in this collection provide occasions for escape, which honor the

book in the best possible way. They borrow ideas, extend words, gestures, and images inunexpected directions, and thus announce in the practice of reading the pleasure of the text.

Generosity constitutes the gift as a given which demands no return. What follows is a reply; itsimply recognizes, in the form of a response, that something has been received.

A key aim of writing The Pandemic Perhaps was to explore the multidimensionalrelationships between hegemonic regimes of scientific knowledge, historical processes of nation-

state building, and compulsive structures of affective attachment. Analytically, the book departsfrom a constructivist concern with “intelligibility” and the correlated fantasy of performative

efficacy. The Pandemic Perhaps troubles accounts, which assume that constructions work,demonstrating how styles of reasoning render things unintelligible. The irony is that such failure

now constitutes a mode of operation. This has important implications not only for our analytics of power, but also for our ability to imagine alternative social formations.

As the comments in this forum capture so well, the book cares about the social, cultural,and historical specificity of pandemic influenza as a contemporary concern. It examines how a

particular imagination of the pandemic threat is anchored in a configuration of temporal

sensibilities and institutional anxieties that is characteristic for a specific historical moment. Onemight call this analytic move a strategy of provincializing preparedness; its goal is to work againstthe idea of globalizability as the hegemonic imaginary of our time.

Raad Fadaak’s research on the Global Health Security Agenda takes this imaginary as itsethnographic object. In his comments, Fadaak suggests that America’s geo-political vision of

global health security is driven not by the belief in the coming plague, but by the presumption thatsomething must be done to prevent the worst. The recurrent invocation of instrumental reason in

the world of policy-making finds its legitimacy in a language of urgency. As the product of anemerging administrative-bureaucratic apparatus, the Global Health Security Agenda refers to a

“number of rapidly shifting possibilities and projects.” Here, actors infer powerful forms of agencyfrom security as an empty signifier.

Fadaak’s account of the strategic “as-if”—a mode of speaking that doesn’t mean what itsays—indicates that scholars need to reconsider the notion of belief and examine the conditions

under which an orientation to the future appears (or fails to appear) as a structure of belief. Forsuch a project the work of Michel de Certeau seems crucial, precisely because it presents belief

not as a form of defective knowledge, but as a “promise of action.” De Certeau reminds us that itwas the tradition of the Enlightenment that made belief a question of epistemology, a question of

knowing the world rather than being in the world. Belief, de Certeau insists, represents a promise


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of action; it is not, as philosophers of the Enlightenment claimed, an example of “as-if” knowledge.Building on this account, one might say that belief is what makes security run.

Ann Kelly’s reading of The Pandemic Perhaps adds another insight to the critical analysisof today’s imaginary of globalizability. What she terms the “power of engrossment” refers us to

the politics of intensified attention and strategic awareness. Malaria eradication campaigns are no

longer driven by the political dynamics of the Cold-War period. The disease owes its significanceto the scientific and economic opportunities it offers to actors and institutions in the global Northand the global South. Kelly points to the question of value, and how value is constituted by virtue

of “urgency,” a measure of political relevance, moral significance, and economic opportunity. Thelanguage of urgency is a powerful language, one that depoliticizes and dehistorizes an emerging

regime of technocratic governance increasingly driven by a focus on ever-shifting “targets ofopportunity,” in Samuel Weber’s sense of the term.

Not surprisingly, the language of urgency invokes the idea of magic. The latter comes withthe promise of immediacy, of making things happen instantly. In states of emergency, where action

is said to be urgent, dramatic health interventions acquire an aura of magic bullets, which promiseinstant results. In so doing, they are liable to frustrations, which intensify the desire for a form of

magic that works.In her comments, Karen Jent extends this idea of magic as promise of fantastic efficacy to

her own ethnographic research on regenerative medicine in Scotland. “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.” The emphasis, inregenerative medicine, is on the salvational side of things. Yet the promise of salvation acquires

significance only in relation to a certain prospect: the prospect of death and degeneration that isincreasingly haunting aging societies, so-called. In that sense, one might say that regenerative

medicine, despite its optimistic orientation to a healthy future, remains subject to the dialectics ofthreat and promise that so powerfully animates scientific interest and financial investment today.

Ghassan Hage observed that our notion of hope is based on a protestant ethic of deferred enjoyment“which fits in very much with the idea of saving and deferring gratification.” Jent’s work on the

regenerative as a site of optimistic attachment is a challenge to think hope “on the side of life,”that is, hope beyond the economic, as hegemonic measure of being and becoming, and, instead, as

the “affirmation of life as it emerges and in the transitions and movements of our everyday life andrelationships.”

In Perig Pitrou’s comments we encounter a reading of The Pandemic Perhaps that presentsthe book as a contribution to the anthropology of life. Viruses are frequently imagined in relation

to other bodies. The life of the microbe appears in Pitrou’s account as that which is contingent onsomeone else’s life. This notion of borrowed life animates The Pandemic Perhaps; it highlights a

more general condition of existence, one that refuses fantasies of sovereignty and self-sufficiency.Borrowed life is an unstable mode of being that remains indebted to the other. Today’s biopolitics

offers a dramatic contrast: it presents the image of a community founded on immunity, that is, onthe isolation of the self and its separation from the other. Pitrou’s reading suggests that the world

of microbial life is more complex than the one generated by the cultural industry and its endless proliferation of militarized contagion movies dramatizing states of immunity under threat. What

forms of life could microbial life forms inspire? What would it mean to recognize the condition of borrowed life?

Christos Lynteris points to the paradox of emergence ontology and its obsession with thenew. Influenza viruses change all the time, so what makes a virus new? It is this undecidability at


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Book forum: Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps "$

the heart of microbiology that makes emergence ontology so generative. Proliferating alongsidethe compulsive concern with the new and correlated attempts to define it is a failure of the

imagination: the failure to envision pandemic disaster “in any other way than in the form of arupture of bourgeois values.” Today’s view of pandemic disaster frames alterity as inverted image

of a normative account of everyday life. Joseph Masco argues that this view casts the suburban

life of the white middle class as a mode of existence in need of protection. The pedagogical pointof disaster fantasy (and there is no fantasy without a pedagogical point) is to make this mode ofexistence an object of desire.

As Michel Serres taught us, the penchant of the parasite is to interrupt dinner parties (“thegood meal in good company” in Kant’s phrasing). The task of anthropology is to make room for

the uninvited guest.

References

Barthes, R. 1975. The Pleasure of the Text . New York: Hill and Wang.

de Certeau, M. 1985. “What We Do When We Believe”, in: Marshall Blonsky: On Signs,Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hage, G. 2002. “On the Side of Life. Joy and the Capacity of Being”, in: Mary Zournazi. Hope. New Philosophies for Change, Melbourne: Pluto Press.

Kant, I. 2006. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Masco, J. 2014. The Theater of Operations. National Security Affect from the Cold War to the Waron Terror , Durham: Duke University Press.

Serres, M. 2007. The Parasite. University of Minnesota Press.Weber, S. 2005. Targets of Opportunity. On the Militarization of Thinking , New York: Fordham

University Press.


Caduff Forum Update2

Documents

Transcript of Caduff Forum Update2